Review: Chainsaw Man

Chainsaw Man is a pretty straightforward battle shounen with a much darker tone than usual. I know that sentence sounds half-wrong, but it isn’t. Chainsaw Man does not bring a completely revolutionary way of showing battles or characters to the medium or anything, it is a shonen that follows almost all the shonen rules but slightly twists them enough to make it feel almost like an entirely new thing. It also adds some very well thought out details.

Mild note that it’s been a while since I’ve finished this manga, so this is not gonna be a detailed review, but more like an overview thing.

If you take all the details away and look at just the outline of the premise, it becomes a bit easier to see. There are devils in the world who kill humans, and devil hunters who kill the devils to protect the humans. That’s a pretty typical shounen premise, nothing new, nothing extraordinary.

These devils are physical manifestations of human fears, like fear of bats, fear of swords, bombs, and ofcourse chainsaws. Anything can be a devil, if it can scare humans, there are no limits, and their power levels are quite predictable according to what people tend to fear the most. The more people fear one thing, the stranger its devil is gonna be. This kind of power system gives the reader a rough idea of how powerful a devil is gonna be just from hearing its name, and avoid moments when we feel like the power scaling is kinda unfair or some characters being op for no reason. Chainsaw Man tackles the problem of a complex power system by connecting it with a complex idea in the real world. People’s fears can be collectively predictable, but on an individual level, few people fear some things for reasons that the others might find silly and vice versa, like my friend who’s scared of frogs, or you might be scared of something that most people have no trouble dealing with, like me being scared of dogs.

And on another level, the most antagonists are pure villains, nothing else. This detail is what sets this manga apart from other series. In other manga, the Antagonists are also almost human or have humane motivations, but in Chainsaw Man, they are nothing but predators searching for prey for no good reason other than the fun of tearing them apart. In other shonen like Bleach, Demon Slayer or most others, there is a chance for you to sympathize with the villains and understand why they ended up as the bad guys. But in Chainsaw Man, it’s not like that, the villains are supposed to be cruel and evil, so they’ll be cruel and evil, even if they might look like humans (you know what I mean).

And on the other side, the main characters, usually the protagonist of a shonen, is supposed to be a good guy fighting bad guys motivated by ideal reasons, like protecting his friends, family or his people. But in Chainsaw Man, the character motivations are more like a seinen than a shonen. The characters are more blunt and questionable instead of having pure idealistic motives, including the main character (especially the main character), I mean we both know what his motivation was at the start of the story, don’t we? ¯_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯)

Some characters are in this devil hunting business because they do want to protect their loved ones, but some are in for the money, some are in for political reasons etc., but no one seems to be enjoying or feeling proud of what they’re doing. Well, you can’t really blame them when they have a very high chance of getting split in half everytime they fight a devil, or a bit of their lifespan being chopped off every time they try to attack a devil. This is another major difference between typical shonen and Chainsaw Man, it’s how the characters are portrayed more vulnerable & realistic instead of positive & idealistic.

It’s the following typical shonen formula but twisting it to make it feel completely unique. This type of structure is what makes Chainsaw Man so uniquely interesting and the story manages to build on top of it to make it a memorable experience.

So yeah, Chainsaw Man is pretty awesome and the hype is really real. Read it if you haven’t yet.