Chainsaw Man #33-34: "Mission Start" and "Full Team"

The attack on the safehouse commences. Police SWAT teams - as well as a semi-military "extermination division" that specializes in bringing conventional force to bear against massed devil forces - will be encircling the building while Section 4 goes in. Presumably so they can blow the whole thing up and accept whatever collateral damage may come as a plan B, but also to ensure that neither Fireteam NOR any S4 members who try to go rogue can make it out. We're privy to the briefing that these soldiers get, and through them we learn about the members of other Special Section teams that survived the attack and got reconciled under the new S4.

Or at least, the members who are considered likely to go rogue. IE, the nonhuman rather than warlock devil hunters. It was mentioned in the restaurant scene that there's at least one other fiend besides Power that Public Security has on a leash, and it now turns out that they have several (in addition to any who Fireteam might have successfully taken out). First is...okay, this issue came out a few years before "Look Back," so LB was including a cheeky reference to this rather than the reverse.

It's shark time!​

Moreso than that though, the "can swim through solid material" thing has got to be a Street Sharks shoutout. Fucking lol.

It seems like Power isn't the only example of an intelligent (but not smart) fiend. Shark Kick seems to be at about her intellectual level, and actually has a better attitude than hers, as we see him doing things like apologize to his teammates after a minor friendly fire incident. I can't imagine Power ever saying sorry, heh.

Next on the list is another fiend, this one a corpse inhabited by a remnant of the Violence Devil. Now that's a broad diabolical purview! Violence is said to be no less powerful in fiend form as he was in his own devilish body, though nothing is said about whether he's gotten smarter or dumber than before in this state. He does seem a bit more restrained than I'd expect from "Violence," at least when it's in his tactical interests to be so.

We're only seeing a few seconds' worth of each of these fiends, but so far it seems like Power might actually be a particularly unruly case rather than the opposite as I'd previously inferred. Then again, that plague doctor-ish mask it's wearing has a weakening toxin in it that keeps Violence from getting too strong and trying anything, so maybe this is just him being grudgingly compliant.

...

In the restaurant scene, we were told that that other squad had a fiend that was more animal than person and needed to be kept locked up when not deployed. We don't see any such fiends here though.

I can't imagine that this sort of fiend would have been more vulnerable to Fireteam's attack (considering that they were being kept in secure facilities at the time), so I guess they're just not bringing them to this mission due to its delicate nature.

...

The next couple of introductions are something different. Well, possibly. We may or may not have seen their like before without being told.

Some devils can take on human form, without needing a living or dead host body the way symbionts or fiends do. And these ones are usually smarter, more social, and better able to control their bloodthirst than most of their kind.

Yeah...

I don't know that Makima is one of these. She could still be a fiend, or just a really fucked up warlock, or something different. "Humanoid devil" is now my leading hypothesis though. It just feels right. And the way that the concept of humanoid devils is just matter-of-factly dropped into the story's possibility space with minimal fanfare via a minor side character seems like it's being done to give the reader a hint about something else.

The last of the new introductions is another free-living devil. This one is very different from the others. And also the best example so far of a (seemingly) friendly devil that (seemingly) isn't just cynically playing along.

The angel devil is sweet, polite, and seemingly dislikes violence even though she's quite capable of it (she can't help that she has Rogue from X-Men powers). She seems glad for opportunities to take support roles rather than frontline comment, and it's out of distaste for fighting rather than cowardice or laziness.

...

The fear of "angels" is an interesting one to try to parse. Especially one that feeds a manifestation that looks like a Haibane Renmei character rather than something with trumpets and eye-studded rings and fiery auras. Touch her and you die, even if she doesn't want to kill you. Hmm. Fear of not being good enough? Maybe? I guess?

This definitely makes me think some more about whether or not it's actually just fear that devils are empowered by, or if they can also draw from emotions like awe or worship. "Fear" in a more...biblical...sort of sense of the word.

Although in that case, why do most of the gods seek fear instead of love? Why make their relationships with humanity so adversarial when they can get the same benefit with less risk? Did something *happen* to sour mankind's relationship with the gods, turning nearly all of the latter into what we now call "devils?"

Well, I could be totally wrong about this entire thing of course, but the Angel Devil is a data point that plays very well with this hypothesis.

...

After the devils thin out the zombie herd, the warlocks start pushing through as well. Watching Aki's interactions with Angel when the two of them find their way into each other amid the mess of slaughtered zombies (fucking hell, how many people has this Yakuza syndicate murdered in the recent-ish past?). Aki's a lot more...hmm...I'm not sure if "friendly" is the right word. He's still curt and businesslike. But he doesn't have the obvious appearance of contempt like he had when being introduced to Denji and Power. Like he's maybe starting to get used to the idea of some devils not being entirely bad.

Angel's whole deal might be doing a lot to further encourage that reconsideration. Depending on how much Aki knew about her before this mission, of course.

On the far opposite conceptual side of things from "angel," these issues also give us a scene that's happening either right before or concurrently with the beginning of the raid. In an earlier Fireteam interlude, we saw Sawatari and Katanaman talking about getting their syndicate's higher ups who weren't directly implicated in the attack to "the villa." We now go to that villa, where Makima is paying a visit to the kumicho and his confidantes.

