It’s Better When It’s Crazy

I’m referring to media made for entertainment, of course. Last night while I was re-reading Chainsaw Man (CSM for short) I realized a lot of things. In order for them to make sense to you, I have to back track a bit.

Last year I got inspired to write some sort of urban fantasy and/or sci-fi story. The notes I have from August 2021 are actually hilarious to read back because they make almost no sense, even to me.
Here’s the description from the Notion page I made to gather my lawless genius:

Yeah, this makes a whole lot of sense. Arms dealers being priests/clergymen is taken straight from my lived experience, by the way.

Even though my desire for this thing to be real surged, I just kept making my little notes, playing with the ideas but not really committing. That is, until I read GANGSTA. by Kohske. Everything about it lit a fire in me to make a story that good. Thankfully I never marry my first drafts, because when I came up with Ghosts In The Snow (GITS), almost all of that went out the window. It was originally going to be a spin-off of the series, similar to GANGSTA: CURSED but as the plot shaped up it took on a life of its own. Now, contrary to the evidence on this website, I have written most of GITS. I was just having a hard time putting my work out there because I was scared it didn’t make sense. I mean, there were times (loooooong times) where I was confusing myself with the plot and I began getting scared of writing anything because I didn’t have a clear end goal in mind for the story. Mind you, the entire reason I ever started it is because I wanted to make a cool manga like Kohske but I really hate drawing and my style doesn’t lend itself to comics anyways, so I settled for plain text. This fear of the unknown, of being bad before I even started, really crushed me into dust. I would write in notebooks for hours just to post absolutely nothing and console myself with “well it’s just a passion project” and other false comforts.

Then I read Chainsaw Man.

Tatsuki Fujimoto, author and illustrator of CSM and Fire Punch (FP), really saved me as a writer. Reading CSM and FP back to back and engaging with other fans of both works on Tiktok made me realize that there is a HUGE market for stories with batshit insane plots. Thanks to his work, I realized that I can just fix what doesn’t make sense by killing off whatever characters were involved or introducing something new to the story to correct it. I’d also like to mention the impact that Gege Akutami, author and illustrator of Jujutsu Kaisen (JJK), had on me to the same effect. I want to be able to fit a lot of ideas into one story instead of starting multiple stories, so I became very comfortable with characters serving specific purposes and killing them as soon as it is time for the next arc or to kick off the next arc.

The deeper I dive into manga that is considered outlandish and/or traumatizing to the reader, the more I lose my anxiety around writing GITS and putting it where other people can see it. Not that I’m trying to traumatize my readers… but you know what I’m getting at here. The stories that stand out to us are the stories that have no equal, and those are my new inspiration. Falling back in love with the process and relishing the act of writing things that may or may not leave a scar on the reader is my Sisyphean task and we must assume that Sisyphus is happy.