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This is crazy lmao
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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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The latest Chainsaw Man chapter, just came out today. The whole series is very good.
Ah. I never got into it origianlly. Maybe I should change that.
It's really worth your time. Fujimoto is a wonderful writer, the series has tremendous emotional weight in a way that doesn't really happen in manga. Combine that with the fact that Fujimoto is almost certainly some flavour of socialist and he's not afraid to get Weird and you've got a great series. Also Part 2 has a really well done lovable girl failure autistic queen that everybody loves.
Man Who Grew Up In Poverty Has Some Things To Say About How Society Is Organised - ~~Das Kapital~~ Chainsaw Man Part 1
What's better between this and Jujutsu Kaisen? (The other shonen manga I've been hearing about lately that got super popular.)
JJK is all style and very little substance. It's EXTREMELY stylish, so stylish that you almost forget there's no substance beyond hype moments and aura farming. But Chainsaw Man is the superior story by a mile.
Chainsaw Man is better by a mile, but I think you're severely underrating JJK's substance. It's got a ton of theming and symbolism, mostly very rooted in Japanese religious heritage and some that I think literally just doesn't end up being translated all that well (e.g. the narrative is all about curses with a lowercase c).
JJK is fun and flashy but it’s a bit thin when it comes to deeper themes, especially compared to Chainsaw man. It nails the vibes of how apocalyptic everything feels nowadays, but it doesn’t really do anything more with it than that. Between the two I’d recommend Chainsaw man, although to be fair to JJK it is really not that bad and you could do a lot worse
Jujutsu Kaisen leans Marxist-Leninist, Chainsaw man actually delves deeper into Stalinism and some of Stalin's speeches and written works. There's even a part all about kulaks and the violence the bourgeois will enact to maintain their wealth and power, and goes into dialectical materialism. Makima, the main character's boss, is literally just authoritarian tankie-ism embodied in a person and as a woman to reflect that under Stalinism everyone had equal oppression opportunities. She literally also feeds Denji instead of paying him, reflecting the adage 'who doesn't work, doesn't eat' and because money is a capitalist social invention.
Jujutsu Kaisen is just fights and powerscaling. Its fights are really well done, but there's little emotional depth or real themes. If you want like cool fighting shonen, Jujutsu Kaisen is great. Chainsaw Man is not really interested in fights or powerscaling, and is much more interested in characters and themes. I vastly prefer Chainsaw Man, but that's because fighting shonen whoa cool power stuff doesn't appeal to me.
I'll just c/p my other comment:
Chainsaw Man is better by a mile, but I think you're severely underrating JJK's substance. It's got a ton of theming and symbolism, mostly very rooted in Japanese religious heritage and some that I think literally just doesn't end up being translated all that well (e.g. the narrative is all about curses with a lowercase c).
And also add that Chainsaw Man actually does do a lot of powerscaling, though it was more prevalent in Part 1 and it usually doesn't take center stage except when Primal Devils are relevant. Probably the most iconic example of doing theming and powerscaling at the same time are the Gun Devil attacks, because there's obviously thematic and narrative weight to them, but a substantial portion of it is also "This thing killed 300,000 people [and leveled part of a city!] in 2.4 seconds," which is inevitably relevant to the issue of opposing the Gun Devil, though ironically the main practical results of its feats are that they are themselves terrifying and thereby making the Gun Devil more powerful.
JJK also does way less powerscaling later on too, because the rank system becomes irrelevant and, like often happens, it becomes more "here's the top tier and here's everyone else and we don't really know how to compare people in the top tier except by having them fight to the death, at which point knowing their comparative strength is no longer a tactical advantage because one of them is dead". Like 90% of the powerscaling content of the last ~quarter of the series is "Gojo is better than you" and "Sukuna is better than you."
JJK is a fun power system and well done fights and has strong theming but a lot of it from my recollection is based in Shintoism and Buddhism and can fly over your head unless locked in. Outside of that, I think JJK is the one that is easier to engage with at a surface level.
I preferred JJK personally due to its simpler surface leading to better social aspects when reading live, but chainsaw man is definitely the more complex. Dunno if id like JJK as much on a reread rn.