Chainsaw Man - Ch. 231 - Goodbye, Pochita

[Kashranox]

Good god my heart...

 

[kohakusan]

This is just a wtf moment after the next on each chapter

 

[daSweep]

Why do people think this is the final chapter? It literally says "To be continued" on the last page, and there are no indications of it being the final chapter on Mangaplus either.

 

[NotSomeone]

I mean I'm happy to provide the flak now, I don't see why you feel vindicated in saying it was bad just because it's ending. I remain pretty convinced that the majority of people who constantly shit on part 2 just can't get over the fact their basic shonen fantasy was killed off with Power and Aki and part 2 didn't bring them back.

It's crazy to call part 1 a Shonen power fantasy. Denji was so low in life he was used and abused and in return he got scraps, sex was ever only a goal because he didn't understand what human affection is and he was hungry for it. He learned what meaningful connections are through Aki and Power, and he gave it back to the world by taking care of Nayuta, the reincarnation of the person who killed his loved ones.

Part 2 is a nothing burger of a story, there's no significant development for the characters, story developments and threads either vanish or are concluded abruptly. For months now every single chapter is a "well, this happened" and any ounce of copium you could huff out of this story was gone the moment it was anounced next chapter is the next.

 

[BladeX3]

Remember kids: don't drink wine with painkillers, then sniff technocol rapid from a bag, before eating funny mushrooms, because you end up drawing something like this. 😂

 

[NotSomeone]

I've always felt that part 2 was never meant to happen, and the series was supposed to end with part 1. I was shocked when I found out that the series kept going after part 1 ended. It felt like the series had hit its climax. Fujimoto really isn't that great of a writer when stretched like this, and he can't frame action shots well at all. The last few months has been basically nothing but random nonsense that people hoped would lead somewhere. They shouldn't have hoped. Firepunch should have been a warning. He's really good with one-shots, and that's about it.

I remember I compared it with Rambo: Rambo 1 was about PTSD and the Military Industrial Complex reprograming young men into killing machines and giving them no place to return to after the war.
Rambo 1 was a complete narrative. The rest of the Rambo series were souless cashgrabs because, the way the suits saw it, the Rambo ip got too big to not be milked to death.
It happens with many ips, be it games, stories, movies and mangas.
I don't know if it was Fujimoto, the magazine, whoever the fuck, someone just wanted to make more money out of the chainsawman ip, that's it.

 

[Dennis-aka-Denji]

Why do people think this is the final chapter? It literally says "To be continued" on the last page, and there are no indications of it being the final chapter on Mangaplus either.

They changed that a few hours after release, originally it said final chapter.

 

[Dennis-aka-Denji]

It's crazy to call part 1 a Shonen power fantasy.

It would be yeah but I'm not doing that.

Denji was so low in life he was used and abused and in return he got scraps, sex was ever only a goal because he didn't understand what human affection is and he was hungry for it. He learned what meaningful connections are through Aki and Power

This is what I'm talking about. You're trying to read this feel good Naruto-lite story into it about a neglected boy who found friends and learned to love. That's just shonen writing by numbers, and at no point was Chainsawman gonna be that. Fujimoto is very obviously dangling that in part 1 just so he can destroy it by killing off Power and Aki. Everyove then kept waiting for Power and Reze to come back so the feel good times can pick back up, but when part 2 pulled that rug from under your feet, you hated it for it. I'm pretty sure you're just pissed off part 1's happyish ending was undone.

Part 2 is a nothing burger of a story, there's no significant development for the characters, story developments and threads either vanish or are concluded abruptly.

I don't get where this obsession with character development comes from. You can very much write a fantastic work of art about a person who stays the same from beginning to the end.

For months now every single chapter is a "well, this happened" and any ounce of copium you could huff out of this story was gone the moment it was anounced next chapter is the next.

Don't know what this means.

 

[Nixhou]

Wait what's the title of this manga again? It's just blank for me and a bunch of naked denji running around exploding things

 

[Woodchipper]

[omitted for brevity]

Goated analysis.

May I offer an addition to this point? Chainsaw Man, i.e. Pochita, was the source of all problems. Not Pochita himself* but his "Consumptive Obliteration".

1. Just deleting something out of nowhere and obliterating knowledge of it is a horrifying ability. That relation is severed from every entity, be it living, unliving, manufactured, natural or even conceptual. Even a single use of obliteration is catastrophic, repeated uses sends the world towards certain doom.
2. Secondly, every major actor in the story either wanted to be eaten by Chainsaw Man, or wanted Chainsaw Man to eat a specific target for their own goals. This only accelerates the problem of the world, especially humanity, ending in some fashion. Aging, War and Death all had their own agendas and each of them would have been a disaster beyond saving. Ultimately Death was erased and now bugs have become a collective apex predator of all life.
3. Bonus point: Pochita is the reason why devils most likely exist in the human world to begin with. Angel stated in chapter 53 that every devil hears the roar of a chainsaw as their last memory from dying in Hell. The operative word here is "every". With Pochita eating himself, will this cycle of Hell <-> Human world reincarnation finally break? Will it never have begun in the first place?

