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Fantastic! This is one of those analysis posts I don't 100% agree with, but you've put so much thought into it and expressed your ideas so well that I respect it immensely.

There is one potential flaw I see, though. It's when Kenjaku was escorting Itadori's former classmate from his old school out of one of the barriers. She wasn't just a side character, she was a minor character - exceedingly minor, in the grand calculus of the manga's story. And while Kenjaku sees Takaba as a side character and treats him like one, there's something off about their interactions with this non-sorcerer, teenage girl.

It really seems like Kenjaku enjoys her presence. Kenjaku laughs at that sarcastic comment she makes, and shows a surprising amount of care with her. They don't just say, "Get out and get out quick. Tough shit if you die." Kenjaku takes her by the hand and gently shows her the way to safety.

And the killer is the last thing Kenjaku says right before she wakes up: "Thank you for being friends with my son."

That line haunts me. It reminds me of what Nanachi said to Belaf about the fake Mitty in Made in Abyss. They don't condemn him, they just say to him: "Thank you for taking an interest in her." The sentiment that you see someone as so wonderful, you're grateful and happy if someone else sees what you see in them.

And it is a sentiment that runs counter to everything else about Kenjaku as a character. I refuse to believe it's a trait GeGe retconned, either. GeGe is always laying groundwork for things in advance, and they're willing to leave something untouched for literal years before choosing to reveal all.

It's not the only discrepancy, either. I can't recall the fine details, but Kenjaku is a name associated with some divinity of compassion, a god or bodhisattva, I forget which. Yuki highlights this much when the group first convenes with Tengen prior to the Culling Games, and she seems to scoff at it, like she views it as a farce. But I feel like this is one of those cases where GeGe signposts something the audience should be interrogating. Is this name some twisted joke, or is it reflective of some deeper truth?

Or that speech Kenjaku gives about how people are too afraid to save themselves, or how they won't take the steps towards their goals. This speaks less to a belief in something about common people being inherently boring and more to a frustration that people as a whole have so much potential they aren't realizing.

Stuff like this adds so much stickiness to Kenjaku's character, to steal a turn of phrase from Jacob Geller's video essay on Pinocchio. Like Kenjaku outwardly acts flippant and uncaring, purposefully rude, irreverent, unsympathetic. Yet in these moments when they're alone or they know their words won't be passed on to others, Kenjaku betrays this genuine passion and sense of care.

It's like Kenjaku does care, deeply, painfully for other people and the state of the world, but puts forth an immense effort to conceal and not act on it. I just can't fathom why, and I'm not sure if I'm just tilting at windmills or if GeGe will ever show us the reverse side of Kenjaku's personality and what's under all the lies and 1,000 years of accumulated influences.

Because there is always the possibility that Kenjaku's identity is a Ship of Theseus of lingering values and personality traits from each successive host, cobbled together with only a tiny fragment of the original person left. That possibility fascinates me, too.

The Death of Kenjaku

So I was planning to write this meta the week that Kenjaku died, but decided to delay until we got full confirmation of his death. Something I didn't believe in even after Kenjaku passed the merger onto Sukuna. However, watching this video about death in Jujutsu Kaisen inspired me to finish this post. Not because I disagree with anything the YouTuber is saying, but because they can speculate on the meaning of so many deaths in Jujutsu Kaisen but can't find the meaning in Kenjaku's sudden death. This has led me to speculate why Gege made the choice to kill Kenjaku in the way that he did. What meaning is there in Kenjaku's abrupt and unsatisfying death?

Who is Kenjaku?

The first step in understanding Kenjaku's death is of course understanding how he lived. We actually know incredibly little about Kenjaku's character by design. Despite the fact he's literally in Geto's body, he's not meant to have sympathetic or human motivations to his actions (though hold onto that "human motivation" in your head for a moment). No flashback sequence shows the audience why this guy is the way he is, no single event seems to have driven him to do what he did.

This is what we know about Kenjaku in brief. He is a sorcerer who is over a thousand years old who was around in Sukuna's day. He once had a friendship with Tengen, but found her original self boring and unambitious. He also contrasts heavily with Tengen, who lives outside of humanity, because he has lived among humanity for 1,000 years. One of those lifetimes was Noritoshi Kamo who violated a woman and conducted heinous experiments. He produced ten children in his one thousand years, the nine death painting siblings and Yuji Itadori. He considers the first children boring, because human and curse hybrids turned out too normal.

