Chainsaw Man

Chainsaw Man takes place in an alternate late 90s timeline where fears manifest as devils. The more people fear something, the stronger it becomes. To deal with that, specialized Devil Hunters take on these threats, often forming dangerous contracts to gain powers themselves. At the center of it all is Denji, a broke teenager trying to survive, who ends up merging with the Chainsaw Devil. From there, the story goes into government conspiracies, apocalyptic threats and a constant cycle of death, rebirth and erased realities.

Tatsuki Fujimoto is a japanese manga author, who enjoys being punished. Thats why he made that ending the way it is, so he can get infinite satisfaction. I’ve already written quite a bit about him elsewhere. If you want a deeper dive, check out my pieces on Look Back or Fire Punch.

“I also like domineering and irrational women. In college, there was a girl who was mean to me, and then one day at school my bicycle had fallen over. I was wondering what happened, when she said ‘I knocked your bike over, ha ha ha!’ I was so happy.”

The last chapter of Chainsaw Man dropped, no part 3 announced. Let’s just assume there won’t be a continuation anytime soon and that it’s officially so over.

I’ve been following this manga for six, seven years. Since the Big C days, week after week, all the way through the break between Part 1 and Part 2, when I read Goodbye Eri to fill the gap, then went back and read Fire Punch. I absorbed everything Fujimoto has ever touched.

I’m not trying to fully break down the entire work here. There’s already more than enough material out there, whether it’s on YouTube, X or Tiktok. I'm completely useless in this fandom, except for the fact that my Fujimoto avatar image pops up on Google and gets used sometimes.

I read a ton of comments on the ending and you could say the house is burning. People are deadass selling their manga collection. But just because the mob is outraged doesn’t automatically mean it’s a bad ending.

The reading comprehension devil may struck here again. Some people really say there are too many plot holes and need everything spoon fed to them, but if you’ve followed this manga for years and actually paid attention, you’re basically an adult by now. You have the capability to fill in blanks by yourself. That said, it doesn’t mean Fujimoto hasn’t started plot threads and for whatever reason just left them hanging. Opposing perspectives can both be valid at the same time, you know.

»Do you know the movie The Big Lebowski? When you finish watching it, you end up thinking, “So… what was that all about?” It feels like everything got resolved, but at the same time nothing really happened. You’re left thinking, “Wait… did any of that even mean anything?”And yet the protagonist has clearly grown, and the story still works as a story. [...] I’d like Chainsaw Man to leave that kind of aftertaste as well. So… I hope people will read Part 2 with that kind of feeling in mind.«

Holy cope? Or absolute genius? Lets look further. On his Twitter pseudonym Nagayama Koharu, he talked about Sora and Kairi from Kingdom Hearts: when they let go of each other’s hands, it left him with the impression that sometimes, for a man and a woman, it’s better to be apart than together.

In Fire Punch, protagonist Agni gets told: »Everybody but you wants you to be happy.« Denji experiences the same thing: It seems like everyone wants him happy, except himself. The end of Part 1 teases that, Part 2 plays it out fully.

We dont get a perfect ending, we get closure. Its about the friends we made along the way, right? Pochita has avoidant attachement style so he notices that Denji is anxious attached and they go no contact basically and you can see how healing no contact can be. Because of it the whole timeline got rewritten evangelion style.

You could cope with the fact that it could be a meta statement about why this story had to end in the first place. Obviously Fujimoto is yearning for doing something else after chainsaw man and some fans state its Shonen Jumps fault for pressuring him too much. We'll never know. What we know is he for sure tweets a lot more since CSM ended.

This series is one of my all time favorites. I genuinely love engaging with it, thinking about it, coming back to it. Can’t wait to see what comes next from Fujimoto-san (for me, Tatsuki).