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Anonymous · 2mo

all the horsemen are women make it obvious the female monopoly on childbirth being humanity's usual "weapon" against the death of the species as a counterpoint on pochita erasing everything and not needing "birth" itself, the association of which to a human male would make denji effectively "anti gynocentric" or "anti-human" (from a gynocentric-death-rebirth view) in the sense devils perceive humans as beings who avoid death via (re)birth while they themselves can't "die" but are stuck in a loop with the exception of the pochita-denji assemblage, in the deleuzian sense. Ps willing to sacrifice children is a last ditch attempt from the human side of the now outdated means of beating death to survive since they can't adapt, namely that more children can be procured is their argument since they're heirs to the female "agency type", while the lack of adaptability to what pochita represented to the devils is its parallel on the devils' side.

ok first i really fuck with this reading of the horsemen sisters v. pochita and want to share this with anyone who's interested in csm analysis. second, anon i need you to use some proper punctuations here and there because it took me a good few tries to figure out what you wrote here. too many run-on sentences, sorry. :') third, i'm so sorry for taking this long to answer your ask. let me give you a proper response here because this is inspiring many ideas in me.

the creation and usage of family - children, mainly - as a means of beating death. that is such a fun view presented on devils' perception of humans and pochiden. devils can't give birth so to speak, they can't create from themselves, and they especially can't create anything in the same way that humans have given birth to them, as manifestations of humanity's fears. they are stuck in their original factory settings, reverting back to that version everytime they are killed. devils can't become or grow on a permanent level, and there's no true 'bloodline' to survive through either, so to speak. as a result, this default version of them is the only one they'll ever have real claim towards, and because of this, they take pochita's nature as an existential threat.

deleuzian is a good way to describe the kind of ideas that denji and he together represent, because more than death and life, I personally believe that pochita is a devil that represents the concept of cycles, among other things. devils hear the sound of revving engines when they are reborn in hell, and that sound is also present when they are devoured and subsequently erased/denied by him. in reset and in death, he is there, denying them the ability to experience inner change and novelty. I'm also curious as to how you view yoru's relationship with the weapon devils and hybrids, with all of this context about overcoming death as a devil in mind. the hybrids especially, considering they are also exceptions to pochita's reality-altering power of deletion.

on another note, there's something interesting to be found in how the horsemen are inherently defined as sisters, when you consider this kind of interpretation on survival. you could infer that kiga seeks to overcome death by preserving her sisters - her family - as they are now, and prevent them from escaping the reset loop that they are all trapped in, along with the rest of the world. in that vein, the blood devil's role in this story takes on a very important position here, as they veer in the complete opposite direction of what kiga and every other character intend to do, and their strand of the plot is outlined as a struggle against this very cycle.

power binds herself to denji through blood as an act of connection, he becomes her chosen family, and they become alive and real through one another, along with aki. then, later, she ties denji to her with the promise, warning him that she'll be erased, reset to her original version and that she'll no longer be the devil that he once befriended and loved. connecting these two sequences here: power lives through denji, as of right now. he is not just her lifeline, he is her bloodline, a mean to overcome death through her bond to him. the blood devil is intimately connected with the concept of family that fujimoto is digging into, and on a metaphorical level, you could toy with how denji now holds her and aki's memory like blood, something that's apart of him and inescapable, something that can be passed down to another being through an act of recreation. I'm a little giddy thinking about all this tbh, there are so many threads to connect and play with here, when you read family, memory and blood as what both transcends and embodies death.

denji's personal, intimate task and promise to overcome death and resurrect power clashes sharply with kiga's own perception of family, death and what overcoming it means. perhaps kiga has even tasked herself with resurrection of her sisters too. she introduces herself to us via 'resurrecting' yuko, arguably saving her at asa's request, but altering yuko to an unrecognizable, corrupted degree. a motivation like resurrection would add further parallels and contrast when set against denji's own promise with his family, and what 'turning the blood devil back into power' might mean for him specifically. memory - and remembering who power was, in denji's case - becomes a key point for both sides here, then. kiga's morbid reshaping of yuko is not driven by any kind of intimacy and memory between the two. you can't resurrect a stranger, you can only merely preserve them in the state you found them in. on the other hand, she has a keener understanding of her own sisters, so there would be much to speculate as to what a motive like this would be followed by, for her.

on the other end, memory ties in with what denji's relationship with pochita has come to represent: the erasure and denial of trauma through amnesia. denji can not allow himself to forget that love and grief, if he wants to break the blood devil out of the cycle, if he wants to escape this inability to change and experience imminence that they are both caught up in. so, eventually, denji might have to one day confront pochita, and the metaphor of trauma that he embodies: not only as the friend who once saved him, but as a he collar he has imposed on himself to survive, now grown so tight that it suffocates and asphexiates him. in line with the themes discussed here, however, power may not come back as the fiend he has always been familiar with, but as something new and other, both the same and stranger than she once was.

thank you for the message anon. you should check out signalis. :]

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