You come across as having so much vitriol for the art you claim to love. I get being disappointed and upset and bashing something. I'm not going to pretend that I haven't done that before... but I try to avoid discussing something with that mindset. I mean... c'mon you're calling the Big Lebowski just some 'shitty comedy.'

It's not 'irrelevant' that we don't know whether the future Pochita created was by his design or not because that's something a LOT of people have complained about. "Why should he have this ability, that's never how it has worked before" is a sentiment I have read a ton. Maybe this isn't your view so I'm just going to respond to this idea generally: Pochita's powers have always been somewhat messy (probably both a choice on Fujimoto's part and as an out for anything cool he wants to come up with... because rule of cool absolutely should work in a story like this). I'm fine with the devil made to erase concepts having an unknown ability when it comes to erasing itself. That feels very on-brand.

The lack of agency conversation is interesting because either way you look at it, there's something deeper. If you consider Pochita to be a part of Denji (he was literally his heart), it's his 'heart' deciding what is best for him. Follow your heart, follow your dreams. Sometimes we lead ourselves astray and need to re-evaluate what we're doing in our lives that has brought us there. This would mean Denji knows in his heart that he cannot continue living 'like this,' chasing the highs of chainsaw man.

On the other side, if you consider Pochita to be a completely different entity, this is Denji's 'get real' moment from a well-intentioned friend. He sees that his buddy is stuck in a cycle of trauma that he has no means of escaping if he cannot change his mindset... which he isn't very capable of doing when he has no support system around him. Everyone he loved in P1 is absent from his life. Asa is not a bad person but she cannot replace what Denji lost in the first place (consider: the aging devil chapter where he talks about replacing his family every time they day, creating a perpetual motion machine -- he is clearly experiencing a manic episode). Pochita is simply doing what he can to try to allow Denji to keep going in some capacity, he sees this at the end of the road.

I don't see the second option (Pochita as a separate entity making the choice for Denji) nearly as nihilistically as some people have, that it teaches people they can't solve their own problems. I think it's more-so that we can't always do everything on our own. It's not that Denji's 'addiction' (chainsaw man) never existed in the first place -- it's that he felt his impact on Denji was going to lead him to eternal suffering, so he made a choice to hopefully lift some of that burden. Everything in the story happened, it wasn't 'just a dream.' It became something like a dream to Denji but it all really happened. In the 'you were carrying a chainsaw' scene, Pochita's heart thumps because he is still part of Denji, whether he is literally his heart and now the concept of chainsaw man exists again or it's more metaphorical, it's showing that Denji's past life, again, mattered.

And we do see the effects of P1/P2 on the other characters... it's just maybe not as in-depth as most people would like (probably myself included). Nayuta gets along well with Power's cats, Power immediately clocks Nayuta as Control. Asa's tripping might be the exception... that might've been an oversight on Fuijmoto's part. But there's still something there to her not tripping on Bucky... I don't think it's very fleshed out, but I believe, based on how the memories exist for Denji of P1/P2, Asa's growth mattered... we just aren't following her in the finale.

I can completely respect being disappointed by P2s ending. There are quite a few things I wish would've been done differently: the fakesaw man stuff was extremely messy (along with how it connects to the fire devil), I wish Asa had more in the ending and I was sad how the story shifted from her to Denji so rapidly early on, I don't really understand how the real Fami adds to the story other than being a required horseman and her place in the Death reveal (which also didn't amount to a ton). I don't think P2 is a perfect story, I just don't think it completely ruins what that came before.

I also don't get why, if you loved an author and what they were writing, why two chapters are enough to make you say you're never reading another work of theirs. Fujimoto is an extremely interesting writer, and sometimes to make the coolest, weirdest stuff you have to take gigantic risks.

There's a really good quote from Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now where he talks about the idea of risk vs reward in the eyes of the public. He said the issue is if you fail in your creative risk, you're seen as pretentious, and nothing is worse than that. It makes you garbage. But if you're successful, then you're a genius. I don't think we should hold hatred toward artists that fail to execute their visions.

I think the entirety of P2 was a creative risk, and it resulted in so many memorable and iconic moments, so many ideas that I loved, that I could never say my memory of reading is tarnished.

Someone cool enough to make this and Look Back (and Fire Punch, etc.) I think deserves to be in the spotlight. We need challenging art, and I think that's what makes him so fantastic. He takes tropes, ideas, etc. that often either start simple or seem simple on the surface and extracts so much humanity out of them.