He is many, he is one



So, what was the deal with Nagumo-Chojin's absorbing everybody and becoming a gigantic multipersonal entity? Sort of like a (more) diabolical version of the huge Rei from End of Eva. Is there any explanation in the manga? Or, which I suppose is more likely, does anyone have any half-baked theories about it?

I'll share mine. It's kind of like Legion in the bible. You know, "I am Legion, for we are many." The possessed man lived in a tomb and cut himself with stones, and then Jesus drove all the demons into a herd of swine...

Only Nagumo is made out of corpses. Or are they corpses? No, I guess that couldn't be right. In any case, at the end, it's like all the corpses are Nagumo's individual cells...

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In the manga it isn't explained either. But from what I gather, the Overfiend is a creature of energy. He must feed on life force from living beings in order to cause this energy to grow in strength and increase his powers exponentially. The more lives Overfiend takes, the more he wants. The more lives the Overfiend takes, the stronger and more powerful he becomes. He is death and life incarnate. Chaos and order. His actions are not linear, like creatures of evil and good. He changes sides like people change their moods. So if the Overfiend becomes a giant magical energy penis thing absorbing everything and everyone in his path, it is to be expected. After all, he is sort of like God and the devil put together. You also have to remember, when Nagumo had first become the Chojin, he was all instinct and he lashed out because he(Overfiend) hadn't felt the sensations of sex and violence in 3,000 years, so he acted out in a kind of primal frenzy. Later on, Nagumo's transformations seemed more stable.

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Thanks for the thoughts. I've read the first two volumes of the manga, and the only vague reference made to the "Legion" form of the Chojin (or should I say "Demon of Destruction?") is the bit where Nagumo kills the doctors and absorbs their souls. When Kuroko sees this he has a vision of the Chojin, who looks like a rather smug kid surrounded by a wreath of protoplasmic heads. That's why I was wondering if there might not be any explanation, before I go hunting down the other four volumes.

Just how similar is Nagumo's final form in the manga to that of the movie? The hospital scene is almost completely different. After he finishes with the nurse, he just reverts to plain old Nagumo. No giant phalluses, no destroying the hospital or anything like that. The emphasis seems to be more on the Chojin's power itself rather than how grotesquely demonic he can become.

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There was an interview with Toshio Maeda in a comic book convention where people were asking him these same questions. I was there and I remember that he had a translator that was explaining to the fans of his comics and the anime that a lot of the stuff that he did was reinterpreted in the anime because he wanted a better way of explaining certain things. In the comic books, or manga, he only had one story that told the tale in a more traditional horror story kind of way. But in the anime, he was able to show more than what was shown in the graphic novels because he retold the story in a far more linear format. Of course, there were many elements that were left out of the anime, that he himself has even wished could have been put into the films, but the thing is with movies, you can only cram so much information into a certain amount of time. Had he made this a T.V. series, then he could have made a significantly more detailed story, as he would have had many episodes to work with, which would have given him the chance to put every element in the story on screen. However, Toshio has himself admitted that the original Urotsukidoji Perfect Collection is pretty much what he wanted to convey the story as. In many respects, the original manga series is a masterpiece, but the uncut, five-part OAV series is basically superior. It not only gives a much more visceral interpretation of Urotsukidoji, but it's closer to the exact way that Toshio Maeda had envisioned the grotesque erotica in his mind.

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