Jujutsu Kaisen

"Jujutsu Kaisen" is OK. It's just OK.

r/Jujutsufolk is amazing. Nothing will top it.

I don't understand my adjacency to anime anymore. Manga, yes, is fascinating, but most manga are presented as anime hopefuls. We are not all Taiyō Matsumoto. We must compromise and draw and write dialogue that will someday be put on the screen. Because we want money.

But I constantly update myself with anime. I know about way more series than most weebs do. I legitimately don't understand why I waste my brain space on it. I can think of one reason, though: I want to watch the death of something.

If something is great, it lives on forever. That's boring. If something is awful, you watch it die as it leaves its creator's mind, and you watch the creator's IQ die as the idea is even generated. The post-mortem analysis isn't necessarily interesting to just writers, it's an interesting psychological analysis of...who even thought of this?

So I don't really read or watch series, I just await their dying, like a vulture, or an omen-bearing crow. "My Hero Academia", which I had no interest in until it ended, had a spectacularly awful ending that I'm sure to reference for a while. I didn't think the ending of "Attack on Titan" was all that bad, but it was definitely weird.

I have never seen nor could I have predicted such a reaction to the ending of "Jujutsu Kaisen". It's glorious. The most fascinating aspect is that the audience does not treat the characters as characters, but as real people.

I think it's because the series has almost nothing in it. When you stare at nothing, you project something into the void.

I don't think the series is bad. "Jujutsu Kaisen" certainly had a sweet spot. Gege Akutami certainly had a few characters he really loved, and love for one's characters is the requisite for interesting writing. Gege certainly had an idea for an overarching theme for a story.

I just remembered I put out an article bashing "Jujutsu Kaisen" in the really early days of this blog. Wow. I get what I was trying to say, but in this case I'm wrong, and too loud and angry. Gege devoted a grand total of one chapter to this exchange. The animators at MAPPA made this bigger than it needed to be. Also, Nobara is crazy. All of the characters are crazy. And Gege is crazy. You can't take anything said in the series seriously.

A deal of the series published in Weekly Shōnen Jump are quite good. I give praise to the editors, who challenge the talent to work under certain constraints. Without them, you end up with the work outside of this publication, which are the literal slop spilling out of the author's brain.

For example, I believe Gege wanted to avoid the high school aspect of "Jujutsu Kaisen" and merely have the characters go on demon-slaying adventures. This is a bad idea. The high school thing is not a great idea. It makes no sense at all why people would want to teach and learn about horrible curses. However, it's a good idea in the sense that it unifies the story together: it gives an environment for unique characters to gather around, and it gives a platform for unique challenges to be created from. Gege wanted chaos, which is typical of him, as I have found out.

As silly as the concept of teaching every niche discipline in a school is, it makes sense for story structure. For inexperienced writers, what is most needed for a story is an environment with diverse moral values. You need characters who contrast with our main characters, but with enough of a color palette that they can take actions that still surprise the audience. We cannot all write "Stardust Crusaders". A school is perfect for this as a school's grading system is, well, graded; people have different perceptions on the concept of a school.

Gege did almost nothing with the school aspect; he mostly utilized it as a platform to introduce his best characters, Nanami, Todo and Mahito. They have a wide-ranging view of what they are doing and their purpose in the universe. Todo, in particular, is crazy. He is actually crazy. That is interesting.

Centering the story around a school, even if it makes no sense, was a good idea because it gives the writer a great deal of flexibility. It's a shame Gege has a lifetime vendetta against the editor who suggested this idea to him, and it's a shame Gege didn't give the man his due when he, y'know, accepted the idea.

That's generally the story of the story of "Jujutsu Kaisen": Gege has an ability to write good dialogue, he has the ability to conceive interesting themes, and he has some ability to surprise and tantalize the reader, but he can't structure a good story. He is very good at developing the aesthetic of his series, but as far as coherency he can't distinguish a good idea from a bad one.

One of the ways the audience knew Gege hated the school plot and wanted to move on from it was his development of terrorist antagonists. Terrorism has nothing specific to do with schools - though, in America, for some reason they're the primary target - so it was abundantly clear he was no longer thinking in that dimension anymore. The plot officially leaves when the terrorists engineer a whole plot to destroy human society.

