Chainsaw Man #13: "Gun Devil"
This chapter picks up repeating the end of the previous one, with Denji on the floor whispering Makima's last words back up at her in disbelief. And then shouting them back up at her in disbelief. She rests her chin on her hand, gives him a coy little smile, and confirms what she just said.
Also, look at how Denji's eyes are drawn, and then look at how Makima's eyes are drawn. Denji has normal anime-style eyes. Makima...yeah, the art is definitely giving as a hint about her true nature here. Or else it's just a red herring meant to trick the reader into thinking she's less human than she is; that would be in-character for this comic. I more strongly suspect the former, though.
Well, anyway. Makima elaborates that the Gun Devil is such a public threat that a blank check is a fitting reward for its defeat. She cuts him off while he's nervously asking if that wish can even be something that starts with the letters "se," and gives him a historical overview.
...
Lol, Denji, I know you've got zero education or social life experience, but still, think about this. If you kill a monster that's feared and hated throughout the entire world, you won't need to beg Makima for pussy. You won't need to beg anyone for pussy. The sex will come to you all on its own, in large quantities, from every cardinal direction.
Maybe he's still afraid to dream that big.
...
Denji may already know about the Gun Devil in the broadest terms, but Makima gives him a more detailed timeline. A couple decades ago, humanity relied much more on conventional forces to deal with devil attacks. Guns wielded by average people aren't effective against all devils, but they are effective against the majority of the common, weaker devils. As devil attacks increased, firearm proliferation did the same. A consequence of this is that violent crime and civil unrest became more common and more deadly, due to the easy availability of weapons. This seemed like a worthwhile price to pay, at first. However, thirteen years before the present, humanity's growing fear of gun violence empowered the Gun Devil, whose first appearance was nothing short of catastrophic.
Hmmm. Well, now that guns for individual and community defence AREN'T in style anymore, and there are these diabolical-pact-making bounty hunters running around all over the place...I can't help but wonder if there's a growing paranoia about them, now? Is a "Hunter Devil" slowly gaining strength? Granted, rogue devil hunters don't poise nearly as much of a constant threat to the average person as ubiquitous firearms do, so such a devil probably wouldn't be anywhere near as bad, but still it's worth thinking about.
...also, if enough people understand how devils work at this point, it seems like there might be a lot of fear of people feeling too much fear and creating the next superdevil. Fear of fear itself, essentially, or at least a fear of other people getting too fearful? Is there a "Fear Devil?" A "Panic Devil," perhaps? A "Zeitgeist Devil?" Maybe a "Dread Devil" would be the more accurate? Hell, even a "Devil Devil" would make sense, unless they're just all already sharing the power that the fear of themselves generates by default. In any case, if there's a specific devil who specializes in this, it would have to be one of the strongest ones out there, probably exceeding even the Gun Devil.
Sorry, enough digression. Back to Makima's history lesson.
The final catalyst for the Gun Devil's appearance on earth was a major terrorist attack in the United States, involving a small army of gun-toting militiamen. No word on who these terrorists were or what their ideology might have been (this timeline is whacky enough that I'm not sure how much about political context you can infer from just the time and place), but in any case their attack was the final straw.
Flash back to that day, but on the other side of the world. While the terrorist attack in the USA is being shown on the TV news (a reminder of how fear is spread and stoked across the world and thus amplified in its devil-boosting power), a Japanese family crowds around its youngest child. As the parents read their young son a story book, their older son - who is dressed in full Japanese juvenile delinquent getup, to an almost Jotaro-Kujo-cosplay extent - enters the room and asks if the father can come outside and play in the snow with him.
I really am impressed by the economical storytelling in these two pages. The whole family dynamic. The older brother's resentment. The younger brother's mixture of guilt and pain. The parents' obvious unsureness if they've been doing the right thing. I completely expect something ridiculous and melodramatic to happen in short order, of course, but even so this is really good, efficient writing and art. It would be equally good in a comic that WASN'T just using it as a setup for some sort of surreal black comedy gag like this one obviously is.
The two boys bundle up and go outside. Older Jotaro-wannabe resents being stuck with him at first instead of getting their father's direct attention like he wanted, but slowly lets his younger brother's enthusiasm melt his heart and overcome his resentment after they exchange a few snowballs. At first he's irritable about the risk of his little brother getting cold and thus getting him in trouble with their parents, but it quickly turns into at least partly genuine concern as he sends him back to the house to get his mittens.
Notaro smiles as his brother returns to the house and stands in place, waiting for him to come back out. This might be an important little moment in the improvement of their relationship, persevering over little brother's chronic illness and the strain it's caused for their family.
Well, "might." It's not like this was ever going to NOT be the setup of a comi-tragedy.
