I came into Chainsaw Man Part 2 expecting Part 1. That was the mistake. Part 1 ends with a finale that people still talk about in the same breath as the best manga endings of the last decade — the Violence Fiend speech, the final confrontation, that last page. I expected Part 2 to be a continuation: same pace, same chaos, Denji somewhere near the centre of the chaos. Part 2 is not that. Part 2 is something different enough that I had to stop three times in the first week and ask myself whether I was reading a masterpiece or a mess. I still haven't decided. That's the whole story.

Here's the week-by-week account — what Part 2 is, why half the fandom thinks Tatsuki Fujimoto is doing something extraordinary and the other half thinks he's lost the plot, and an honest verdict for the Indian teen deciding whether to start.

Part 2 is slower, weirder, and more uncomfortable than Part 1. Whether that's a feature or a flaw is the only conversation Chainsaw Man fans are having in 2026.

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What Part 2 Is — Before You Go In

Chainsaw Man Part 2 moves the story forward approximately a year from the end of Part 1. Denji is still there — but Part 2's protagonist is Asa Mitaka, a high school girl who becomes host to a Devil called the War Devil. The central narrative engine is no longer "Denji survives increasingly impossible situations." It's quieter and stranger than that: Asa is trying to survive school, manage a voice in her head that has its own agenda, and navigate a relationship with Denji without knowing his secret identity. Think less Shibuya Arc, more awkward dates and classroom politics — but written by someone who cannot write anything without it eventually becoming unhinged.

This is the Part 2 that Part 1 fans didn't expect and roughly half of them haven't forgiven. The complaints are real: the pacing is slower, the action is less frequent, the tonal register shifts chapter-by-chapter in ways that feel deliberately disorienting. The defences are also real: Fujimoto is doing something more ambitious than Part 1, building a relationship dynamic that requires the slowness to feel earned, and asking questions about identity and violence that the blood-soaked pace of Part 1 didn't have space for.

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The Week of Reading — Day by Day

Days 1 and 2 — Chapters 98–120. The Asa introduction arc. My first reaction was confusion followed by genuine interest. Asa is a different kind of Fujimoto protagonist — more self-aware, more internally contradictory, not the chaotic forward momentum of Denji but something more recognisable. The War Devil's voice in her head — manipulative, strategic, occasionally funny — is one of the best character dynamics Fujimoto has written. By Chapter 110, I was invested.

Days 3 and 4 — Chapters 121–145. The Aquarium date arc, which is either the best thing in Part 2 or the most frustrating depending entirely on your expectations. These chapters are slow. They're mostly two characters talking and being awkward and misunderstanding each other in ways that feel specific and uncomfortable and true. If you came from Part 1 wanting action, these chapters will test your patience significantly. I didn't come from Part 1 wanting action, so these chapters were my favourite section of the week.

Days 5 and 6 — Chapters 146–165. Here the pace shifts back toward something Part 1 readers will recognise. New devil threats, more violence, consequences from Asa's earlier decisions arriving faster than she expected. The section that had the Indian reader community most divided in late 2025 lives somewhere in here — a development involving a major character that made half the reader base feel it was earned and the other half feel it was arbitrary. I'm deliberately not naming what it is. The reaction you have to it will tell you something about whether Part 2 is working for you.

Day 7 — Caught up. Reading the weekly chapter-by-chapter release schedule after a binge is a specific kind of suffering. You go from "okay, one more chapter" to "I have to wait seven days." The current arc (as of mid-2026) is doing something with the Chainsaw Man mythology that retroactively reframes certain events from Part 1. This is either evidence that Fujimoto planned more than readers gave him credit for, or a retcon handled with enough confidence that it functions as planning. Probably both.

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The Division — What Each Side Is Actually Arguing

The Chainsaw Man Part 2 discourse isn't about quality. It's about what you wanted from a sequel and whether Part 2 gives it to you.

The criticism of Part 2 isn't that it's badly written. Nobody serious is arguing that. The criticism is that it's written for a reader who isn't the reader Part 1 built. Part 1's audience came for violence, momentum, and a protagonist who processed trauma by refusing to stop moving. Part 2 asks that audience to care about school drama and awkward romance and a new protagonist whose relationship with violence is much more conflicted. That's a real shift and it alienates real readers.

The defence of Part 2 isn't that the pacing criticism is wrong. It is slow in places. The defence is that the slowness is doing something — that you cannot build the kind of emotional weight Part 2 is constructing without the chapters that feel like nothing happening, because the chapters that feel like nothing happening are when you find out what these characters are actually like when nothing is threatening them. Asa in a classroom making a bad social decision tells you more about who she is than Asa in a fight. Fujimoto knows this. Part 2 is built around it.

Which argument you find more convincing depends on what you read manga for. Both are legitimate. The manga itself is not confused about what it's doing — it's the readers who are divided about whether what it's doing is what they want.