Script for "Chainsaw Man: Kill Your Darlings"

The best thing about being made out of chainsaws is that when you lock yourself out, you don’t have to pay a locksmith. You can just threaten to slice them in half with your chainsaws and they’ll open your door without pay.

Trust me, it works. I’ve tried it.

This video will have spoilers for season one of Chainsaw Man and zero manga spoilers, but a lot of what I have to say about the storytelling in general will apply to the rest of Part One as well.

Alright spoiler warning over, roll the intro.
*Blizzic Presents*

It’s well known by now that Tatsuki Fujimoto, the author of this heart wrenching nightmare fuel disguised as a shonen battle manga, is a pretty weird dude. But the popularity and general critical acclaim of Chainsaw Man is a decent argument that you should take his writing advice and kill your darlings.

It’s a very popular writing adage, but it’s well known because it’s true! That’s right, you should torture, kill, mutilate, harm, and psychologically destroy your most favorite characters in your writing. Fuck ‘em up.

Just like in Chainsaw Man! Remember that part where Himeno was a great character, so Fujimoto had her shot? Good writing!

Except…no, actually, contrary to what I think a lot of people assume, that’s not what “kill your darlings” means. If you do decide to torture the shit out of your characters, it should be because your story supports that. But not all stories do. If you’re writing something nice and pleasant like Spy buried treasure Family, then that interpretation of kill your darlings definitely doesn’t apply.

The actual meaning behind the phrase “Kill your Darlings” is that when writing and developing a story, you shouldn’t get married to any particular element of it. Just because you really like that one moment or character or story arc, and/or just because you’ve put a lot of work into it, DOES NOT mean that you shouldn’t cut it if it isn’t working. Hell, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t cut it even if it IS working. If it’s unnecessary, if it doesn’t serve the story or the experience of it, it shouldn’t be there, cut it. That might feel like a really tragic and painful thing to have to do, but that’s exactly where the saying comes from. You have to kill your darlings. Don’t let your love for an individual screw blind you to the fact that the machine works infinitely better without it.

So what does Chainsaw Man have to do with darling murder…well obviously there’s no way for me to know what was cut, but the writing demonstrates all the hallmarks of a story that was mercilessly gutted of anything that wasn’t absolutely crucial. People often say that Chainsaw Man is fast paced, and when they say this, they don’t mean that individual scenes or moments are fast paced. In fact what the anime has illuminated is that individual scenes in Chainsaw Man are actually very slow and measured.They mean that the pace of the overarching story is fast, and yeah, I can see how it might feel that way…if you’ve been reading a lot of shonen manga.

Chainsaw Man’s not fast, My Hero Academia is fucking slow.

This manga isn’t paced like an endless shonen battle manga because it’s not one of those. It’s paced like a movie. (whispering) Pssst. I don’t mean that it’s as long as a movie, I mean that the progression of its overarching narrative is filmic in its general lack of side stories and commitment to forward motion, just to clarify.

It doesn’t have room for the nonsense, it has removed all the nonsense from the outline, it has killed it. Denji decides that his next objective is going to be touching boobs, and in the very next, extremely short arc, he succeeds at his mission. Same thing with his first kiss. He decides he wants one, he survives the arc, he gets it. Notably, neither accomplishment leaves him as satisfied as he thinks it will, but he’s still ignorant about what he actually needs, so it leads naturally into the selection of his next objective: he decides he wants to sleep with Makima.Then, things quickly spiral out of his control, with every new arc putting a slight twist on that basic premise until other spoilers happen, Denji comes face to face with inevitability, and then just like that, the story’s over.

Chainsaw Man doesn’t take any of its premises or inclinations and drag them out to ridiculous lengths, it’s constantly moving to the next thing. Could it have expanded these little arcs with more fights and focus on side characters? Could it have pulled a Demon Slayer and given us the entire backstory of the Bat and Leech Devil’s romantic life together? Sure it could have, but why? What purpose would that serve when the story is already so succinct?

Well, it would give us more time for character. But I think that idea is stemming from a limiting perspective on how you do character. I’m not one of those people who thinks that stories need to be ALL PLOT, ALL THE TIME. MACGUFFINS. KILL THE BAD GUY. NEVER STOP MOVING THE MAIN PLOT FORWARD OR ELSE ITS FILLER AND FILLER IS BAAAAAAAD.

(angry) If you think that’s what filler is, then I wish to politely inform you that you are incorrect.

