Gonna drop a long thread on why I believe not only chainsaw man has a lot of depth, but the entirety of the narrative is spent exploring how loss impacts people, both in shaping them in their inception but also their growth as well. https://twitter.com/saintrevent/status/1290009368948166656

Denji as a character, is shown to be a orphan who’s only companion for the majority of his childhood being a dog devil called ponchita, his life before the story could be described as crippling debt and living off scraps, one of his earliest goals being having toast with jam

because someone who grew up without shaping figures lacks a cohesive sense of self and real aspirations, his childhood could be described as lacking in formative human interactions which creates a definitive inability to form social ties with people easily

This idea is immediately reinforced by his initial interactions with aki, being a physical confrontation because of the nature of his goals with makima, another thing that stems from his inability interact with people in honest due to his stunted emotional growth．We see denji

Struggle with this social aspect of being a person for a lot of the early story, his presumption sexual intimacy is same romantic love, his inability to process feelings of loss when Himeno died and masking his guilt with the tournament, and countless other small examples

the whole first half of the story constantly reinforces this idea that denji’s base behaviour isn’t due to a lack of depth or character but fundamentally lies in his early childhood environment depriving him of this ability, and as the story progresses we start to see what lies

beneath that, as he comes to interact with people, he starts to learn how express himself as a human being. This first glimpse of this, is the bomb girl arc, Reze as a character fundamentally is meant to show an opposite extreme of the same spectrum. Her background

As an assassin trained from childhood to kill people and forced to become a devil human hybrid, her innocence masks the fact almost everything she said to denji intially was manipulation to service her mission, to capture denji. But as the arc progresses the fact

denji similarly lacked a normal childhood, ended forming a real emotional bond between them, just like how denji is unable to express himself because he doesn’t know how, reze couldn’t express because she wasn’t allowed to, so when denji scares her life and offers to run away

with her, we see the truth of their relationship, she really did care about him and her last words echo the similarity they shared, “I never went to school” a simple but poignant line that highlights the impact their environments had on them, the impact of reze felt on denji

As after that arc, we see him showing consideration to the people around him and a fundamental understanding of the people he surrounds himself with. Instead of going on a trip with makima, he chooses to nurse his friend power while she is suffering trauma from their last fight

rather than sleep, when he sees aki staying up all night thinking about his lost family, he chooses to sit beside him, it’s through the new relationships formed, the loss that deprived him of basic human traits, is filled with something new, but ultimately, that did not last

in the current chapter we see the culmination of this character arc, of denji’s long trip to become a proper human, result in the death of his closest friend, aki, that despite his adamant refusal to fight aki initially, when he sees the fact people are dying, he resolves himself

To kill his friend, a person that could be considered the closest thing denji had to family at this point in the story, with his own hands, the chapter ends off stating the person this death will impact the worst, is not aki but rather denji. To say there is no depth to a series

That spent so much time showing how loss impacts these characters, not just denji, aki’s lost family, power’s loss of humanity, lacks in substances shows how you willingly lie to justify an irrational hate for this series. You could just say you don’t like it, but saying it lacks

in substance is balantly untrue