in a watsonian sense I don't think it's unreasonable for Lisa to be a terf but from a doylist perspective I'm sitting here going BOOOO. BOOOO. ARUMA ARIMA IS A COWARD.
even Lisa FINALLY broaching the thing I've been waiting ages for someone to say (maybe your individual happiness isn't ACTUALLY worth harming other people for!!! maybe romantic love isn't actually worth that!!) isn't enough to get the taste out of my mouth.
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as someone with compulsive and addictive behaviors myself nothing in chainsaw man has ever hit like 231. like the fear that my friends and loved ones are outwardly understanding but my behaviors are slowly eroding their goodwill until one day they go "hey, FYI, the person you fear you are in your worst moments is exactly who you truly are. you are completely right," and just peace out is The Nightmare, like that's the main nightmare. holy shit fujimoto. my god.
spoiler panels below the jump
oooooh hit me with it. fucking kill me, fjmt. do it.
"it feels like chainsaw man just makes denji's inability to change into a big running joke"
denji's inability to change has helped ruin his own life, get his family killed, ruin global society, and basically instantiate hell on earth. the fact that he picks himself up each time and goes "wow haha my inability to change is fucking ruining my life and destroying my self-concept" doesn't mean movement isn't happening. it's just that not all movement is forward.
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new mtefil chapter unfortunately insanely boring. need all hell to actually literally break loose immediately. if imuri/priest falling in love is an unmitigated good then why even bother with this series lol
everywhere you go the comments are just WOW. I'm so glad our protagonist had hetero sex with a woman minutes after she woke from a coma! What a great way to prove his development and become a real man
just absolute slop reactions lmao kill this series if this is actually where it's going
new mtefil chapter unfortunately insanely boring. need all hell to actually literally break loose immediately. if imuri/priest falling in love is an unmitigated good then why even bother with this series lol
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never stops being funny looking back at naruto. shonen that opens with the main character kissing his rival and constantly turning into a beautiful woman that turns men on and the first arc is about the doomed yaoi between a powerful murderous ninja and his beautiful boywife.
then like 500 chapters later they get reincarnated for evil plot reasons and the mentor character is like. thank you. your doomed yaoi taught naruto how to be a true ninja and expanded his consciousness and morality.
then the manga ends with the main character and his rival fucking echoing their death poses
and i was like 8-12 years old when this stuff was hitting the states so everyone was like "yeah haha anime is just like that sometimes." but the truth is anime is not just like that sometimes. the other big 3 are not like this. one piece has gay characters and we're all very proud of oda for learning trans people are people but nothing in one piece is nearly this homoerotic. bleach? don't make me laugh. goku and vegeta fuse but they both have wives they love in a very straight way and vegito is like the straightest concept imaginable they are NEVER doing this shit
the realest yaoi is made by men so unhealed they don't even recognize when things are gay. thank you kishimoto for the powerful contributions of your ignorance.
finally started playing limbus company and they got my ass. through canto III and that's just three actual stories with beginning, middles, and ends. definitely some gacha-style issues to the storytelling but they are on the "this is too many combat stages to make dramatically interesting" end and not the "we entirely forget about characters as soon as their banners finish" end, so I find them much more bearable
I do find it funny that I avoided projmoon stuff for such a long time because I was like, idk, you all seem very self-serious and pretentious about what amounts to "scp meets warhammer 40k in a corporate dystopia with Lots of Lore." And after playing it for a while...my diagnosis was 100% right. This is scp meets warhammer 40k in a corporate dystopia, anyone who thinks this is peak fiction would have their mind blown by reading even fifty pages of one of the works from which it liberally borrows, and the tutorials are genuinely garbage.
It's just that, you know scp/Warhammer/dystopia is cool and fun when people aren't trying their utmost to convince you they're serious and not at all juvenile (which they totally are, which is fine). is it the high art the most vocal fans seem to want me to think it is? eh, we'll see. is it fun midbrow high-gore sci-fi? absolutely it is. I was gonna make a joke that it's as gay and artistic as Warhammer 40k is but that's not actually fair: there are canonically LGBTQ characters in WH40K. That's not to say the projmoon stuff is bad, just that its fans sell it inaccurately as like, thoughtful progressive sci-fi when it's much more clearly (and enjoyably) shock-forward grimdark satire
mfw when the enigmatic and capricious devil with power over hunger and the starved denies me something i desperately need and desire at a critical moment
thinking a little bit about yoru as a parent. obviously, makima-as-the-mother imagery was key to part 1 both visually and as part of its ongoing interrogation of abuse, love, and the family structure. similarly, though yoru as peer and lover to denji is a popular framing (particularly after chapters 191-193), i think there is a lot to be gained by reading yoru not from denji's view in which she is a possible equal, but from asa's perspective of her as a mother figure.
spoilers through chapter 193 follow.
if you're here voluntarily reading this post you probably don't need an explainer on the makima-mother stuff so here's a quick recap image
clockwise from top-left: fujimoto interview with shueisha, ch. 82, ch. ch. 76, anime ED1, ch. 82
wow! what a shitty mom.