When you stare at it from the beginning, it's a good idea. You want to shake things up, you want to challenge certain characters, and you also want to give an opportunity for certain characters to shine i.e. Sukuna. Aesthetically, putting our heroes in the darkest hour allows for great emotion.

Except there's one problem. What happens afterwards?

And so now we perceive the fly in the ointment.

When a character wants to dramatically change the environment of the story, and their plan isn't hollow, as in, it's not clear to the audience their plans will fall on their face or the plan won't end the story, they either succeed or they don't. If they succeed, the story irreversibly changes. If they don't, the status quo is maintained. Gege chose the latter, as in, they failed. Which led to great moments between our terrorists and other characters, with great dialogue. But Gege wanted a high-octane story that, as we have deduced, ends with the characters back to their regular lives. Shortsighted, huh?

He knew this, but did not want to grapple with the reality of it. He ignored the reality. He pretended that, no, the status quo is not maintained, X and Y decided to do Z after the events of the story, but this rings hollow when the threat is exterminated.

From thereon out, the story becomes a mess of Gege trying to convince his audience of the urgency of the plot where the urgency is manufactured. Which isn't all that different from regular Hollywood blockbusters, so we can forgive him for that.

This is the lesson a writer needs to learn: writing requires heaps of bravery. It's better to take the story into a direction where even you do not know where it'll go; a good piece of writing challenges even the writer's preconceptions on the world. Because looking back is just as dangerous as wading into unfamiliar territory.

That being said, I like the idea of the Culling Games. It's another structural idea: create a bloody brawl where fighters past and present (and future? that would've been funny) participate, and the resultant aggression and violence fuels the greatest curse of all. You can build new challenges from this, new twists, and dive into really strange ideas, all stuff writers love.

But the Culling Games is divorced from the story of the characters. This is a point hard to make, so let me get there by a twisty path of describing one of the main antagonists. Kenjaku is a sorceror from a thousand years ago who put his brain into the body of a horrible racist who was the friend of one of the main characters of the series, Gojo.

So... how do the character conflicts get resolved in the melee?

There are ideas by which you structure stories and there are ideas by which you structure character arcs and themes. The work of writing is uniting these and other needs. The Culling Games has nothing to do with the central conflict of, "My friend who left behind this horrible, horrible, violent legacy has his body taken over by a thousand year old pervert and I'm not sure what to do about it." One way this could have been resolved would have been for the character not to have a thousand year old brain in posession of the character's friend's body, but the idea is metal so why not, fuck yeah, let's put it in the story.

Gege-ism: An idea that's really cool on paper but abandons every other thread of the story.

The fascinating thing about writing is that you are really screwed if the ideas don't cohere, and there's almost no course of correction once an awkward, not bad per se, idea is implemented. It's fairly easy to foresee where the plot was going to end up. The purpose of the Culling Games is all about fighting, ergo the main characters fight. That's it, that's where it ends up. So you end up needing to resolve everything through fights. You either develop punch-able problems or fit un-punch-able problems into punch-able holes. Gege tried to do a clever thing where people negotiated with the rules of the games, but at the end of the day you have to punch your way out of the situation.

There is one possible way to get out of this hole, that Gege thought of. Take Shibuya, for example. That was not merely an issue of, We are threats, and you must deal with us; the goal of the terrorists was to terrorize. Mahito, the best villain of the series, did exactly that. That's why that story works. Characters exchange their perspectives on a situation; fortunes reverse, and thus the story shifts; and the story doesn't necessarily conclude when the terrorizing ends, though in this case it did.

Gege then thought, "Oh, what if the Culling Games ended up with a reversal of social fortunes as with Shibuya?"

Which led to Gege introducing the US military. And which led to my first introduction to "Jujutsu Kaisen", oddly enough.

Gege introduced the idea that the cursed energy of the sorcerors could be used as a clean and more effective alternative to fossil fuels for the US economy.

This is a great idea. It's also really stupid.

