Transcription
With Chains in chapter 173, the madness continues in typical Fujimoto fashion. And for this chapter, we have less dialogue than normal. But given the reveal of yet another unnamed devil and the war against POA seemingly intensifying, sometimes there really isn't room for a lot of talking. All because, as the expression goes, actions speak louder than words, especially given the plot twist at the end of the chapter, which once again loops back around to Chainsaw Man Part One and ties up something that we'll have to reveal is it when it comes to Makima's character in particular, what she said in Part One, because it is now relevant once again. Which is even more unsettling when you realize that this chapter once again highlights the duality of Fujimoto as a writer, because of the way that he is connecting Makima and Yoru together.
We open up this chapter with the wacky fallout from the last chapter continuing onward. The ears of everyone and everything around the world, they are now gone. And for the first time in my life, I never knew I needed to see what an elephant looks like without the big ears that it has. And Fujimoto has just delivered that, because one of the first panels we see is of elephants in the safari without ears.
This leads to a rather spooky scene where we see all these people, and they're dressed in white while they're sitting in chairs. And the members of Public Safety are explaining what happened while they're on the phone. They're revealing how everything's been erased by POA's true power is the Chainsaw Devil. And it's in this moment you get the first of a few callbacks in this chapter to Makima's character. So if you recall way back, back in Part One, when we were dealing with Katana Man, Makima, she had that iconic scene with all the prisoners where she basically sacrificed them in order to kill her targets while she stood on top of that temple. And we see Public Safety appears, keyword, appear to be in the process of doing something similar with more devil trickery. But in reality, this is just a subversion of our expectations, because you find yourself thinking, maybe it's going to be the prisoners who get sacrificed. But Fujimoto pulls a fast one, and he switches it up by showing these guys in Public Safety, they're all in the bathroom, and they're standing in front of mirrors. And one of them just cuts his finger off in a brutal fashion. And it's in the moment we know that the devil trickery that is rearing its ugly head is happening in this very moment. Because as we've seen in the past with other devils, when you make contracts with them, they ask for something in return, like say, years off of your life, or they ask for fingernails, or in this case, they ask for a whole finger.
All the guys at Public Safety begin writing out various parts of the body, in particular, the spine, the neck, and the vertebrae with the blood on the walls looking every bit like something you see out of a horror movie. Which by this point, you expect nothing less of Fujimoto. And we get the reveal of a devil sitting on a chair with humans underneath it serving as the legs of the chair, holding it up. And in the blink of an eye, after raising his hand and smashing it through this portal, it slams right into POA from the ceiling. And it hits it so hard that he is briefly stunned.
And this is where Fujimoto hits us with another zinger. It's the return of Yoshida. And in this moment, Yoshida is using the Octopus Devil tentacles to wrap Chainsaw Man together, looking every bit as calm and emotionally detached as he was when we saw him for one of the first times in Chainsaw Man Part One. And if that doesn't scare you, allow me to explain to you why this absolutely should frighten you. We saw in Chainsaw Man Part Two, more than once, it looked like we might be seeing a mutual respect, a type of friendship early on developing between Denji and Yoshida. But as we all remember in the previous arc, where Yoshida was betraying Denji, had him in that devil extermination center, all of that was a lie. Like so many others who had come into Denji's life, Yoshida, he had his own purposes for dealing with Denji. Yoshida's character was never meant to truly sit right with readers. Going back to his introduction, he's super strong for his age, enough so to the point it was even remarked in Part One during the Assassins Arc by his peers that they forgot he was even in high school, that he was still a high school student. And yet, for every bit as strong as he is, he is equally smart, cunning, and he is a killer at heart. When we go back to one of the first scenes we have of this guy in Chainsaw Man Part One, he's literally coming around the corner smiling as he's about to kill someone. And ever since then, we've never really gotten a motive for the character, unlike someone like, say, Aki, who we knew the tragedy of his family with the Gun Devil made the guy become a devil hunter. With Yoshida, everything it is still a mystery.
This leads to Yoshida using the tentacles in a way where he's applying so much pressure to POA's stomach that it forces him to cough up the Ear Devil, who had previously been consumed. And it's in this moment that Fujimoto wants you to think this whole thing might have been an experiment to figure out if the devil eraser was truly one of the powers of the Chainsaw Devil, something that Kishibe would have been told by Makima in Part One. And this by extension means that humans and all creatures that have ears will have regained their ears as well. But what this should do, however, is not just make you look at the goals of Public Safety, but instead go back to two of the Four Horsemen in the series itself: Makima, the original Control Devil from Part One, and Yoru, the War Devil from Part Two. Yoru, somebody who previously got part of herself bit by Chainsaw Man, if you go back to some of the stuff that's been said. So what we're seeing here is Fujimoto is revealing the theories that Makima alluded to where she said that Chainsaw Man ate up the other devils, which those weren't necessarily theories per se, but we have to label them theories because we're told it happened, but we didn't actually see it. It really just comes down to how reliable of a narrator that you think Makima is. But the important thing here is that we are seeing a circling back to information that was given in Chainsaw Man Part One. And even though Makima is not here, we are still seeing that the character has some relevance in Part Two of the story long after she's dead. Which that's the sign of a well-written character.
And with Yoru, she directly said, hey, Chainsaw Man ate the Nuclear Weapons Devil. And Yoru takes a step further, saying that you can force Chainsaw Man to spit up the devils that he has consumed. And when this happens, they're essentially brought back to the world, and the effects of their eraser, they're being reversed right now. Which means you've opened up a whole another can of worms regarding the types of devils that we could be seeing in the future. As Makima tells us in Part One, there's a lot of powerful devils sitting in POA's stomach, just gathering and taking up space in his stomach. Go back to a conversation with Kishibe where she casually explains the power of the Chainsaw Devil to Kishibe. She says that Chainsaw Man, he ate the devils that humans used to have a sick sense that there was a life that would break children's minds. And Makima says she can't recall the devils that Chainsaw Man had eaten before they ceased to exist, but she remembers the sighted devils fighting Chainsaw Man devils like the Nazi Devil, the AIDS Devil, and so many more. Even with Yoru, this was her goal at the start of Chainsaw Man Part Two. She was looking to make Denji, or in this case, POA, cough up the devils that were associated with war in order to help her regain her full power, devils like the Nuclear Weapons Devil.
And I want you to think about it for a second. All the terror that the world is feeling right now as a result of the plan that Fami put into action with these fake Chainsaw Men running around and Public Safety at war with them now. Imagine throwing in the Nuclear Weapons Devil, because nuclear weapons would now be back on the table. Nuclear weapons being objects that can destroy humanity. Look at what's going on with a lot of conversations now, with the tensions with the United States and Russia, people saying, oh my God, if we go to World War III, everyone's going to die, everything's going to get nuked. Look at what we're getting here. All of this stuff that we're having in Chainsaw Man right now, it is building towards the reveal of the Death Devil. And what way to do that than to potentially put on the door the return of the Nuclear Weapons Devil? Fujimoto is laying the groundwork for utter chaos, and I am loving every minute of it, because this chapter has so many ramifications waiting on us, which obviously we won't get the answers to that until we go to the next chapter.