Kyoichi Tsuzuki: ‘Happy Victims’ (1999-2004)

evil drawing that is murdering me I DONT WANNA DRAW THE HANNNNNDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

Tehran, 1976.

I need to like. Sit on it for a bit. But i'm also itching to be louder than the people who outright hate it so here goes;

I've seen people talk a lot about how it's a bad ending, both badly written and bad, as in depressing. Denji ends up again with no family, a slave to Public Safety under Nayuta's rule, and poor, basically. So there's the question of why the whole story even matters.

I'm not sure how many of these people were around when Part 1 ended in 2021, but that was the exact same argument going around. Denji ends up with no living family, just the promise of one, in the spirit of the woman who ruined his life, and devils still exist--So, again, what was the point? The difference being, people loved the ending of part 1.

I'm not sure if I've vocalized it before, but I always thought Part 2 wouldn't have a good ending (well written but sad, I mean), for the simplest reason that Part 1 is the good one. I think the whole point of separating them so clearly and switching casts and stakes, instead of presenting Part 2 as a natural continuation of part 1, was so that Fujimoto could go balls to the walls with metaphors and absurdism and overall craziness, while still giving the reader a satisfying conclusion to the story, if they don't want to follow. I see the ending of Part 1 as a stop sign that's like "fuckery road ahead. If you're satisfied now, this is how you should remember the ending as. If you trust me, no you shouldn't, but follow along anyway."

All this to say that part 2 is a surprisingly more hopeful ending than what I thought Fujimoto could pull. I seriously believed he was going to pull a Fire Punch and blow the earth up or something. But I guess this just says more about me, and what I think is nice, more than anything. Why is it nice if Denji ends up indebted and blind and friendless again?

The thing is, Fujimoto doesn't believe in perfection, and he keeps hammering in that Evil, Turmoil, and generally "Bad Things" are as necessary to life, and the human experience as Good things are. It's been the same point he has been making since part 1. We know what Good movies are because Bad ones exist. You only know joy because you've known pain. One cannot meaningfully exist without the other.

So of course, Denji gets some of the good bits--he gets to live in a reality where he was never horrifically abused and brutalized in the ways we saw him being in the story-- along with some bad ones; he's still poor, and family-less, and his past with the yakuza still tracks. It's forgiving, in a surprisingly realistic and grounded sense,, though I get why to many people it might ring as unsatisfactory. It's hard to see a character you've been rooting for for years not get what he wanted, even after coming so close. But it's not meaningless.

There's the Dreams bit. In a few words, I can describe it as: Is it better to dream about something forever and never know what it feels like, or to get it, and then have it be not at all what you wanted? And what if you get it and it's every bit as good? What do you have to live for, then? Are you supposed to keep finding new dreams, stuck in a never-ending cycle of fulfilling them and chasing them over and over? Are dreams better off staying dreams? Are people who realize theirs the most miserable creatures on earth?

Denji still dreams of going to school and he still has this insatiable, vaguely shaped hole in him for things he once had, but can't remember having them-- but he will never know what it's like to go to school and be completely isolated by your peers and feel the chasm between your life experiences grow unbridgeable. He still wants a girlfriend (presumably) but he will never know what sitting in a cafe waiting for Reze as she bleeds out on the street is like. He'll never meet Aki, but he will never know what sounds he makes as he dies in his arms.

And Asa, it's the same with her. He saves Asa from falling, therefore erasing the event of her becoming ostracized by her peers. But by doing so, Asa will never see her face in Denji's. She will never feel as alienated and odd as him. And she will never call him Denji.

So is the ending well-written? I think yeah. It's in line with everything that I've been told Fujimoto believes in, and everything that Chainsaw Man has set itself up as, symbolically. I can understand part of the frustration being that many plot-threads are left ambiguous, or nonsensical in a very anti-shonen fashion, but man....Chainsaw Man was never about that for me. I don't want to rip its carcass open and make sense of every excruciating detail just so that it can prove its own plot-driven genius to me. I have attack on titan and Fmab for that.

bs idia doodles to post bc i havent in so mf long (working on a bunch of things and now working a real job whoa i know)

TWST x adventure time: ignihyde