Review of Chainsaw Man

If you think the protagonist is lewd, low, uneducated… you are absolutely right. However, if that’s the reason you are disappointed at the series, you would miss what the author wants to convey. When your goal is to be a scientist, cure cancer, find antimatter, or address key philosophical issues, and find the meaning of your existence, the protagonist’s goal is to live a normal life. The tragedy is … even this goal seems unreachable to him. If you had thought about it, if you were living in that situation, with no parents, no money, no education, would you still have been able to achieve what youhave achieved, and dream what you are dreaming.

Admittedly, the human society seemingly present striking inequality among individuals. Naturally, some appear noble while some despicable. Having needs, however, whether basic or transcendental, is a universal human condition. Imagining a person that never experienced love or happiness, there could be two possible outcomes: either he would become incapable of love or being happy, or he desires to be so. The former is the depressed giving up attitude, the latter the opposite. Both are unfortunate, understandable, and sympathetic. Both are manifested in the protagonist’s struggle. The story thus becomes his journey to discover what it means to love, to be happy, in a pursuit to love and happiness.

In this sense, the author’s message is existentialist. To live, to experience, to find out the meaning during this process, that is what gives our individual life meaning. When a person gets terminal cancer, he then realizes that living one more day would mean happiness to him, that normal everyday happiness is something so trivial that he had overlooked his entire life yet values to him the most at that point. Our protagonist, on the other hand, realizes this from the very beginning. To him, eating delicious food is luxury. Having a girlfriend that he can cuddle and play video games with would feel so good. He appreciates every opportunity to achieve those things, and keeps on hoping to achieve them. In this sense, he stays optimistic despite the depressing situations. Whether intentionally or not, he remained oblivious to the despair of this world and remained hope throughout the series. That is humanity in the highest form.

Be grateful to what life has given you. That’s what the series taught me.