He also partially blames himself for how boring they are, because he can't create anything that will exceed his expectations, the only thing that can exceed his expectations is born in chaos. He spent a thousand years organizing the culling games, and wants to use the games to create a merger, because he thinks creating a merger between Tengen and Humanity will create something entirely new and interesting. He also believes the way towards the future lies in further optimizing cursed energy, not in breaking away from it the way Yuki Tsukumo tried to do and Maki has.

The only people whose word we have on Kenjaku's motivations are Kenjaku himself, and Tengen's word and Tengen themselves who claims to not know what goes on in the human heart.

From all of the above Kenjaku seems to be a shallow character who's motivations can be summed up as "because I can" and "I want to see what happens." This shallowness is intentional however, as Gege who once praised the minimalist storytelling of Nasu and Evangelion likes to pick and choose what crumbs of backstory he gives out for his characters. We've never gotten any exposition on the Gojo clan, but we have an entire chapter about Takaba's failed career as a stand-up comic. This isn't a judgement of good or bad writing, this is just how Gege writes as minimalist as possible. This is in line with how Gege writes the ancient sorcerers as well, they are all much more shallow driven by instinct or Freudian Id (I desire) rather than the higher reasoning of modern-day sorcerers. Takaba uses comedy as a means of communication and bridging the gaps between people, Higuruma's backstory is the critique of the modern day justice system. Ishigori apparently lived a satisfying life where he was succesful and had good women, but that wasn't enough so he wants to get into a fight with Yuta to satisfy his hunger and feel like he's eaten desert.

It sounds shallow when I summarize it in text, but in the context of the fight with Yuta, it's a challenge for Yuta who for the most part only cares about his loved ones and sees the world through his love goggles to be more selfish and fight for his own desires. It's also reflective of a more basic and instinctual kind of thinking, as opposed to the higher reasoning and logic that modern-day sorcerers apply.

I'm keeping most of this first part to text for this reason, like go back and read the fight with Ishigori and Yuta. If I summarize Ishigori's character reasoning out of context it sounds stupid, but read the fight and it works because it's ID (I Desire) vs. Yuta's superego in not only having to collect points to help rescue Tsumiki, find a way to protect all the innocent people in the Culling Games, and also collect enough points to take on Kenjaku himself so Gojo won't have to. Meanwhile Ishigori's just fighting to get some of that sweet desert, the shallow works in contrast to the more layered motivations of our heroes.

Kenjaku is a shallow archetype fighting to satisfy his baser impulses (in his case curiosity) in comparison to the main characters who are fighting for more complicated reasons and often people besides themselves.

The question then becomes what archetype is Kenjaku. In that case answering who Kenjaku is is quite simple.

Kenjaku is a clown.

It might be more accurate to say that Kenjaku embodies what's commonly known as the "trickster archetype" but I'mma go with clown.

The most obvious example of a clown villain is what most consider the joker to be, that is a silly little clown man who challenges the straight faced and grim batman and sews chaos where Batman attempts to establish law and order in Gotham and make the city into a better place.

From the book Batman and Psychology:

More than any other villains, the Joker and Two-face reflect Batman himself as funhouse distortions, converses of who and what he is. The laughing, jesting, brightly colored Joker contrasts with grim, dark Batman. The Joker is the Joker. No alter ego. The film's opening bank robbery shows him wearing a clown mask over clown makeup, Under the surface there's only more Joker. He gives no history except inconsistent lies. When he finally considers the impact of his demand Batman unmask, he retracts the threat and demands that Batman's identity remain undisclosed. He wants a batman who has no other self, a Dark Knight whose only deeper layer is further darkness.

Is there a better descriptor for Kenjaku then these words?

Kenjaku is Kenjaku. No alter ego. A clown mask over clown makeup., Under the surface there's only more Kenjaku.

In other words, what you see is what you get.

Kenjaku even mirrors Joker's opinion of Batman, he thinks people should be more like him, not the other way around. He's not the outlier, he's being true to humanity's basic impulses of curiousity and discovery.

A more apt comparison as a clown though would probably be Loki, one of the most classic examples of clowning in the shared mythology of humanity. The character who challenges the common wisdom of gods like Odin who suspended themselves from the world tree for eleven days in order to gain wisdom. Loki, who through his trickery manages to bring about the events of Ragnarok for no deeper reason than because he can. Everyone swore not to harm Balder and Loki goes to find something that can harm him because BET.

Mythological Loki doesn't need a deeper motivation because what he represents in the mythology is someone who challenges authority and brings about a change, because in Norse Mythology nothing lasts forever and no era is permanent. Jujutsu Kaisen is also a story about how things should not in fact stay the same and tradition is bad sometimes.

