Chainsaw Man V6 (part three)

Issue forty-eight, "kaboom, kaboom, kaboom," is one part informative to three parts agonizing. Deliberately agonizing, I mean. It's designed to evoke sympathetic pain in the reader. But still, it makes for a taxing read (or rather, look. There's not much dialogue in it).

Denji has his initial clash of blades against Reze in the amusingly video-game-like setting of "literally on top of traffic in a busy highway." In most cases, closing the distance ASAP, cutting away with all chainsaws, and counting on his healing factor to outlast the enemy's healing factor is a winning strategy for Denji. It makes sense that he'd default to it. However, against Bomb Girl it's the exact wrong thing to do. Before he knows it, he's picking himself up off the cratered floor of what used to be a nearby building, and Reze is striding toward him with chiding condescension.

This is the informative bit of this chapter. And it connects with something we engaged with a little bit earlier, with Denji's defeat of Katana Man.

...

Yakuza-kun apparently didn't know that he could turn his legs into weapons as well as his arms. At least, I assume he could. It certainly seems like he should have been able to, if Denji can, given how closely their powers mirrored one another's. Katana Man was faster, but Denji's greater familiarity with Chainsaw Man's abilities (owing either to more time bonded to his devil, or more extensive training done in the time he had) let him do things that his opponent didn't know they could do.

Looking back at that chapter, I'm also pretty sure that Denji removed his chainsaw-chains and used them to tie Yakuza-kun up after knocking him out. They sure looked like chainsaw-chains, at least. And they seemed to be able to persist and retain their structural integrity even after Denji detached them from his body and resumed human form. That's another non-obvious thing he must have figured out he could do.

Reze - in addition to having more conventional combat training than either of the other weaponhosts we've seen so far - is able to turn any part of her body into a bomb, and keep them that way even after detaching them.

Her advantage here is basically the same as Denji's against Yakuza-kun. She's unlocked more of the transformation-tricks that should theoretically be possible for all weaponhosts. She either has had that hamster in her for much longer than Denji and his pupper, or she was trained by people with a much better understanding of what weapon-devils can do. Possibly both.

With that in mind, I think it's pretty clear how Denji is going to get out of this. He's going to start turning every individual bit of his body into chainsaws and chainsaw-components as needed. Launching volleys of vibroblade fingernails. Deploying ablative steel bits from whatever part of his body he needs to deflect the next explosion. Tearing out bits of his hair and using them to plant chainsaw-caltrops in the ground to lure his opponent into. Spiderman-swing his way across the battlefield using chain-lassos. Stuff like that. Hell, maybe he can even learn to spray gasoline; that's something you could use to great effect against Reze in particular if she doesn't see it coming.

If she can do the shit she's been doing, then he theoretically should be able to do most of the stuff I listed above. His discoveries at the end of the Katana Man arc strongly foreshadow it as well. It's just a matter of how long it takes him to realize this and figure out how to move those muscles.

...

Unfortunately, even if Denji is already thinking along these lines, he doesn't have the time or blood supply to act on it right this second, and Reze has no intention of giving him more time.

A bit of her finger, still hanging off of one of his blades, detonates right on top of him. He hasn't finished recovering from that before she closes with him and launches him over the cityscape.

And even free-falling through the air storeys overhead isn't an escape from Bomb Girl. Not even for a few seconds.

I'm not sure if her purview actually includes liquid-fuel missiles, or if she just improvises something like old school blackpowder rockets using chained bomb-segments. Either way, she's able to get above him, and then send him downward at high speeds in a string of sequential blasts that bury him in the pavement.

And that's not even the worst part. No, the worst part is when she picks his gurgling wreck out of the crater and basically does the explosion equivalent of what Roy Mustang did to Lust.

That scene in FMA:B was agonizing to watch even though Lust was straightforwardly a bad guy and the audience's sympathies were fully with Mustang. It makes things that much worse when you flip that equation around. The horrified civilians watching in abject terror from behind the blasted rubble are feeling exactly what the reader is.

Especially when we see the state of Denji after she's finished. I almost feel like I should be spoilering this for gore.

I mean, Chainsaw Man takes place in a pretty cartoony, ironic setting. The comedic nature of the comic's...well, its almost everything...and its generally kooky and over-the-top portrayal of injury and violence in particular...does soften the blow a little. But only a little.

She picks up the steaming, unmoving, half-melted lump of flesh and steel and starts walking away with it. I can only assume that it must still have an intact-ish Pochita inside of it, for her to still consider it worth carrying, but you'd never have guessed that by looking. I'm pretty sure that Denji is dead at this point. To at least the same degree that he was dead when the Zombie Devil chopped him up and threw him in that dumpster. Reversible death, but still, it's not a state of being to take lightly.

Rescue comes in the form of Aki, who manages - presumably with the help of his precognition - to sneak up through the smoke and sirens and get close enough to do some damage before Reze notices him.

I figured he's going to keep Reze distracted while Beam rescues Denji's remains and dips them in puddles of dead civilian even before I saw the name of the following chapter.

I mean, it's really just the obvious strategy for this situation.

Aki doesn't have a hope of meaningfully hurting Bomb Girl, of course. But, by staying up in her business, concentrating solely on defensive precognition, and following his foresight as fast as his muscles allow, he can keep her distracted for a while and pray that further reinforcements arrive before she tires him out. Which they do, in a somewhat unexpected form.

Maybe Violence isn't actually cowardly, but simply prudent. Determined that they didn't have enough forces to win with at the moment, so withdrew, regrouped, and came back with more.

Well. Either that, or Makima sent him a threatening text message and he decided he was more afraid of her than Reze. Same outcome either way.

