X-SOLDIER
Harbinger O Great Justice
- AKA
- X
I figured that for the sake of simplicity (and given that it's fairly quiet), it'd be worth consolidating this all into a single thread at the moment.
Of any of the manga writers I've read in recent memory, Tatsuki Fujimoto has a very particularly acute & extremely understanding of what it's like not just to survive trauma, but also the way in which people who experience traumatic events react to them differently based upon subtle differences in what's happened to them and who from, and what their circumstances are. In all of his works, there are a load of tiny details about his characters that have a really layered nuance to them in a way that really stands out even amongst other Shonen series where that's often a very central theme to a lot of characters. I think what makes it different is that they don't show it the same way, but there are particular quirks to the psychology of the characters that shape them in ways that feel unbelievably real.
The other thing that he does is use an absolute boatload of cinematic language & references, which have ended up calling out a lot of specific works explicitly that I've ended up watching as a result. That cinematic language is one of the things that the anime adaptation of Chainsaw Man really leaned in on, which is evident in just how much they crammed into the opening, as well as how there are a decent amount of rather obscure visual references that you'd never catch without being a fairly prolific cinephile.
That focus on cinematic language aids to why I find it just incredibly rewatchable & fascinating as they really pushed the envelope in doing a lot of things the way that they're done in cinema rather than in anime in the series. On top of that, every episode has a unique ending song & animation that's directly intertwined with each episode (and MAPPA has a playlist that contains all of them and makes it easy to rewatch them). While the Reze Arc, which is being done as a movie, had an official teaser on December 17th last year – there's no release date for it yet. I'd expect that there's a decent possibility that we'll get some news in the near future as it's likely that this has some room to start up its marketing campaign, given that the film adaptation of another of Fujimoto's one-shot manga Look Back was an overwhelming success, and it's out digitally now.
Before watching Chainsaw Man, I read through both it & Fire Punch. Afterwards, I read his one shots, Yogen no Nayuta, Goodbye Eri, and Look Back (though I haven't gotten around to watching the adaptation yet), and I've yet to read Just Listen to the Song or his compiled early works that were released as Tatsuki Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man though they're both in my library. Since I'll likely be going through those soonish, there's a decent amount of stuff I'll likely dive into, or have thoughts on, or info to share, not to mention that Chainsaw Man is still being released weekly.
While I think that series like My Hero Academia did well in making the things that its kids went through feel more permanent than is often the case in the Shonen format with Dragonball or the big three (Naruto, Bleach, & One Piece) and there was also a Game of Thrones sort of period with things like Promised Neverland, Attack on Titan, & Jujutsu Kaisen where no one being safe from death felt like it was linked into the audience experience, Fujimoto's manga don't feel like that at all whether they're in a fantastical or a mundane setting. Despite all of the cinematic influences, and moments that are clearly crafted in a way that captivate the reader, they never really feel like they're stories written FOR the audience so much as they are always just narratives for the people in the story to make sense of what's happening, if that makes sense.
For me, I think that's what makes his work feel a bit more like how BERSERK handles trauma where it's always felt that the narrative is driven by Guts' need to make sense of everything that happened within a massively epic story, especially with Fire Punch as they're both on about the same level of needing an extreme content warning. However, Chainsaw Man really steps outside of that and into something that's a lot more in the typical Shonen realm, while his other one-shots that I've read so far don't really fall into that same space, and are right next to something like Your Name. There's a way in which he peels back layers of deeply uncomfortable human experience and stares them directly in the face without looking away, and translates that into something that's not about the shock value, as that's often what trauma gets conflated with, but rather than emphasizes the framework of why it's difficult in overt and extremely subtle ways all at once that are all executed with a mastery that is just difficult to overstate.
Even while I've gone diving through a vast range of manga focused around that general subject matter over the last few years, another thing that stands out is the ways that he makes his characters, as they have recognizable little bits & pieces shared between his various series that makes it feel like it's just different framing of a lot of his own lived experience (though I'm not sure if he's every spoken on that at all). As such, his writing often feels a bit more like it's an obscured autobiographical examination of struggles with things he's experienced that are always stacked up within a very purposeful layer of fiction. Goodbye Eri feels like it probably has the most direct framing of that in addition to also having exceptionally strong echoes to a particular key relationship in Fire Punch, much in a similar way to how his one-shot Yogen no Nayuta shares a lot of its DNA with Chainsaw Man. I'm curious if anyone's read/seen any of them or wants a recommendation on where to start.
