Chainsaw Man ended recently, and let’s just say the reactions to the ending were a mixed bag. Given that it’s Chainsaw Man, that bag is probably made out of a man’s bag, and, if you reach inside it, you’ll discover horrors beyond your comprehension, sweet, sweet man cream, and a motivational cat poster with a properly plump Meowy.

If you’ve been on Twitter because you’re a bad, bad boy like me who has unfortunately not deleted all social media as a healthy adult might, you might’ve seen some of the jokes going around about the ending. 

What fascinated me was that plenty of the critiques fell into two camps. The first landed on the phrase “themes and such.” This is meant to be a playful jab at those who enjoyed the ending or were defending it. The argument here is that thematic analysis, consistency, or resonance matter far less than story — though story without theme is really just plot, and plot does not a good story make. Not on its own. 

The second camp we can call the questioners. They read the ending, and their immediate response was, “What was the point?” They weren’t merely asking what the point of the chapter was, nor of the seeming dream-ness of the story. They were asking what the point of the character arcs, the symbolism, or the exploration was. Or, really, what they were asking was this: As I feel ill at ease, disappointed in this ending, as I question the point of the story, did I waste my time? What was the point of reading Chainsaw Man?

Unfortunately, you can only ever answer those questions by pissing off the first camp and talking about themes and such.

In this essay, I want to do the following—and yes, I know, wild to have an outline statement. What is this, an eighth-grade literature class where you write a 5.8 paragraph essay? Yikes—talk about what Chainsaw Man is for the uninitiated, talk about what absurdism is, examine the absurdity of the manga, and then hunt for meaning. I’m going to answer every single one of those questions. 

What was the point, you ask? Stick around.

First Bite: The Manga

Chainsaw Man is an absurdist horror action manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto, the mangaka behind the very depressing Fire Punch and a bunch of excellent one-shots. I first started reading Chainsaw Man from its first chapter when it was scanlated and uploaded to MangaStream. (Remember that place? I am old.)

In the world of the manga, there are humans and devils. Devils are seemingly born from human fears. If someone out there is scared of it, there’s a devil for it, which means that yes, once that world hits the late 2010s, there will be the big tiddy goth mommy devil, the COVID devil in the 2020s, and the demon twink devil… Come to think of it, that’s just Angel. 

Devils like to feed on humans, mess with humans, and so forth. Devils are born in hell. When they die in hell, they come to life in the human world. When they die in the human world, they’re born again in hell. It’s cyclical. Put a pin in that.

Devils can also sign contracts with humans. These contracted humans often gain a bit of the devil’s power, such as being able to summon parts of the fox devil. Sometimes, a devil takes over a human corpse. These are called fiends. Then, a select few devils, it seems, though it’s not entirely certain, can form special contracts with a human whereby they reside within the human and give them a devil form. These are hybrids. Hybrids are most often weapons: katana, arrow, rope, gun, chainsaw, and so on.

We meet our hero, Denji. Denji is an orphan with a genetic heart disease who works any job he can get to pay off his father’s debt to the yakuza. He lives a horrible, lonely, disgusting life, but he lives. 

One day, he finds a wounded little chainsaw puppy dog that he names Pochita. Noting that Pochita is a devil, he offers up some of his own blood to help him heal. They become friends and hunt devils together. One day, Denji is killed by the yakuza, and Pochita goes into his corpse, puts it back together, and makes a contract with Denji. He’ll be Denji’s heart so long as Denji shows him more of his dreams. 

Denji revives as a man with chainsaw arms and a chainsaw poking out of his head. He’s the titular chainsaw man. He slaughters the yakuza, who have been turned into zombies by the zombie devil.

He’s then found by Makima, of Public Safety, the government’s devil hunters. Makima promises him two things: 1) If he can be a useful dog for her, then he’ll get a job and a somewhat better life. 2) If he refuses or proves useless, she’ll kill him. So he joins. 

Denji, we quickly learn, is very into sex. He’s a horny dude motivated—seemingly motivated anyhow—by sex, which he desperately wants to experience. This desire makes him easy to manipulate for the women in his life.

Denji is looked after by Aki, the brooding type. They’re joined by Power, the blood devil who is a bit crazy, a bit idiotic, and a bit the best part of the manga. Yes, this is the Naruto Team 7 trio of the light-haired crazy boy, the dark-haired revenge-obsessed brooder, and Sakura if she hit her head a bunch. I love it, and I love their dynamic.

They’re tasked with searching out the Gun Devil, an ultra-powerful devil that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people, including Aki’s family, and increased its power in doing so because people became even more afraid of it. A devil’s power is tied to how much humanity fears it. But, they’re eventually told that the Gun Devil was already defeated. Everyone is warring for parts of its body because whoever has the most can control it. 

You know who loves guns? America. We send the Gun Devil to Japan to go slaughter Makima, AKA the Control Devil. AKA Conquest, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. During Makima’s fight with Gun, Aki is killed. He becomes a hybrid. He becomes Gun Man.

Denji has to kill him.

This is depressing. Denji doesn’t want to think about it. It hurts. So he asks Makima if he can be her dog, and she laughs. It turns out, this has all been an effort to destroy his contract with Pochita. There’s a knock at the door. Power’s there with a cake for Denji’s birthday, and Makima kills her. Denji is totally overtaken by Pochita. He becomes the devil devils fear most: Chainsaw Man. 

