Creator / Tatsuki Fujimoto

There's no getting off this heart's wild ride.

"I made and ate my own parfait. I want to eat a parfait from a shop."

—Fujimoto's author comment on Chainsaw Man Chapter 81.

Tatsuki Fujimoto (藤本 タツキ born October 10, 1993) is a currently active mangaka best known for Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man. Fujimoto's works are noted for referencing his love of movies, a distinctively "scratchy" artstyle with high levels of detail, and writing rich worlds with distinctive characters. They're also well-known for having a commonality of existential dread and nihilistic despair... and yet a surprising amount of hope when faced against such overwhelming odds and sadness.

Serialized manga and single-published oneshots:

• Fire Punch
• Chainsaw Man
• Look Back
• Goodbye, Eri

Other oneshots:

• A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin' in the Schoolyard
• Sasaki Stopped a Bullet
• Love Is Blind
• Shikaku
• Mermaid Rhapsody
• Nayuta of the Prophecy
• Woke-Up-as-a-Girl Syndrome
• Sisters
• Just Listen to the Song

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Tropes applicable to his other works and in general:

General

• All for Nothing: It's quite common for his characters' goals to end up being all for naught. It's commonly to show how self-destructive these habits ultimately were and how these people were probably better off prioritizing other things in their lives.
• The Anti-Nihilist: Fujimoto's works have multiple characters who are fully willing to admit that they think life and existence can be pain and misery... but also are unwilling to give up on trying to live because of the bad hand they are dealt.
• Anyone Can Die: Fujimoto has admitted that he cares more for the story than the characters and as such is mostly disconnected from them, resulting in an almost laid-back attitude about killing off characters both minor and beloved whenever he pleases.
• Art Evolution: One will notice that Fujimoto's art style was originally more cartoony than his later works, partaking in practices like Art Shifts and Wingding Eyes while still being semi-realistic. A lot of this faded by the time Chainsaw Man Part 1 ended, and Fujimoto's style from then on became more clean but also more realistic, at least in comparison to the exaggerated art styles of his manga contemporaries.
• Author Appeal:
  • Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man shows that he is a huge cinephile, making references that range from arthouse masterpiece classics like Un Chien Andalou... to Syfy channel original movies like Sharknado.
  • He's admitted to having a thing for domineering, "unreasonable" women, resulting in his manga featuring Action Girls and domineering women who hold power over the male protagonists. During an interview he mentioned he quite enjoyed it when a girl he knew in college bullied him by flipping over his bike. Interestingly, outright abusive female characters are portrayed as sinister and unsympathetic rather than following Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male.
• Bathos: He has a knack for putting character in positions that are both starkly awful but also comical in their absurdity.
• Bittersweet Ending: Almost none of his work has a truly happy ending, with the damage all the misery and pain that transpired heavily affecting the characters but never leaving them without hope or peace.
• Breakthrough Hit: After a series of one-shots, many originally in an obscure online-only magazine, Fire Punch put him in the spotlight due to its... unique contents. While he built a reputation off of it, it was eventually Chainsaw Man that made him a household name and a mangaka to be reckoned with.
• Colbert Bump:invoked He regularly gives out movie or manga recommendations on social media or author comments, resulting in a slew of his readership flooding to check out said movie or manga. This also often ends up creating Friendly Fandoms between Fujimoto's fans and fans of those recommendations. There was once an incident where Fujimoto recommended an explicit Yaoi manga created by one of his former assistants, leading fans to joke about obediently reading gay porn simply because Fujimoto told them to.
• Creator Backlash: He was really hesitant to republish his old one-shots in collections. On the one hand, it's because they were drawn during dark times in his life where he felt drawing manga was All for Nothing and thus his work was wasted time. On the other hand, he flat out admitted that it also was because he was too lazy to draw new covers or write any comments.
• Creator Thumbprint:
