It isn’t always gorey and violent however, as you can see it during the later chapters.
Denji, as Aki states, is scum. He’s rude, says whatever he wants and is vulgar towards anyone who isn’t an attractive woman, and we see all of that in just the first few chapters, such as when Aki beats Denji up, saying how he’s not being serious about devil hunting at all and really only in it because he wants to get with Makima. In response, Denji doesn’t negotiate and become friends with Aki out of fear, he does what every teenager wants to do: fight back and win.
It’s..to touch some boobs.
That’s what he wants, that’s his dream. However, what initially comes off as a joke to the reader adapts into one that makes you realize how fucked up his situation is. He doesn’t have a purpose. He doesn’t have a father figure anymore and didn’t get to experience the happy childhood other people usually go through. He doesn’t have friends to hang out with and eat amazing food with. He doesn’t have anything except chasing a dream. And once he achieved the dream of touching boobs in less than 10 chapters or so, he asks the question of:
“That’s it?”
We get good grades in school, then what? We go onto a great job, then what? We meet a person we’re into, then what? We get married, then what? We have children, then what? We sit in our last moments of life as the children we gave birth to move on, then what? Nothing. That’s it. We know that one day we will die, and it’s something inevitable, something we can’t stop no matter what. The next possible thing to do? Live a life you’re proud of. One you had fun with. One you made a lot of friends in. And that’s what Denji is. He’s a boy that doesn’t know what he wants to do, so he does everything everytime he gets the chance, and through it, he learns what it means to have a purpose.
I’ve seen too many shounens that focus on action and not the shounen character in question, and it sort of led me to fall out of the genre. I do still watch and read them, but I haven’t been as interested as I was initially in any of them because of what they do. To me, Chainsaw Man is one of the best shounen around because while still paying attention to the action, it goes through the problems of a teenager and how they’re unsure of what life they want to live.
Animators are already overworked, but in Mappa’s case, there’s way more stuff to work on than a studio would usually have. I sincerely hope the rumor of freelancers being the ones to work on it is true, not only to let Mappa’s staff rest, but because there’s so many talented Chainsaw Man fans in Japan who love the manga just as much. I, like many other people, would like any company to take their time for greatness rather than a rushed piece of work for a month’s worth of food. If every fight scene isn’t fluent, if any song is not the correct choice, if anything happens that you don’t like, please do NOT harass the people who worked on it.