When Kenjaku finds Tengen's true body he's curled up in a tree root in the fetal position, and he killed what is basically the all-knowing, all-seeing supposedly immortal sorcerer that maintains the status quo of japan, it's not exactly subtle.

Kenjaku is a clown, and clown's gotta clown. We don't need any more explanation that, it's more about what he does for the story. However, what he represents, the deep intellectual curiosity, and also a drive to disrupt the status quo in an attempt to see something more interesting can also be analyzed more deeply because they are human emotions that motivate us as well. The same way that Mahito is an inhuman monster, but he's created and motivated by the fear of other humans, something all of us have. '

Before moving onto his death though, I wanna hammer in how Kenjaku really is just motivated by these two things, a desire to see something interesting, and intellectual curiosity by comparing him to other characters.

The Clown in Fiction

I've already compared Kenjaku to Loki and the Joker, but when it comes to someone who wants to disrupt the entire order of the world simply because they're bored we've got to go to the original girlboss.

So there are plenty of villains who go "I'm evil because I'm bored" but they usually tend to be pretty shallow, either shallowly written for the lulz evil characters who just exist for shock value or just kinda dull. No one has ever done it as good as Junko Enoshima and no one ever will again.

For those who need context DanganRonpa is a death game series where the main villain basically has caused the apocalypse, wiped out most of humanity, and then induces survivors in a bunker to kill each other in a death game, where if someone commits a succesful murder they can escape the bunker, but if they're caught in a trial they're executed. Also, if they're not convicted in the trial everyone else is killed, motivating the jury to find and execute the guilty murderer.

Junko Enoshima the main villain and orchestrator of this death game ended the world because despair. She wants to inflict despair on everyone because despair. Because hope sucks and despair is where it's at.

It sounds shallow and it is and Kodaka has said in interview he wrote Junko to be a villain character with zero redeeming character traits, and no sympathetic backstory to describe why she is the way she is, but there is still something motivating her.

If you go a bit deeper into the lore and read Dangan Ronpa Zero, there is an entire book which explains the lengths which Junko goes to feel normal human emotions. The thing is much like Kenjaku Junko is too smart for her own good, everything is predictable and therefore everything bores her. Once in an attempt to live normally, she literally lobotomizes herself, makes it so that she can't remember anything and has continual amnesia constantly forgetting what just happened to her, because that's the only way she can live without knowing everything that's going to happen and constantly predicting everyone's actions.

Junko has whatever her universe's version of the six-eyes is, but instead of lording it over other people like Gojo and basking in her superiority she wants to feel normal, and connected to the world. If she can't have that she tries to make the world as unpredictable place as possible so she can experience it the same way that everyone else does.

Hope is harmony. A just heart, moving toward the light. That is all. Despair is hope's polar opposite. It is messy and confusing. It swallows up love, hatred, and everything else. Because not knowing where you will end up is despair. Despair is even what you cannot predict. Only despair's unpredictability can save you from a boring future.

I'm still not describing it properly because I don't want to go into a Danganronpa essay in this post about Jujutsu Kaisen, but one example I always use is two characters from American Dragon Jake Long. They're a pair of twins who see the future, one always sees happy things, and one always sees sad things. The one who has happy visions is a goth who's very depressed and the one who sees disaster is an incredibly peppy girl.

Jake is so confused as to why the twin who always sees good visions is so depressed, and she basically tells him to imagine having every good thing, every small little surprise, every pleasure taken out of life.

Kara: When you only see good things, nothing's special anymore. All the pleasant surprises are taken out of life. Sara: But, when you only see bad stuff, even the smallest bit of good news makes you happy!

All of this to say what Junko feels isn't just boredom, or a desire to commit evil for evil's sake, but also a full on existential crisis where she's simply too smart so she doesn't feel any connection to other people or the world around her. In order to feel that connection, that connection that everyone else has, to feel like she is actually a participant in her life not an observer she's willing to go to extremes to make the world a more interesting place, to therefore make her own life feel satisfying.

Kenjaku vs. The World (Kenjaku Pilgrim's sad little life)

To connect all this back to Kenjaku imagine the profound existential despair of a person who's lived for a thousand years, and felt bored all that time. Sukuna is at least a hedonist, he gets his fun by getting into fights, humans might be bugs to him but they're tasty bugs.

Kenjaku goes to similiar motivations and has similiar extremes, he's uninvested in the world around him, he's lived a thousand years but has no attachment to the world, to life, to the people around him. I said that Junko wants to be a participant in life not an all seeing observer and that was purposeful language because to bring back an old post. I rambled on this post about Gojo that part of Gojo's problem is that he only experiences observer-to-object relationships or I to it.

