I’m (Not) In Love With America: Chainsaw Man Essay Footnote

Asa Mitaka hides her guilt and her malice by disguising it as tripping. She trips to kill her father, she trips to kill her mother, and she trips to kill herself against the Bat Devil. Even when others trip her, like when the class president makes her kill Bucky, she felt a jealousy and desire for it to happen anyway (Chapter 101). She stores her internal agony, her feelings of loneliness and yet simultaneous superiority, her likely symptoms of autism spectrum disorder; she stores all of it in the act of tripping. Tripping is likely the most common accident a person experiences in their day to day lives next to stuttering or dropping something on the floor. It’s so mundane and so devoid of intent. One does not blame the person who trips, but rather the sidewalk or the carpet or even their own feet. 

This doesn’t change when Asa’s body is taken over by Yoru, the War Devil. In some ways, Yoru is a manifestation of her worst impulses and her desire to dissociate. She leaves her body to the hands of a destructive figure, one that lets her fulfill her dream of “liv[ing] more selfishly” (Chapter 98). Not everything Yoru does is what Asa wants, but even the horsewoman of the apocalypse cannot escape the influence of Asa’s emotions. Eventually, this dissociative pain leaves her with mere minutes of consciousness, which she takes in the War Devil Arc to shoot herself in the head, a pointless act without the assistance of Denji consuming her when her devil body will easily regenerate. Self harm does not heal her pain. 

Even when Denji tries to help ease her guilt, he can’t save her from this spiral while he’s going through his own. As Yuko says: "Having Chainsaw Man around doesn’t stop bullying. I guess he only kills devils," (Chapter 106). It’s only Yoru who can assist her in these moments, lost away in a mental space far from reality. By the time she says that her sins are nothing in the eyes of a devil, it’s far too late to claw out of the hole that’s been dug. In a desire to avoid making mistakes, too afraid to come to a conclusion on what’s right and wrong (Chapter 113), both Denji and Asa are buried alive by guilt, mania, dissociation, and self destruction. 

A finger is often pointed at the audience for their role in these spirals. There is no person who more obviously criticizes a part of the audience than Yoru. A group of who dissociate from the violence inflicted in their name and often by their hands. A group who hide this crushing guilty or inhuman malice behind “tripping”; people hide behind the philosophy of a similarly intent-free, chaotic, and uncontrollable system. Unlike the laws of physics that cause us to fall to the ground, the military and economic autocracy of the United States of America can be changed. 

Yoru steals the fingers of NRA members to power her Sniper Devil hiding in the Statue of Liberty. When America reinvents nuclear weapons from scratch, she declares that she is “in love with America” instead of Denji (Chapter 210). Yoru is an American. She’s selfish and self destructive at once, burning down the world with her for daring to imagine one of peace. Asa is an American. The one hiding away in the land of Normalcy, where this violence is invisible as long as it’s just tripping. It is no longer tripping when you fling yourself to the ground in hopes of fulfilling a selfish desire for normalcy or for power or for revenge. Asa nor Denji develop the self awareness and the self love to change this spiral on their own. Letting dissociation or self harm dominate does not truly help with guilt, it only hides it for a while. There’s only one way to truly forgive yourself: declare that enough is enough, and do what you think is right.