Makima fights Chainsaw Man and wins. But he’s saved by the last remnants of Power before she vanishes. Denji confronts Makima, cuts her into pieces, and slowly eats her. He says this is love. Kinky.

The Control Devil is reborn on earth as a girl named Nayuta, who is put in Denji’s care. Denji starts going to school.

Enter Asa, the deuteragonist of Part 2. Asa is a clumsy girl who hates herself. She’s killed by a devil, much like Denji was at the start of Part 1, and she’s saved by a devil, much as he was. But she’s saved by Yoru, AKA the War Devil. Like Makima, she wants to fight Chainsaw Man, but not out of Makima’s fangirling obsession. She doesn’t want to use him. She wants to kill him.

Asa and Denji meet. They have several cute moments together, including a kiss, but Nayuta makes Asa forget a good amount of this. Public Safety requests that Denji stop being Chainsaw Man in order to avert a potential apocalypse brought on by him and the Death Devil. Others, invested in bringing this future to fruition, egg him on into being Chainsaw Man. 

Denji can’t resist. 

Public Safety ceases protecting him and Nayuta. Their apartment is burned down by anti-Chainsaw Man figures, killing their pets. Denji and Asa fight against the Falling Devil. In the aftermath, while getting sushi, Denji spots Nayuta’s severed head on the conveyor belt. This is the consequence of becoming Chainsaw Man.

After all the fights following this, Yoru decides it’s time to kill Chainsaw Man. The two of them do brutal battle against one another. Denji wants to save Asa, even though Yoru has to be stopped. In their fight, Denji eats the Death Devil. This erases the concept of Death. With no death, insects populate the world. They feast on living beings who cannot die. It is a world of unending torture. The bug devils are now feared more than anything.

They slaughter Denji.

Pochita decides he’s had enough. Denji stopped being able to dream. He could only be Chainsaw Man. So Pochita eats himself, erasing Chainsaw Man from existence.

We’re in the final chapter, which is sort of the first chapter. Denji is killed by the Yakuza, but he’s saved by Power, who forms a contract with him. They become buddies in Public Safety together, under the rule of the playful Nayuta. Asa is still in school. She doesn’t trip and fall and crush the chicken devil her classmates are all friends with because Denji manages to grab her before she hits the ground.

The end.

Second Bite: Absurdism

To really understand what Fujimoto is doing in this series, we have to understand absurdism.

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word absurd? If someone says, “That’s absurd!”, what do you think? Preposterous, maybe. Random. Meaningless. Silly. Maybe you think of humor. You might think of other schools of thought and art: Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism. Dadaist and surrealist humor are often very similar to absurdist humor. You might think of the era in the 2010s where “That’s so heckin’ random!” dominated internet humor.

What is absurdism, though?

Do you think there’s a grand plan? When you look at the universe, do you experience it as a machine striving toward a goal, ordered within our systems of logic and morality? Is it machinated by some higher power, a God perhaps, through which life derives meaning? Is there objectivity? Is there subjectivity?

What is the nature and purpose of our existence?

At some point in your life, you will experience an existential crisis. You will question, even if only briefly, the nature of your reality. To translate it into the words of college stoners, “What if it’s all, like, a simulation, man? What if this is the Matrix? Do you take the red pill or the blue pill? Do you suffer through the movie because you’ve been told how good it is, or do you click off and watch something else?”

But is that really what the existential crisis is? No. That’s the question that leads you to the crisis. The crisis comes when you look at all the many unknowable possibilities and explanations for our reality, all the ways none of this might matter, and you realize there is no inherent meaning to the world. The universe does not care about our beliefs or desires. It is cold, literally and figuratively.

If we’re in a simulation, what’s the point of any of it? We’re just code. If there’s some deterministic god out there pulling the strings, what’s the point? It’s all already decided. If the universe exists in an unending loop, a ball that Bounces between Bangs and Crunches, then this has already happened, and it’ll happen again, and what’s the point? Is there free will? And does it even matter?

The universe is absurd. We wish to find meaning in it, and it offers none to us. We search for something in the nothing, and this is a ridiculous trait of ours. This is absurd.

There are a few reactions you can have to this. You can reject it entirely and turn to some system of ordering and meaning, if you can convince yourself of one, though I had no idea how easy that could be. You could accept it, despair, and die. That’s nihilism. You could accept it and take on the awesome and terrifying responsibility of creating meaning from the self. This is existentialism. Or you could accept it, decide human-level meaning-making can’t really solve the clash with an uncaring universe, but declare we must live in defiance of this. This is absurdism.

Now, in reality, absurdism and existentialism are very similar. Their end-result behaviors are very similar. Their literary outputs are different. The existential plot typically revolves around testing whether you can embrace self-meaning or if you doom yourself to having meaning imposed upon you by others, even if it’s false in some way. That is the plot of No Exit. The absurdist plot typically revolves around the lack of meaning itself and the question of whether you can find happiness within it. Existential plots are often about burden. Absurdist ones are often about cyclitity, the Sisyphean tasks.

