 Hello everyone, welcome back to another Illumilani video essay. So the topic of this video was in a poll a couple weeks ago and won by an overwhelming majority and was also a topic a ton of people asked me to cover. At the time of making my first Chainsaw Man video essay, I hadn't read the manga yet and didn't have a full scope of every female character, but I am happy to report back. I absolutely devoured that shit within a week of making that video. I couldn't stop reading, it was fantastic and I think Chainsaw Man is easily one of my top 5 anime slash mangas now, and there's a ton to talk about with it, but today we're going to be focusing on two things, Asa, Quan Chi and Riz, the women of the manga, and updated opinions on the women we had already previously talked about since my thoughts have somewhat changed since that video. Of course, this one's gonna have some major manga spoilers, so if you haven't caught up to the manga and are interested in it, I strongly advise you read it before watching this video. Alright, let's begin. I'm gonna be going in chronological order for the manga girlies here since it just makes sense, but Riz is the very next woman to be introduced after the anime leaves off and man am I stoked to see her appear in the anime whenever it returns. Admittedly, when I had first read the manga, I speed read through her part and I liked it, but I didn't love it like everyone else, but after rereading her chapter and gathering more context around her character motives, I absolutely adore her and the tragedy surrounding her character. Riz falls into an anime trope that I see quite often, but I love how different and complex the story plays the trope. Riz is a femme fatale in the story, but I feel like her character digs a little bit deeper. This isn't to say I hate femme fatales, I do think they have their place, but we're talking about subversion here besties, subversion. Sure, Riz uses her flirtation skills to lure denji in, but the manga girl also gives us small pieces of her motives that add more depth to her as well. Riz's backstory is not something that's revealed to us until the end of the arc with denji, and even then we're not given all of it. However, even with the very little we're given, we can deduce a ton about her character. Denji is an orphan who was experimented on and raised to be a spy for the soviet government. It was later on revealed that, despite her initially telling denji otherwise, she'd never been to school just like denji. These moments are integral to understanding the relationship they have with each other. They were both children forced to do a job, cut off from the outside world, and deprived a necessary developmental growth for the sake of their organization. For this, Riz, in... What might seem like either a hard disinterest in denji, or on the other hand, a love for denji, actually ends up being deeper than both At some point after their fight, which we'll get more into later, denji offers to take Riz up on a previous offer she'd made on him to run away. She turns him down, asking if he really thought she was into him. While the extent of interest Riz carries for denji's left intentionally vague, it's implied that she, at the very least, was going to take him up on this offer. She tries to go to the cafe where they said they could meet, but ends up getting taken down by Makima. It's utterly tragic, and never even has to say anything explicitly. We know she didn't like her life as a Russian soldier, since she was about to leave it in favor of a quest for freedom, and might not have been romantically into denji, but she was willing to take this quest with him. I don't think it's a stretch to even say she saw herself in him and personally related to him, but that's also something I want to get into more later. She's also, also, a love interest for denji that is of appropriate age! Woo, yeah! One last thing I want to get into about her character was the big fight scene between her and public safety in chapters 46 through 52. One thing I wanted to get out of the way before we start, I didn't really like that she was naked for a lot of the fight, mostly because she's underage. A couple things to note about this, though. God, I feel like this is gonna sound like such copium. It does have lore reason backing behind it since she spawned her body from the neck down and couldn't get her clothes back after her body was destroyed with them on. She's also not the only female character to do this, or even the only character in general. Both denji and another woman in the manga do this after losing their heads, which makes it pretty consistent across the board and in some aspects, good story writing. However, I would be a hypocrite in regards to how I feel about Momo's outfit from my hero if I just let it pass because it was done for lore reasons. I think lore surrounding women is usually made the way it is so that they can show their body for fanservice. For example, Momo's power to generate objects could come from something entirely different, like, eh, I don't know, literally any other way than skin exposure. Or in this case, the bomb devil could have just had a single moment to put her clothes back on. It's also a little bit funny that she magically spawns underwear and only underwear in the middle of chapter 46. Upon rereading it for a fourth time, I suspect she took them from one of the guys she killed, which is funny as fuck. Uh, but then why didn't