Stepping away from the main plot can be a seriously valuable exercise. Just look at how much we get from Chainsaw Man’s backstory sequence about kids throwing snowballs at each other.

This happens during an exposition scene. It could have just cut right to the part where the Gun Devil destroys everything, but instead, Fujimoto gives us a glimpse into the lives of these characters. It’s enchanting, and it’s important. It makes the world feel real and tender, and gives us key insight into what exactly forged Aki into the fucked up hotboi he is today. So yes, you can do that. You can engage in small, granular storytelling that isn’t pure plot.

But that is not the same thing as filling your story with unnecessary padding, that also happens to be lower quality than everything else because you were short on good ideas, just so the audience spends more time with the characters.

I’m sick and tired of pretending like screentime and character development are the same thing. They’re not. Sure, maybe it’s true IN GENERAL that it’s easier to do more things when you have more time in the story to do them. But there are short stories that will leave you emotionally devastated (onscreen: Goodbye Eri) and stories with hundreds of chapters that will leave you feeling nothing (onscreen: The Promised Neverland)

Same thing with characters. A character can barely actually appear and be absolutely brilliant (Shao Tucker is in ONE episode of a 64 episode anime and people still talk about him) whereas a character at the center of an endless epic can be endlessly boring (onscreen: Kirito).

When you’re watching something, do you just sit there while characters interact, checking your watch until it’s been an arbitrary amount of time and then go “okay, times up. I care about them now.” No, that’s not how this works. Good character writing isn’t about the amount of time that the audience spends with them, it’s about empathy, authenticity, interiority, relationships, dynamics, motivations, wants, needs, growth or deliberate lack thereof. If all the pieces are there and they’re executed well, it doesn’t matter how short or long the overarching narrative is. A good character is a good character.

So yeah, Himeno is barely in the story before she gets shot and killed. But Fujimoto uses the short time that we do have with her to stunning effect. When she’s introduced, we’ve only really met Power, who is a feral nightmare, Makima, who is nice enough, but mysterious, off-putting in her unflinching calmness, and clearly manipulating the shit out of Denji, and Aki, who is definitely the most normal out of all of them but also definitely sulky, closed off and damaged. Himeno is our first example of a Devil Hunter who is both seemingly normal and actually cheerful. In that respect, she’s an extremely good foil to Aki. Upbeat and approachable, seemingly his polar opposite, and yet she’s got seniority over him, and they’re obviously really close. What’s great about character foils is that yes, they make character differences pop, but they also highlight similarities. You might initially mistake Himeno for well-adjusted…but gradually, it becomes clear that no, she is just as traumatized as Aki and also not handling it well. On the endless eighth floor, she seems like she’s the only one keeping it together. Power even comments on it. But then Aki gets stabbed, everything seems hopeless, and her upbeat attitude fails her. She breaks down into a tearful panic. And yet, once they escape…she sticks with that coping mechanism of a false smile. Because it lets her get right back to feeling okay. It’s addictive.

Both her and Aki are drunk on the exact same kind of fatalism, but whereas Aki handles his trauma with stoicism and emotional barricades, Himeno partygirls her way through it, acting more nonchalant than she feels and indulging in base pleasures, which leads to a pretty severe lack of self reflection about a lot of things, including her unfortunate tendency to get minors involved in things that minors really shouldn’t get involved in.

You know, like smoking…and fucking an adult.

Himeno’s not one of those characters where they’re mostly just a paragon of healthy behavior and their “character flaw” is that they’re a little reckless sometimes. She’s a bad person, even before she meets a traumatized sixteen year old and decides he’s someone she can use for her own purposes. But because we’re made to understand the way she thinks and how she turned out like this, we can empathize with her anyway.

In my book, the best way to get the audience invested in a character is to get them invested in the character’s struggles. When we arrive at the first Himeno flashback, all we’ve seen of her is casual cheeriness and fucking around for fun while on the job, so this dark scene in the graveyard is very suddenly tragic.You don’t know who she’s mourning, but the devastation on her face and the fact that this is only one in a long string of losses…you can just immediately feel her desperation for some semblance of stability and peace. She immediately says as much. “Don’t you die, Aki.” But she isn’t crying. She can’t do that anymore. Yet she doesn’t try to erect walls or push Aki away. She’s desperate enough for intimacy to put herself at risk of more pain and build a relationship with this new partner of hers, especially after he makes her laugh by sticking gum on that woman’s clothes.

