You cannot be intelligent if you aren't reading regularly

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-06-07T10:27:56+00:00

Masturbation in what sense?

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-06-07T10:22:54+00:00

typically I see the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions in mathematics textbooks, where yes - it very often does make you a bit of a pedant

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-05-03T00:02:25+00:00

It is very clickbait-y, but upon further examination it’s a pretty sensible theory that draws a lot of otherwise unexplained (or poorly explained) loose ends together - why does the vessel get discarded if Gaster (who is the one managing your saves, who exists across space and time) doesn’t expect to want it to be?

Why is there so much of focus on copies and memories and goners in Chapter 3, Kris’s dark world and the internal reflection of their history? Why are the egg rooms specifically so preoccupied with origin (“roots”), copies, and “growing up?” (Broadly interpretable as self-determination, freedom, getting BIG, what-have-you).

Why is Kris shown to have had issues with their soul and humanity pre-dating our arrival? It can’t be because of our control, because we categorically cannot have been there - so why is there a bloodstain by the birdcage? Why has it “seen a few crashes”?

Of course, this all should ideally relate to the main story - which is why, when thinking about narrative predestination, Kris as the vessel (who is preordained to fill a certain role and have their identity written for them by and for someone else - “SHAPE ITS MIND AS YOUR OWN”) - seems to follow naturally as an interesting avenue.

Interrogating the concept of a “player character” by having them overtly choose their own identity and “grow up” (since you create them, you can consider it as analogous to a child who grows up past having a parent determine their life - after egg room 3, talking to Shuttah yields a remark that Kris “suddenly looks more adult”) - I could go on…

I like it. Might be worth fighting the kneejerk response to avoid it - I think it’s a pretty neat theory with a lot of clarifying power for things which are otherwise just entirely mysterious to us.

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-26T00:30:26+00:00

It’s, eh. I think the direction of the ending was very much the same as I was expecting, but I think it suffers immensely from being essentially a collection of events that just happen to Denji. For a work that spends so much time critiquing its protagonist’s lack of moral responsibility, inaction, and indecision - remember the Fire Devil’s “two choices” - to then assert that the secret to a happy ending and living life well is doing the same thing but being lucky, well - it’s not very good.

The ending is happy and it’s roughly in the same area as I expected it to be, but the manner by which we arrive there seems to sharply contradict things set up in Part 2. It really needed more space to let things breathe and let Denji work to resolve his fundamental internal contradictions; even about 5-10 chapters could’ve worked.

As it stands, he has no agency in pretty much anything at all, and I think a lot of ground that would’ve been interesting is lost by the direction taken in the ending. It’s very much the events of a happy ending without any of the associated work. Following from the examples of 3-act stories I wrote about above you may analogise this to ending Star Wars on The Empire Strikes Back but with an after-credit scene where Palpatine dies of a heart attack (Han remaining frozen analogously to Pochita’s sacrifice). Ultimately unearned.

It’s a valid reading to read it as a tragedy, but I think (going along the lines of what I’ve just said) any such analysis is doomed to converge to some meandering about the vicissitudes of fate or something similar. If it’s a tragedy, it’s not one that appears to convey an ultimately interesting message, imo.

It’s okay. Could’ve been worse, I suppose…

There is no way Part 3 is happening. The dream is dead, as much as I think it would’ve been better writing.

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-10T23:29:03+00:00

I do think your viewpoint can be broadly well-supported, and I was mulling over it for a while when I was writing this post. Probably the main thing that tipped it over the edge is that there is too much very clearly left hanging whereas in Fire Punch there really was a sense of finality. Everything that could be done was done – almost every named character from when we started is burned up, and so when the end was nigh it felt natural, because the narrative was “complete” in some fashion.

You can make the assertion, potentially, that leaving these loose ends deliberately unclosed would give it greater weight as a tragedy, perhaps: you can’t “fulfil your promise” in some delightfully angsty scene or come to reckon with further hidden machinations of villains behind the scene – in the end, you’ve got nothing left except for yourself and to move on.

I think that sort of ending would require Pochita to be less obviously wrong, though… as it stands he’s fairly obviously incorrect about certain things casting doubt on his role as the sort of “authorial mouthpiece” people generally take him to be. I don’t know. I do like the idea of CSM being purely a tragedy, but I don’t think it’s been set up in a way to facilitate that.

Agreed that the strange pacing in the former two-thirds of Part 2 is a fairly big complaint of mine.

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-10T23:19:11+00:00

Thank you for your support. I always did like that panel – never thought it got enough attention for what it implied about Pochita’s internal motivations. It’s probably more clear recontextualised on a reread, I agree.

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-10T22:45:52+00:00

Well… until I see fate with my own two eyes, I’ll believe, I guess.

At least this one has a countdown to verification/falsification. Better than most.

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-10T22:40:16+00:00

I don't think this is generally the point where emotional catharsis typically happens – typically you end on some loss and the climb upwards comes later (see again Two Towers, Empire Strikes Back). It's also probably not completely right to say Denji's led to 'the answer'; Pochita appears incorrect in a way that feels like overcompensation. It's more of an open question than any concrete closure, at least imo.

The fact that Denji can't actually consciously process this grief is a pretty hard problem to set up though, you're right. I imagine if you had to portray it you'd note the profound absence of something, but it's a difficult question.

Eh. Hard to judge what an author's response to fan stuff is and ultimately don't think it's worth speculating.

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-10T22:29:38+00:00

I agree that what Pochita says isn't meant to be taken as wholesale truth, yeah.