she take their pants? Whatever. It's not the biggest deal to me with all the context. I just thought it would bring it up as it's one of my very few small grievances I had with the manga, and I'd like to be consistent with my opinions at least. Aside from the wardrobe choices of this part, though, I think the writing of these chapters is near flawless. The little pieces of this fight give us a lot of context surrounding her feelings about Denji. As mentioned before, Fujimoto intentionally keeps Riz's exact feelings for Denji vague, and for me personally, it was a bit hard to tell if Riz was lying at first when she said she actually liked Denji, or if she was lying when she said she didn't. However, a couple of things have me believing that Riz didn't fact like Denji, just not romantically like Denji hoped. One is the fact that in this battle, she gives him pointers on better fighting techniques and tells him he needs to learn how to hone his skills. I don't think these are words from someone who intends to kill Denji with no remorse. She would have no further purpose for teaching him something new, but she chooses to anyway, kinda like how she taught him how to swim. Denji also points out in this fight that she could have killed him the first time they met. The point isn't revisited until later in the manga where Riz is stopped by Makima, and Riz asks herself why she didn't just kill Denji when they first met, and it's implied that it's because she saw herself in him after she admits she didn't attend school either. These scenes also have me believing that she was being sincere when she offered to run away with Denji, since if her motive was to kill Denji from the start, she would have just done it then and there. Another awesome part of this fight is the actions taken themselves, so for some context, something I see far too often with fights against women is one of three takes. Either the woman is so strong and kicks everyone's ass because we aren't allowed to see her lose, or she only loses to a woman because a man can't hit her, or the man refuses to fight her because I don't hit women. Before anyone comes to the fact that Sanji's an example in this video, I need you to please please know he's one of my favorite characters from One Piece. I am only using him as an example. I know this one might sound counterintuitive, like, but you can't hit women. Don't you want strong female characters that kick ass? Isn't that women empowerment? And my answer to those are yes, you actually can in a fictional fight, and well, sometimes. Here's the thing, the way I see it, writing any fight with gender in mind is almost always gonna come off as contrived. That goes for both fights where a woman can't win against a man because he's too strong, and for fights where the woman can't lose because women are perfect and never do anything wrong. In the wise words of that man, It's odd to me too, because I think this pitfall would be easily avoided if you just let each character use their power to the best of their ability, then even if the woman loses, it'll feel like she gave it her all and the wind will never feel gendered. And I believe this is exactly what Chainsaw Man did. Rhee's killed hundreds of people. She's a trained assassin, and for the stink I gave her earlier about being half naked during the fight, I think it goes to show just how fast-paced she was fighting, and how much of her was going into this fight. Killing one guy with your head, and then killing the other by detaining him with your body? Dude, that's sick. The only reason she loses this fight, despite having more fighting experience, is because she was fighting against multiple people in public safety trying to kill her, allowing Dungey to trap her and take her underwater where her powers were useless. As I stated in the previous video, a big reason Fujimoto's women are so subversive and real is because he writes them like people. The story managed to avoid all the common pitfalls of a typical femme fatale woman by simply writing her as a person, someone with motives and goals outside of the main character, but also as a compliment to the main character. She's okay, I guess. I'm just kidding, I was trying to be normal, but I can't, I'm so sorry, I thought she's perfect. Sorry you had to see that. I love Quan Chi a lot. As you can tell, I had her appearance tease for me on TikTok, and I knew going into it that she was gay and going to have a harm of women around her, but goddamn, was it everything I expected and more. Admittedly, she was much more of a side character than Riz was and had a smaller part to play, but I adored every bit of it, and I think the fandom did too considering how often I saw the phrase giga-chad lesbian all over Reddit and TikTok. But this is what I think makes her unique to anime. First and most obvious is just how blatant her sexuality is shown in the manga. A lot of popular shonen mangas will tiptoe around their gay characters, simply preferring to imply homosexuality if they even have gay characters at all. Fujimoto, however, pulled the absolutely chad move of making a two-page scene in the middle of an arc. It's important to note that the women in these scenes are all of legal age, which if you're going to do fan service is the best case scenario, should be the only case scenario, they also constantly refer to these encounters, having them hanging on her as much as they can, and have her call them her girls, making it