Transcription
With Chains of Man chapter 176, we start the chapter off with a flashback to a few weeks ago on the timeline where we see Yoru. She's sitting in a bathtub and she's testing out her powers, this time making a sword out of a bar of soap. And that's what's interesting here is that Makima and Yoru, they confirm something that you've probably been thinking for a while now as you've been going through Chains Man part two, which is that they don't need to touch something or speak its name just to turn into a weapon.
Now their powers, they have clearly gotten stronger, just as the story has been leading us to believe. And we see them making their final preparations for the upcoming battle with Chains Man, but not without sowing more seeds of eventual conflict between the two women that share the same body, Yoru and Makima. And that conflict will eventually come to the surface, but it won't come to the surface right now.
Yoru says that despite the increase in their power, their current power level, if we were to put it on a chart next to Denji, Yoru and Makima, they would come up shorter than the combined power of Denji and Pochita when Denji transformed in Chains Man. While people are growing more fear towards War and people are starting to remember War's name and the horrors of War, there are people who are fearing the power of Chainsaw Man because of the actions of those fake Chainsaws that are running around currently. So it's like every bit of progress they make to get stronger, Denji and Pochita, they make an equal amount of progress as well, so the gap, it never truly closes. Each time they take a step forward, so too do Denji and Pochita.
When Makima suggests calling a truce between Chainsaw Man and Yoru, both because she sees the issue in overtaking Chainsaw Man from a power perspective, but also because she knows Denji is Chainsaw Man, there's a dilemma there on her end because of her feelings for Denji. Yoru quietly ponders her point before shutting it down, saying that she has her comrades that she has to get back at all costs. And her comrades are devils who were eaten by Chainsaw Man in the past, which to do that, she's going to have to force Chainsaw Man to pick them up, which that goes back to the first chapter of Chainsaw Man part two where she stated her goal.
Yoru reveals that the weapons that she could make, they would easily greatly surpass any of the weapons that Makima made from the past, from her college fund to her apartment. But the prospect of sacrifice that will be required, it would go against the very thing that she's trying to do by freeing her comrades. And this is Fujimoto setting the stage for the plot twist that will be coming up shortly, because as we've learned by now, wherever there is a no pun intended, a nuclear option that is listed for a character, more often than not, it's going to get used, especially when a character like Yoru is as prideful as she is, where a big part of the reasoning for what she is doing is because she wants to prove herself as being above Chainsaw Man.
And this is important. It just builds on all the small hints we got earlier in part two where Yoru said that bullying exists in the devil world, and it's said without being directly said that she is a victim of bullying in the devil world, likely from her three sisters, Famine, the Famine Devil, Makima, the Control Devil, and whoever the Death Devil ends up being revealed to be. Think about our own world. So when people have been bullied, or there's somebody who's the youngest child out of a bunch of siblings, they have a tendency to have this chip on their shoulders to want to prove themselves to others because they are so used to being doubted or being looked past. Even if it's just a stereotype and it holds no weight at all, it's still one that is so often used in literature because it's an effective one for character building and internal conflict.
It's a great way to take a character like Yoru, who you know as a reader that you know you shouldn't be rooting for, especially when you consider all the buildup that you had in Chainsaw Man part one where you saw the suffering of Denji and you saw how Denji had to overcome everything. And now in Chainsaw part two, you've been seeing him slowly get his humanity stripped all over again. And some of it's been because of some of the actions of Yoru, like we saw a few chapters ago where Yoru took over Makima's body, she gave Denji the hand job and then basically looked at him and said like, "Hey man, no big deal." It's one of those things where you know Yoru is not a nice person, you know Denji's not the best person either, but you've fallen in love with them throughout Chainsaw Man part one. So it makes it a little harder for you to consciously root for Yoru.
And yet, when you get moments like this where you see how badly she wants to win, so badly that she will cross lines that she would not normally cross, so badly she is obsessed with it, and you see how there are hints that she might have been bullied and that might lead to a bit of an inferiority complex, for a moment, it gets to you. And at the very least, it makes you stop and pause, if not outright altogether make you want to root for her or turn things around.
This transitions us to Yoru staring down Chainsaw Man as Pochita is preparing to slice her head off with one of the chainsaws. And we see Yoru has made her mind up. She's going to use that nuclear option. She's going to turn what she refers to as her children into weapons. And she calls on the tank and the gun. And my God, does this [ __ ] really start hitting the fan here. Yoru has played one of her biggest trump cards to turn the tables on Pochita. And we see two different parts of the world erupting in chaos simultaneously. The Tank Devil is coming out of Mexico, and the Gun Devil is coming out of the Soviet Union. So this would be the 28% of the Gun Devil that the Soviet Union has possessed, which is absolutely freaking crazy.
Yoru, the War Devil, she just sacrificed her children, which they are the weapons of war, the Tank Devil and the Gun Devil, to now become her new arms. The left arm being the tank gauntlet, and the right arm being the gun gauntlet. And she's blown Chainsaw Man back. And in the process of doing so, she's forced Pochita to vomit up the Mouth Devil, so now she can speak again. In short, this chapter was Yoru saying she heard all the fraud allegations and she didn't just take them seriously, but she used them as motivation. And with just what she was able to do with the Gun Devil, it makes you really think what she could do if she got the Nuclear Weapons Devil coughed up like the way that she originally wanted. Because the leveling up here by Yoru, it is insane right now when you think about it. She went from being faced with certain death to now having turned the tables with just 28% of the Gun Devil's power. One blow was enough to do this much damage to Pochita, which is crazy.
Throw in the Nuclear Weapons Devil, for nuclear weapons, say a nuclear weapon sword, or the Nazi Devil, or the World War II Devil. There's something bigger being cooked here. Makima in part one, she named several devils, but only three of them, the Nazi Devil, the World War II Devil, and the Nuclear Weapons Devil, are the ones who have been associated with the War Devil. Which means that Yoru's power and her potential, they are crazy. One arm for defensive purposes, and it can also double as offensive purposes in the form of the Tank Devil, and the other arm in the form of 28% of the Gun Devil for pure offense. Round two of Pochita versus Yoru, it just got way more interesting. Because we went from a one-sided beatdown in the last chapter to now Yoru has leveled up and she's leveled the playing field, potentially.
This also makes you look at Pochita and realize that what we've been seeing with Pochita isn't anywhere near his full power, because this guy used to routinely box with the Four Horsemen all by himself. And if Yoru can do this without using her full power, and Makima was strong enough to send Pochita flying into space in part one, Jesus, this fighting we're about to see in the future when everyone is at their peak power, it's going to get insane. This one, coupled with the addict characterization of Yoru, where she's showing her childlike nature and obsession with taking out Chainsaw Man, and the lengths she's willing to go to in order to do so, it just makes you look at her character in a different way. Because if we take her at her word, this is a mother willing to sacrifice her own children to secure a victory, or at the very least, get close enough to victory where she has a better chance to win.
Well, that's going to be it for this newest Chainsaw Man chapter, and the next one won't be out for another two weeks. Click here to watch more Chainsaw Man content, or click here for this new video from Anime Explain.