A Sisyphean task is one that is unending. Laundry. No matter how much you do, there will be more laundry in your future. Eating. We eat to fill ourselves, but we will empty, and we must eat again. Making the bed. There’s no real purpose to doing it, and we will mess the sheets up once more. Work is often Sisyphean. 

Humans live our lives in miniature loops. This is the way it is. There’s likely no cosmic why to our nature, but it is our nature. Or reality’s nature. Or something. 

Maybe nothing.

Sometimes, you’ll see purists who claim that absurdism must follow in the style of woman-hater Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. These people probably also like Ionesco, that anti-actor prick, so they might not be worth listening to. An absurdist plot, they say, must be about meaninglessness, and there must be no meaning to it, structurally, experientially. I call bullshit.

Think about absurdist comedies. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind? I reckon it isn’t fucking Godot, because Godot isn’t here, so you can’t have intercourse with him. It’s probably something like the film Airplane! Now, Airplane! has a traditional plot structure. The characters believe in meaning. But what is the texture of the film? Physics get thrown out the window. Language degrades into meaninglessness. There’s violence, cartoonishness, and sexuality. Things seem to happen for no reason at all. Airplane! does a 9/11 on meaning. Through attacks on language, physics, and logic, it builds an absurd universe. It shoves the absurdity in your face, and then says, “Look at these people living full lives despite this.”

That is absurdism.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is absurdist. It declares that nothing matters, and knowing nothing matters, it’s just life, so keep dancing through. But it isn’t just life. Absurdism doesn’t declare you must be jovial or laugh at the world. Evelyn rejects her daughter’s nihilism not because there is objective meaning, not because the world is just funny haha times, not because she can dance through it all, but because there are moments that she gets to be with her daughter and love her despite it all.

That’s the real phrase of absurdism. Despite it all.

This is why I argue absurdism can exist outside traditional meaningless plots, outside comedy, and outside stories wherein the characters grapple with meaning. One of the most hated tropes is the “And it was all a dream…” ending. I’ve written about it before a couple of years back. To summarize: Don’t we hate this ending not because we claim it’s lazy but because it forces us to confront the question: What’s the point?

When a story ends with it all having been a dream, you might throw the book down in frustration, or close the app, I guess, and feel like you wasted your time. “What was the point in reading that? Why did I invest all those years reading this weekly? It was all undone, so what does it matter?”

Yet, you already know. You know that you stuck with it because, despite it all, it meant something to you. What does it mean for something to matter? This didn’t happen, yet despite that, it was important to me. This doesn’t matter, yet despite that, I adored it. I spent time with it. It affected me. Changed me. Metamorphosis. Hello, Kafka.

Dream endings on otherwise non-absurdist stories add a layer of absurdity. But it’s meta. It isn’t the characters who must confront meaning. It’s you. The reader. You’re under the microscope of your own eager, begging, judging eye.

Why are you here? Why are you anywhere? What is the point?

If there’s no point, why do you persist despite it all?

Third Bite: The Absurdism of Chainsaw Man

The place to start with Chainsaw Man is probably in the world-building itself.

Devils are born in hell. They are killed. They are born on Earth. If they are killed, they return to hell. Each time is basically a restart. They do not retain who they were. Born. Die. Again. Born. Die. Again. It doesn’t matter what they do in their time on Earth. When they die, they won’t remember. It will no longer be part of them. Die. Born. Again. When they’re killed in hell by other devils, what they did in hell will no longer affect their subjective identity when they’re reborn on Earth. Die. Born. Again. 

This is unending. It is cyclical. This life means vanishingly little for the next. Cycles and repetition are important for the absurd.

But the lack of inherent meaning, the lack of carry-over, the absurdity of it all, doesn’t mean that nothing happens, that actions have no consequences. A devil’s time on Earth may very well increase the fear people have of that devil. In their next life, they will be more powerful.

Angel Devil, our twink extraordinaire, reveals that many devils recall one faint sound before being born on Earth – the revving of Chainsaw Man’s engine. So let’s talk a bit about Chainsaw Man. 

First of all, we don’t know what he is. He’s not the chainsaw devil. He’s not the birth devil or the memory devil. He’s not the dementia devil or the erasure devil. He isn’t the dream devil. What is he? That’s one question fans want resolved. How do we know he isn’t those things? Well, when Chainsaw Man devours a devil, the devil and the concept it represents are erased. Chainsaw Man ate the Nuclear Weapons Devil, and so the nukes in the world were gone. In Part 2, we watch as he eats the Ear Devil, and then everyone’s ears are gone. But he pukes it back out, and ears return.

This itself is wild. What are the rules here? Is there a real logic to it? Can we understand the universe? Does it have inherent meaning? The worldbuilding is absurd. But let’s stick with it. 

Because at first, we’re led to believe that the only way for devils to escape cyclicity is to get vored by Pochita. His gut is the only true rest. But, we discover, this isn’t really true. He spits out the Ear Devil pretty soon after eating it, so we know he can regurgitate his prey, and this puts them back in the cycle. How much is stored in his gut though? Does he digest those who stay too long, permanently erasing them, or can they always be regurgitated? Is this fatal digestion or endosomatic vore? Is it possible to answer that?