almost unavoidable and necessary to portray them in the sexuality that they are. No localizable gal pals here ma'am. There are a couple of things I do want to mention about this though, one being that I could also see it if some LGBT women did not like this particular aspect of it and felt it was a bit fetishizing. Obviously this isn't my issue to take, or even to go crazy applauding. I just want to address that while I think it's awesome that Kwanchi's sexuality so blatant, I would also understand people who find it a bit objectifying. I would love to hear opinions from everyone on this though. But outside of that, Kwanchi's lesbian harem does do more than just add LGBT representation. A big genre for anime is harems, whether that be one male all female harems like high school DxD or Nisakoi, or one female all male harems like Orin High School Host Club in Amnesia. With Kwanchi and her girls though, there are three big things that set her apart from the others. One is that they're adults, which just makes for an interesting story for me. I loved high school anime when I was also in high school, but now that I'm no longer part of the demographic, it can get a little bit uncomfortable seeing children and fans serve as heavy roles. The fact that they're adults allows the sexual aspects of it to actually hit the mark and also makes it feel more natural. Two is that Kwanchi shows genuine love for every single one of her girls. In a lot of anime harems, there's a group of people vying for the attention of the head or the main character. The main character usually has to make a choice on who's going to be the one and only for them, and no hate to harems, they definitely have their place in a romance fantasy kind of way, and serve their purpose in getting fandoms to root for best girl or favorite himbo, but I think Kwanchi's relationship with her girls takes it into more of a polyamorous territory in which she never has to choose and loves every single one of her girls. The lines where she asks for her girls to get an education, or where she tells Maki mother she can kill her but spare her girls, it's so so sweet. It shows that while yes, the nature of their relationship is pretty s***, Kwanchi also deeply cares about these girls and is willing to go above and beyond to ensure their happiness. Third and last, by the simple act of making both Kwanchi and her girls women, they've removed any sort of gendered power dynamics to the relationship. Typically with harems, even in reverse harems, there can be a sort of gender expectation at play. I think two things happen between both harems and reverse harems. The man is always doing the saving and having the power, and the women are the weaker ones getting saved, think Kirito saving a bunch of women in sword art and how do he getting saved by Tamaki. Again, I'm not ragging on the genre, I think they know what their audience wants to see and they play it up. However, simply by making Kwanchi a woman along with her harem, Fujimoto has taken out any sort of male power domination that could have happened. In fact, Kwanchi's girls are regularly helping her out in fights and even being a huge reason that she or public safety wins. And then, I mean, you've seen Kwanchi. Her abilities are insane and she herself is quite strong on her own. Speaking of Kwanchi's strength, her fight scenes also bring to light a couple of other details I'd like to mention. So, a couple months ago, a story analysis YouTuber who's on here as Shni made a video about how Arcane writes women. In that video, he pointed out a scene where Vai gets punched and has spit and blood flying out of her mouth. He points out how most media doesn't give their women a moment like this, a moment where they take a hit and have a scene where they look ugly, so to speak. Again, while this sounds counterintuitive and might make most people pause and think why are they hitting a woman, it's actually essential to the writing and feminism of both Vai and Kwanchi's characters. In chapter 62, we see Kwanchi getting a fight with Yoshida, in which he lands a nasty solid kick on her face. And in Vai fashion, she takes it like a champion and is still standing. Yoshida even remarks right here that if she kicked him in a similar fashion, it would have killed him. This goes to show just how powerful she is, while also being flawed enough to miss shots and take hits in the fight. And I think it's really important character writing to see both of those sides. One last thing I want to point out. Earlier, we mentioned how Reece was naked for some of her fight after spawning from the neck down and that there was another female character who does this as well, and that character's Kwanchi. A couple things I want to get into about this. First off, how f***ing cool was that transformation? A top-down shot of Sugihagi literally holding Kwanchi's head and then dropping it into a pile of bodies where Kwanchi reforms? I just know that's gonna look so good in the anime. Aside from that though, I want to talk about why her specific nudity doesn't really strike me as all that bad. In her fight, she never seems sexualized and is really only posed in cool action shots, save for the singular butt shots. Honorable mentions before we move on to Asa, I want to point out just how f***ing awesome the line of corpses talking is, which was said by one of her fiends before she killed a public safety demon hunter when he was being anti-semitic to