Chainsaw Man #16
Final chapter of Chainsaw Man for this set, and I believe also the last chapter within Volume 2. This hotel mission is turning into a pretty big deal.
So, let's see if this chapter resolves it, or leaves it on a cliffhanger.
Denji is woken up in the hotel bed by Himeno. She's smiling, but it's the wild, antsy smile of someone trying to cope with immense stress, and she's smoking a cigarette. She fills him in on what happened while he was asleep, which is basically "nothing but sanity slippage." Electricity, air, and water are all still coming in. There's a bit of food left, but not much. Aki has been obsessively searching the same corners over and over again for the devil, and refuses to take a rest no matter what anyone says to him. Arai has locked himself in a random bedroom and refuses to come out. Kobani had a nervous breakdown and had to be knocked out for her own safety. Power, on the other hand, is...I'm not sure if "fine" is the right word, but she's at least unaffected by their situation.
Himeno herself has been keeping watch over the two incapacitated newbies and the one untrustworthy newbie, and she woke Denji up just now because she needs a bathroom break. To her unspoken - but visible - relief, Denji finds this a reasonable enough reason to wake him, and takes over for her without complaint. As she walks away, Denji notices that she smokes the same brand of cigarettes that Aki does. When he asks about it Himeno explains that she was the one who got Aki addicted to tobacco in the first place.
Time for more backstory!
Shortly after they started working together, Aki and Himeno found themselves looking off of a dark balcony and gazing moodily at the shadowy city below. Day in the life. Himeno is offering Aki a cigarette, and brushing off his health concerns with the assertion that devil hunters don't live long enough to get cancer.
She also correctly guesses that he's out to avenge one or more family members against the Gun Devil. He's not the first one she's met. The crop of constantly grim, brooding new novices that all appeared at around the same time are easy to pick out once you've seen your first few. The government-employed devil hunters are the only ones allowed to carry the bullet casings into the field to further the hunt for Gunny, so pretty much all of these would-be-avengers have swarmed their organization.
Aki still refuses to smoke with her. Just gets annoyed at her implication that he's as doomed as all the others. She probably should have predicted that, but they're teenagers, emotional maturity would be in short supply for them even if they weren't traumatized monster-hunters.
Later that day, as the two of them walk down a busy Tokyo street, Himeno spots someone approaching through the crowd and tells Aki to stand back and not get involved. As Aki stands back and doesn't get involved, the new person - a young woman around their age - walks up to Himeno, slaps her brutally across the face, and walks away without a word. Himeno just takes it. Doesn't try to defend herself. Doesn't say or do anything after the fact. Just rubs her face and stands there until Aki comes over and asks her what the fuck just happened.
We already knew this was not a healthy society, but occasional reminders are always good.
I like how, while Aki and Himeno are too young and poorly educated to pick up on it, the comic is aware that the people have lost something in the wake of the Gun Devil's rampage and the governments' responses to it. Maybe it was the least bad policy decision those governments could have made, given the circumstances, but that doesn't change the sociological effects. A scant few years earlier, people had gotten used to the notion of protecting themselves. Fighting for themselves. Now, over a very short period of time, they've had that power taken away from them and concentrated in the hands of these new devil-hunters. That's where the resentment is really coming from.
Aki is less sympathetic to the grieving woman than Himeno is, and shows it by sneaking up behind her and sticking his chewing gum into her hair.
That's a surprisingly Denji-like move, heh. The two of them really are more alike than Aki would like to admit. Well, at least Himeno was amused rather than annoyed.
Himeno tells Aki that she's more optimistic about his longeviy now. The most effective devil-hunters are the ones who aren't quite right in the head, and Aki seems to have some screws loose in the way that the best ones usually have some screws loose. That said, she still doesn't expect either of them to live the decades it would take for lung cancer to catch up with them, and if she and Aki are going to be working together for a potentially semi-lengthy period then smoking is a social activity that might help them deal with the job. So, reluctantly, he accepts her offer and smokes his first cigarette.