  • Fujimoto notably deemphasizes characters' names, to the point of recycling the protagonist's name between two oneshots. Many of his main characters have No Full Name Given or literally Only One Name (including the protagonist of all his works but Sisters and Part 2 of Chainsaw Man), while even major supporting characters may have No Name Given. Most names are short and simply written, containing no kanji (or extremely common ones for names) and written purely in katakana, even if they're Japanese, giving them an apocryphal feel.
  • Movie theaters seem to be the prime location for Fujimoto to place his characters in for some downtime. MAPPA even directly pays tribute to this in Chainsaw Man's first anime opening by showing the main characters (and then some) watching a movie in one.
  • Spontaneous Weapon Creation is a recurring superpower shown in a variety of flavors in Nayuta Of The Prophecy and Chainsaw Man.
  • He has quite a few characters drawn with moles, usually distinct patterns of several (especially a pair near one of the eyes). He himself once said in an interview "I think it's good to have at least seven on the face"
  • For some reason, all Ludicrous Gibs seem to be intestines. Whenever guts are exploded out of a body, they almost always look more like intestines than the actual organs you'd find in a human body.
• Fan Disservice: Nudity abounds in his work, but often the subjects are either caked in filth or emotionally vulnerable.
• Love Hurts: Relationships in his work, be they platonic, romantic, or familial, tend to be sources of extreme physical, mental, and emotional stress, even without taking into account the extremely high casualty rate in his works. Romantic relationships in particular tend to end in disaster, with one partner usually betraying the other, dying, or both.
• Loving a Shadow: A common theme in his works is about loving someone based on idealized perceptions rather than who they truly are, causing no shortage of drama as a character's perception of the other person is steadily challenged by cruel reality or said character refuses to see the truth to live in blissful ignorance.
• Metafiction: A majority of his works from serials like Fire Punch to short stories akin to Just Listen to the Song comment on various media types, how they're made, and how they're perceived. Chainsaw Man pointedly isn't this at first, but it still plays with the art form, such as how one Devil attacks with giant fingers that flick from beyond the frame, and how a page will feature panels made from the arms another Devil dismembered from its victims. By Part 2, some of the manga's Real Life reception is incorporated into the In-Universe public's opinion of the titular hero.
• Reclusive Artist: He's seldom shown his face publicly, with many photos of him having his head cropped out. For years he used a Twitter account where he roleplayed as a nonexistent younger sister talking about her "brother's" work (except for a period when the account was mistaken for an actual minor's and locked). Back in his days as a Pixiv artist, his bio claimed that he was Filipino. When he appeared at Jump Festa 2022, he was represented by an animated graphic of Pochita sitting on his stool while he answered interview questions from off-camera. A later interview had him imply that receiving death threats from overenthusiastic readers made him desire more privacy.
  • He did reveal his face, or at least the top half of it, publicly in a video he posted on YouTube, where he announced that he'd discovered the secrets of levitation. His instructions on how to "levitate" consists of a grainy, one-minute long video of him in a nondescript room with his bottom half entirely out of frame, jumping in the air, once.
• Reused Character Design: You'll notice that he tends to have at least one character with unkept black Messy Hair and long bangs. See: Nayuta, Togata, Anzu in Sisters, Reze, Nayuta (again), Kyomoto, and Eri.
• Self-Deprecation: He regularly makes fun of Chainsaw Man.
  • When MAPPA was announced as the studio behind the adaptation, Fujimoto expressed excitement at the studio behind the anime for Dorohedoro and Jujutsu Kaisen taking the helm since, as he claims, Chainsaw Man rips both of those off anyways.
  • When the manga won the Harvey Award for "Best Manga", he called his own series "crude" and "unbefitting of any reward" but also says he'll happily welcome any other awards that might be handed out. When it won a second time, he continued the trend by saying the prestige of the Harvey's will diminish if it keeps winning.
• Trans Tribulations: Fire Punch is notable for having what is considered one of the most sympathetic and nuanced portrayals of gender dysphoria in a mainstream manga. Woke-Up-as-a-Girl Syndrome is also seen as highly allegorical to the dysphoria a trans man might feel.
• You Are Not Alone: As bleak as his work can get, a common theme that resonates through them is how there is always someone else who will genuinely appreciate a character who's feeling lost or alone.

