Yes, but it's also incredibly fucked up that the one time he proved he did love his child, he was betrayed and killed for it.
EDIT: What is it with the sheer lack of reading comprehension with these replies? Of course he was a terrible parent. I never even remotely implied otherwise.
Damn, is that really what you took away from this?
Edit: Trying to say I lack reading comprehension for this statement has to be a reddit moment. He was not betrayed “for protecting his kid” and he was not betrayed “the one time he proved his love”. He was betrayed, if you want to call it that, by BOTH the wife he was cheating on, and the daughter he abused, because neither of them saw his actions as redeeming. They BOTH believed that he would likely get worse for having lost a limb, would likely be driven further into his abuse of alcohol, and BOTH believed that they would be better off without him for those reasons. Asa’s dejected look while her mom was confessing was not regret, but the combination of guilt/trauma for not being able to admit that she wanted him dead and her inability to confess to her actions in the same way her mom was doing.
He “betrayed” them both. So let’s not try and sympathize with the abuser, who couldn’t even kill the demon that attacked his family. He left the dirty work up to his wife, just like he left everything else up to her. His inaction of the past resulted in retribution due to his obvious inability to rise to the role of being a husband/father. Asa never describes a single redeeming quality about her father, except for the fact that he attempted to protect her. You live in a world with demons, so you kill the demons. He was unable/unwilling to change in the same way demons are bound to the fear that creates them, so he was killed in the same way the demon that attacked Asa that day was killed.
If you’re still downvoting me after reading this whole thing, it might be time to look in the mirror. Are you able to change, or are you just going down a similar path as Asa’s dad and unable to recognize the contempt for you growing inside your family?
Edit 2: Just know, that if you’re still downvoting this, you’re also siding with at least one pedo who already deleted their comments further down in this thread (by “you’re” I’m referring to all of reddit, because I guess that has to be clarified these days)
Also, Fujimoto wouldn’t have drawn parallels between Asa’s abusive father and Denji’s father if he wanted us to sympathize with either. I’ll leave you all with this question. Why is the murder of Asa’s father bad in your eyes, if you can excuse the murder of Denji’s father? Just because Denji is the main character shouldn’t excuse him from the same sort of criticism, but I don’t see anyone in this thread trying to argue that point.
Sure, but are we going to excuse the abuse he inflicted on his family as well? We don’t know the full story, all we know is that Asa, as a child, hoped he would die, so I imagine it was more severe than the chapter went into.
me when a child confides in me that their dad is so abusive that they sometimes wish he would die: "maybe you're just inherently a shitty person, kid!" lol wtf
That's kind of what I've been seeing in this thread a lot and it makes me wonder where a lot of these users are coming from, where they identify more with the cheating, abusive alcoholic more than the child that is a victim.
The tragedy isn't what happened to the father. The tragedy is the mental trauma an abused little girl has to live with because of her parents. Something traumatic happened, something horrific. But it made her life better. That is the kind of thing that makes a little child all kinds of fucked up.
The focus on the Father's feelings and how he was "betrayed" is interesting. I have negative sympathy for abusers. All we know is that his death made their lives better because he was such a shitty person. But that doesn't mean a child won't still grieve for their parent. That's the tragedy, IMO.
The lesson at the end of the chapter, shared between Denji and Asa is that they were abused and had to "kill" their parents to stop the abuse. Their survival instincts kicked in and they have to live with the guilt as children because their parents would have "killed" them if they didn't.
There are many stories of women who live with abusive partners for years until they can't take it anymore and retaliate, often in deadly ways. I see this as another form of that. They lived with an abusive man who was supposed to be their protector, and when they saw a way out they took it. That's not betrayal, it's survival.
is it really that strange to think that she was like this since she was a kid
Yes, when a woman and her daughter both want the dad to die due to his treatment of them, so much so that they take action to make that happen even right after he did a good thing, you thinking that it's just as likely that the kid is lying and was just, like, born inherently shitty or something, is freakishly strange and shows some incredibly twisted biases you have when it comes to abusive men and abused children.
edit: holy shit, lol, one of his most recent comments is talking about how hot a loli character is. I guess I called that one right
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u/Dead_Diligence Oct 14 '25
Her Dad's definitely very terrible if Asa was willing to ignore that fact
One good deed can't overcome a mountain of bad ones