Chainsaw Man #39-43 (part two)

We get a little bit more Aki at the start of #41, "Before the Storm." Just a little, though, and it's actually more focused on a different character rather than him. A rather surprising one.

The Angel Devil is a weirder, and also more traditionally devilish, character than his earlier appearance suggested (and he is a he, apparently, not a she. Just the femmest femboy who ever femmed). His aversion to violence, it turns out, is actually on account of laziness rather than anything moral or ideological. He'd just rather sit around eating ice cream than exert effort on anything, violent or otherwise.

When Aki - who is temporarily babysitting Angel in much the same way as Denji is temporarily babysitting Beam - finally twists his arm into fighting another devil with him, and they find a wounded, dying devil-hunter lodged in said devil's throat and begging for death, Aki tells Angel to euthanize the broken man with his insta-death touch power. This time, Angel's refusal to comply has a totally different justification.

I'm not sure if you can even call this sadism, since Angel isn't taking any apparent pleasure in watching this painful death. He just thinks that it's something that *should* happen, for reasons more abstract than personal gratification. He attributes this belief to his diabolical nature, but I don't think we've seen other devils express any attitudes like this. For the most part, they haven't been picky at all about how quickly or slowly their victims die, and whenever we've seen a devil draw out the kill it's either been for personal revenge against a person who's harmed them, or as part of a larger tactical ploy.

So, does Angel actually believe that the other devils share this perspective? Maybe some do. But not the majority, as best I can tell from our sample so far.

Rereading these pages, I'm starting to get the impression that Angel is just trying to get under Aki's skin. Giving whatever answers he hopes might frustrate or unnerve him the most (in this scene, Aki ends up having to euthanize the half-digested man himself). Petty revenge for pushing him around, perhaps?

We also get a little scene of Makima briefing Aki on Angel before assigning them together, and there's a line she casually drops that has me really raising my eyebrows and going "huh?"

I'm not referring to the weapon-creation ability (though that it also odd in its own way. Turning stolen life force into weapons only very vaguely relates to the concept of "angels," unless it's alluding to some particular story I haven't heard. Also, heh, makes it kind of ironic that Aki uses a katana created by Angel to kill the guy after Angel himself refused). Rather, I'm talking about the mention of a devil having been born. What does that mean, exactly?

I guess it's possible that this is a translation vaguery, and the intended reading is something like "the village where he first manifested" or "the village we first encountered him in." But even in that case, it raises a ton of questions. Questions that mostly tie back to one of the earliest and biggest questions I've had about this setting.

...

When did the devils start appearing?

The comic has buried the lede on a lot of worldbuilding stuff, justifying it with Denji's secluded ignorance and using it to parcel information to the reader at a digestible pace. From a writing perspective, this is a good decision. But we're more than forty issues into the comic now, and at the point where I think this lede has been buried too deep.

We know from the Gun Devil backstory that devils weren't a problem (or at least, they weren't a very major or frequent problem) until sometime after the global adoption of firearms, narrowing it down to sometime in the last four centuries or so. Reading between the lines, there's also some implicit evidence of it having started sometime within the 20th century. Specifically, the continued existence of the USSR into the late 1990's suggests that this world's history was more or less the same as ours until sometime after the October Revolution, but diverged significantly since then. It's probably safe to assume that this historical divergence happened at the same time the devil attacks became a big deal. The way Aki and Denji recall their childhoods further suggests (again, only implicitly, but still) that devils have been a fact of life for as long as they can remember, which would probably go back to the mid eighties or so.

So, I could be chasing some red herrings here, but it's most likely that the devils really started showing up sometime between 1917 and 1983. That narrows down the when, but not the how, or the pace.

Even before this, there have been clues pointing toward the devils arriving on Earth piecemeal rather than all at once. There's been dialogue where characters speculate if the devil of a certain concept exists or not ("IF there was a coffee devil..." etc). The Gun Devil doesn't seem to have been a more minor devil who grew in power with the rise of gun violence, his big rampage was his first ever attack (since we also have a Tomato Devil and a Sea Cucumber Devil running around, I'm going to assume that the timing of Gunny's arrival coinciding with so much fear of guns was coincidence. If devils needed a lot of fear energy to enter the world, there'd be no weak devils). Etc.

