Chainsaw Man’s final chapter smashes One Piece in digital views

Chapter 232 of Chainsaw Man, which concluded the long-running manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto, is currently sitting at 1.1 million views on Manga Plus, Shueisha’s worldwide digital reading app and platform. It’s an incredible number that testifies to the huge following garnered by Chainsaw Man over the years. At the time of writing, One Piece, another massively popular manga available on Manga Plus, has only reached one million views with two chapters in the past four years (chapters 1053 and 1011).

This comparison isn’t a slight towards Eiichiro Oda’s masterpiece. One Piece is the best-selling manga of all time, has over 234 million views on Manga Plus alone, and has sold more than 600 million volumes. But it’s significant that so many fans flocked to read the conclusion of Fujimoto’s manga, despite the mixed criticism received by its Part 2. The sudden ending of Chainsaw Man shocked many readers, and also, to their dismay, left a lot of unanswered questions about the series and its world.

The impressive views can partially be explained by the hype surrounding the announcement that such a popular manga was ending. In fact, chapter 231 of Chainsaw Man, where the imminent conclusion was announced, also surpassed one million views quickly. The legacy of a series too often rests on how it ends, and Chainsaw Man will be no exception. Fans are already dissecting the final chapter online, looking for clues to explain some of the mysteries that Fujimoto left hanging in the air, such as the true nature of Chainsaw Man (the chapter confirmed that Pochita is not, in fact, the Chainsaw Devil).

Most of the discussion seems centered around the happy ending that Denji got in the finale. After Pochita ate himself, erasing his existence from history, a new reality was created where Denji never met the demon. In that world, Power and Nayuta are still alive, and everyone is apparently a lot happier. It’s a surprisingly upbeat conclusion for one of the darkest manga in recent history, and one that contrasts a lot with the ending of Part 1, which showed Denji cooking and eating Makima’s body. Some fans are not convinced by the sudden shift in tone and the “world reset” plot twist, but Chainsaw Man has always been a polarizing series, and I’m sure that the subtleties of Fujimoto’s storytelling will be discussed for a long time.