u/Dakoolestkat123

A piece of art can be so on the nose, so lacking any form of subtlety about what it is meaning to say, and still will have the people who speak with the understanding that a work is about more than the fictional characters inside of it be called morons.

This isn't the most egregious example, but it's the one that has pissed me off the most recently because of how blatant it is that the people arguing against a certain reading are doing so because of their personal feelings. In part 2 of Chainsaw Man (spoilers ahead), the main villain is the War Devil, essentially the personification of humanity's fear of war. She is one of the four devils representing the horsemen of the apocalypse (War, Death, Famine, Conquest/Pestilence), and most of her motivation as a character comes from the desire to make humanity more afraid of war, namely by causing horrific wars. This is because the more humanity fears war, the stronger she is, but the main thing in her way is the titular Chainsaw Man, who has the ability to erase concepts from existence and human memory, and did this with nazis and nuclear weapons among other things. Anyways, about halfway through the part she stops in the middle of a fight to see a news broadcast announcing that America has just used a nuclear bomb on the Soviet Union, which means that America reinvented nuclear weapons from scratch after their very concept was erased from existence. This leads to her excitedly realizing out loud that she's forgotten her true love in the world: America. From the text, "Of course! I remember everything now! I don't love Denji, I'm in love with... America! America made me powerful...terrifying...and attractive! Arigato, America! Arigat- I mean... <Thank you, America!! Thank you!!> (this is the translated version, in the original she switches from Japanese to English to properly thank America).

This is followed by a sequence of her singing the U.S. national anthem as we see a montage of families walking through the rubble of what was once a town, American planes swooping to drop bombs on cities, and rows upon rows of charred civilian corpses being gathered by service workers to clean the aftermath of this destruction. Again, these images are overlaid with the literal U.S. national anthem being sung by the literal personification of the horror of war. After this, she becomes extremely patriotic towards America, and is able to use numerous American cultural landmarks (IE the Statue of Liberty, the American flag planted on the moon) as weapons due to her having metaphorical ownership over the entire country. I’m not even citing all of it, I cannot emphasize enough how clearly and frequently the author bashes you over the head with the message “AMERICA = WAR. AMERICA IS OWNED BY WAR. WAR = BAD. AMERICA = BAD. MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX = BAD.” For Christ’s sake, her scars form the fucking Lockheed Martin logo. This is so clearly a central themes of Chainsaw Man part 2.

AND YET when you look up “Yoru America” (Yoru is the name of the war devil) in Chainsaw Man forums and fan spaces, you would think that her association with America is like a damn Easter egg for how little its talked about, AND FOR HOW MANY PEOPLE LITERALLY DENY THAT THE AUTHOR IS MAKING ANY FORM OF NEGATIVE COMMENTARY ABOUT AMERICA WHATSOEVER. I genuinely, GENUINELY cannot think of a way in which the author could convey the message that these people would understand that he is condemning American jingoism and war crimes. There are right wing sections of his fan base that realize the intended message and just willfully misinterpret it to like, rage bait people (to which I would ask why don’t you spend your time and energy being a fan of something that doesn’t constantly denounce you and your morals except I know why it’s cause chud art sucks), but there is an even larger portion of the fanbase that just straight up doesn’t think that’s the intended message, to which I’m honestly even more baffled. It’s like reading A Christmas Carol and honest to god thinking it’s about how you should hate other people and never donate to charity. I know people joke about fans of such and such property not being able to read but this kind of stuff makes me sincerely question the basic reading ability of the average person.

From the Pathfinder wiki - “Vildeis, the Cardinal Martyr is an angel empyreal lord fanatically dedicated to the eradication of all evil everywhere. Other goodly divine beings may rail against the sins of the wicked, but none has devoted themselves as wholeheartedly to its destruction than Vildeis. […] It is said that when Vildeis first emerged from Heaven and learned of the existence of evil in the Great Beyond, she tore out her eyes so that she would no longer see its foul touch throughout existence.”

I LOVE lawful good/heroic characters that are also just absolutely horrifying, and Vildeis is one of my favorite fictional deities ever. She is the idea of fanatical heroism made manifest, and her worshippers are the only lawful good *cult* that I’ve seen in media. Being around her or her followers makes one truly relieved to not be one of their victims evil foes.