Jujutsu Kaisen is a story that begs for a grand, sweeping history, one that lets us peek over the edge of the world we were introduced and enjoy the structure holding it up coming together piece by piece. By the end of season 2, our setup is done. The world has changed irrevocably and we’ve come to what feels like the climax at the end of Act 1 of Three. 

I began reading the manga before the second season was released and have been following it since the Perfect Preparation Arc (post-Shibuya). I went in thinking: ‘The tragedy of the plot cracks open the society we were briefly introduced to. Here is where we strip our characters to the bare essentials and see what it does to them.’ The way Jujutsu Kaisen is told, the dialogues and monologues characters have, the pieces introduced, it all gives the story to analysis with an assumption of revelation and resolution.

Who are the higher-ups? How does the clan system work? Are there any other clans? What makes the Big Three clan ‘the Big Three’? Is it size, wealth, power, or influence? How will this new vacuum of power in the Gojo clan affect all the others? How will it affect the jujutsu society? How will it affect normal society? How has the history of jujutsu flowed through Japan? What made the Heian-era sorcerers so special? What formed this Golden Age? Where did Sukuna come from? How did he develop into a curse? How does Yuki expect to break away from cursed energy? Have there been prior attempts? How does cursed energy relate to the body and the soul? What about Kenjaku’s experiments? What do they have to do with Yuuji? Why is Yuuji so unusual?

At the time of writing, we are 246 chapters into the manga (109 chapters away from the last adapted one) and none of these questions have been answered. Much of what is introduced does not get the full attention it deserves leaving one wanting more information, more exploration, more emotional stakes, more, more, more, and getting nothing.

The story seems immensely uninterested in its history, in the lead-up to its present, and the forces of power that shape that present despite how it purportedly affects our characters. We are left with an anemic world devoid of the richness required to convince me it is real. 

The narrative risks the fate of Japan of course, the ‘end of the nation’ as we know it, etcetera etcetera. And that is supposed to be deemed sufficient but we’ve seen the end of the world before. What I want to know is what ends for a character. Which is where I believe the story’s greatest failings lie. I could stomach the lack of historical and political lore, but as the story goes on our characters flatten and stiffen, their cores, the cores of any characters (emotional investment and motivations), hollowed out into set pieces we can see Akutami’s fingers very clearly moving. 

Manga Spoilers Ahead

The beginning of the end for me came after an arc that centred two of my favourite (living) characters: Maki and Noritoshi Kamo. They both participate in the jujutsu system to make life easier for a loved one: Maki’s twin sister Mai and Noritoshi’s exiled mother. In this arc, Maki and Kamo have to fight a monstrous reincarnation of one of Maki’s abusers. Maki, a 16-year-old who just wiped out her whole clan and lost her sister two days prior is struggling. But Akutami makes her struggle one of skill and hyperindependence.

A valid conflict, but not the one her character arc has been about. Strength was simply a step toward her true goal: making a space for her sister. But now that she’s gone, who is Maki, what does she do now?

It’s not like Akutami’s characters cannot consider these questions, Noritoshi does so in Chapter 194.

But somehow this introspective unresolved grief eludes Maki. She’s never given a new centre and the plot wraps up its goal of bringing her to the needed strength level and then moves on. It makes her a shell. And not even the sort you can say grief causes because we barely touch that grief; her sister gives her an afterlife handshake and the loss means nothing from then on.

Purpose drives characters. It defines their every move and fills out the corners of their existence. When a goal is unreached, we grieve for the characters. Nanami’s death resonates with the fandom because he ends with regret, unable to protect the juniors he’d been struggling through pain to find. His death means something because we can point to turns in the plot that would have been different if he lived. We can’t say the same for Nobara Kugisaki.

Her status is left in a state of limbo that is as of now, unresolved and with seemingly no space for her return so here I will treat her as dead. We know Nobara was brash, enjoyed her life’s femininity, and guarded the boundaries of her heart in a manner befitting a sorcerer. You could be forgiven for thinking her goal was to enjoy life in Tokyo.

But, right before she dies, we learn of her past, of the other people in the seats of her life, this sudden swell of emotion made tiring.

Nothing of this goal influenced the way Nobara lived or what she fought for. If this was an attempt to fill out her character, it flattens her, setting her even further away from the questions her counterparts are wrestling with. I had previously thought of Nobara as important to the dynamics simply based on ‘trio tropes’ alone, even when she was repeatedly sidelined from the heft of the now-forgotten question of what it means to save people. 