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A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin' in the Schoolyard

• Alien Invasion: Aliens invaded Earth, killed all the humans and took over.
• Aliens Love Human Food: Double Subverted; the aliens eat humans, but most of them think eating chicken and pork is disgusting. Unfortunately for Ami and Yuto, there ends up being a New Transfer Student from a planet where they do eat chicken.
• Armor-Piercing Question: When Yuto gives Ami the usual line that "eating humans is just like humans eating pigs and cows", Ami asks if that would make it OK for her to eat him. Yuto doesn't know and takes up his human identity to find out.
• Bolivian Army Ending: The story ends on Yuto transforming to fight the alien police officer. He comments on later events, but that may well be Posthumous Narration.
• Bittersweet Ending: Yohei dies, Yuto probably will as well, and humanity goes extinct not long after, but Yuto is able to save Ami for the time being and thinks fondly of the time they spent together.
• Cheerful Child: Ami is perpetually-optimistic, believing the aliens will just abandon Earth and let the humans have it back.
• Curiosity Causes Conversion: Ami makes Yuto wonder what being a human would be like, causing him to take up a disguise and decide to protect her.
• Deceptively Silly Title: The title is a tongue-twister about chickens, while the story is about the last human survivors of an alien invasion.
• Easily Conquered World: "In the year 2019, the war between aliens and mankind began. Aliens can transform to power up. Humans lost, just like that."
• Gonk: None of the aliens are pretty, but Masatoshi manages to be weird even by comparison. He only has nostrils instead of a nose, his eyes are never in focus, and his lips don't cover his teeth. He also has awful manners, doing things like picking his nose or drooling.
• Gonky Femme: Moemi is a hulking, masculine humanoid alien with an insectoid head that wears a Sailor Fuku and acts like a stereotypical tsundere. She's considered a "cute girl" by alien standards.
• Humans Are Insects: The aliens devoured humans for food, casually dismissing the idea that their intelligence makes doing so wrong, saying it's just the same as humans eating animals.
• Killed Offscreen: The narration mentions Ami is killed with the other humans shortly after she's separated from Yuto.
• Klingons Love Shakespeare: Played for horror; aliens think of humans as food but the ones who moved to Earth deliberately adopted the culture of the people they wiped out.
• Next Sunday A.D.: Written in 2011, set after an alien invasion in 2019.
• Obsessed with Food: Masatoshi goes in a blind rage the second someone mentions there's chicken for him to eat.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much:
  • Yohei is the one sheltering humans in the mountains and subtly tries to make his classmates ethically question eating them.
  • Yuto is actually an alien that decided to try living as a human to understand their lives. He ended up growing close enough to die protecting Ami.
• Pun-Based Title: The Japanese title (literally "There were two chickens in the yard.") is a tongue-twister based on several different words containing the sound "niwa" (Niwa ni wa Niwa Niwatori ga Ita). The English version follows this slightly by making the first half alliterative.
• Racial Face Blindness: Exaggerated; the aliens can't tell humans and animals apart, and so mistake people in chicken mascot-style heads for actual chickens.
• Special Person, Normal Name: The aliens all have regular Japanese names.
• Title Drop: Yuto drops the title on the last page as he hopes Ami remembers the time they spent together.
• To Serve Man: Aliens love the tastes of humans, often to the point of Horror Hunger. They greedily devoured them until they went extinct.
• Tomato Surprise: Yuto's Face Framed in Shadow under the chicken mask conceals that he's an alien.
• Work Info Title: The title is a complete sentence about the disguise Yuto and Ami live under.

