I’m trying to see Chainsaw Man through the “conventional on the big strokes, but it always takes the unexpected path getting there” lens, now that it’s been suggested to me.  Because, you know, that’s a formula that could work for me.  I still don’t know if I could say the show itself is working, but one does notice things when looking from that angle.  This is a shounen after all, Weekly Shounen Jump at that for the part the first cour of the anime is covering.  That gives it plenty of conventions to tweak, and that Fujimoto is doing so is kind of glaringly obvious to me now.

Aki remains the one character here I sort of identify with.  And that’s interesting, because he’s hardly a model of stability and balance in his life.  He’s only got two years of it left thanks to his contract with the Curse Devil (and things are going to get even worse for him, it seems).  He’s basically committing suicide in order to gain revenge, which is hardly a conventionally healthy life plan.  Himeno was even trying to get him to quit Public Safety and go private – which Aki finds out thanks to a letter Himeno’s younger sister brings him in his hospital room.

Makima has brought the two Kyoto spooks (Kurose and Tendou) in to train Aki in the wake of the 4th Division massacre (which I kinda suspect was set up by her).  But for Denji and Power there’s no such luck – that job falls to Kishibe, who we met a few episodes ago.  Kishibe so far at least sticks to the Jump archetype for his character pretty closely – no sign of anything unconventional there.  He reasons that since he’s the strongest devil hunter around, killing the baka pair over and over (he confirms that Denji is immortal and Power “mostly immortal”) till they can beat him is the best training he can provide.

So we have our training arc now, and so far it mainly consists of Denji and Power dying in vast pools of blood.  Basically if you combined their intellects they’d be about half-bright, so it’s gonna take a lot more than glasses for them to outwit Kishibe.  Their little ambush wasn’t a terrible idea but it never really had any chance of succeeding.  I’d kind of like this subplot to end pretty quickly – it’s not really much of a gag and it gets less funny every time Kishibe kills one of them.

As for Aki, the Kyoto duo make it clear that his current arsenal isn’t going to cut it.  Especially as Kon seems to have abandoned him after the Katana Man debacle.  So they take him to Public Safety’s giant underground Devil storage (because why not) where they set him up to make a contract with the Future Devil, which sounds like a pretty unpleasant turn of events.  Aki getting shit on by life seems to be a pretty strong recurring them here – we’ll see if his character (which for me has more potential than anyone I’ve seen so far) can grow beyond that narrative cage.

I do appreciate where CSM is trying to elevate the conventional with stuff like Denji flashing some self-awareness about his blasé reaction to Himeno’s death.  Denji wondering whether he’s still human (he’s not, of course) is a natural progression, but this is where not really making most of the cast relatable kind of extracts a toll.  Denji’s reflection loses a lot of impact because of the way Fujimoto has drawn the character – we just don’t have much reason to care about him or his navel-gazing (less reason than with Aki, for me).  I know the potential to grow past that exists – I know Fujimoto is a good enough writer when he wants to be.  What I don’t yet know is whether he wants to be.

Samu’s Impressions:

As a manga reader I continue to be surprised at just how much they are taking their time with the source material. Chainsaw Man is not a particularly wordy manga and Fujimoto is an artist willing to cover less content per chapter if it means delivering its material in a more visually exciting manner. For many readers I expect seeing the story play out so slowly is a different experience than blitzing through the panels that normally take a couple seconds to register. The fact that this adaptation is instead fleshing out just about every moment of downtime to this extent makes me think this could even be a 3-cour adaptation, but somehow I suspect that’s still not the case. Now that the place they are going to end this cour is becoming obvious I’m even more curious how it will cap off the vibe of the series so far (more on that in two weeks, I suppose).

As for this episode, I really liked it. Not only was the pace slowed down but it felt like detail and attention was given to every movement of just about every character which really drives the point of the grim reality everyone is being forced to live through. Of those living perhaps Aki’s is the most tragic; his closest teammate (who had a crush on him) sacrificed herself for him, giving us the chance to see the aforementioned “Crybaby Aki”. Not only that but the Fox Devil has abandoned him and he’s been forced to take on another potentially dangerous contract with the Future Devil to keep him within the Special Division. But maybe the worst of the three major aftereffects of the latest conflict is that by using his Curse Devil within his sword he’s now down to just two more years of life left, which puts a whole new perspective on his cold determination to get back at the Gun Devil while he still can.

On the other hand we have Denji and Power going through with their latest round of training, but without their Straight Man in Aki we’ve got two Wise Guys trying to put their brains together in hopes they can form a cohesive thought. This is the amusing dynamic I think of with this duo – now that that Power is no longer on Denji’s radar as a means for his sexual journey, and Power seems to be warming to her new company in her own way, seeing these two peas of the same pod try to navigate their journey together is one of the more amusing relationships in the series.

We also get a formal introduction to Kishibe, their equivalent of Kakashi in WSJ-terms, if he was a nihilist and alcoholic; he’s from Division 1 and the self-proclaimed strongest devil hunter, and after clarifying that due to their partly-demon or fiendish ways they are respectively immortal and semi-immortal, they then end up the bloodiest punching bags for whatever he has in store for them. His attitude is pretty grim but it’s yet another piece of evidence that those who survive in this profession are ironically those who are in someway less attached to their base human emotions. We see that in almost everyone still alive, from Makima and her cold and unreadable demeanour down to Denji who this episode questioned his inability to feel sad or cry when faced with death of his allies or even considering how he would react to the death of any others.  This begs the questions: just how foregone is his once human heart after everything he’s gone through and lost – the same heart that everyone else seems to want so much?