Towards the end of Part 2, America does what it does best, and it re-invents nuclear weapons. The manga doesn’t answer this question, but it forces us to ask it: Is this a new, different devil? Is it the same one Chainsaw Man ate, pulled out of Chainsaw Man’s hammer space by virtue of the concept being built all over again from first principles? Imagine he eats the knife devil. Mankind would quickly start shortening daggers to be of more use in the kitchen. Is this a new devil or the same devil of old? Is Chainsaw Man truly the end of the cycle, or is his gut just a temporary reprieve?

Makima reveals that Chainsaw Man ate the devils that represented the other paths besides death for the end of a life. We’re left to imagine what this means. Did there used to be an afterlife? Was there a heaven? Evolution? Devolution? Transformation? Rebirth? Were humans once part of the exact same cycle as devils?

If Chainsaw Man ate the Hell Devil, what would happen to devils themselves? To those in hell? To those who die on Earth?

We don’t know. It is impossible to know, but we long to know. We want sense in a world that defies our logic, our ordering, our senses, and our morality. Yet still we seek. Still, we are denied. This is absurd. There is no such thing as an objective analysis of art. We search for something we will never find.

Let’s pivot and look at the texture of the story. Much of the story is funny. 

There’s a crotch kicking contest. There’s an intense battle that pays homage to the Sharknado films, with Denji riding the Shark Fiend to fight against the flying spaghetti brain that is the Monsoon Devil. There are meme faces drawn in some of the panels. Some of the exaggerated facial reactions are funny. 

Power’s character constantly makes fun of our human social conventions. She takes things literally. She invents meanings for phrases and words and acts authoritatively on them. This is funny in the way absurdist comedies often are — the humor comes from an attack on language, which is an attack on meaning. It makes fun of meaning. And we laugh. Meaning-making, we see, is absurd, both in the silly and in the somewhat pointless senses. And then we laugh some more, because laughter fends off the sea of nihilism. The scariness.

This is a horror action manga. One of the creepiest spreads comes when we meet the darkness devil. Why’s there a frog? Why the astronaut corpses? Is it just because it looks cool, and Darkness Devil is aura farming and spooky-maxxing? It’s because the universe defies us. We are terrified of many things, but the unknown is chief amongst them.

Makima was scary because we knew, or at least felt, she was up to something, but we didn’t know what. Yoshida was somewhat scary when we first met him because he was unknowable.

When you’re watching a horror movie, what’s scarier? Your imagination of what’s to come, of what’s haunting, or the reality when it shows up?

Look, look in the dark. Those who venture into it do not return. Stare into the abyss, and feel the chill of space creeping into the gel of your eyes. They’re freezing to the spot. Look, look into the dark. Did you hear that? Ribbit. Is it a frog or a harbinger? 

Look, look in the dark.

Why is Chainsaw Man the devil that devils fear most? Is it because he can destroy them or because he is the unknown? We know not what he’s the devil of, we just know he’s Chainsaw Man. We know not what happens to those whom he eats, nor do most of us remember them at all. He takes meaning, and he erases it.

Chainsaw Man is the abyss.

Look, look down his throat and see the dark that even darkness fears.

This is the fear of the absurd.

Huh.

So what is Pochita? I say: Pochita is the Absurdity Devil because, sneakily, I think Fujimoto wrote an absurdist story that is ultimately anti-absurdism and pro-existentialism.

Let’s explore that. 

When Makima talks to Kishibe toward the end of Part 1, she describes Chainsaw Man as chaos or absurdity, depending on what translation you’re reading. She says that he is killed over and over, but he revs his engine and rises back up. Die. Rev. Born. Die. Rev. Born. Kill. Die. Rev. Kill. Die. Kill. Chainsaw Man, more than any other devil, lives the Sisyphean cycle. It matters not how many times he is killed. He will rev his engine, fight, kill, and die. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. He creates nothing, and he destroys. He erases. He takes concepts and meanings, and he de-meanings them.

Makima is a fan of his cycle. Makima is a villain.

In Part 2, one of the weapon hybrids, Barem, is a major antagonist. It’s because of him that Nayuta and Yoshida both die. At one point, he tells Denji that he, too, is a fan of Chainsaw Man. He wants to see Chainsaw Man fighting, dying, and trying again and again and again. He wants to watch the cycle. He wants to see the unending despite it all of Pochita and Denji’s existences. He wants to see Sisyphus roll the boulder up the hill, watch it fall, and start again, because he finds meaning in the struggle. The rebellion of continuing despite it all. The immortal struggle. The absurdist struggle.

Barem is a villain.

In the final chapters, Pochita laments that Denji has become the tragic absurdist hero. He finds joy only in the destructive rebellion. He is exhilarated by the push and fall of the boulder. He wants the cycle more than anything else. He no longer dreams, not truly. He claims to want sex, to want love, to want happiness, but he doesn’t. He wants the cycle. He dreams of the cycle. Denji wants to be Chainsaw Man. 

He wants to be the Absurdity Devil.

Pochita lived that life. And he saw it amounted to nothing. It felt like rebellion against an unknowable, meaningless universe. But to raise rebellion to the dignity of The Thing that will fulfill your soul makes you nothing but a complacent tool.

We do not die when we are killed. We die when we cease dreaming.

