This article contains mild spoilers for Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc.
I recently had the opportunity to watch the highly praised Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc movie and it was everything it promises to be. It’s lively, well written with an amazing soundtrack — but it was not in line with my expectations going into it.
I’ll be the first to admit that whenever a piece of media becomes hyped online, I’ll hop on the bandwagon even if I don’t have prior knowledge of the media itself.
If I’m really into the hype, I’ll stalk a subreddit just to get a dopamine hit from excited discussions on the topic. I did this for Jujitsu Kaisen during the highly anticipated fight between Gojo and Sakuna, which spawned Lobotomy Kaisen, where some of the funniest memes and shitposts from the community originated from.
In those moments, I always had the impression that my passive interaction with the general discourse of any given fandom gave me a good enough understanding of the story to get the gist of things: the highs, lows and overall morals.
So, I initially avoided Chainsaw Man with the preconceived notion that it was a “gooner” anime — one which uses sex appeal to attract an audience — so when there was an almost violent shift in online rhetoric around the nature of the show, that got my attention.
While scrolling, I began to see post after post dripping in praise for the Chainsaw Man film. I was taken aback, as from my prior scrolling experience, I had never seen such genuine and wholesome praise for Chainsaw Man; I knew I had to see the film.
I can now admit that my previously held beliefs about Chainsaw Man were wrong, and I firmly believe that if you haven’t actually read or seen the story of a show, it’s best to refrain from commenting on it at all.
While Chainsaw Man does include a lot of sexual content with the main character, Denji who often acts in sexually depraved ways, this content isn’t simply for sex appeal: it is a commentary on life with hypersexuality, trauma and the role sexuality plays in the human experience.
Chainsaw Man is an exploration of the desire to find connection for someone who’s grown up having never known connection, or more aptly, for those who have grown up in a society and culture that hinders connection.
The movie was an amazing experience, with it being a story not just of first love, but of true connection outside of a self-ascribed purpose in life. Oftentimes, we become so tied up in our professions and titles that we forget who we truly are as individuals and stop considering who we would be if we didn’t need to fight to survive.
What nude scenes were included in the movie were also executed in a way that they felt intimate rather than purely sexual, laying out the human experience for the viewer to take in not with their eyes but with their hearts. These scenes brought a complete subversion of what I had expected from Chainsaw Man.
I’ll be honest, I felt euphoric exiting the theatre, it had been a long time since I had seen a movie so well written. Frankly, the Chainsaw Man film might be the best movie I have ever seen. Yet, I also felt somewhat guilty; I had done a poor job of engaging with the actual work of Fujimoto and had instead listened to poor recaps of the story that I had gleaned from Instagram and Reddit.
Watching this movie was a hard lesson in actually knowing what you’re talking about when discussing media, and why you should never build any sort of knowledge base purely off of Instagram reels. Social media is meant to drive clicks and engagement, and as my very recent experience demonstrated, it’s willing to misrepresent important stories to achieve that.
Social media can definitely be fun, especially with fandom memes like Lobotomy Kaisen. However, I would never recommend trying to understand a show through online commentary, and I definitely would not recommend passing judgement based on that either. That principle goes for all media, not just anime.
I can’t yet claim that I am part of the Chainsaw Man fandom, but I am a huge fan of the movie. I’ve learned my lesson, and I’ll be picking up the story so I can hopefully go from a poser to a true appreciator of creative human expression.