The bossman is very eager to tell Makima that this Sawatari woman is a mysterious outsider who wrested away the loyalty of some of his clan's younger recruits, and that Fireteam is his enemy as well as the government's. He'll happily answer all the questions that he can about this rogue cell.

When she tells him that she also wants the names of the people Fireteam has hired from other yakuza clans, though, the man's tune changes. And he seems to either forget who he's talking to, or perhaps not realized in the first place.

Not pictured above is his longwinded speech about how if it wasn't for the yakuza retaining its power and stability, the Chinese and Russian mafias would move in to Japan, and they would be ten times worse. That...well, I'm hardly an expert on this subject, but from what little I've picked up while this *might* be true of the bratva, organized crime in modern China doesn't hold a candle to them or to the yakuza in terms of harm to society. Things could be different in Chainsawman Earth than they are in real life, but I doubt they're that different.

Makima is amused by his antics, and reciprocates by showing him a paper bag full of human eyeballs. She claims that they were removed from the still-living skulls of the close family members and loved ones of all of the men present, and that the entity that removed them will be happy to put them back again in exchange for the syndicate's full cooperation.

...

Dang. Future Devil maybe, with its eye motif? Or a different one? Maybe Makima did it herself. We still don't know what her full powerset is.

Granted, it could also just be a bluff and the bag is actually just full of organ donor eyes. But I don't think so. At the very least, the yakuza men all react to Makima's presentation as if they find her story plausible. Which means that it's the type of thing that Public Security can and does do in this setting, even if they didn't actually do it this time.

...

One man freaks out and tries to attack Makima. She gives him a stern look. He bleeds to death out the face. And also comes incredibly close to disclosing her true name (whatever exactly it is) in the little villain speech she follows that with.

She doesn't actually say the words "I'm the State/Police/Government Devil," but the difference is almost academic.

Hmm...I think I'm starting to get the connecting theme of Makima's powers now, but they don't seem to relate all that closely to the concepts she most likely personifies. Then again, I also would have never guessed "healing" from "snake," so me not getting the connection between "control other people's bodies" with government" is...okay nevermind, I'm stupid, "control other people's bodies" is a PERFECT power for a devil that embodies fear of the police state lmao.

Let's see, so far we've seen her crush bodies to a pulp, cause Denji to feel this super orgasmic rush, make people's chests explode, (possibly) remove and reinsert eyeballs, and now make someone bleed to death. Yeah, that all fits into the purview of "make your body do _ against your will."

Though granted, the one power we *haven't* seen from her is outright body-puppetting, which seems like a strange thing for her to not have in light of everything else. Then again, part of the horror of state violence is one's own complicity in it, so from that angle I can see how this might be a reconciliation of "can control your body" and "you're still the one who ends up conquering yourself and loving Big Brother dommy mommy." Outright mind control would free her victims from the personal nightmare of complicity.

Alternatively: maybe she CAN just straight up cast dominate person, but it's her ultimate weapon that she chooses to keep very close to her chest. That would also make sense.

...

The retort she gives to the kumicho also recalls a lot of my earlier thoughts about her and the Gun Devil's relationships with the national consciousness. Makima and her lackeys are almost like a national ego, while Gunny and his are a national id.

Guns keep us free. Yakuza keep the gaijin away. It's our national lawlessness. Our friendly neighbourhood monster who's welcome to eat our children from time to time as long as it keeps scaring the yucky outsiders away too.

But it needs to remember who actually owns the place, or it gets whacked on the snout. A constant knife-edge dance between collusion and warfare. It's fine though, everyone whose opinion matters is cool with it.

Having the onscreen representation of both these factions' leadership be a light-haired woman with medical-ish powers is a nice reminder of the two's common root.

...

Suffice to say, Makima gets what she came for in the end.

The pair of chapters end back in the building, with Aki sending Angel to carry out some captured Fireteam grunts and then coming face to face with Sawatari. And it turns out her Snake Devil has yet another bizarre ability you'd never have expected from it. Apparently, it actually SWALLOWED Himeno's Ghost Devil when it closed its jaws around it in the last battle, and it can spit up other devils that it's swallowed again as servitors. Kinda like that one squeaky demon dude from Samurai Jack.

Something tells me that the Snake Devil has multiple bullet casings souping it up. Maybe even some entire bullets.

Well, we haven't seen Denji, Power, or Kobeni since the raid sequence started, so I'm guessing one or more of them is going to walk in on the battle and give Aki some much-needed backup. Whatever the resolution ends up being, though, it'll have to wait for the next post, as this is the cliffhanger ending of both chapter 34 and of volume 4.


Aki just plain has supplanted Denji as the main protagonist at this point, hasn't he? I doubt it'll be permanent, if only because Chainsaw Man is an ongoing comic and Aki has little time left to live, but even if it's temporary I'm surprised at how it managed to creep up on me like this.

Heh, also, I just realized that if Makima actually is the "State Devil" specifically, it might be a bit of double-entendre. She's called the State Devil, and she's also Japan's state devil. Cute, if correct.