You could say that Denji fails the absurdist crisis. Sure, he doesn’t fall into nihilism. But he ceases being able to dream. His life, if continued, would be nothing but unending despair, and he would trick himself into imagining the Denjiphus happy. A Sisyphus who dreams of nothing but the boulder is a Sisyphus who has lost to the Gods completely. We cannot imagine him happy. But the absurdist must. Pochita wants to imagine Denji happy.

So he has to destroy the absurd cycle of Denji’s life. Pochita eats himself.

Pause though. Let’s talk about plot and story structure, because a lot of people are caught up in and are obsessed with plot. Fair enough.

In one of the first arcs, we run into the Eternity Devil inside a hotel. This devil traps Denji, Power, Aki, and their group inside. No time passes in the outside world, but it passes for them. They will run out of food. No matter where they go, it’s just the hotel. They’re trapped with each other. There’s No Exit. Eternity is nothing but a series of cycles that slowly drain you and lose their meaning and yours. To defeat Eternity, Denji must become Absurdist Man and continually kill the thing as a blood-powered perpetual motion machine. His rebellion works. Eternity surrenders. They escape. The cycle ends.

In Part 2, the Eternity Devil returns.

Oh. The cycle doesn’t end. Absurdity cannot destroy the cycle. The circle. The wheel.

In Part 2, Denji and Asa get trapped by the Aging Devil. In the Aging Devil’s inner world, devil powers don’t work. No one grows old. But when humans reach a certain age, they simply turn into trees. This is nonsensical. Perhaps tree-i-fication is one of the four paths besides death that were forgotten, but it still exists somewhere in some form. It reminds me of Fire Punch’s ending, really. 

The Aging Devil cannot be defeated or killed. Their attacks against it are meaningless, but they struggle anyway. It is an absurd endeavor, made all the more so by dragging the Aging Devil into its own world. The devil releases them all because the alternative is that it will be left there with only Denji, and it does not enjoy talking with Denji. This is an absurd, weird ending. If it weren’t funny, it would feel anticlimactic.

Anti-climax is interesting. It’s antagonistic toward the audience. It makes you question the point of the buildup and the struggle. 

In Part 1, as we’re spending our time thinking we’ll maybe do some sort of monster-of-the-week arc style on our hunt for the Gun Devil, Fujimoto smacks us in the face with a revelation: The Gun Devil was already defeated. Oh.

Throughout Parts 1 & 2, the mystery behind Yoshida is built. He’s strange. He’s really powerful. The octopus devil holding such strength seems odd. Who is he? Why is he the way that he is? What does he actually want? He threatens Denji. He seems like the potential Makima of Part 2, something we’re primed to look for given all of the mirroring between the two parts. He kidnaps Denji. He nearly kills Asa. He seems to be pulling strings, and there is a weird sexual tension between him and Denji.

Then he shows up with pizza. He thanks Denji for being his friend. Then he sets off an explosion. Barem shows up and torches his corpse. That’s the end of Yoshida. Buildup. Buildup. Buildup. Tension. Boom. Nothing. 

I watched a lot of people, when Yoshida’s death chapter came out, ask what the point of his character was. Those questions were asked again after the final chapter. Who was he? Why was he in the story? What was his point besides being yaoi bait?

We want to understand, and yet he and the universe defy our easy understanding. This fills us with a sense of the absurd.

It’s important to talk about the mirroring between the two parts. We start with Denji and Asa, who are both orphans. They’re lured out and killed. A devil forms a contract with them, and they slaughter the ones who killed them. The Bat Devil appears in the early arcs for the two parts. At a school, both Denji and Asa befriend an eccentric girl, whom they think they can form a close relationship with, whether romantic or platonic. This girl turns out to be both crazy and bloodthirsty. Denji and Yoru fight their crazy lady. Both win. Neither can bring themselves to kill her. She escapes, and thinks about starting a new, better life, only to get murdered by a third party. Reze is killed by Angel and Makima. Yuko is killed by the fake Chainsaw Man, who is ultimately being manipulated by the machinations of the Death Devil, Makima’s older sister. We eventually learn that both played a role in the deaths of their fathers. Denji killed his. Asa’s mother killed hers, but she was slow trying to get help, because she wanted him dead too. And they hate themselves for this.

Fundamentally, they both want to be loved, and they have no idea how to go about getting such a thing.

Part 1 is the resistance against control. What if we live in a deterministic universe where there is no free will? Nothing we do matters. If there is a god who rules us with an iron fist, we are nothing. Right? Or do we rebel, despite knowing the bleak odds, because the rebellion is worth it? In Part 2, the resistance is against death. In Part 1, Denji devours the Control Devil. This stops Makima, but not control. The Control Devil is soon found on Earth again, though how or why she was quickly destroyed in hell, we don’t know. It turns out that perhaps Denji eating things doesn’t have the same effect as Chainsaw Man eating things. Control wasn’t erased. 

Or so we’re led to believe. After all, a world without any control is a world so utterly devoid of ordering that there might not be anything to it at all. Maybe we instantly reinvented Control. Maybe if Denji eats the other horsemen, we might think, they will be reborn. We wonder if he’ll eat the War Devil. But he doesn’t. That’s not the mirror. He eats the Death Devil. Death vanishes from the world, and this is what destroys the world. Bugs multiply without end, and they feast on undying corpses. Eating Makima saved the world. Eating Death doomed it.