Story-wise, this allowed Gege to re-evaluate the course of action of the Culling Games, introducing a motivation to participate in the games beyond the actual written purpose of the games themselves. Sorcerors were seen as valuable commodities. People who were losers before they attained great cursing power were now winners. People from the past could use this new social shift to ingratiate themselves to modern society. These social factors would irreversibly alter the way of life our protagonists were trying to protect.

But then Gege abandoned the idea. Oh well! Fuck it!

It did lead to my favorite line from an American character: "The Japanese should stick to making cars and anime!!!" This was the first chapter I had ever read of "Jujutsu Kaisen" - I knew about it but was really turned off by the violence - and I thought this was fucking hilarious.

And so Sukuna, who calls himself a calamity unto himself, could only be resolved by punching the living shit out of him. Not by doing this, or this, or that. Every character stood in relation to him as to whether they could or could not punch him. This is a writer writing themselves into a hole and finding themselves in China.

Leading to the other character every other character feared punching, the aforementioned Gojo.

This is when I was introduced to r/Jujutsufolk.

I realized from this subreddit that fans are smarter than they appear. Fans are in the business of liking things and are smarter than critics in the sense that they don't need to verbalize why they like things. They can look at something as a whole and make their own judgment call. This judgment, whether they like or do not like a thing, is the most important part of viewing a work of art. This was a great revelation for me as someone who greatly disliked "Jujutsu Kaisen" initially.

The fans knew about everything I just said, even if they couldn't articulate it in the same way. But they still liked the series. They recognized the strength of Gege's stylistic choices, they knew what he was trying to accomplish, and they were satisfied with it. I think r/Jujutsufolk helped me realize that fans are fans, fans are great because they enjoy something (unless you are a fan of hating things, then fuck you (jk)), and God bless them.

To watch them lose their shit as the dominos began falling, though, that gave me quite a smug smile on my face.

Falling in love with the idiosyncrasies of a series is like falling in love with the idiosyncrasies of a person. After a while you realize they're insane and have no idea what they're doing or where they're going in life. The sheer charisma of the idiosyncrasies holds the relationship together until the charm stops working. I realized now that's why I take the hat of a critic: I prefer not to be heartbroken.

Watching fans of "Jujutsu Kaisen" become heartbroken when Gojo lost to Sukuna was a fucking trip. Luckily, they were heartbroken by a work of fiction rather than an actual lover. And they had some right to be upset because the alternative was probably better.

Yes, Gege having Gojo defeat Sukuna would have been more interesting. Because we wouldn't know what happens after.

I mean, isn't that the job of the writer? To explore the unexplored?

Everyone predicted the last year: if Sukuna did not lose, he would have to be punched by every character in the cast. The doom was palpable after Chapter 236. Some felt genuine empathy for the loss of their invincible husbando, to the point they made a subway mural for him, and some felt despair for the state of the story.

They turned their knives on the author, who represented himself through his characters. They slandered Sukuna constantly. They then slandered the guy who thought he could take on Sukuna. They kept slandering and slandering and coping and deluding themselves that, nah, this character is gonna come back. And then, Nah, I'd win. Because defying the author's story is a form of having revenge.

I loved every second of it. Well, one, I didn't like "Jujutsu Kaisen" all that much, so there's that. Two, the energy of the subreddit filled me with life. There were moments in the last year where I was pretty depressed and r/Jujutsufolk would cheer me up with their...unhinged ranting.

Three, I found out that this kind of defiance was a positive energy, not a negative energy. Criticism, I admit, takes energy out of a room. Creation puts it back in. Cracking a joke demonstrates more love than hate.

Which led me to realize the virtues of "Jujutsu Kaisen". This is a miracle in of itself. Their love for the series led me to kinda liking it. That's a victory if ever I've seen one.

This is a weird accomplishment of Gege's. Yes, his work is uneven, but it's never heavyhanded. He allowed the audience to project whatever they wanted into the series. It appears the series had such gaping holes that the audience was perfectly happy to fill them in; in fact, they were even happier compared to when they had no such holes in other series, cough cough "My Hero Academia". Because Gege never took the racism seriously, fans made whatever they wanted out of it. Because Gege never took the misogny seriously, fans made whatever they wanted out of it - and apparently, the misogynist is one of the more beloved characters of the series. Again, "Jujutsu Kaisen" fans are wild.