Ich and Du, translated as I and Thou is a book by philosopher Martin Buber. His two main porositions is that we may address existence in two ways:

The attitude of the “I” towards “it” towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.

The attitude of “I” towards “Thou” in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.

In Buber's terms, those who only experience the first type of relationships are only observing the world around them not relating to them. Kenjaku doesn't relate to other human beings because they are objects, he only experiences subject -> object relationships and never subject -> subject.

Buber also goes on to theorize that meaning in our lives comes from subject -> subject relationships we form with other people.

Kenjaku jokingly says that to be his friend you have to never bore him and be his equal, but there's no one considers his equal because he's the subject and everyone else are just objects.

He regrets he can't sit down and talk theories with Tsukumo Yuki because she's one of the few people who think like him.

Kenjaku is a paradox of an incredibly brilliant man who is also shallow as a puddle that you can stand in and not get your socks wet. However, he tragically can't really form a more complex identity because our identities are formed by our relationships to other people and Kenjaku doesn't relate to anybody.

That's basically the theme of the whole Choso and Kenjaku fight, Choso is a weird aborted fetus of a curse who still has a strong identity and is able to feel unconditional love for Yuji because of the connection of family and the ideas of brotherhood that binds the two. Kenjaku is a bad father who abandoned Choso because they were "boring" but also never really gave them a chance to grow up or be interesting, he just dismissed them offhand and moved on to the next weird science project.

However, his reason for dismissing Choso isn't Choso's fault but rather a case of Psychological projection. It's not Choso who is boring, but rather Kenjaku himself, he said so earlier.

"What I can create, does not exceed the bounds of my own potential. The answer is always flickering darkly in chaos."

Kenjaku cannot look within to find anything satisfying abput his life because there's nothing inside of him. He doesn't have a fully formed identiy he's just ID, and because he tramples all over other people to form his desires he also cannot ever form a full ego. Just like Sukuna and most of the ancient sorcerers he's a paradox of being all ego, and yet having an underdeveloped ego with shallow motivators.

Kenjaku cannot look within because he's a boring person, and he cannot look for other people to find worth in his life because they're just objects, so instead he looks into the void, he tries to change the world around him by spreading more chaos hoping that it will make something unpredictable happen in front of his eyes - and that will give him the meaning and investment in his life he's deprived himself of because he refuses to form relationships with other people.

It's the Gojo problem. It's the Kashimo problem. It's not the Sukuna problem, because Sukuna admits he doesn't care about and rejects things like love and meaning.

If Kenjaku makes the world around him a more interesting place, he will be able to live in it. It's the same as Gojo trying to raise people up to his level by creating stronger students.

So after going to great length to demonstrate how powerful and all-consuming Kenjaku's boredom is, and how cut off he is from his own humanity, here's the part where I sort of defend his death.

Wouldn't it be funny if the joke character killed the main villain?

Let's be honest it was Takaba's kill here, Yuta just camped and killstole. I think part of the problem with people not understanding the meaning behind Kenjaku's sudden and unexpected death is attributing the death to Yuta cutting his head off out of nowhere, and not Takaba's thematic victory over Kenjaku.

Takaba represents a blindspot for Kenjaku which is why the main characters use him as a weapon against him, and he also calls out in a fashion Kenjaku's hypocrisy. First and foremost, Kenjaku presents himself as an agent of change, but he actually has no interest in many of the modern sorcerers and holds a bias towards the heian era as the peak of sorcery. He even says that he's going to bring back the Heian Golden Age to Sukuna at the end of Shibuya arc.

Because that's what Chaos is Kenjaku, things being the same as they were 1,000 years ago. Kenjaku is an agent of change and chaos and somehow his definition of change is... resetting things back to the past because the sorcerers of the past were so much better than today.

Kenjaku goes out of his way to awaken hundreds of modern day sorcerers, and then dismisses literally off of them except for Hiromi because they don't have enough potential for him compared to ancient sorcerers. He essentially did the same with the Death Painting Bros, he went through all of the trouble to create them, then dismissed them as not having enough potential BEFORE THEY EVEN GOT THE CHANCE TO GROW UP.

Kenjaku has a habit of just going BORED NOW and leaving before he even gives things the time to impress him. He does the same with the Culling Game, he set up the death game to push sorcerers to fight each other and bring out their powers, but he never actually intended to watch the sorcerers evolve. He just wanted to slaughter everyone inside to start the merger.