Why?

Why is the mirror like this?

Because in Part 1, in the climactic battle, Denji throws away Chainsaw Man. He defeats Makima as Denji. In Part 2, Denji embraces Chainsaw Man. He eats Death as Chainsaw Man.

Denji has failed. Though he tries to grow, he is quick to throw things away. He falls into the same patterns. He sexualizes things. He tries to numb his feelings. In Part 1, he asks Makima if he has a heart. He wants to be human. In Part 2, the Fire Devil calls Denji a devil because Denji has slowly grown ambivalent to human life as a coping mechanism.

Denji has looked at the pattern of his life – of growing close to people and building families only for them to be taken away from him – and decides he’s fine with the pattern. He’ll live through it again and again because he likes the highs even if he hates the lows. At least, he wants to like the highs a lot. He wants to want to have sex.

But, Pochita claims in the penultimate chapter, what Denji truly wants is to suffer.

He has become obsessed with the cycle. He experiences his dreams not as real dreams but as reasons for the cycle to continue.

Pochita hugs him because, at the end of the day, what Denji needs is for someone to hold him. Not sexually. Just physically. He needs to be cared for because he refuses to care about himself, despite how selfish he comes across.

In the penultimate chapter, Pochita says, “In a world without me, maybe you could continue dreaming.”

Denji has given up on dreams.

When you put too much stock in the cycle, when you embrace absurdity to its peak, you fail the absurdist crisis because you can no longer live a full life or try to despite it all. You do not live despite the meaninglessness. You live for the meaninglessness. It’s for the thrill of it all, of nihilism, of despair. This is not a philosophical embracement of absurdity. This is the annihilation of the self dressed up in absurdist language.

Near the end of Part 1, Denji wants to be nothing but a dog. Near the end of Part 2, Denji wants to be nothing but a devil. These are both ways of unbecoming. Denji’s ultimate desire is the same as Makima’s. He wants to be devoured by Chainsaw Man.

Pochita eats himself.

And now we blend absurdism with existentialism. We’re back at the first chapter. But there’s no Pochita. Through mechanisms we aren’t meant to understand, there’s a new timeline. Denji is in debt. He’s dying from his heart disease. He gets killed by the yakuza. But this time, he’s saved by Power. She’s herself. Alive. She makes Denji her pet. They’re captured and employed by Public Safety under the thumb of the Control Devil, who is Nayuta. While on a devil hunt, Denji stops Asa from tripping and killing the Chicken Devil.

Denji does not have a perfect life, because that isn’t what Pochita wants. He doesn’t want Denji to cease being himself. He simply wanted Denji to dream again, and the only way to achieve that was to rid the world of the Absurdity Devil.

But this doesn’t rid the world of Sisyphean tasks or cycles. Denji still lives as a dog to someone. There are still jobs. There are still things we will never be able to know, and people search for meaning where there is none inherent. In a world without Absurdity as a concept they can recall, where do these people fall? Well, you reject the notion of meaninglessness, you sink into nihilism, or you embrace existentialism.

Denji wakes and thinks he has had both a good and a bad dream. That is what the manga was to him, a good and a bad dream. It was all a dream. This is an existential or absurdist plot point. It forces the reader to question meaning itself. It has a meta purpose. But. The dream still matters. It is remembered, though you can’t recall it. 

The Control Devil is Nayuta, not Makima. Denji’s character has grown despite it all. Or, more accurately, because of it all. His choices, his thoughts, his past, his remembered yet forgotten life, semi-erased to a dream by Pochita, still mattered because of the interactions between people. Love. Friendship. Bonds. Help. Struggle. Choices.

They mattered even though they didn’t.

When people ask what the point of Chainsaw Man is after hitting that final chapter, I would say that you remember all the nice times you’ve had, the choices to read and engage, the thrills, the laughs, the despair, the bonds between fandom if you engage in that, or the satisfaction of analysis. You remember all of it, even if you can’t recall, and you chose for it, in those moments, to mean something to you. You gave it meaning. That’s why it mattered.

That’s existentialism.

And now you’re asking about what meaning even is because that is what Tatsuki Fujimoto wants you to do.

I’m not saying you have to like the ending. You don’t even have to agree with my analysis. Art is by no means objective. But I do think you’re wrong if you say it’s an asspull or lazy writing. It’s uncomfortable, is what it is.

But… You know, part of me wants to rebel against absurdism, much like the manga itself. I want to plunge its depths and find meaning, even if it’s invented, even if it doesn’t matter, even if it doesn’t create any sort of objective meaning.

Fourth Bite: Meaning

At one point in time, when I was spending more time on essays and somewhat churning them out in a semi-cynical bid to build a platform and sell more scripts and poetry, I had the vague desire to write an outline on sublimation in the world of Chainsaw Man. If you’re unaware, the very basics of sublimation are as follows:

Type 1: Freud – Negative sexual drives (desires) are socially shunned and cannot be expressed. The libidinal energy of these drives must find an outlet, though, so we change the course of the energy to express itself in some acceptable form. Aggression might express itself through sport, domination through politics, or any of them into art, and on and on.

Type 1.5: Freud-Adjacent – Sexual drives aren’t the only negative drives that can sublimate (transform). Rageful bloodlust can find an outlet through painting. Art is often where we go to release these energies. Despair turns into political action. So it goes.