So yeah, Pochita understanding that he's both Denji's shield to protect him from pain and the reason why he feels "cool", as seen in Usuario1257's post, Pochita probably also understands that his power is what keeps making things worse for everyone but also, more importantly, for Denji in specific.

So as I was thinking about it while cooking breakfast I came to the conclusion that yeah, Part 2 is a mess but this mess makes sense because it was a disastrous escalation that was bound to happen. The world changed so much within days, then changed back, then changed again. Denji was caught in the crossfire because he was unlucky enough to befriend a chainsaw dog. It was a continuous disaster almost completely out of Denji's control, brought upon by the worst people and even worse devils being selfish as they wished for eternal war, to end human suffering, to help humanity evolve.

 

[Eighty-six]

The devil that ate them may well be stronger than Pochita so maybe that's why they can't get out?

But that's not how being a weapon hybrid has been demonstrated to work (they're so immortal that they can be left indefinitely partitioned and still be reassembled), and the reasons Pochita gives for eating himself are entirely separate from the fact that they had gotten eaten.

Even if they did get out tho, Denji is now responsible for the mass extinction of humans, I doubt he'd have much will to go on. Maybe Pochita doesn't see the point in continuing if his boy is broken.

Yeah, but that's not what Pochita explained. Also, at least at that moment, Denji was not concerned about any mass extinction.

None of us need another by the numbers manga, and Denji going on a Power-finding trip would be just that.

The potential cost of being successfully subversive is that everyone tries to ape your style, you set the new standard, and future generations will look back on your work as being derivative or outdated without readily recognizing that you set the standard in the first place. So, I don't worry about a work being "by the numbers".

More importantly, Denji going to Hell to find the Blood Devil wouldn't have been anything except following up on a thread that was conspicuously left in Part 1. Power even tells Denji that she won't have her memories but that he should still go, find her, and make friends with her again. Even then, my own expectation would have been that he'd only be able to follow up on this by happenstance, because it's a big deal to get in and out of Hell. So, it was glaring that he actually did enter Hell, and the only thing he did there was watch Asa get mutilated by a demon locust before hauling her and himself out of there.

Denji eating Makima kinda made up for it for most people, but I do think by and large people stopped being totally on board after Aki and Power were killed, which was the first major slap in the face of the typical shonen narrative.

But everyone knew Aki's death was imminent because it was constantly rubbed in our faces from the moment he made the contract with the Future Devil. In general, Fujimoto made it clear early on that he was at least liberal, swift, and brutal when it came to deciding on the deaths of even prominent characters. I also can't imagine that people were too put off when we got the reveal of the Chainsaw Man not long after, along with his various antics-- comedic, logic-bendingly impressive, or otherwise.

I think you put too much stock on what other manga seem to be doing and I can't be of the same mind. Being subversive and supposedly not following typicality doesn't guarantee an enjoyable impression, in the same way that relying more on typicality can't necessarily prevent one. There are many things in this manga that are typical of action shounen (e.g. the special group of weirdos Denji is placed in that is the Special Division, the initial three-man squad, Aki being more competent than Denji while also being contrastingly dark and broody) but what of it? I liked it.

 

[NotSomeone]

It would be yeah but I'm not doing that.

This is what I'm talking about. You're trying to read this feel good Naruto-lite story into it about a neglected boy who found friends and learned to love. That's just shonen writing by numbers, and at no point was Chainsawman gonna be that. Fujimoto is very obviously dangling that in part 1 just so he can destroy it by killing off Power and Aki. Everyove then kept waiting for Power and Reze to come back so the feel good times can pick back up, but when part 2 pulled that rug from under your feet, you hated it for it. I'm pretty sure you're just pissed off part 1's happyish ending was undone.

I don't get where this obsession with character development comes from. You can very much write a fantastic work of art about a person who stays the same from beginning to the end.

Don't know what this means.

I never said it was a feel good story. Is a story a "Naruto-like, feel good by the numbers slop" because it has elements of healing and being a better person despite the world being a piece of shit? I'd argue CSWM 1 was a tragedy.

AGAIN: Aki and Power's deaths were necessary for Denji's as a character, they were needed so he could learn how to forgive. Eating Makima's corpse and forgiving her reincarnation, believing she wasn't bad by nature but by virtue of how she was raised is Denji realising how important love and family, things he laked, are, he validates his existence.

I never argued Aki should return, never agued Power should return. You're just projecting whatever you don't like unto my arguments.

Character development is necessary because otherwise things just happen, if your characters don't react and learn from what's happening to them and by them then nothing is happening, action without reaction is just void of meaning.

 

[SylB]

okay so here's my take: fujimoto is dying and he released this chapter as a sort of emergency escape button

 

[Kani1337]

Why do people think this is the final chapter? It literally says "To be continued" on the last page, and there are no indications of it being the final chapter on Mangaplus either.

Because when it was released yesterday the last page stated that the next would be the final chapter. It has been updated sometime in the last 24 hours. I have no idea why though.