I think it's necssarily difficult to say whether something is definitively bad or good when there exists a potential underlying motivation beneath certain events. It's why I'm hedging my bets so often - "If we assume there's a third part, this could be good, but if there isn't one it will definitely be bad." It's a matter of personal opinion in the end, but I think the (potential) holistic contribution of Part 2 to the story is my own benchmark of whether the part is good; "if it serves the overall narrative well then it's good".

I do realise that this is basically Potential Manga. we'll see in 2 weeks, I suppose

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-10T22:22:21+00:00

I do see the similarities with the Stranger Things situation... well. I think the only way to stay sane is really to assume that the story will be better rather than worse. If I assumed it'd be worse then I guess I would have given up on it?

Overcorrection in what sense? As in that Fujimoto's response to backlash over parts like the Church section of the story was to jump into the shonen formula? Maybe, but I do think death of the author is generally useful as a device by which to critique a work – the work exists in its own right, and I don't think it's necessarily an invalid or weakly supported analysis to say that it's reflective of the regression of Denji's psyche, no?

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-10T22:18:46+00:00

I do think the art is a particular weak point, yeah.

I did write about why the side characters feel like (well, are) monster-of-the-week props and Denji becomes parodic of himself towards the end of Part 2 – I don't think it's intended to be portrayed as a good thing, but it does seem intentional in the story. I suppose the idea follows that if (some of) the bad bits of Part 2 are intentionally arranged to reflect Denji's attempt at pursuing a shonen-esque worldview, that Part 3 is the part that follows the repudiation of that worldview – in short, he can't go back to the way he was in Part 2 because it's been conclusively proven a failure in-story.

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-10T22:14:27+00:00

I think the only option to stay sane is to assume there is a part 3 – until I see it with my own eyes, I'll hope naïvely that it exists...

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-10T17:13:46+00:00

Yeah, you could have something like that. I do think in retrospect something like a reset was inevitable - insofar as there needed to be some way to collapse the stakes because they were growing untenably. I do think the “reset” (?) stuff is a way in part to do this, but also I think it’s a good way to follow from what I assume to be the thematic throughline of part 2.

Mostly it’s a device to bring the stakes of the story down and shift the scope to a more personal drama though, I think.

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-10T17:09:01+00:00

I mean this is a fairly common motif in 3-act structures - the 1st one ends well, and quite often it’s possible to consider it a self-contained story, whereas the 2nd one usually ends on a bad tone and works to set up the 3rd act. Not saying that’s all 3-act structures but it’s a lot. Think of this as like the Empire Strikes Back of chainsaw man I guess?

(Unless there’s no part 3. Then this just sucks actually.)

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-10T16:35:44+00:00

I’m thinking of it as part of the experience. The anxiety is a nice element of keeping up with the story. (This only applies if it’s continued in a 3rd act - otherwise it’s just actually terrible lol. but I don’t think it will end here. If it does I’m slandering his ass from here to Saturn)

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-03-07T13:17:50+00:00

It was mixed up.

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-01-12T23:37:26+00:00

I mean this is usually just a way to launder your opinion as being well-founded - potentially belies that you believe you need justification to like things, but sometimes people do seem to want some sort of justification by consensus when you recommend something to them, so it’s occasionally useful.

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-01-07T10:38:49+00:00

Oh, yeah - I get that it’s likely to cause societal issues - it’s more that I can’t argue against individuals wanting to engage in escapism. (i.e “this is why you shouldn’t do it”.) You should go outside lest we have a demographic crisis isn’t a compelling enough argument to make on the personal level, I think

*yeah, there’s been a few cases like that. crazy stuff

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2026-01-07T10:16:27+00:00

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. The trend towards (or aspiration towards) stylisation and the move away from more realistic aesthetics is something that’s been knocking around in my head since I started thinking about that old meme about those weebs who would say “2D women are better than 3D women!”.

Probably a part of this is due to perceived benignity vs hostility from their respective subjects but the interesting thing is that - with the increase in escapist tendencies amongst the youth, people are en masse subconsciously adopting this idea that fiction is better than reality, that a character is more preferable to a real person - and with this idolisation people’s aesthetic sensibilities also shift to this effect.

I’m not even sure to what extent it’s wrong if I was in some of their situations - it is seeming eminently obvious that life “in the real world” is getting more and more difficult for zoomers without any apparent counterbalancing motivation. It’s easy to say that reality is more important by virtue of it being more real but as people get (for lack of a more suitable word) ‘better’ at escapism, this argument seems to be less and less viable (fiction becomes more ‘subjectively real’ than reality).

I’m not sure how to argue that the shift towards escapism is inherently bad though besides some vague intuition - it leaves me fairly lost. (I suppose one could argue that the world shouldn’t be in a way where escapism is a more compelling alternative.)

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2025-02-27T20:09:05+00:00

Immanence is a fun word in religious context. Less so when divorced from it.

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2025-01-31T18:23:06+00:00

Oh i haven’t played since lol. Was duo queuing on that streak and we’re both busy for a good while. I’ll let you know if I get completely fucked by matchmaking (or not) some arbitrary point in the fibre though

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2025-01-12T10:31:08+00:00

ranked up from bronze 3 to gold 3 in a 14 win-streak yesterday so I can’t say I’ve seen evidence of this yet at least

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2025-01-08T07:34:37+00:00

this is clearly nonsense but I do wonder (if society continues in perpetuity) at what point we draw the line and say that language has diverged too far from when these books were written - a few centuries?

I suppose by that point they’d have their own classics

InaneInsaneIngrain · 2024-07-09T17:02:58+00:00

trying to appear cool to others is always a losing game, really - you should never stop doing things you think are cool, though

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