her. It's one of the many fantastic lines in this manga. Fujimoto seems to be really great with stuff like that, and in the words of a Redditor, I found while doing research for this video, and then finally, Cosmo the Halloween girl and her bit about being insanely smart and having all the information in the universe but being condemned to only saying Halloween has to be the funniest f***ing sh** I've ever read. Kwanchi's character was so perfect for this manga though, all this to say, she's a super interesting and unique female character and I really hope we get to see more like her in other manga and anime. I absolutely adore Asa, though admittedly my thoughts on her are a little bit more scattered than the other women on this list. Asa is basically the main character of part two, which by itself is a step up from the usual shonen woman, but of course just being the main female of a show does not automatically make you well written. What makes her a well written female character comes from the complexities of her actions and her desires. One of Asa's biggest personality traits is just how awkward she is. It's such a big personality trait, in fact, that when the fandom describes why they like her, they call her things like femcel, f***ing cringe, adorable in a pathetic way, annoying and stupid lovingly, and wait, hold on this one's my favorite, I wanna hit her with a tire iron, affectionate. I know all of those sound bad but wait, just hear me out, hear me out. In most anime when you hear words like annoying and pathetic describing a female character, you're probably hearing about a character that yells all the time and is somewhat of a throwaway character, however, with Asa it's relatable, and not even to just women either. They're a men that feel and act the same way Asa does in real life, which touches on something I remember hearing a long time ago. I forget where I heard it exactly, but it was something along the lines of, if you wanna write a good female character, just stop trying to write a female and write a character, essentially saying pick the motives and personality first and the gender second. Asa feels like she was written in this regard with more feminine aspects of her character added afterwards. One of Asa's main drives is the loneliness she faces in her life. Her only family is dead, and though she used to have cram bone to keep her going, much like Denji had Pochita, it was taken from her by this awful excuse of a person, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. Asa is truly alone at the beginning of her arc, but instead of pining for friends, she's decided it's easier to stay distant and feel internal contempt or jealousy for people who do have friends and love. The whole reason she hates Bucky the Chicken at the beginning of the arc is because she's jealous of the attention he gets. However, it's made clear that despite what comes out as outward disdain for people with friendships, Asa loves positive attention from people and is willing to change her mind on things just to be their friend. For example, the disdain she showed for Bucky was gone instantly the moment Bucky asked her to be on their team and the rest of the class agreed, or when she lied about liking Chainsaw Man because Yuko said she liked him. Asa puts up walls and shows disdain for other people when they don't directly and outwardly like her, but the moment someone does show any positivity towards her, she tries her hardest to keep them. It's the kind of nature that can come off as hot and cold to readers, especially towards Denji, but it's so perfectly indicative of not only the nature of a teenager, but also someone who's guarded and afraid of getting hurt. A good scene to highlight this is the one where she goes to Denji's apartment after being invited over. It's right after Asa finds out she's unable to make a sword at a Denji's spine, essentially saying Denji doesn't like her enough for her to do that. She had previously thought that he did, however, and so when her prediction is supposedly proven wrong, Asa becomes insecure and tells Denji in his apartment that she would never make out with him and that she doesn't like him, despite inviting him out on the date. This confuses Denji, of course, but shows she's careful with the feelings she shows, lest she be the one that people disagree with. What makes her a good female character, though, is the mosaic that her personality is, which takes character traits that might seem annoying to some, and instead makes them endearing when we're able to relate them to ourselves. So like I mentioned before, I wanted to do a quick revisiting of the characters from part one of the subversive women video I'd covered, and just give a little bit of an update on what I think of them now. None of the opinions have really changed that drastically, so this is going to be a little bit shorter than the other girls, but there are certainly some things I want to talk about. And the last part, I mentioned just how foreboding and terrifying Makima is, and I think that perception absolutely still stands. She was such a well-written villain and so perfectly hateable, despite having a somewhat tragic backstory with the whole wanting to be hugged and loved thing. I thought the line Makima is listening, and her repeating a corpse is talking back to Quan Chi and her fiend before killing them, implying she was indeed listening to the entire fight was super cool. I think this is