When a story is told, more often than not it will utilize tropes (even when subverted or averted). Not because the story is unoriginal but because there are only so many ways to move from point A to B and to bring your reader along. Yuki Tsukumo had all the hallmarks of what should have been an important character. Hinted in the Kyoto ExchangeArc, her strength and knowledge scaled as a special grade in Hidden Inventory and finally, set up as a foil to our main mastermind.

Will you believe me if I told you she died in her first fight?

We don’t even learn about her. Why this goal, what does she even do, how does she research, what conclusions did she come to about the soul, about the body, cursed energy, why this breaking away, how could it happen, why so insistent? All we are left with is a notebook. Of ‘research’. And an encouragement to the hybrid Death Painting to live on as a human, a struggle we are meant to give credence to as if it wasn’t introduced in the same chapter a character as fascinating as Yuki Tsukumo was killed off.  

Her death marked the severing of a conversation about the soul and the body the series had been having earlier. In the Vs. Mahito Arc, Ieiri brought up the ‘black box’ relationship between the body and cursed energy, her expertise used to form the urgency behind gaining points in the Cullking Games but that too has been abandoned. Any concept the plot no longer needs faces this fate. Like Megumi’s sister Tsumiki. Akutami doesn’t even give Tsumiki a voice, using her to carry a much-derided, ever-so-convenient possession to sink Megumi’s soul for Sukuna, desiccating a twist that was this close to heartbreaking.

Sukuna’s possession of Megumi yanked the dynamic between the both of them and Yuuji back into the limelight although not much has been done with it since then. However, there is still time seeing that our final battle was always going to be between Yuuji and Sukuna; there was no other way. Given his role, Gojo stepping up to the plate in the meantime was also expected and I knew there was no way he was going to return alive. There was a prevailing theory about the loss of an eye rendering him less-than-powerful either before or during the battle but still his chances of returning whole and unscathed were at 0%. I say all this to make it known that my problem with Gojo Satoru dying is neither the dying itself nor the method. It’s the emptiness.

Within the Decisive Battle at Shinjuku arc, Gojo Satoru and Ryomen Sukuna, two characters on opposing sides of the same coin, one bound to Earth by love and care and yet set apart solely by strength. And the other, so selfish and powerful his actions become a calamity, so self-assured that loneliness means nothing to him. 15 chapters of fighting and there’s no conversation straining at the metaphorical ties between these two sorcerers. Not even over the fact that one of the people supposedly binding Gojo to humanity, his student Megumi, was possessed by Sukuna. It was right there. Sukuna’s pursuit of strength had flooded into the life of Satoru Gojo in an intimately personal way and nothing came of it. 

In the scene with Yuuji’s first death what Gojo mourned was not just the student but the loss of potential. Setting himself as a benchmark, he dreams of raising students, allies to him and each other to carry the weight of strength. This dream comes to pass sooner than he expected and almost entirely because of his absence. By the time he’s unsealed his students are scarred, amputated, the wrong one is possessed and another is just missing. 

And he says nothing about that. Not once, from the moment he’s unsealed till his afterlife dream sequence ends, does he mention this dream, the state of his students, or their strength. We’re 25 chapters away from his sealing, 10 away from his death and since that page turned, nothing from the chapters of Gojo Satoru’s life has mattered. His severed body left in the cold of the battlefield hasn’t even warranted a mention. 

Over and over, themes and threads and emotional arcs, fizzle out like this in Jujutsu Kaisen. It makes for a deeply unsatisfactory work the longer it goes on and renders prior arcs and twists and dialogue frustratingly weak. It’s awful I think, to invest time and energy into a work that masquerades as rich and filling only to find an incomplete, water-logged shack.

Still, in some way, I love Jujutsu Kaisen. Its exposition-heavy storytelling makes for a fascinating scaffolding to hang theories and fan stories. The slapped-together plot fillings could make a deep hole if you’re ready to dig by yourself, or preferably, in conversation with other people who are aware of what it is and enjoy it all the same. 

Will I get over the waste of Nobara and Yuki? Probably never. Have I stopped hoping for any form of payoff? Yes. For two years this manga was my thing. Its power system alone and the unique way it manifests in its characters yanks it high up the ranks of shonen manga. The vast potential cannot be underestimated. Yet it remains in a lot of ways, just potential. So I just make up my own endings, flesh out the story myself. Knowingly or unknowingly, most fans are already doing that.