Back to Voremio's Profile Voremio's Profile

Vague spoilers will be mentioned
Chainsaw man is a huge waste of time. Had it been written by someone who can write I feel it would have potential. The plot is messy, inconsistent, and confusing and most characters have no real purpose.

The story:
Even if it makes an attempt to deviate from the norm, Chainsaw Man is just another run of the mill “beat em up” shounen manga. It’s very clear that the story was there to accompany the fight scenes and not the other way around. It comes off as lazy, thoughtless, and messy. There were attempts at plot twists and foreshadowing, but almost none ... had much, if any at all, impact on the story, making them ultimately pointless. Had the story been properly thought out, maybe it could have gone somewhere and been an interesting manga. The pacing is inconsistent, flipping between being too fast or too slow, and the plot leads nowhere. Fujimoto tries to shoehorn “symbolic” moments in during random scenes to feel like he was writing something deep and important, but they never made sense and didn’t add anything to the story for the reader to interpret. Things that should have been answered were left unanswered, which I am assuming because the answer was overlooked and forgotten about. Fujimoto also handles characters and their deaths extremely poorly. Apart from the few main characters, almost every other character introduced will die in the following chapters after their introduction. Their deaths don’t leave much impact on the readers even when you can tell they were intended to because there just was not enough time to begin to like the characters. The story was riddled with tons of plot holes that also give an unsatisfying story. The ending of the story (or at least the “arc”) was also extremely underwhelming, confusing, and disappointing. I will not spoil the ending, but don’t go in expecting much. Overall, you can tell that Chainsaw Man was written because some guy wanted to draw gore and fight scenes and was forced to add a story to it.

The Characters:
Most characters in csm are unlikable, boring, or just annoying. There were few I cared about at all, which is saying something because I tend to like most characters from series I get into. They are all riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions which can get annoying because of how often they appear in the story. Denji tries too hard to divert from the typical shounen protag, but he winds up just being a different protag cliche. We’ve all seen too many perverted teen boy characters whose only goals are to have sex or something of the likes. Most characters weren’t able to get proper development because they just died soon after they were introduced. After about the midpoint of the series characters began getting crammed into the story with motives that come out of nowhere and don’t make sense and then all of a sudden, they’re main characters that we should care about. Ultimately almost every character is not there to be their own character, but instead to progress Denji’s story in some way or another.

The art:
I can see the idea Fujimoto had for the art, but because of how he executed it, it comes off as messy and amateur. I read a bit from one of his previous works “Fire Punch” and the art there is infinitely better than the art seen in csm. If there wasn’t a small blurb about his previous works at the start of each volume, I would have thought csm was Fujimoto’s first manga. Although the art does improve over time, the character art generally has sloppy lines and inconsistent proportions, which I think is generally a bad look. I will say he is pretty amazing at drawing backgrounds, but with the clash between how he draws backgrounds with clash between how he draws characters makes the characters seem very out of place. They do not merge well at all which makes his bg skills feel wasted. Onto the devil designs, they are either trying too hard to be unsettling or they are way too simple. Every human who has the ability to turn into a devil will usually just have their head and arms as their devil’s weapon’s name, which gets boring after you’ve seen it ten times. On the other hand, the regular devil designs usually wind up also looking extremely similar, but they try to be disturbing and way too over detailed. I think the art had potential, but Fujimoto fell through with the execution.

I think it can be enjoyed casually, but all in all, Chainsaw Man is a mediocre story that tired too hard to deviate from the norm, carried entirely by the hype surrounding it (which to this day I’m still confused on how it got that hype in the first place). Don’t waste your time on Chainsaw Man, read Dorohedoro instead, this was just a rip off of it anyway. RIP ANGEL🙏

This isn’t directly related to the story but I would like to mention you can tell pretty clearly that Fujimoto has a vomit fetish and he enjoys drawing it in detail. He only does it a few times but it’s generally just off putting and was almost always unnecessary to the story. You can argue he’s doing it for shock value, but it’s overdone and off putting. I tried to give him that benefit of the doubt, but he just kept putting it into the story. This part is a spoiler but near the end of the series Makima mentions that in the csm universe World War 2 and Nazis don’t exist because the chainsaw devil ate them (when he eats something its existence is erased entirely including memories of others). This just left a bad taste in my mouth because it comes off as holocaust denier ideology. You can claim he mentioned it so that the readers could relate to the scene but there are plenty of tragedies to mention so it just comes off as extremely odd to me that he picked nazis and WW2. Neither affect the story much, but they are something to keep in mind.