Return to the present, where Aki smokes more habitually than Himeno does. It's definitely not a metaphor for the hopelessness and self-destructive nature of the role they've been funneled into and groomed into making a part of themselves, it's just a silly aside about cigarettes. Anyway. Himeno comes back from the bathroom just in time for Aki to spot the devil. Or at least, another manifestation/avatar/spawn/whatever of the devil. One or the other. It's, uh, a little bit bigger than the previous one they killed.
Human body parts all mashed together. And quite powerful, with abstract magical abilities that are unlike those of the devils seen previously throughout the comic. Something related to claustrophobia, I'm guessing? The Confinement Devil, perhaps? The Enclosure Devil? The Crowd Devil? Probably something along those lines. Anyway, even without having absorbed one of the Gun Devil's casings, this thing's proximity to very a common irrational fear probably made it a tough customer to begin with. Adding the bullet casing on top of that, and yeah, this kind of outright reality-warping power is appropriate.
As the party prepares to fight the enormous beast and hopes that killing this form will make more of a difference than killing its little minime on the first floor, the devil surprises them by making an offer.
Hmm. It knowing Denji's name isn't too suspicious by itself. They've been trapped in its dimensional prison thingy for something like eight hours at this point, so it's definitely heard them say each other's names. It wanting to kill Denji specifically, though, suggests something way more complicated. I doubt it just picked him at random. I also don't think that it would have calculated that demanding him out of all the party members would sew the most discord and paranoia within the group, if that's all it's trying to do.
Maybe it was friends with the Zombie Devil? It does look fairly similar to that one. But that was such a long time ago, and it couldn't have known that Denji specifically would be part of the group sent to the hotel. Yeah, no, I don't think that's it either.
Best guess? It smells Pochita inside of him, and either a) has a grudge against the Chainsaw Devil, or b) thinks that consuming it will give it a power boost. If this devil has already absorbed a fragment of Gunny, then that's an established personal history of cannibalism. Depending on what this devil's original (probably claustrophobia-adjacent) power word is, it might rank a bit below "chainsaw" in the hierarchy of "things that evoke fear." In which case, eating Pochita might empower it. And, of course, if it has a grudge then the empowerment potential is irrelevant.
So yeah. That's my theory for now. We'll see if I'm right.
As Aki, Himeno, and Denji stare defiantly at the mass, Kobani steps out into the hall behind them. Looks like she regained consciousness a little while ago, and has been listening in. Which isn't a good thing, as it turns out.
Eh. Well. She IS having a nervous breakdown. If she wasn't, it would likely occur to her that if the devil is bothering to negotiate at all, then that means it can't just wait them out and eat Denji alongside all the rest of them once they're weak and starving. Them accepting its offer must give it something it wouldn't have gotten anyway. Most likely, it's afraid of them eventually figuring out its weakness if it gives them long enough, which in turn means that it does have a weakness they can exploit. Or, on a similar note, it's afraid that eventually other humans will attack from the outside in a way it can't just no-sell, perhaps by demolishing the hotel that it's infesting, and it can't relocate until it's gotten rid of them one way or another.
Like I said though, I won't judge her too harshly. She's not in her right mind, and definitely not in any state to apply game theory to their situation.
Also...other people were able to flee the hotel before the hunters were sent in, reportedly. Did anyone NOT manage to flee? Are there civilians trapped in other dimensional pockets woven into other parts of the building? That has implications of its own regarding its weaknesses.
Anyway. Battle against coercion and hopelessness. Allowing the ambient despair in. We've got, like, themes and stuff. Unfortunately, we've also got a cliffhanger, because this is the end of the chapter, the volume, and the commission.
Sorry that I don't have much analysis to finish this off with. I feel like this was a bad trio of chapters to review in isolation, because they're all just setup to a later payoff, and anything I have to say about the arc will only be sayable after I've finished it.
That's not @toxinvictory's fault though, it's just an unfortunate consequence of how I manage the fast lane queue; they ordered several more chapters, that presumably DO complete this arc and give me more to work with, but that'll have to wait.
