#just listen to the song

[sugar-grigri]

I swear I'm sick and tired of the "Just Listen to the Song" OS being used to attack people who dare to interpret Chainsaw Man.

As soon as a take exceeds 2,000 characters, it screams over-analysis, when every take I see systematically refers to a box, a line, a page, an event in the manga, and everything is sourced.

Analyses aren't blah blah disconnected from the work; they're debates ABOUT the work.

Fujimoto never said that his works shouldn't be interpreted; Just Listen to the Song is about the difficulty for a creator to convey a precise message to a precise audience.

That creating can be frustrating, that it's easier to reach the whole world than to communicate with precisely ONE person.

All Fujimoto is saying is that analysis shouldn't overtake experience, that reading is fun, that not everything has to be intellectualized.

This doesn't mean that Chainsaw Man is doomed to be a linear work, with no links to be made. Otherwise, why did Makima and Denji, when they were confronted, refer to the bad films, which had been introduced some sixty chapters before?

Interpreting is also about having fun, let people live.

Saying that CSM is just a fighting manga is as dangerous as someone going too far in their analysis.

[hikikomoriheadphonegirl]

[shingerion]

just listen to the song

[hel7l7]

Die Like Your Brothers // The Plot In You

[iridescentscarecrow]

transcribing a twt thread again (i apologise) but people often quote fujimoto's oneshot just listen to the song as proof that csm doesn't offer itself up to interpretation and exists to be absurd and zany and completely meaningless but i think that's a severe misreading of jlts's themes, and since a lot of similar threads crop up in fjmt's body of work, it's a take that obscures csm's own themes as well. because the song in just listen to the song is never devoid of meaning! it aches of human expression and this is also why it manages to resonate with so many people and take on a life of its own.

when i read jlts, i felt most strongly the thing it was trying to put into words was the tussle between the artist and their creation. barthes' death of the author, their creation forming interpretations in other's minds, being taken out of their hands, morphed, appropriated;

i don't think fjmt's commentary on this is normative in the slightest; he's rarely preachy. taking jlts as an indicator against fans engaging with a work seems fallacious when this is a statement you're deriving from the work too! to me, jlts is about human feeling when conveyed.

and this is a common line of thought in fjmt's work. i've earlier mentioned part one's metanarrative and makima's struggle mirroring an artist's. there is a bit of commentary here about symbolism and its connotation. fritters of symbols which add up to nothing.

this quote from sontang's "against interpretation" is one i often come back to. art's what is conveyed to us, the reader, what strains of meaning it carries with it:

and i think fjmt takes this thought further with the commercialisation of art. meaning as bestowed through the production process in goodbye eri, molded through capitalist forces in csm part 2.

the chainsaw man, falling out of denji's hands. the song, falling out of the mc's hands in his oneshot. this transition to fiction, art as a product residing in social consciousness is consistently something fjmt engages with and is interested by. boiling it down to the surface level discourse of "the curtains were fucking blue" is fairly reductive, because art exists and has always existed to narrativise, to be told and felt as an interplay between the author and their audience. and that exercise in itself forms meaning.

[zdf]

[blueraimo]

[alfredda-butt-ler]

Jason Peter Todd is Crack Baby by Mitski coded

[tsukifujimoto]

created by someone brillant.

[choujinx]

FUTSUU NI KIITE KURE (2022) by fujimoto tatsuki

[saccharinescorpion]

absolutely fucking speechless. can not believe Tatsuki Fujimoto came to my house and personally vaporized me off the face of the Earth

[sugar-grigri]

why did you leave twitter? (not that it was a bad idea)

avalanche of notifications... the fact that it no longer makes me happy… above all, I had too much to do with the Chainsaw Man community, and I remembered how much I needed to be away from it. Because paradoxically, despite the gems, it sometimes tarnishes my relationship with this work.

People think you shouldn't interpret Chainsaw Man, advocating Just Listen to The Song like a bible, without knowing that even this OS, they read it with their asses and misunderstood it.

That's it! 🫶

[disasterpenguin]

Bite My Tongue by You Me At Six & Oli Sykes is so Deancore. (It's about his parents mostly)

For better or for worse

You say I'm privileged but your gift is my curse

I can't recall the last time someone asked me how I was, last I checked I was a fucking wreck

I called for help and no one showed up so I sit in the dirt

You keep me on the edge of my seat

I bite my tongue so you don't hear me

I wanna hate every part of you in me, I can't hate the ones who made me

[celestialmega]

[firefly-sky]

man up from book of mormon but it’s butters? it’s his prof chaos origin song. the girl (forgot her name) is dougie. elder price can be kyle leaving coon and friends or sum.

[electronicstarlightfestival]

I completely lost control of my CSM obsession and devoured almost all of Tatsuki Fujimoto's works available online.