When her dead buddy’s girlfriend shows up to slap Himeno across the face, she explains to Aki that it’s just part of the job. It doesn’t even occur to her to do anything other than just take it. So obviously Aki getting a petty little revenge for her says a lot about him, but I would also speculate that it’s the moment that Himeno starts to realize that there’s something other than stalwart commitment to her job and her path, ironically coming from the person who is the most stalwart in his commitment. Eventually she realizes she doesn’t give a shit about the Gun Devil anymore. She decides to be selfish. She’s done with the idea of “public safety.” She’s done trying to pretend she’s an altruist. Fuck Makima, and fuck all of her belongings. It’s every man for himself!

But somewhere along the way, there’s a complication: she catches feelings for Aki.

I adore the way she won’t admit to Denji that she wants to get with Aki because she loves him, and just says she’s after him for his looks. That is just…so on brand for her. “Yeah that’s right, I fuck people cause they’re hot and I smoke cigarettes cause they’re nice. Definitely not anything deeper going on here, no need to self reflect.” This attitude also lines up with her being unable to kiss someone unless she’s drunk. Anything to numb the terror of intimacy!

(another layer of the tragedy is that we know Himeno has kissed Aki while drunk, but if she’d ever managed to do it while sober he probably would have taken her feelings more seriously alright I’ll stop now)

But her love is too genuine for that. It consistently pierces the armor she’s built around herself. The problem with having feelings for Aki, and also not wanting to die fighting the Gun Devil like Kishibe says they both will, is that Aki is not going anywhere. His anger towards the Gun Devil hasn’t faded. It is fresh and it is burning. No matter how much she tries, she can’t figure out how to convince him to drop it.

And so we have this setup that’s effective for very similar reasons to that trope of “They can’t be dead, they were so close to retirement!” In her heart, Himeno knows that both of them need to quit. Quit public safety, quit meandering towards their own deaths, quit acting like they don’t feel how they feel, and quit smoking.

But as long as Aki’s still addicted to all that…she’s along for the ride.

And it kills her.

Himeno’s first appearance is in episode four and her last appearance before she dies is in episode eight. Everything I just described is contained within five episodes. My Hero Academia can’t even get through a training arc with no stakes in that much time. (I’m sorry I keep picking on My Hero, I actually like that show, I’m just kind of starved for negative examples recently. I need to watch more bad stuff. I think I’m gonna get into isekai)

Point is, it is not about the length of time, it’s about what you do with it. (If you’re typing a dick joke into the comments section right now, come on, you can do better than that.)

Sure, we could have spent more time with Himeno. We could have done three or four more arcs just like the Endless Eighth Floor. And maybe it would have been fun. But the timing of this death is so crucial.

Right when you’re starting to get a handle on what this show is going to look like and the dynamics of the cast, everyone gets shot. That has to include her. Otherwise, it means so little. In other words…it would be the narrative spinning its wheels.

Fujimoto doesn’t try to make Himeno a bigger character than she is. He doesn’t try to make anything bigger than it is…unless it’s a really good joke.

He reduces Chainsaw Man to its most important elements and only its most important elements and the story is stronger for it. Unlike so many of the other manga releasing in the same magazine as it, it just REFUSES to get bogged down when it could be moving forward.

It has no interest in wasting your time.

Although…there are definitely a few places that Fujimoto may have overdone it with the darling genocide. In particular, Sawatari, Katana Man, and some other villains anime only’s haven’t met yet could have really used just the slightest bit more development. And hell. I think the entire second half of the katana man arc could have really used a bit of extra oomph, something that the anime was smart enough to go out of its way to provide. So maybe don’t use a chainsaw to do it…but you should definitely kill your darlings.

Maybe like a desert eagle, or something. Something painless.

And do it while your darlings are reminiscing about the rabbits they’re going to take care of. You know, happiest possible moment? Standard practice. Not everyone can get away with relishing in the kill the way Fujimoto does, but his work is a really great role model, something that I hope future Shonen Jump manga are willing to learn from.

Your audience doesn’t want every one of the ideas swirling around in your head and in your early drafts. Hell, they don’t even want the ones that you like the most! They want your very best.

So give it to them. Quickly. And then move on to whatever’s next.

OR. Write a never ending manga about pirates.

Cut everything to get to the end as fast as possible, or don’t ever end. The two genders.