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Read Chapter 54 - 91 of Chainsaw-man ( https://anilist.co/manga/105778 ) #AniList
Chainsaw Man... good. I have some Thoughts about it, will keep them for the evening.
I think what makes Chainsaw Man compelling is that, beneath the apparent wildness of the story, there is still a very clear and genuinely poignant core theme, that of Denji's journey into becoming human.
Denji is someone who, due to trauma and extreme poverty, never had a chance to grow and properly develop as a person: His whole character is animalistic, acting always on instintc, happy as long as he gets to eat, sleep, and be horny.
Devils, being representations of human fears, feed on it and grow more powerful when they are feared. Denji, however, being akin to a wild dog, is effective at fighting them due to simply not having grown in a "human" way, he has not learned to "fear".
This would be one of the core themes of Chainsaw Man: To feel fear is to be human. But it is not simply a fear of immediate danger that Fujimoto says is part of being human, but a conceptual fear, a fear that is very much of uniquely human construct and not a simple instinct.
However, we see that the most powerful demons are those that represent primal fears, those that are buried deep in humanity's most animalistic urges. And yet, there is still very much a uniquely human property to them. Notice the first appearance of the Darkness Demon.
No one would argue that the fear of the dark is very much a primal urge, we are diurnal animals after all. Fujimoto however, doesn't choose to represent Darkness simply as the night or something like that: Darkness is represented by dead astronauts, by space travel.
The fear of the dark is therefore represented in a uniquely human way: Fear of the great beyond that lies beyond our world. The astronauts, the explorers who would expand humanity's horizons, dead and quartered, praying to the great primal fear that destroyed their dreams.
Now, how does the theme of fear as a human quality reflect on Denji's character? The answer lies in the second core theme of Chainsaw Man: Love. Not a romantic love, but an appreciation for the world, for it's people, and for lived experiences.
As said before, Denji's traumatic childhood deprived him of the human qualities he would've grown with. Denji seems incapable of feeling any affection and only cozies up to women for purely horny reasons. He himself recognizes he wouldn't feel sad if the people around him died.
He struggles with thinking this inability to feel affection is part of his turning into a demon-hybrid, and questions his humanity in the process. However, there was someone he loved dearly before turning into a demon: Pochita.
While he may have not realized, Pochita had saved him way before he was killed, Pochita saved him by simply being with him. The child who had no one now had someone to love.
When demons form contracts with people, they always ask for something in return. Body parts, senses, even entire lives. When Pochita fuses with Denji, however he simply says: "Show me your dreams".
While this might not seem much at first, what are dreams if not the objectives a person strives to achieve in their lifetime? Pochita asked for something greater than Denji's life: He wanted to see Denji's entire existence.
From this point forward, Denji is given a second attempt at life, and strives to fulfill his dreams, which often involve satiating his base desires, and starts to feel hollow when he achieves them, realizing that he was happier when he was chasing them than after fulfilling them.
This is when he implicitly learns to love the experience. He does not realize it overtly, but deep in his heart he knows that his happyness came not from fulfilling certain goals, but from experiencing living life as a person while striving to achieve them.
Next, Denji will learn to love: Enter Power and Aki. While he initially feels disdain for them and thinks of them as annoying, his experiences with them, living with, eating with, and pulling pranks of them will eventually lead him to feel genuine affection for them.
Yet again, Denji doesn't realize it, but he was always someone capable of love. Him changing into a demon hadn't deprived him of that capacity, he was simply too traumatized to believe himself capable of loving and being loved.
We have now established Denji as someone who regains his humanity through him regaining his ability to feel love. Now, let's talk about how this relates to what I explained before: The human dimension of primal fears and instincts.
Denji is a person who has been manipulated by everyone who had been in position of power over him, and exploited his trauma and loneliness for their own gain. Denji has always been under the influence of Control. Of greed.
If a person seeks to control something, they fear the lack of control over that something. From the Yakuza that governed his childhood to Makima, Denji has always been used as a tool to fulfill someone else's desires. He was never his own person.
I feel like this is one of Chainsaw Man's main theses: To control someone else is the greates sin one can make, it is demonic, it destroys entire existences in favor of selfish desires.
When Pochita fuses with Denji, he asks to show him his dreams. Pochita gives Denji back his life, he does so both literally and figuratively. Pochita gives Denji back his agency, his will to live. He gives him the chainsaw.
The chainsaw is a "weapon" that allows Denji to cut through the puppet strings that controlled his life. But chainsaws are not weapons, they are tools. They are not elegant, not efficient, not clean. Using a chainsaw as a weapon is ugly, it's raw, dirty, fucked up.
In loving Pochita, Denji gained the ability to claim his life for his own, to learn to experience, to love, to live. But the road there is not gonna de pretty nor easy, it's going to be full of bloodshed as he tears down all constructs that wanted to dehumanize him.
These are my thoughts on Chainsaw Man, the manga about the horny boy who grows chainsaws from his body. I'm going to sleep now.