At any rate, that feels like a decent place to kick things off.
X
Of any of the manga writers I've read in recent memory, Tatsuki Fujimoto has a very particularly acute & extremely understanding of what it's like not just to survive trauma, but also the way in which people who experience traumatic events react to them differently based upon subtle differences in what's happened to them and who from, and what their circumstances are. In all of his works, there are a load of tiny details about his characters that have a really layered nuance to them in a way that really stands out even amongst other Shonen series where that's often a very central theme to a lot of characters. I think what makes it different is that they don't show it the same way, but there are particular quirks to the psychology of the characters that shape them in ways that feel unbelievably real.
The other thing that he does is use an absolute boatload of cinematic language & references, which have ended up calling out a lot of specific works explicitly that I've ended up watching as a result. That cinematic language is one of the things that the anime adaptation of Chainsaw Man really leaned in on, which is evident in just how much they crammed into the opening, as well as how there are a decent amount of rather obscure visual references that you'd never catch without being a fairly prolific cinephile.
That focus on cinematic language aids to why I find it just incredibly rewatchable & fascinating as they really pushed the envelope in doing a lot of things the way that they're done in cinema rather than in anime in the series. On top of that, every episode has a unique ending song & animation that's directly intertwined with each episode (and MAPPA has a playlist that contains all of them and makes it easy to rewatch them). While the Reze Arc, which is being done as a movie, had an official teaser on December 17th last year – there's no release date for it yet. I'd expect that there's a decent possibility that we'll get some news in the near future as it's likely that this has some room to start up its marketing campaign, given that the film adaptation of another of Fujimoto's one-shot manga Look Back was an overwhelming success, and it's out digitally now.
Before watching Chainsaw Man, I read through both it & Fire Punch. Afterwards, I read his one shots, Yogen no Nayuta, Goodbye Eri, and Look Back (though I haven't gotten around to watching the adaptation yet), and I've yet to read Just Listen to the Song or his compiled early works that were released as Tatsuki Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man though they're both in my library. Since I'll likely be going through those soonish, there's a decent amount of stuff I'll likely dive into, or have thoughts on, or info to share, not to mention that Chainsaw Man is still being released weekly.
While I think that series like My Hero Academia did well in making the things that its kids went through feel more permanent than is often the case in the Shonen format with Dragonball or the big three (Naruto, Bleach, & One Piece) and there was also a Game of Thrones sort of period with things like Promised Neverland, Attack on Titan, & Jujutsu Kaisen where no one being safe from death felt like it was linked into the audience experience, Fujimoto's manga don't feel like that at all whether they're in a fantastical or a mundane setting. Despite all of the cinematic influences, and moments that are clearly crafted in a way that captivate the reader, they never really feel like they're stories written FOR the audience so much as they are always just narratives for the people in the story to make sense of what's happening, if that makes sense.
For me, I think that's what makes his work feel a bit more like how BERSERK handles trauma where it's always felt that the narrative is driven by Guts' need to make sense of everything that happened within a massively epic story, especially with Fire Punch as they're both on about the same level of needing an extreme content warning. However, Chainsaw Man really steps outside of that and into something that's a lot more in the typical Shonen realm, while his other one-shots that I've read so far don't really fall into that same space, and are right next to something like Your Name. There's a way in which he peels back layers of deeply uncomfortable human experience and stares them directly in the face without looking away, and translates that into something that's not about the shock value, as that's often what trauma gets conflated with, but rather than emphasizes the framework of why it's difficult in overt and extremely subtle ways all at once that are all executed with a mastery that is just difficult to overstate.
Even while I've gone diving through a vast range of manga focused around that general subject matter over the last few years, another thing that stands out is the ways that he makes his characters, as they have recognizable little bits & pieces shared between his various series that makes it feel like it's just different framing of a lot of his own lived experience (though I'm not sure if he's every spoken on that at all). As such, his writing often feels a bit more like it's an obscured autobiographical examination of struggles with things he's experienced that are always stacked up within a very purposeful layer of fiction. Goodbye Eri feels like it probably has the most direct framing of that in addition to also having exceptionally strong echoes to a particular key relationship in Fire Punch, much in a similar way to how his one-shot Yogen no Nayuta shares a lot of its DNA with Chainsaw Man. I'm curious if anyone's read/seen any of them or wants a recommendation on where to start.
At any rate, that feels like a decent place to kick things off.
X