So...what does this process of initial manifestation, this "birth" as Makima has now described it, look like? Is there any rhyme or reason at all to when or where it happens? When DID this all start, and do people have any idea what might have triggered it?

I feel like it's high time the comic started providing concrete answers to these questions. It's not like characters who aren't Denji wouldn't already know this stuff.

...

Anyway, on Aki's side of these interactions, we learn that Aki hasn't scored enough kills yet to assure his place on the team they're about to send after Gunny. Seems a little unfair to me, considering he pretty much led the team that procured the mass of bullet casings that's allowing them to even send this expedition, but okay.

...hmm. You know, it occurs to me. Do they know that the Gun Devil's main body is even in Japan? I don't think it ever specified whether or not Japan was the country that got hit last in its rampage. If it was, then yeah, it stands to reason that it's remaining body might be hidden somewhere in or near the Japanese government's jurisdiction.

...hah. What if the direction their bullet-casing-mass pulls them toward turns out to just be to the similar masses being assembled by the Chinese and Soviet governments? That would be kinda funny.

Well, back to Denji now.

Reze is a really bad employee. When she's not flirting with customers, she's doing her schoolwork on the clock. But then, depending on whether or not the cafe owner is in on this operation, she might not actually be employed here at all, so whatever.

Over the course of his next couple visits to the coffee shop, Reze tries teaching him the basics of reading and writing. Which...god, it's painful seeing the artificiality of her interest in him, because this would be so heartwarming if she was actually teaching him out of the goodness of her heart. He really needs someone to be uncynically invested in him, you know? Honestly, once he learns the truth about both Reze and Makima, I have a feeling Denji is going to end up just hating women.

...

Granted, between these two and Himeno's own brand of skeeviness, I'm starting to look at the author himself a little askance when it comes to women.

Granted, we do have Kobeni and kinda-sorta Power as counterexamples, but if we don't start getting more female characters who aren't like this I'm going to have to make unpleasant inferences.

...

The topic of book learning, along with the increasing intensity of flirtation (all coming from Reze's side), eventually leads her to offer an unusual invitation.

Most teenaged romance thing ever. And appealing to Denji's generally lawless nature on top of it, along with a loose association with the nice thing she's been doing for him (teaching him the school stuff he was denied access to as a child).

Meanwhile, a third party seems to be making his own plans for Denji. And, whatever agenda Reze is serving, this one's seems decidedly worse. A rogue warlock and his intimidating-sounding Typhoon Devil patron are planning to extract Pochita from Denji's body. Presumably on the Gun Devil's behalf, though Typhoon keeps the reasons close to its watery chest.

If this guy is able to extract Pochita and hand it over, Typhoon will grant him weather control powers for the rest of his life without ever asking anything else of him. A much, much better deal than warlocks normally ever get.

...hmm. Weather control. Maybe this guy and Reze actually ARE working together, what with that mysterious flash rainstorm that allowed Reze's to start getting her hooks into Denji?

The final page of the issue has the warlock cackling about how he has a proven successful strategy of capturing his targets' friends and loved ones and torturing them until the target begs to be killed in their stead. Apparently, he's already killed an allegedly cold and ruthless Chinese devil-hunter using this method. And the camera does zoom in ominously on Reze as he says this. And...I'm not sure who the hell he'd try to target to threaten Denji with *other* than Reze.

...well. Actually, come to think of it, what would make the *most* sense would be if Reze is an actress. He's going to capture her on their illicit date night and "torture" her to secure Denji's surrender, and then she walks away with thirty million yen once he's extracted the heart. Or, maybe that's what she thinks is going to happen, but he's actually planning to torture her for real and then kill her to tie up loose ends. Yeah, the more I think about it, the less Reze and Typhoon Boy's appearances seem like a coincidence.


Anyway, will this end up being a test of the heart that Denji is so proud of himself for having? Or a test of the brain that neither he nor the reader has any reason to put faith in? Possibly both. Next time, the final two chapters of this order.