Type 1.?: Freud Reversed – You could also call this sexualization, which is a defense mechanism. In this, negative drives are sublimated into sexual drives because they’re safer or more socially acceptable. Some men might sexualize fear because it’s more socially acceptable in certain zones of influence to be horny than to be afraid. Sometimes, suicidality is sublimated into impossible kinks surrounding things such as fatal vore because the impossibility and sexualization compartmentalize the desire, negate its power, and allow you to indulge in it, theoretically at least, without risking any action upon the original drive. Often, especially with impossible kinks, this will then sublimate in the normal Freudian way into art.

Type 2: Lacan – So you know how no matter what you do, there’s an unfillable void within you that desires more, and that true contentment is a myth? Right, so this is Lacanian Lack. The Hole. It’s an unfillable hole, a bottom who’s an incel. Now, despite knowing this on some level, we go after things we believe will fill the Hole. This is The Thing that will make me complete. Das Ding. Sublimation is the process by which we elevate something to the dignity of The Thing. Or, you could say, sublimation is what occurs when we decide something has the meaning for which we are searching. This is what I long for. When I achieve this, my yearning will end. Of course, it won’t end, because desire is unending, because the hole is unfillable, because to be human is to be a metaphorical bagel. We are defined by our hole. As a gay man, that’s fine with me.

So, where do we see this in the manga?

Well, first we have Denji’s base drives. He wants sex. Makima, noting that, gives him career goals. He channels his sexual drives into his work and his fighting, not because they are true expressions of those drives for him, but because he is told that through achieving X and Y, he may satisfy his libido.

But what of his libido? How much of it is real? It’s somewhat typical of a shonen protagonist to be horny, and horniness is the expression of desire. Libidinal want is maybe the base state of the living. But… Denji is very sexual. He uses his sexuality as an excuse. If he gets through X and Y, he can grope someone. He can get a kiss. He can have sex. These are his goals, but he isn’t out there jerking off all the time or going to brothels. He isn’t trying for random hookups. He doesn’t buy himself an onahole, as far as we know. Denji wants sex but does vanishingly little to attempt to actually satisfy these drives. This makes me question their purpose. 

I think the answer comes in the penultimate chapter. Pochita says what Denji longs for is to stay in the state of despair and violence because that makes him feel alive. But to admit that is shameful, so he wraps it all up, instead, under the guise of doing it so he can have sex. He doesn’t sublimate sexuality into violence like we first think. He mentally sublimates the goal of violence into the goal of sex. This makes it more tolerable for him to live with himself and his choices.

Makima sublimates loneliness into Machiavellianism. She wants to be loved, but she has no idea how to express that desire, so instead she endeavors to share her love through controlling others. To be loved is vulnerable. There’s a layer of submission to it. Submissive desire is often sublimated into expressed domination. This is what’s behind all the alpha male asshole types. They long for submission but find the idea of submitting intolerable socially, so they act out in pretend domination instead. Makima, we know, wants to be consumed by Chainsaw Man. And if he won’t eat her, then she’ll defeat him and take control. If I cannot have ultimate submission, I will have ultimate domination.

This is an expression – ironically, perhaps – of a fear of the loss of control. It’s a fear of vulnerability.

But why does she want him to eat her? If Chainsaw Man eats her, she will become one with him. This, if you talk to people into vore, is much of the appeal. It’s inseparability. Love. Consumption.

You could also see it as a response to the void. If he eats her, perhaps she will be The Thing. And upon her death, Chainsaw Man will finally feel complete.

Makima, it seems, is positioned against the void itself. That is her ultimate enemy, not because she fears death. That’s the wrong void. She despises a world of lack. She wishes to remove all the things that harm humanity, even if she must be a godly dictator to accomplish this. She wants humans to live in a world without lack.

But in such a world, there would be no humanity. We are defined by the holes in our centers. Rid us of the hole, and we cease to be. Makima would rid us of bad movies. Denji recognizes this makes her an enemy of mankind. We must have bad movies. We must sit through a marathon of shit, wondering what the point was, and then watch something we love profoundly. Meaning means nothing without the lack of meaning.

This is similar to her obsession with the cycle. Absurdism.

I would somewhat map Lacan onto philosophy in this way: We all have a lack. Lack exists whether we acknowledge it or not. It is placed within us the moment we exit the womb. Acknowledging the lack is nothing more than a simple question. It isn’t yet anything on its own. But if you come to the determination that nothing will ever fill the void, which is true, you do have a few choices laid in front of you. You can despair. Nihilism. Nothing matters, nor can it. 

You can actively choose what you sublimate to the dignity of The Thing, and by giving it dignity, you make it dignified. Existentialism. 

Or you can say there is no point to elevating anything to the dignity of The Thing. Sublimation will only harm you, because you will catch the object of your desire, and realize desire remains because the lack remains, and you knew this. You endeavored for something pointless. Sublimation doesn’t matter. It’s pointless, but you should live despite that. You should live despite the ache and the yearning and the pain and the hole. Learn to live with it and laugh at it. Absurdism.

Denji ends Part 1 in a state of active sublimation. He is dreaming.