a lot of analysis about yoru and asa and denji situates and investigates yoru as either 1) a peer (to the extent a devil can be a peer) or 2) a part of asa's personality. either way, she's considered and framed as someone roughly on par with asa and denji, not least because just as they are teenagers struggling to find their place in the world and understand romantic feelings, yoru seems to be doing a lot of the same! the visual imagery contributes; not only is yoru positioned against denji as an equal (versus makima looming over him, or crouching to speak to him), she's also made an equal to the missing asa via the empty chair. a lot has (understandably) been made of contrasting this against, again, makima and denji.
ch. 12, ch. 193
but of course, yoru is not just a peer to these teenagers. on one level, this is true because she is an ageless and ancient devil. though we don't have a sense of how "old" potoo-war is when it first meets asa, it's clearly not "young"; it remembers that it used to be more powerful and also that nuclear weapons existed, so clearly it has at least some understanding of its past.
but more than that, it's true because yoru's not like other teens. she's a mom. a cool mom.
ch. 176
in a very real way, from moment 1, as soon as war (let's call her by her maiden name, shall we?) shows up, she's mothering asa. wake up, welcome to the world, now go to school or you'll be punished. are kids bullying you? i'll deal with them. i'm here to give you tough love, but i'll also tell you when you're being too hard on yourself.
ch. 99, ch. 100, ch. 121
war is making a conscious effort to teach asa how to behave, to impart values to her, and it's generally working. of course, the realization that one is behaving just like one's mother might be a point of filial frustration and irritation just as it is a point of parental pride.
ch. 145
in this frame, it's easy to see war not just as a facet of asa, but as someone external to her that is protective of her, that wants what's best for her and also wants her to get what she wants, but can also be impatient, demanding, overrides her autonomy, and acts like she never knows best. she doesn't just want to help asa achieve her desires, but to make sure her desires are the proper ones.
ch. 124, ch. 168, ch. 135
but of course, some degree of discord exists because asa's concerns are not 100% how war perceives them, and the heart wants what it wants. children don't live in the same world their parents imagine they do. a child can see rules and invisible lines a parent doesn't, particularly with respect to their own relationships and social life. and even when they're wrong about those, their feeling a line has been crossed might actually be communicating something more complex and sensitive about their own problems, or their efforts to form an identity.
ch. 168, ch. 113
i don't think any of this motherhood framing is all that accidental. in fact, i think it's there from the very start. when war makes a contract with asa, it exactly parallels how she thinks about motherhood.
ch. 177, ch. 98
"children are their parents' property, no?"
"if you want to live, your body will be mine."
being (re)born is neither a voluntary task nor an independent one: a child is entirely at their caretakers' mercy until they are capable of fending for themselves, and of course, would not have been born if their parents hadn't conceived a child. to many parents, this state of contingency and guardianship implies ownership, which implies the right to abandon or destroy. "i brought you into this world. i can take you out of it." war might care for her children. but ultimately, their lives and their bodies are hers to do with as she pleases. if she wants you to do something, she will steal your body and do it for you. the ultimate helicopter parent.
when read in this way, war's fascination with denji can feel like she read her daughter's diary and is aggressively and disastrously intervening in her personal life. she's taking it on herself to teach asa's crush about relationships and courtship, and even make sure he's properly fed.
ch. 192, ch. 193
of course, in doing so, she's usurping asa's place, enacting not what asa wants, but what she thinks asa should want (a kiss, a handjob, a date, sex). the daughter vanishes entirely, erased and replaced by her mother's facsimile of her.
ch. 193
to be clear, i don't think this does much to change or negate the reading that yoru is experiencing her own feelings for denji. if anything, i think it adds interesting nuances and wrinkles to it as not just a fight internal to asa, but as a complex case of what is almost covert incest.
i do think one advantage of this reading, however, is that it centers asa's relationship to yoru. most conversations lately have focused on yoru's relationship to denji, for understandable reasons: it's been the main action of the manga for the last few chapters, and asa has been intentionally sidelined.
i believe that it is extremely intentional the last major interaction asa and war have before everything kicks into high gear emphasizes asa's horrified response to her philosophy on parenting.
ch. 177
and almost immediately afterward, war exploits asa's affection for her to override her control of her body and do exactly what asa wants her not to do.
ch. 179. read right to left. yes i know the pages are on the wrong sides.
your mother doesn't trust you. she thinks you're weak. she takes control of your life, tells you where to go and what to do. she forces you to go on a date with someone you don't even like, then berates your performance the whole time. she tries to erode your personality and desires to replace them with hers. when you object, she tells you not to think. you can do nothing but watch as she exploits her other children and hurts people. when you try to stop her, she leverages your real affection for her to guilt you into acquiescing. either she's developed feelings for your crush and is sincerely trying to have sex with him, or she's pimping you out to him for her own gain.
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y'know we skipped over it because things went sort of crazy in the sequence of events from denji wakes up to the handjob to the nayuta reveal to aging devil to now.
but what did everyone else in the group think happened in that alleyway
i just wish i could sit down every chainsaw man poster on reddit and twitter and explain
it is possible for someone to desire you and still manipulate and abuse you
it is possible for someone to genuinely like you and still manipulate and abuse you
manipulation and abuse you can readily identify as such is still manipulation and abuse
manipulation being obviously shoddy and emotional and not "5d chess" doesn't mean it has ceased to be manipulation
someone who is manipulating you by offering you rewards or concessions in exchange for a desired behavior might also enjoy the rewards or concessions. this does not mean you are not being manipulated. it means they have engineered a no-lose situation and you have minimal leverage.