Full spoilers for Chainsaw Man Part 2.
After chapter 232 dropped, a specific observation circulated in Japanese online communities and made its way into English-language discussion:
“チェンソーマンの最終回否定派の人の願望ってポチタが『デンジに夢を見続けてもらいたい』って願望よりもバルエムと同じで『苦しみながら戦い続けてほしい』ってのが本音なんやろうな”
Roughly: the people who reject this ending want the same thing Barem wanted — not for Denji to be happy, but for Denji to keep suffering and fighting forever.
That comparison is uncomfortable. It’s also precise.
What Barem actually is
Barem Balance is a member of the Chainsaw Man Church who worships Chainsaw Man — not in the sense of wanting to defeat him or use him, but in the sense of needing him to exist, to fight, to keep being the thing he is. His specific desire is for Chainsaw Man to remain Chainsaw Man forever. He wants Denji to keep being the weapon. He wants the violence to continue.
What makes Barem disturbing is that his desire isn’t evil in the conventional sense. He’s not trying to harm Denji. He genuinely, in his way, loves Chainsaw Man. He just loves the role more than the person. Chainsaw Man existing is the condition of his own meaning.
Japanese fan analysis of Barem through Japanese anime and manga communities kept returning to the same uncomfortable parallel: this is what fandom looks like when it tips over the edge. The fan who doesn’t want the story to end. The reader who doesn’t want the protagonist to rest. The person in the comments who says the ending was a betrayal because Denji stopped suffering.
Fujimoto’s history of putting the reader in the story
This isn’t the first time Fujimoto placed a version of the consuming fan inside his own narrative.
Makima loves Chainsaw Man as a concept — she wants to possess and control the thing she loves, can’t relate to Denji as a person rather than a symbol. The parallel to obsessive fandom is present in Part 1 and has been discussed at length in Japanese fan spaces.
Barem is the same move, made more explicit. Where Makima’s consuming love was directed at Chainsaw Man as a cosmic force, Barem’s is directed at Chainsaw Man as spectacle. He wants to watch. He wants it to continue.
One Japanese blogger noted the escalation cleanly: “マキマは所有欲、バルエムは消費欲” — Makima is possessive desire, Barem is consumptive desire. Makima wanted to keep Chainsaw Man for herself. Barem just wants to keep consuming him, indefinitely, without the story ever ending.
Why the comparison to finale critics lands
The observation generated real pushback — there’s a difference between wanting a satisfying narrative resolution and wanting a character to suffer forever. The pushback is understandable.
But the sharper version of the critique isn’t about suffering. It’s about the reader’s relationship to the story’s continuation.
Barem doesn’t want Denji to suffer specifically. He needs the story to keep going, because the story continuing is the condition of his own meaning. The readers who described chapter 232 as a betrayal — not a disappointment, but a betrayal — often framed it in terms of what they were owed: more story, more fights, more Chainsaw Man. The ending as denial of something they were entitled to.
That framing is Barem’s framing. Fujimoto put it in the text two years before the ending dropped.
What it means that the satire is in Part 2
Part 2 is, among other things, a story about what happens when a person becomes a symbol — when Denji as Chainsaw Man becomes more real to the world than Denji as a person. The Church worships him. The public consumes him. Barem needs him to keep performing.
Chainsaw Man, after Part 1, had become exactly the kind of cultural phenomenon that the Church represents within the fiction. The demand for more — more violence, more spectacle, more Chainsaw Man — was the real-world version of what Barem embodies.
The finale is the refusal. Pochita doesn’t give the audience what Barem would have wanted. He gives Denji what Denji needed.
Whether you find that satisfying probably says something about which side of that mirror you’re standing on.
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