He ends Part 2, before Pochita’s intervention, in a state of faux-sublimation. Chainsaw Man is the Thing, though he pretends sex is Das Ding.

When Pochita says it’s good that Denji didn’t get to have sex, it took me a little bit to understand this thematically. Fujimoto doesn’t seem to be the anti-sex type, and there’s nothing inherently true to the idea that sex would destroy Denji… until you realize that it’s the only pretend dream he clings onto. It is the last “Thing” besides Chainsaw Man. If he had sex, he would have realized that sex cannot fill his hole because it’s with a girl and not with Yoshida, and Asa isn’t into pegging or something like that. But seriously, he would reach his long-awaited goal. Achieve his dream. And realize once again that the real thing isn’t as great as the dream. He’d still feel empty.

Would he have kept going through the cycle? Would he have embraced the despair of Chainsaw Man and turned into the Devil Devils Fear Most, or would he have just killed himself?

I also want to talk about coping mechanisms.

We have the two most obvious off the bat: Denji uses sexualization to avoid dealing with the reality of his violent choices and the shitty world he’s forced to participate in. Asa isolates herself through a false superiority complex to protect herself from her crippling loneliness.

We also see compartmentalization. Denji takes his largest childhood trauma - murdering his own father - and he shoves it behind a door he tells himself not to open. In this way, he can “forget” it. Or, rather, remember it without recalling it. Asa does something similar with her memory of the day her mother killed her father. There’s regression involved in their inner worlds as well.

Kobeni is a workaholic who is constantly apologizing. Power’s insane confidence helps her push away her fear. Aki turns trauma into vengeance, aiming to sublimate despair into rage and rage into justice-seeking. To seek justice is to put some sort of meaning on your suffering, though suffering has no meaning to it. Kishibe is an alcoholic.

Then we have someone like Quanxi. She deals with the troubles of the world in part through sex and love. In part, she operates through a chosen ignorance. The less she knows, the less it hurts. The less she has to question or think about it. The more she can bask in the peaceful moments with her harem. Ignorance prevents you from dealing with the void. You can pretend it isn’t there, sort of. But she’s wrong. Her way of operating gets her and her girls killed. She’s turned into a slave of Makima’s, then becomes a dog of Public Safety. Her path of ignorance destroyed her.

Then again, is there a path beyond destruction?

We really do need to consider consumption itself. Yes, this does apply to the drinking and the cigarettes; it can be used as a metaphor for sex. Plenty of moments in the manga are about literal food, but look at the world-building and the meta. Denji is an ultra-traumatized boy. He survives by eating. He consumes blood to heal himself. He bites his enemies. As Chainsaw Man, he devours them.

As Chainsaw Man, Denji can heal himself through eating. Through eating, he can rid himself of his enemies. He can destroy the very concept of a scary thing by eating it.

And he’s bound to the eating. Much as he might want to turn to sex as his coping mechanism, it isn’t. He would choose devourment over sex any day. 

Denji has an eating disorder. He thinks he can eat his way through his trauma. If he devours it, it’ll all be okay. Maybe he’ll have to keep eating. Being alive is Sisyphean, after all.

But Pochita eats himself. This is his ultimate act of love for Denji, just as Makima thought love would have been to feed herself to Pochita. Denji wakes in a world without Chainsaw Man. He can no longer devour grief and pretend that that is working. The only way for him to be happy is to live in a world where his coping mechanism is not what defines him, where it isn’t his greatest strength, where it won’t save and simultaneously destroy him.

I think that says some interesting things.

It provided meaning to the story for me.

I’m going to end this essay not with a tight little conclusion but with one final statement on meaning. In 2025, I released a poetry collection titled A Museum of Art and Eggs. It’s a collection primarily consisting of ekphrasis, poems about other pieces of art. Traditionally, they describe visual art, but I colored a bit outside the lines. This is my poem about Chainsaw Man. When I read the final chapter, and I asked, “So what was the point?”, I came back to this. It helped me express something. Now, I share it with you.

Eat the cigarette for money.

Eat the vomit for a kiss.

Smoke and bile are the potion ingredients

for the curse of the good life.

If you beg and bark and kill when told,

you’ll be called a good boy.

Eat the undead to live.

Eat the living to kill.

A storage receptacle resides in your stomach,

affordable housing for everyone

you can’t afford to lose, but you are too poor

to afford to see open their doors.

Eat the malicious.

Eat the loving.

In the end, they’re the same. The ones

who hurt us are the hardest to let go.

They linger in your stomach, in the fridge.

Butterflies cause lovesickness and indigestion.

Closed doors have a habit of opening.

The primal fear of abandonment lies within,

a beast with a black hole in its bronze chest

that unendingly drips bloody with s*men.

You turn the corner down the city streets in a new life,

and there’s the door in an alley.

The memories flood back.

I eat when I am in pain as if I can devour grief

before it tears away another of my limbs.

I thought I sealed the door away in a box

with underwear and wishful letters,

but doors never vanish, even in the ancient ruins.

He has never been to my house, yet he wheels

his house to my driveway. He steps out with a smile,

with a tear. I cannot leave a stray kitten.

I miss you. I love you. I’m sad. I’m lonely.

My feet betray my brain, and I bound over the vestibule

knowing full well he will push me out with less flesh.