As Aki and Violence face down Reze, with Angel and Beam hurriedly dragging Denji away for regeneration in the background, we get our first seemingly genuine humanizing tick from Reze for a while. It's pretty funny as well as characterful.

She might just be luring them into a false sense of security with the "I'm anemic" bit, but I don't think so. Shedding that many body parts has got to cost her something even before getting into the limbs that Denji and Aki managed to sever. She's been running them ragged, but she also hasn't had a free moment to stop and eat a civilian herself. So, I think this is genuine.

Also, Violence being able to execute that level of sarcasm puts him way above Power as far as smarts go. He's got to be pretty much at the maximum upper end of intelligence for fiends. Assuming he actually is a fiend, under that mask of his; it's entirely in character for the brass to be lying about his nature to the rest of the team, so he might actually be something else.

If we're getting into surprising characterization, though, nothing tops this next little soliloquy from Angel as he picks out a dead body from the rubble to heal Denji with. There doesn't appear to be anyone within earshot of Angel during this part, so he's not putting on a show.

To further clarify, the woman appears to be breathing her last just before Angel leans over her. We see her reach her hand up as if asking for help, but then it collapsing again before contact is made. So, the woman may or may not still be able to hear Angel's words. If she can, then I guess there could be some sadism in there, reinforcing the certainty of her death. But then, saying "you're going to heaven" before anything else? That seems like it kind of outweighs any negative emotions that the rest of it is likely to cause.

And, if Angel doesn't think that the dying woman can still hear him, then that indicates that Angel truly believes everything he's saying here. In which case...does he actually know this to be true? Is heaven a real place, and can humans go there? Or, is that just a religious belief of Angel's? In the latter case, that still tells us a lot about who Angel is and how he sees the world and the people (regardless of species) in it. And it's far away from the impression he's been giving Aki when he randomly comments on how it's wrong for humans to not suffer before dying and other psycho shit like that.

In either case, it seems that Angel was indeed just trolling Aki before. And that the overall assessment of his character we've been given by the authorities is likely inaccurate.

Once Angel hands the dead woman to Beam and the latter eagerly bathes Denji in her blood (I wonder if there's a legal clause that covers the use of dead citizens by state-controlled devils in situations like this...), Denji comes back to life and quickly regenerates. Beam, of course, simply cheers about how he knew his lord and master was too powerful and mighty (in his words, "the badass-est") to let his host die for real. As Denji gets a grip on the situation, Angel gives another very surprising, very intriguing monologue, this time directed at Denji.

Huh.

What is Angel trying to do here, exactly?

I don't think he's trying to hand Reze the W. If he was, he had much better opportunities for sabotage than this.

Does he actually want to see harm minimized? That would be really surprising. The first actively benevolent (rather than just benignly self-interested like Pochita) devil that we've seen so far.

Does he want to see the PSD's special division weakened with the loss of members, as revenge for enslaving him? Probably not, once again for the same reason of "there was a lot more sabotage he could have pulled off here if that's what he wanted to do."

Or, perhaps, is he legitimately curious about the nature of Denji's character? Just wants to see how his squadmates will react to moral dilemmas, without having too much of a stake in them himself? That would definitely fit into the role that angels typically play, as judges of souls. But, I don't think we've ever seen Angel ask these kinds of probing moral questions before, have we? If that was his shtick, you'd think he'd do it more often.

It really seems like he actually cares about humans and would prefer fewer of them die. That might not be the case, but as of right now it sure seems like it.

Well, while that's going on, Reze calls on the Typhoon Devil that she bullied into helping her earlier. So, the people distracting her now have a serious distraction of their own to deal with.

Which means that Denji doesn't have a lot of time to think about Angel's proposition.

Well, Denji did make a promise that he's gonna try and live and enjoy his life, and that's more important than possibly some more civilians who he doesn't know. Also, he doesn't want to die himself tbh. So, he guesses that fight it is. He'll need some new tricks if he's going to be able to have any more success against Reze and her windy friend this time, though. On inspiration, Angel asks Beam - who seems to remember the Chainsaw Devil's previous incarnations and thus knows more about it than either of them - what his old master would probably do in a situation like this. When Beam says that "Lord Chainsaw" is ultra-fast and doesn't bother using his host's feet when he needs to move really quickly, Denji puts that together with Reze's hints.

Denji detaches a pair of chainsaw-chains, whips them free, and then the comic remembers that it's supposed to be comedy and realizes that it's been doing depressing heavy shit without anything silly to go with it in way too long. So, Denji tells Beam to go into shark form, and does this:

Angel starts screaming at him to use his chains to swing around, obviously, idiot! Denji either can't heat him, or pretends not to. Beam, of course, upon being questioned by his lord and master, quickly realizes that he must be mistaken about Denji being mistaken and that this indeed is the correct course of action.

Part of what makes the joke land so well here is that Denji really does have the mind of a much younger kid, at least in many ways. So, to him, this might actually have been more obvious than what Beam, Angel, and the reader all consider to be the obvious thing.

Well, uh. Beam can do the whole Splatoon thing swimming at high speeds through concrete. So this DOES make Denji more mobile. And uh...maybe it'll help? Somehow?

I kinda hope he beats Reze like this while managing to completely miss the point until after the fact lol.

For the time being though, Reze herself is mostly just amused when she sees what's inbound on her position.

But, since Beam can Splatoon his way up the sides of buildings, he's able to swim Denji up to eye-level with both the climbing Reze and the flying Typhoon. And the chapter ends on this completely ridiculous image:

The next chapter, #49, is of course titled "Sharknado."

Of course this was all just Fujimoto scrambling to set things up for that reference. Of course it was.


Well, next time, sharknado.