Sasaki Stopped a Bullet

• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Kawaguchi being nice to Sasaki convinced him she is a literal god. He's right.
• I Resemble That Remark!: Kuwano came to publicly confront his old crush with a gun, but insists he isn't a "terrorist".
  Kuwano: What? No! I'm not a terrorist! I'd never commit a terrorist attack! You've got it all wrong! Aaah! Shut up! (shoots the ceiling) Shut up and sit down or I'll shoot you!
• Teacher/Student Romance: Sasaki has a crush on his teacher Kawaguchi, imagining her like she's a god.

Love Is Blind

• Achievements in Ignorance: Ibuki's confession ends up so stirring it convinces a mugger to let them go and for an alien to cancel plans to destroy the Earth.
• Community-Threatening Construction: The Galactic Union plan to demolish the Earth to make a highway in its orbit.
• Lighter and Softer: Not much of Fujimoto's signature themes about existential dread or toxic romances is present, and is otherwise a purely goofy and silly story about a boy being determined as hell to confess to his crush.
• Saying Too Much: Ibuki's Love Confession ends up firing prematurely.
  Ibuki: Right now! I'm about to confess my love! Planetary destruction is the least of my priorities!
  Yuri: Huh? President! Confess your love to whom?
  Ibuki: To you...
  Yuri: Ah.
• Skewed Priorities: Ibuki is determined to confess to his love, ignoring the rain, getting mugged, and even an alien invasion.

Shikaku

• Ear Ache: The police shoot off Shikaku's ear when she's screaming out a window for Yugeru.
• Flash Step: Yugeru dashes through a SWAT team, tearing pieces off several of them and breaking through a wall at the same time.
• Nothing Left to Do but Die: Yugeru wants to die because he's lived for 3500 years and claims he's done everything interesting, calling whatever's left boring. Shikaku is unable to kill him, but she proves amusing enough that Yugeru decides to keep living with her.
• Obliviously Evil: Shikaku is insanely prone to violence, but insists the way she acts is normal. For instance, she thinks it's appropriate to tear someone's eyeball out because they looked at you wrong.
  Yugeru: You're a twisted mind with twisted skills, just like they say.
  Shikaku: Twisted? It's not twisted! It's wrong to leer! I'm not twisted!
• Our Vampires Are Different: Yugeru is a vampire, which gives him Complete Immortality via regeneration that he can bestow on others. If the typical weaknesses evidently aren't enough to kill, otherwise he would have done so.
• Professional Killer: For a 10 million yen fee, Shikaku will kill anyone, no questions asked.
• Reluctant Psycho: Shikaku has a complete Lack of Empathy or any grasp of moral behavior, but wants to be normal. As a child she would try to follow the letter of her parents' scolding (they say to stop pull the legs off spiders, so she promises to pull apart dragonflies instead), but now just deludes herself into thinking how she acts is normal.
  Why doesn't anyone forgive me when I apologize?

Mermaid Rhapsody

• Aliens Love Human Food: Toshide feeds Shiju a sweet red bean bun, which she appreciates when mermaids usually only have fish and seaweed.
• Ear Ache: Shiju bites off Toshihide's ear in a blood frenzy.
• Either/Or Offspring: Toshihide's father is human and his mother was a mermaid. Though this lets Toshihide stay underwater for hours, he is consistently referred to as a human, not a hybrid.
• Imagine Spot: Before he's met a mermaid, Toshihide's mental image is shown as a kappa with a fish's lower half.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: The mermaids look like the typical young women with fish tails for lower halves with the minor variations that their tailfins are round. Behaviorally, they are mostly benign, if haughty, but uncontrollably try to eat humans if their blood spills. Though not specified as a One-Gender Race, all the ones we see or hear of are female. Shiju also mentions humans eating mermaid flesh out of a mistaken belief it will grant gain immortality.
• Paranormal Romance: In the process of teaching piano, the mermaid Shiju and human Toshihide fall in love.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: While in the ocean, Toshihide unexpectedly encounters a Threatening Shark... which bites him twice (inflicting minor wounds) before swimming off, as shark attacks usually turn out in real life. The real problem is what drawing blood does to Shiju.
• To Serve Man: Played with; mermaids don't actually want to eat humans, but the smell of their blood triggers a Horror Hunger that can take over. It's implied mermaids avoid humans and encourage their reputation as man-eaters because they're afraid of hurting them.
  Humans aren't for eating out of choice.
• Warts and All: Toshihide and his father before him both decided they loved a mermaid so much that the risk of their lover losing control and eating them is Worth It.
• Water Is Air: Toshihide's piano is able to play music underwater because it was made by a mermaid.