Notaro was standing just outside of the blast radius, apparently. He gets to live with the guilt of sending his bright-eyed, enthusiastic despite his illness, loving little brother home to die without ever having treated him the way he wished he had.
Like, it's so perfectly calibrated for MAXIMUM SADNESS with so little buildup that...well, it's another great example of what I termed "parody high school writing." This is the kind of shit that I could imagine, say, Kara no Kyoukai trying to play straight, but with just a feeeew adjustments to pacing and presentation to make the comedy clearly intentional.
And, just like the ridiculous bonding moment between Denji and Power during the bat/leech devil battle, it somehow manages to actually pull at the heartstrings *just a little bit* even while revelling in its own ironic cliche and juvenility and being primarily a satire. It's a REALLY hard balance to strike. I'm not sure if I can put my finger on exactly why it succeeds, but it does.
Anyway, the following panels show that what happened wasn't an explosion so much as a wake. Like someone fired a big railgun across the city, flattening a line of buildings a few blocks wide and several neighborhoods long. Fitting, for a "Gun Devil." The devil's attack in Japan claimed 57,000 lives with a single, half-minute long appearance. And, it turns out that Japan got off lightly compared to some countries, on that day.
The death tolls might correlate to the respective countries' ambient levels of gun violence (would explain why USA is at the top, in addition to it being the Gun Devil's first target chronologically), or it might just be down to circumstantial factors at each city it hit. In any case, in addition to its immense destructive power, the Gun Devil demonstrated the ability to travel all around the world at nigh unbelievable speed, crossing oceans and jumping continents in the space of minutes.
Thinking about those traits, and looking at the damage patterns it left, I wonder if it might actually be the BULLET Devil, rather than Gun.
All in all, the Gun/Bullet Devil killed over a million people in its debut appearance. So far though, that has also been its only appearance, at least as far as anyone's been able to confirm. Strange, that it would wreak havoc with such impunity and then lay low for over a decade. That's not how devils typically behave. But then, I suppose this one was never a typical devil.
Since that day, gun controls got much stricter all around the world in favour of dedicated devil-hunters, and governments started doing a lot more to clamp down on media coverage of major threats and disasters. Eeeesh. That's one hell of an authoritarian world the devils are pushing us toward, but it completely makes sense that...
...
...fucking hell, I just realized that this is exactly the thing that they should have done with the grimm but didn't. Like, literally this thing. Exactly this thing.
And, thinking about things a little more, we have...really creepy and uncomfortable sex appeal, weird hyper-stylized personalized weapons and powers, inscrutable authority figure whose erratic behavior seems more malicious and incompetent than allknowing and mysterious, psychotic teens being trusted with power no one would ever actually trust psychotic teens with, and a dumb horny ignoramous who gets recruited into the monster-fighting organization without knowing some really basic things about the world, only it's all INTENTIONAL.
Well, that's a longstanding question answered. "What would it look like if RWBY wasn't shit?" The answer isn't "anime Witcher." It's Chainsaw Man.
Yeah, I'm as surprised as you, but here we are.
...
Well, so, the gun devil hasn't appeared again since then, but everyone is low-key (if not high-key) dreading its return, and there's still an immense bounty on it. Denji observes that defeating this thing, or even finding this thing, seems like a quixotic challenge, but with Makima half-lowering her eyelids and biting her lower lip at him he's unreasonably optimistic. So much so, that he makes a visual pun so bad that it took me over a minute to get it:
Denji, you go to your room and think about what you did.
Anyway, when it comes to finding the Gun Devil, Makima says there's already a project underway toward that end. During Gunny's rampage around the world, some bits of its flesh and skin were torn or friction-burned free of its body and left scattered by the rough pieces of ruin, where they turned into magic bullet casings. When brought in contact with one another, these casings fuse together into a semi-organic mass, which then starts slowly trying to roll itself in the direction of other nearby casings. The pull gets stronger, and the attractive force reaches for a longer range, the more of them you stick together. If they accumulate a big enough mass, it'll hopefully start pulling itself toward the main body wherever it might be hiding.
Many of the casings have been found and eaten by other devils; apparently, consuming a fragment of an exceptionally powerful devil can give something of a strength-boost to minor ones. I wonder if that's why Batboy was so strong? I wouldn't expect bats to generate much fear, but he did demonstrate a penchant for consuming other devils (even if he complained about the taste while doing it), and if he happened to bite a nibble off of a really powerful one in the past then that would explain his high threat level. So, basically, the casings are quest rewards; unusually strong devils are likely to have a Gunny fragment lodged in their guts. Presumably, the Japanese, American, Soviet, etc governments all have their own growing collections as they hunt their way through the scavengers. In theory they probably have an agreement to make a coordinated global search once their chunks have enough range for it, but in practice we've seen that some of these governments suspect each other of treachery so it might not work out that way.
