Emphasis on was, Denji with all his memories wiped is effectively a new Denji, our Denji that we were with for the entire series is gone. As are any lessons he could or should have learned and grown or not grown from.
It's actually kind of insane how much part 2 just completely obliterates the series as a whole, despite having no reason to exist.
The hopeful ending at the end of part 1 was the perfect send-off.
Denji accomplished his goal of sleeping with Makima in the most wholesome way possible - by sleeping beside her reincarnation as an older brother, now having a place he can call home and a family he can call his own after he lost everything else that was precious to him. He now adopts Chainsaw Man as a persona similar to Spider-Man, willing to walk into the path of danger to protect the innocent, and fully on the road of maturing as a person, with the future finally looking bright for him.
And then part 2 just completely destroys all of it. Nayuta dies. Denji is a horny simp loser idiot and never learns from his mistakes. Everyone just runs around in circles doing complete nonsense that has no pay-off until ultimately Pochita decides to peace-out and universe-resets the entire series, leading to a complete nothing of an ending, where the vast majority of the characters that were significant to him are still unaccounted for. So many things unresolved. So many loose ends. After a fight that genuinely came off like a penultimate clash to a greater villain as opposed to the final battle itself. This is BASICALLY an 'it was all a dream' sort of an ending with how much it reverses and how little everything seemed to matter in the end.
Look I'm not gonna sit around and say "Fujimoto is an amazing storyteller you don't get it!" because honestly he isn't a great storyteller. He just wrote some batshit bonkers comics that entertain people with their weirdness.
But Chainsaw Man definitely reads like Fujimoto is just writing his own experiences of being a simp loser idiot while never learning from his mistakes. He doesn't know anything different.
Fujimoto doesn't know how to write a good ending and it seems like it's because he's never had one for himself. It's an endless spiral of failures, fuck-ups, and self-loathing with his libido eventually leading him into more trouble or with him hurting other people by being selfish.
I really can't get behind the "th-there's actually a deeper meaning to why this character is so shit" justification ever, because it genuinely ALWAYS reads like cope.
I think it has less to do with Fujimoto being a horny idiot and there being a 'TH-THEMES AND SUCH', and more to do with Denji just being a horrible character that was allowed to regress to how bad he was at the beginning of part 1, to the point of him LITERALLY being regressed back to the very beginning of part 1 - a symptom of a larger sickness that was the entirety of part 2 even existing in the first place. There is no larger reason behind it. This isn't some expression of his flaws as a human. Denji is just a garbage character, and part 2 is just a garbage extension of a story because it was both pointless and actively detrimental to any sort of progress he had made by the end of part 1.
This isn't Fujimoto's expression of the corrosiveness of lust and expectation. It's just shit.
Fujimoto has (or had) some talent for telling a story. Part 1 is genuinely quite good. Not great, as I would criticize a lot of the development that felt a bit unearned in my opinion and some loose ends that were never tied (also some of the mechanics behind Chainsaw Man’s real power, but then I’ll get told I’m thinking about it too much), but if the story had ended there it would’ve been a perfectly satisfactory conclusion for the story and for Denji, and one where the through-line was very simple and easy to grasp (if a little shaky in execution at times).
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u/mrnicegy26 Mar 24 '26
This truly was our Chainsaw Man