Too Many Words About Makima From Chainsaw Man.

A Few Too Many Words is a very informal analysis essay series of any given series and/or character. These posts are for people who are familiar with the series that I’ll be discussing. It is also a way for me to be able to get rid of perfectionism when it comes to writing posts for this blog.

Anyway, here’s a few too many words about Makima from Chainsaw Man.

The only way to describe Chainsaw Man is buckwild and poignant. Like all of Fujimoto’s work, its quiet moments feel more like a kick to the nuts than the actual kicking of the nuts in the show. No seriously.

I finally got around to watching Chainsaw Man in November.

It is gorgeously animated and has a cast that I could help but like. I’ve been reading the manga since its debut in 2018, and read it weekly, which is my way of saying that this post will be full of spoilers for Chainsaw Man.

My friend thinks she’s hot and was shocked that I didn’t at first. Then I explained why.

Makima is really. Fucking. Creepy.

Makima is pretty hot and the leader of Division 4. Initially, I thought she was a girl boss, but soon after I got creeped out by her voice. I thought she had no nonsense for the Public Safety team she led, but a niggling voice told me that it was something much deeper than that. Even deeper than some backstory where the Gun Devil (the main big bad) killed her family, like fellow Devil Hunter Aki Hayakawa.

Instead of turning me on, it gave me the ick. Her drive to get the Gun Devil felt more like her trying to tame an apex predator by any means necessary, far from the very human drive Aki has and even further from Denji’s desire to do damn near anything to have human connection.

The horror of Makima is similar to the horror I felt when first discovering the video series, The Backrooms. It’s not the fear of the unknown due to the empty spaces, but the presence of an event that led to said absence. Hence the ick I had for Makima.

That was before knowing about how her powers actually work. For the longest time, I thought her powers were that of an exchange: a life for a life. She had to make a contract with some very powerful Devil in order to get those powers. Also, whatever circumstances led to her being able to make a contract with it had to be horrifying. Boy, how fucking wrong I was. Turns out, she’s a Devil herself. In most analyses of Makima’s character, the reveal of her being a Devil is where people leave it. Devil’s are evil, so it retroactively makes Makima’s evil actions make sense.

Devils aren’t always evil. They just are. Devils are manifestations of society’s fears, but they are capable of thought and decision making. They don’t eat people because they hate people. It’s like saying humans hate cows and that’s why we eat beef. Devils eat people because people are delicious. Given the right interventions they can make different choices.

For instance, Pochita can be taught to be kind and give its life for Denji. It’s a bond, not a contract in the way that Makima describes it. The Ghost Devil sacrifices itself when Snake Bitch (I refuse to remember her name) takes it away from Himeno.

And then we get into the fiends. Devils that take over corpses and be brought to be good and helpful to all of mankind. Power, Beam and Angel are good examples of this. Also all of Quanxi’s girlfriends.

Getting back to Makima is a Devil of immense power that is beholden to the Japanese Government in the same way that the American Government is to the Gun Devil and Americans fear guns.

As a black American who does activism no less, I cannot tell you how many times that being shot by cops or extremists at a protest has entered my mind. Or the off chance I’d be shot at while doing something as banal as grocery shopping.

I can only imagine how prevalent the idea of control permeates Japanese society, for better or worse. I won’t even try to make some point about Japanese work culture or the other typical shit western writers make about Japan. I’m not an authority, and to be honest after everything I learned this past year about the American government sticking its gun-shaped fingers into the mouths of every country on Earth, I know we had something to do with it.

Makima wields her unbelievable power the way that a man in political power controls their pawns. Her character shockingly dodges several misogynistic tropes about women in power.

There’s this recurring trope that women in positions of power will corrupt them, but Makima is in a position of power because she’s not even human. She’s a Devil, the Control Devil. She was always designed to be like this.

Or more accurately, groomed. The story hints at Makima being groomed to never care for humanity or make connections to humankind because she was a necessary evil to be controlled by the Japanese government. When I read the chapter of her crying about never being able to have connections with others, it was the darkest piece of irony in the series. The Control Devil is controlled by something else.

When I noticed that, I realized her power is used exactly the way an old majority cishet male government would use power. Violence is not only an answer to a problem, it is the answer.

It’d be a bit gauche to say that the real villain is humankind in either one of these stories. It doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. Also it’s a convenient excuse. The real villain isn’t mankind: it’s a lack of empathy. Lack of empathy is not inherent to humanity. It’s humankind’s most fundamental flaw.

A lack of empathy has led to basically all -ists, isms, and phobias in mankind. It’s so deeply entrenched in our society that we deem it natural to us instead of something to actively work through.

It seems like Part 2 is addressing this idea at hand.

With the Control Devil’s reincarnation, Kishibe asks Denji to not let Nayuta become another Makima. This has not been an easy task for Denji. Nayuta goes to school and only cares for Denji. Everyone else, and I do mean everyone, means very little to her. This storyline offers an interesting chance to see how those fears, even primal ones, can be used to help the greater good of society.

Anyway, that was a few too many words about Makima.