Anyway, two pretty clear extrapolations I can make from this:
1. Makima giving this "special mission" to Denji is completely meaningless. All the devil hunters in the world are already working toward finding Gunny, using the exact method she just described to Denji. The only thing he can do with this knowledge is exactly what he was already doing before. Which, of course, means that she might well have made a promise like this to ALL of her underlings while letting them each think they were being given a special assignment, provided they don't think about it too hard. On second thoughts, she'd probably only do this to the dumber, less critically minded, underlings, because most people would figure this out in hours if not minutes. On third thoughts, going by the sample we've seen so far, she might only recruit dumb, uncritical underlings in the first place, for exactly this sort of dickery.
2. Speaking of things that should be patently obvious with only a little bit of thought, they're bringing the Gun Devil back to life after it died and broke into pieces during its first attack. There is no "main body" left for them to find, they're reassembling the damned thing from the ground up. The minds behind this project are either hilariously stupid, or have some secret motive for wanting Gunny to return to life; depends on whether they're more malevolent or more inept as it turns out.
And...actually, synthesizing those two things together, I just realized that:
3. It's extremely possible that this ISN'T what most countries are doing, and Makima is just lying to make it sound like this is something the authorities have deemed a good idea. If she actually is a secret devil, then she might be trying to recreate Gunny on her own initiative using these witless humans as tools. Heck, she could actually BE Gunny herself, waiting to reassimilate her mass when they've collected enough of it to restore her power and enable another rampage.
The more I think about it, the more that 3 feels right. It fits the hints we've been given, and it would certainly lend itself to a satisfying, climactic final battle to end the story with.
We then cut from Makima and Denji's conversation to Aki and his squad in the field. They've just killed the Junji Itoh Devil, and Aki was unsurprised to find a bullet casing in its stomach; it did seem awfully strong considering that Iroh only ever wrote one story that was more scary than just weird and trippy.
And "Gyo" wasn't even the actual scary one. This devil really fucked it up lmao.
Aki's eyepatch-wearing lackey wonders aloud if these devils really all just happened to pick bullet casings out of the ruins without being noticed, or if someone's been disseminating and feeding them to lesser devils deliberately. Aki thinks on this for a moment, but doesn't seem to consider it a serious possibility. He says that whatever the case, they just need to keep doing what they're doing, and hopefully they can take out Gunny himself eventually.
Then we find out that...oh my god its so cheesy its beautiful.
Probably should have seen that coming, to be honest.
I wonder how long it was after the loss of his family, with him feeling personally responsible for his little brother sharing their parents' fate, that he got snapped up by Makima. Probably not that long. She seems to have gotten him to imprint on her as a surrogate everything, on top of him potentially being physically attracted and manipulated through that like Denji.
I'm also willing to bet that she's been deliberately discouraging (or outright sabotaging) his attempts to form meaningful relationships with anyone else either.
...you know, it's kind of incredible how many obnoxious shonen tropes stop being obnoxious if you just make Sensei the villain. I think Aki might be the first Shonen Rival I've encountered whose existence I don't completely despise, and it's directly because of that context.
Cut ahead...I think a few days? Maybe longer?...to their department responding to a situation downtown. A powerful devil has taken over a hotel, and its already killed several civilian devil-hunters who tried to go in after it. Additionally, the bullet casing clumps they have in their possession are all trying to wiggle in that neighbourhood's direction, so this devil has a plot coupon for them to collect. So, Makima scrambles the entire team for this mission. Aki, those three so-far-unnamed new recruits he's been working with, Denji, and Power are all going.
And, unfortunately, this is the last chapter I've been commissioned to review.
I'm pretty damned sure I'd keep doing this if I weren't currently in the middle of K6BD.
Between Chainsaw Man and Look Back, I've definitely learned that I should pay attention when I see Tatsuki Fujimoto's name on something. In particular, he's consistently impressed me with how much characterization he's able to communicate with just one or two small speech bubbles and a few carefully drawn facial expressions. Really a master of saying a lot while speaking very little.
I'm also seriously floored at how he's able to make these incredibly cliche story beats actually evoke their originally intended feelings even while he's making fun of them. I can't decide if Chainsaw Man is a deconstruction of the shonen punchy-man genre, or a reconstruction of it. I think it might be both at the same time. Somehow.
Anyway, I'm not sure if I can rightly call Chainsaw Man a great work of literature, but I can confidently call it an endlessly entertaining one, and quite a bit smarter than it looks.
