Warning! Contains massive spoilers for Attack on Titan and Chainsaw Man!

Although pretty much everything about Attack on Titan is dark, there's a particularly twisted moment in the Chainsaw Man manga that directly mirrors Eren Yeager's last interaction with his dad before taking it to a whole other level of psychological morbidity.

Throughout the series, Eren Yeager endeavors to learn the truth of how he came to wield his Titan abilities and eventually discovers that his father, Grisha, gave him the Titan injection so he could transform. But that wasn't all Grisha had in mind. He possessed the power of the Founding Titan and wanted to pass the ability on to his son. But the only way another Titan can become the Founding Titan is by eating them. So upon injecting his son with the serum, Grisha waited as Eren transformed and then proceeded to allow his son to devour him.

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In Chainsaw Man, Denji, who possesses the heart of the titular monster, is forced to kill the insanely powerful Control Devil. This is rather difficult for the hero to accomplish, not just because she's powerful, but because he knows her as Makima, his mentor and, more importantly, the woman he so desperately loves. After numerous attempts, the only way he can think of killing her in a manner that he can live with and accept is by eating her. But he doesn't devour her when he's Chainsaw Man, which would have made the deed a little more acceptable. Instead, he cooks her into a delicious soup and eats her as Denji.

This would be profoundly disturbing on its own, but Denji's suffering doesn't end there. He later learns that Makima has reincarnated as Nayuta but still looks exactly like her old self. This is problematic for Denji because, even though he loved her, Makima was incredibly manipulative. Throughout the series, Makima leads Denji on both physically and on a platonic level to the point where Denji actually wishes to become one of her dogs so he can stay with her, allowing her to dominate him further. Things then get real when Makima kills his friend right in front of him and reveals she actually doesn't care about him. She only cared that he contained the heart of Chainsaw Man and was actively sabotaging any chance he had at happiness so that he would continue living as Chainsaw Man and not as Denji.

Somehow, things get exponentially worse when the heart of Chainsaw Man inside of Denji requests that his host take care of Nayuta. Makima, the Chainsaw Man reveals, always wanted to have a family and the only reason why she treated Denji so badly had been due to extraneous circumstances. She therefore needed to be nurtured, and the Chainsaw Man felt Denji was the best one for the job. This is rather morbid as Denji had been devastated when he learned the truth, so him having to care for her is forcing him to relive the pain Makima put him through and risk having his old feelings return.

The combination of both how Denji eats the woman he loved and how he is later forced to care for someone who looks just like her makes Chainsaw Man so much darker than Attack On Titan. Eren's father may have put his son in a position where Eren had no choice but to eat him, but Eren didn't have to relive the experience, regardless of how traumatic it was. Nor did Eren perform the gruesome deed as a human, unlike Denji. Eating Makima in his human form makes him seem more like a cannibal, and a cannibal devouring their loved ones is much more twisted than when a Titan does.

Next: Why Chainsaw Man’s Anime Will Make Its Worst Scene Even Grosser