something I've missed a lot in recent American media, a good, genuinely terrifying villain with a tragic backstory that's still just a remarkably terrible person. The scene where the American government made a contract with the gun devil to kill Makima, and every single subsequent death was named in the search for her was so absolutely chilling. It was perfectly horrific, and really really drove home the fact that Makima was immensely formidable, since that many people died in a failed attempt on her life. And also slightly off topic, but I thought the part where the American president was like, I'm sorry to my people, we're taking your life spans, it had me laughing a little bit. I remember scoffing and telling my boyfriend there is no way the American president would actually care about all of our lives like that. I feel like the conversation would sound more like, Homie, those lives are yours, we'll kill Makima. I also thought it was really cool how after Makima died and Naita became the control devil, it kind of brought up this topic of nature versus nurture, and is trying to show that with a better home life, Naita can be different, and I'm really really excited to see where her character goes. I could cry just thinking about her. I knew it was coming, since it got spoiled for me before the anime even came out, but god, I could not have prepared for the straight gut punch that all of the context brought with it. The next day was Denji's birthday dude, it's f***ing birthday! I was pretty happy though that after she died, she still had a moment with him, and I think after Denji had that snowball fight with Aki, I'm in denial, thanks for asking. He really needed something like that, or he would have ended up being a lot more like Asa in the whole apathy for living thing. I was also really happy to see her save him, and it really drove home just how much she cared about her best friend, and how much growth she'd experienced in terms of how selfish she started out when she was ready to sacrifice Denji for her cat. I also thought the scenes where she was traumatized from the darkness devil were really well written. I was a little bit sus at first when she and Denji were taking baths together, but seeing them finally could see that this would always be a platonic relationship, and that they were just so incredibly close that they could do this for each other, was actually really touching. Also the fact that Aki slept next to her too, and helped take care of her, that was sweet. My favorite part though is how she stayed calling Denji her buddy till the very end, and it was so wholesome for her character who was kind of anything but. Ultimately I love that she got to keep her unhinged personality, while learning to trust and love, and I can't wait to see if Denji will actually find the blood devil, and bring her back to life like she asked him to. So obviously Himuno wasn't in the manga after chapter 39, which is where I started reading, but there was a couple of comments left on my last video that were super interesting regarding her role in the story, and I thought I'd like to point that out here. First and foremost I'd like to say that I still think her actions towards the younger boys were very questionable at best, but I think she was more integral to the story than I said in part one. I think upon reading those comments and seeing what everyone else had to say about her, the nice people, not the people just straight up saying she did nothing wrong. Guys come on, that was a little bit weird. I've kind of come to a slightly different conclusion about her character. There was a comment left by this person right here that I thought was really interesting, pointing out that she served to deepen the world building of Chainsaw Men, and kind of really highlight how dark the world was, and how public safety was filled with not good people, since they didn't bat an eye at Himuno taking Denji home. And then this comment right here that was pointing out Himuno's perception of death and how she feared no one would remember her after, as represented by the ghost devil she made a contract with. They basically said that the ghost devil represented her fear of being forgotten and of course dying, and that it was a really fitting contract for her to make. Another comment I can't find right now pointed out how Himuno was not so much intentionally going after Denji, but going after people who desired Makima because she felt insecure that Makima had taken Aki, for lack of a better word. On this last one though, I think it still doesn't make her a good person and doesn't erase that she almost had s*** with a minor, but I believe that's all intentional and really hits home on the darkness of public safety and the people working there as a whole. There were a ton of very insightful comments on my last video though, and I'm really really happy you guys enjoyed it. I hope that this one at least somewhat lived up to your expectations since you guys had been asking for a part two. After finishing the manga, Chainsaw Men moved its way up to my top five favorite stories ever, and I absolutely admire the world building going on here. There's actually still a ton of content I want to go over about it, and I've been holding back on gushing about how interesting Denji's character is, so I'm excited to get more into his time passes. But anyways, thank you guys for watching, and I hope you guys will come back for the next video. Bye!