ull spoilers for Chainsaw Man Parts 1 and 2.
With Part 2 finished, Japanese readers are in the middle of a specific kind of reassessment. Not a reassessment of Part 2 — that verdict came in while the series was still running. A reassessment of Part 1, and of what made it work in ways that Part 2 didn’t.
The answer they keep landing on is Makima.
What Makima actually was
Makima is the Control Devil — an entity that can dominate any being it considers inferior, which is essentially everything. She operates through the series as Denji’s handler, then his object of desire, then the revelation that the two of those things were always the same. She wanted to own Chainsaw Man. Denji, who had never been loved without conditions, couldn’t tell the difference between her attention and the real thing.
The reveal that Makima was manipulating Denji from the beginning is Part 1’s central structural move. It works because Fujimoto constructed it so that the reader is in Denji’s position — also taken in, also unable to see it clearly until the moment it becomes unavoidable.
Japanese fan analysis after Part 2’s conclusion keeps returning to something specific: Makima didn’t just work as a character. She worked as a structural device that organized everything around her. Every arc in Part 1 exists in relation to Makima — either moving toward her, or revealing something about the world she controls. She was the architecture.
What Part 2 had instead
Yoru, the War Devil, was positioned as Part 2’s equivalent to Makima. The parallel is explicit — another powerful female devil, another relationship with the protagonist built on manipulation and power imbalance, another figure who complicates simple categories of villain and ally.
Japanese readers have noted, consistently, that Yoru never quite achieved what Makima achieved. Yoru’s goals are less mysterious, her relationship with Asa is more openly adversarial, and the series never quite reveals what Yoru actually wants in the way that Part 1 eventually revealed what Makima wanted.
But the deeper issue is the organizational one. Yoru was a character. Makima was a center of gravity. Every scene in Part 1 was pulling toward or away from her. Part 2’s scenes were pulling toward multiple things at once, and none of them with the same force.
The Nayuta question
Makima’s reincarnation as Nayuta — the Control Devil reborn as a child who lives with Denji — is Part 2’s most interesting structural element, and also its most underused.
Japanese reader commentary on Nayuta tends to focus on what the series didn’t do with her. The setup was rich: the devil who destroyed Denji, reborn into his care, with her full power suppressed but her nature intact. The possibilities for what that relationship could become were mostly left unexplored.
Nayuta’s death hit Japanese readers harder than Western readers, partly because Japanese fans had been tracking her potential throughout the series. One voice in Japanese online communities: “ナユタの扱いが一番もったいなかった” — Nayuta was the biggest missed opportunity. The sense wasn’t that her death was wrong in itself, but that it closed off something that had never been opened.
In chapter 232, Nayuta reappears in the new world — steering Denji toward Public Safety, in the position Makima once held, but without Makima’s consuming intent. The new world gives Nayuta the role that Makima occupied, but as someone who might actually have Denji’s interests at heart.
Japanese readers have noted this quietly. It reads like a correction.
What the re-evaluation means
The post-finale reassessment of Makima in Japanese fan spaces isn’t simple nostalgia for Part 1. It’s a structural argument: Part 1 worked because Makima worked, and Makima worked because she was not just a villain but an organizing principle.
Part 1 had Makima. Part 2, for all its individual strengths, never found its equivalent.
The finale’s quiet restoration of some version of that structure — Nayuta in Makima’s position, but different — reads, in Japan, as Fujimoto acknowledging the gap.
Whether it fills it is another question. But the acknowledgment is there.
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