Is my interpretation of the explosions in Goodbye Eri right?
Ik this is a chainsaw man subreddit but there’s no other really active places on here for fujimoto’s other works that I saw.
“In the beginning of the manga, Yuta’s mom is dying from an illness and asks him to record her until her final breath. He’s hesitant at this request, but ultimately agrees. Despite his mom’s constant criticism, he continues to go along with her request until the day he refuses to go to the hospital to record her final breath. When Yuta edits down the thousands of hours of footage into a short film for his school, he creates a very touching movie that honours his mom, until the final scene where yuta runs away from his mom’s hospital as it explodes.
Despite how crude and edgy the ending seems, the explosion actually has a deeper meaning, as it’s supposed to represent Yuta breaking free. While he did agree to do it, Yuta most likely didn’t want to film his mom until her death. Not only is it a heavy request for a 12 year old, his mom’s constant shaming wasn’t making it any easier. The explosion is a dramatic, yuta-fashioned way of showing the end of him passively obeying his mom’s will, and is also a depiction of the bursting/release of emotions that were pent up from him refusing to disobey his mom.
Later on, he meets Eri who helps him create another movie for the next school festival. It’s revealed that she’s also dying from an illness, and similar to the situation with his mom, Yuta decides to record her up until her final moments and turn the footage into a movie. This time, it’s very well received, yet Yuta can’t help but spend years re-editing the film because it felt like something was missing. As an adult, Yuta is miserable following a tragic car crash that killed his entire family, and decides to kill himself in the building where he and Eri would always watch movies together. There, he finds out that Eri is still alive and is actually a vampire. After a little chat he feels relieved, and comments that he thinks he found out why he kept recutting Eri’s movie as he walks away from the building as it explodes (impying the explosion is what was missing).
When Eri tells yuta that whenever she watches his movie, she will get to remeber him again and again, that snaps him out of his trance. In the making of his second movie, Yuta got so caught up in making a movie about Eri, that he forgot that this is HIS movie. The building explosion is supposed to represent the end of Yuta’s fixation on Eri and the start of him being himself again (because the explosion is supposed to show Yuta adding in his “pinch of fantasy” again), and his walk away from the building in contrast to the run away from the hospital is supposed to represent the realization that his life is his own and he can live for himself.”