Denji Makes His Epic Return in the Most Iconic Fashion
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The following contains spoilers for Chainsaw Man Chapter 102 by Tatsuki Fujimoto, Amanda Haley and Sabrina Heep, now available in English through Viz Media.
Chainsaw Man‘s best boy has made his return in Part 2, and in the most Denji-like way possible. While Denji isn’t the typical shonen hero and some may even argue that he fits more comfortably as an antihero. It’s not just the fact that he’s the Chainsaw Man, a Devil that encompasses the fear of chainsaws and makes every Devil in the vicinity shake in their metaphorical boots — it’s how he’s kind of a dunce, so in just about everything he does, there’s an almost painfully primal reason for doing it.
On the contrary, Chainsaw Man may have a new protagonist in Asa who is much more emotionally complex. But the two of them share a lot of unexpected similarities. Both of them have had difficult lives and lost people they’ve loved. And both of them, apparently, would do anything to save a cat.
Asa and Yuko get knocked off their feet by the Bat Devil, and upon seeing Yuko unconscious with a pipe impaling her leg, the War Devil, Yoru, urges Asa to kill her so that she can use Yuko as a weapon. She taunts her by telling her that she knows that the guilt that Asa feels from Bucky’s death isn’t that she accidentally killed him, but it was because she was caught. But curiously, Yoru says “You are me, so I know,” rather than the other way around, even though she is the one taking residence in Asa’s body, further cementing the fact that Asa is only the vessel.
Back in Chapter 98, while Asa lay on the ground dying, the last thought she had was how she wished she could have lived more selfishly. In Chapter 102, she remembers when she and her mother were running away from a Devil and she, spotting an injured cat, had rushed over to save it. At the most critical — and deliberately cliché — moment, Asa trips and her mother gets killed when she saves her. Objectively, the right thing would have been for Asa to ignore the cat and her mother would have been alive.
Asa’s memory parallels what happens when Denji arrives. The Cockroach Devil presents Denji with the trolley problem: will he save the one individual, or will he save the car full of five seniors? Denji does neither. He ignores the falling man and car and runs straight towards the Devil and kills him. He’s only concerned about one thing and one thing only: saving the cat hanging by its claws on the rooftop. It’s an obvious homage to Power in two ways with Power’s love for Meowy and how Denji sacrificed six people to save the cat similar to how Power wanted to sacrifice Denji for Meowy.
Selfishness is a funny thing and is subjective. In the eyes of certain people, certain actions will be perceived as being egotistical. In a generic shonen setting, Denji would have been labeled a villain and Asa would have been labeled as being, at the very least, selfish and foolish but Chainsaw Man frames this concept differently.
Yuko changes Asa’s perspective of selfishness. When Asa refused the shoes, Yuko brazenly told her that she didn’t care how she felt. She boldly claimed that if her heart was in the right place then that was all that mattered to her. In other words, it’s selfishness under the guise of good intentions. It’s like what Denji did: he wanted to save the cat and didn’t care that other people would die as a consequence of his choice. While Yuko probably said it so that Asa wouldn’t think she was pitying her, how she’s interpreting it in the context of her mother and Bucky’s deaths does come off a bit like she’s pushing away accountability — a justification of doing wrong things as long as you didn’t mean to do it.
However, that’s not entirely true in Asa’s situation. She’s suffered from survivor’s guilt for her mother’s death and Yuko’s words had allowed her to finally alleviate that guilt and ultimately push her into doing the right thing. And it’s interesting, too, that this epiphany comes right before she saves Yuko which was the right thing to do. In the case of Chainsaw Man, instead of focusing on how Chainsaw Man allowed six people to die, the newscaster declares him to be a hero.
Right and wrong; heroism and selfishness. A Devil who is portrayed to be a hero and a Devil who’s acting like a human. The confrontation between Chainsaw Man and the War Devil is sure to be one that’ll go down in the history books.
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