Woke-Up-as-a-Girl Syndrome

• Attractive Bent-Gender: Most of Toshihide's class regard him as cute as a girl, which he very much dislikes—especially when guys start hitting on him.

• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The story can be read as a metaphor for a trans man going through puberty but asserting himself as a man regardless.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Overlapping Double Standard: Rape, Female on Female because of Toshihide's condition. Rie wants to prove she and Toshihide are still in love by having sex, mollifying his hesitance by insisting they can do it even if he doesn't have a penis. But inbetween, Rie immediately demands sex and starts forcing herself onto Toshihide despite his vocal protest, which is immediately forgotten afterward.
• First Law of Gender Bending: Toshihide is changed from male to female and his doctor bluntly states There Is No Cure. Somehow even surgery (and presumably hormone therapy) won't help.
• Gender Bender: Toshihide's sex changed while he was sleeping because he contracted Woke-Up-as-a-Girl Syndrome. It's stated sex-change surgery won't work, but no further elaboration is given.
• Gender Bender Angst: It's made immediately clear that, regardless of Toshihide's wishes, his body means most people will see him as a woman at best—if they don't think he's some kind of freak for having previously been male. It doesn't help that his classmates are also grossly apathetic or misogynist to him on top of that. Even among friends that will acknowledge him as a boy, Toshihide worries he's also become a girl in personality and assume his sex life with his girlfriend is over.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: We never see what Toshihide looked like before his transformation. Even the one flashback to his childhood obscures his face.
• Hotter and Sexier: Though not graphic, the sexual content is quite a step up from Fujimoto's previous oneshots. Several of Toshihide's classmates very aggressively proposition him and then one ask if Akira is going to rape him. There are explicit references to Toshihide and Rie's sex life (including Toshihide outright saying he can't have sex without a penis), and several pages of Rie trying to force herself onto Toshihide.
• Lost in Translation: Seeing Toshihide "flirt with" (i.e. get aggressively hit on by) his male classmates leads to one of the girls calling him an okama yaro (お釜野郎), a specifically-insulting variant of okama. It's mostly definitely some sort of Gendered Insult, but the extremely broad use of the term makes it hard to say the standard of what gender Toshihide is being held to. The English version translates it as "slut", going with the idea the girls thought of Toshihide as a girl and was acting inappropriately as one.
• Magic Realism: The protagonist suffers a spontaneous sex change, which is treated as a rare disease. Otherwise, the story is entirely mundane.
• Match Cut: A flashback ends on Rie offering a hand to Toshihide to help him up. The next panel uses the same framing for the present, where Toshihide grab Rie's hand to talk to her.

• Men Act, Women Are: Encouraged by Rie. When Toshihide finally breaks down, Rie gives him a speech about wanting him to perservere. By the end of it, she tells Toshihide that he'll be a girl if he remains sad and weepy about the situation, but a guy if he intends to pursue her even without his male body.

• No Sympathy: Rie and Akira are the only ones who give any kind consideration for the stress Toshihide is undergoing, everyone else either treating him as a freak, lusting after him, or acting like he's lucky to have to change clothes with the girls.
• Production Throwback:
  • The main character is named "Toshihide" just like in Mermaid Rhapsody.
  • This oneshot was made during serialization of Fire Punch and is even listed as a chapter of Fire Punch on the Shonen Jump+ website (though it's not included in the volumes). Toshihide's gender anxiety is notably similar to that experienced by Togata, a trans man that wants to assert himself as a man despite being unable to change his body. Most likely Fujimoto wanted to explore the concept more, as the oneshot was published between chapters 49 and 50, right after Togata died.

