The Chainsaw Man anime may be missing in action just yet, but Studio MAPPA had a hit with the first season of the anime adaptation. While fans wait for news about the second season, creator Tatsuki Fujimoto is taking the opportunity to release new chapters of the gory manga series. As Denji takes a back seat to the new star of the series, a war fiend named Asa Mikata, a new flashback gives us a tragic look at her early life and how the friendly cat taught the protagonist a harsh lesson.
Currently, Asa is having a big problem with her latest encounter with the “Faling Devil”, a primal fear that causes people around her to die quickly. With the devil also having the ability to infect his targets with some serious fear, Mikata unfortunately has to relive his days at the orphanage after his mother’s death at the hands of a terrifying supernatural force. It may be quite a while before we see Asa appear in the Chainsaw Man anime after her Chainsaw Man manga debut, but the second season will have a lot of new characters to introduce.
When Asa MIkata’s mother died, it was thanks to a future war devil who tried to save the cat from the devil’s path, causing Asa’s parent to jump to her aid, but lost his life in the process. Asa’s maternal figure at the orphanage, adopting a cat and naming it “Crambon”, explained that it was “unfair” for her to have a cat while all the other orphans had no family of their own. Of course, Asa would learn the harsh truth about a world that has been affected by devils, as the matriarch of the orphanage decided to kill Crambon by throwing him into the river.
The lesson Crambon taught Asu isn’t great, but it feels “right” for the world created by Tatsuki Fujimoto. Despite saving this cat and losing her mother in return, Mikata would end up losing the cat as well, showing how dire the circumstances of this world are for normal people trying to live their lives. In the previous chapters of Chainsaw Man, readers were informed that large sections of the population were regularly dying thanks to the Devil’s attacks, and it doesn’t look like that trend is going to stop anytime soon. When the Primal Fears start arriving, Denji and Asa will have some work to do.