I may be crazy, but I also think the fans had better ideas than Gege, the first instance of successful crowd-writing I've ever seen. For example, there is a character(?) that can adapt to anything. Another character can take people to court. The idea of Mahoraga becoming a lawyer to win is a brilliant idea. Some people posited that Kashimo could use quantum tunneling. I know this post is a joke, but people introducing weird, random rules to the Culling Games would have been fascinating. That being said, resolving the plot of Kenjaku through Takaba i.e. the guy who makes reality into one big joke, this was a great idea by Gege. If any format of storytelling ought to surprise people, it ought to be this one, the one built around action.

I did attempt a rewrite of "Jujutsu Kaisen" - not to flex on Gege, and not because I'm particularly passionate about the series, but only as an intellectual exercise - and I stopped myself from finishing it when I realized I was trying to make the series make sense. From the ground-up the series has never made sense, which is why I initially avoided it like the plague. Like, why curses? Why do these specifically take on physical form? And they've done so for millenia? This is very different from ghosts and demons in, say, "Inuyasha", where these monsters have agency, they can hide, they can choose not to be assholes. Curses are inextricable to humanity and are fundamentally opposed to human beings, so there must be conflict. Putting a lens onto any particular detail into "Jujutsu Kaisen" has the effect of a black light, where you see all the gross behind-the-scenes ideas Gege had going on. Like, why are there are only two schools, why is the fate of all society dependent on this one woman, how did Kenjaku hijack the barriers of this one woman which span all of Japan, etc.

The series is just excess after excess after excess, which I think is another reason why fans latched on to it. In a world where every facet of our being is criticized and the criticism gets criticized it's nice to have this one space which we can criticize but choose not to. The excessiveness is a joy.

There is one element of Gege that ought to be criticized: his anger towards everyone and everything, which seems to be triggered on random and by no reason. I mentioned earlier he bitterly hated an editor who I think was extremely reasonable, and quite frankly right. The end of the series feels like it was written out of a place of anger against the fans. This is a tall thing to say about someone else I don't know, but the evidence is...thick. For example, the third-to-last chapter consists of the characters literally - no, LITERALLY - arguing against the plotholes that the fans brought up. That same chapter also has Gege explaining one of the minor details of the world of the series for NO REASON. Then the last two chapters have no resolution to any of the main characters' arcs. The last panel is a close-up of one of Sukuna's fingers, the appendage of a character who himself is really unimportant to the story. Finally, there is the strangest insult of all: Gege decided not ... to have a referendum on the most popular character of the series. No one mourns him, no one comments on his life, we only get a flashback of Gojo saying "Who tf wants more of Gojo Satoru?" He essentially doesn't exist anymore, which is upsetting, because Gojo is a person. Gege possesses this extremely odd logic where the guy who enjoys living the most also enjoys death the most. Such that the fans thought the curses were more human than the humans.

This is petty. I get it: fans can be assholes. On one hand, some fans will love anything one does, to the point of bafflement; on the other hand, some fans will want the story to be something it fundamentally is not. But this is going too far. To deny the fans the human texture of a story, as concerns the characters, the story's morals, et cetera, that's just... I don't even know how to put it. At that point, why write in the first place?

Again, more mind-reading, but "Jujutsu Kaisen" seems to have been made by a man who thought, "I never expected to be here, so let's see what I get away with." This is a talented man, and he has a right to do what he wills with his talent. But he actually did waste his audience's time. He also wasted the time of a lot of animators, who were overworked to the point of illness. Then again, they wasted their own time animating Sukuna punching a white blob over and over again. That he wasted people's time is an indication of his talents, which convinced people that their time would not be wasted. But it's a shame he did not do much with his abilities. Again, though, that's his choice.

So that's the legacy of "Jujutsu Kaisen": madness, madness, descending into more madness. Gege is a clown, but he, by committing to a very public series, is our clown. Even if he has a tense relationship with his audience, he still completed his entertainment of us. God bless you, Gege Akutami.