• Right Through His Pants: Bizarrely, Rie and Toshihide getting ready for sex only involves the latter disrobing.
• Stunned Silence: A combination of discomfort and shock leaves Toshihide unable to respond to anyone for his entire first day back at school.
• Trans Equals Gay: Toshihide treats a possible attraction to Akira as a sign he's "become a girl on the inside". He ultimately asserts his masculinity through his decisions to keep loving Rie, writing off his feelings for Akira as admiring him as a role model for being a man. That Toshihide could identify as a gay man, a lesbian, or bisexual aren't addressed.
• "Which Restroom?" Dilemma: A student asks the teacher Toshihide's place in gendered spaces—specifically when changing for gym class—and the teacher bluntly insists it's with the girls. The class then jeer or congratulate Toshihide for the potential lechery he is no way interested in.

Sisters

• Green-Eyed Monster: Having her younger sister Anzu defeat her in a painting competition was bad enough for Mitsuko, but losing to a nude portrait she made of her makes it even worse.
• No Name Given: The young sister, sort of. Dialogue never mentions her by name, she's just called "[my/Mitsuko's] sister". Her painting is labelled "江原 杏子", but there's no furigana specifying which of many common names "杏子" can be read as. The official English translation uses "Anzu Ehara", but this may well just be a guess. The earlier fan translation used "Kyoko" to match her older sister "Mitsuko (光子)".
• Photos Lie: The main conflict involves the titular little sister Anzu creating a nude painting of her older sister Mitsuko. Due to Anzu holding Mitsuko in such high esteem, the portrait is extremely flattering, showcasing her sister with an impossibly perfect body. It's also incredibly inaccurate, and Mitsuko's classmates and even her family poke fun at how her proportions, skin, and even her hair don't match up to the idealized form rendered by Anzu.

Just Listen to the Song

• Achievements in Ignorance: A lot of the one-shot's central conflict revolves around the boy's song receiving acclaim for things completely out of his control. The Ambiguous Ending also suggests that in the aftermath of all this, his first song might've managed to get his crush's attention after all, but what kind of attention is left open.
• Ambiguous Ending: In the aftermath of the boy's second song flopping so hard that he deletes his other videos, his crush suddenly appears to sit next to him on the train to listen to his first song with him. Does she now appreciate what he was trying to do and willing to at the very least give him friendship if not a chance at romance? Or is she there to further lambaste him, torturing him with the song that brought him a lot of grief?
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: The first and only Fujimoto work thus far to not be drawn by him; here it's drawn by Oto Toda.
• Cringe Comedy: A young man isn't able to properly handle the sudden unexpected attention he gets for a deeply personal music video he made specifically for his crush, and is subsequently humiliated in the public eye for the clumsy way he tried to deal with it.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Fujimoto seemed to have caught wind of the various rampant fan theories concerning the imagery in Chainsaw Man and wrote Just Listen To The Song as an apparent measured response. The protagonist uploads a song online, only to be bombarded with undeserved acclaim over various incidental elements completely out of his control and nothing to do with the main content. The notion that gun violence is being commented on is undoubtedly a jab at analyses on the Gun Devil making similar claims.
• No Name Given: The protagonist and his Love Interest aren't named.
• Self-Deprecation: Fujimoto does a lot to imply on a meta level that Chainsaw Man's success feels completely accidental and that a follow-up with a more direct, unambiguous message won't live up to the original.
• Skewed Priorities: There's some supernatural crap going on in the background of the boy's video, including supposed evidence of a ghost. The boy doesn't really care and only acknowledges it as one of the many things that he never intended for the video.
• Tsundere: One way to interpret the crush's attitude in the ending. She listens to the song with the protagonist and calls it cringey, but also acknowledges that the whole song is based on an intimate moment they shared when they were younger, something she shouldn't bother to remember unless it held some significance for her as well.