He goes through a lot of potential to set up these situations and then abandons them before they have the chance to even evolve, because they do not have enough "potential" in his opinion, but like his opinion is often shown to be wrong. Takaba represents that blindspot because he was one of the modern sorcerers that Kenjaku underestimated and dismissed offhand as boring without giving him a chance to shine.

That is the joke that Takaba introduces himself with "Wouldn't it be funny if a random comic relief side character suddenly defeated the big bad?"

He's immediately pointing out a blindspot, because Kenjaku automatically believes himself to be an important character, he underestimates Takaba because he's a side character, one of the people Kenjaku has dismissed as boring and uninteresting (before they even had a chance to evolve into something else). Like that's the other thing Kenjaku wants things to evolve but he doesn't... let them. He abandoned Choso and the rest before they even grew up, they were literally fetuses and he threw them away. Kenjaku is the protagonist of reality, and Takaba is a side character, and therefore Takaba couldn't possibly harm him because Kenjaku and his boundless curiosity are the center of the world.

It's not just about subverting the audience's expectations to have the main villain die in such an anti-climactic way before the final act even starts, but it's pointing out how narrow Kenjaku's viewpoints really were all along. He wants everything to be surprised but he never lets anything surprise him, because either he gets bored right away, or he looks down on others before giving them the chance to evolve, or the third thing he just straight up has to control everything. He can't let the culling game evolve naturally he's going to slaughter all the players by hand so he can move onto the next part.

It's the contradiction between a schemer who needs to control everything and everyone to bring about his intended result and everything needs to be a part of his big plans, to someone who wants to be surprised by others and have things go off the rails. You can't have both of these things at once, Kenjaku cannot have things surprise him if he rigs everything to go his way with his overly elaborate schemes and his tight-fisted control of everyone in the story.

Like, in comparison to Kenjaku the joker just blows things up and sprays people with laughing gas. They're both playing the same game but the joker is having fun and Kenjaku isn't.

Kenjaku wants an unexpected future, but he doesn't care about any of the modern sorcerers and has a bias towards the heiean era that he considers the height and wants to reset things to bring back the heian era. He wants to be surprised but won't give up control.

Kenjaku's boast is that unlike Tengen he's spent a thousand years living on the ground instead of lording up on them from above like some deity, but is that true? Has Kenjaku lived? Has he engaged with the world? Formed relationships with people? Or does he just sit in the corner rubbing his hands together menacingly and scheming his schemes.

Takaba unironically gives Kenjaku what he wants, something he's never seen before in a thousand years, and it's from a place Kenjaku never expected. Some random guy, who he dismissed as one of the boring modern sorcerers with no potential like Higuruma.

Takaba not only exists in Kenjaku's blindspot, he almost immediately points out Kenjaku's second hypocrisy. If he's willing to resort to mass murder just to feel entertained, then if he found something else to entertain him there'd be no reason to get violent and scheme his schemes.

In other words Kenjaku hasn't really gone looking for other places to try to find what makes life worth living, or at least enertaining, he hasn't really tried any alternatives to finding joy in life because Jujutsu is all he cares about. Takaba says that if he found something else even more entertaining than the merger there'd be no need to go through with the merger, and he turns out to be right. Kenjaku could have found meaning and entertainment with the world someplace else, he was just too narrow minded and never looked anywhere else.

As I said from the beginning Kenjaku's existential crisis comes from his inability to relate to other people and viewing them all as objects, but in Kenjaku's mind of course he can't relate to others they're too boring, so therefore it's the world's fault, and the fault of others and not himself.

However, right away one of those boring people starts relating to Kenjaku.

I joked about how we know nothing about the Gojo clan but Takaba gets an entire backstory chapter about his failed comedy career, but this chapter is plot important because jokes are the way that Takaba relates to and forms relationships with other people. Takaba makes jokes to relate to others but has a fallout with a comedy partner and has never been able to form a lasting relationship with a comedic partner because comedy doesn't mean the same to them as it does to him - because to Takaba comedy is about forming relationships with people. Which is why he thinks he's failed if he's failed to make everyone in the audience laugh because he wants to make comedy that will make other people relate to him and understand him.

However, he almost gives up on comedy because he's afraid that he might fail on that endeavor. He gives up on striving to make everybody in the audience laugh, because of self-affirmation and a desire to protect himself. He didn't want to fail so he started distancing himself from the audience under the excuse "Well, I can't make everyone laugh so it's okay if not everyone understands me."

Takaba at some point gave up on trying to use comedy as a means of understanding and relating to others, because of his fear of failure and at that point he nearly lost - but he rallies himself by saying that he won't give up on making someone like Kenjaku laugh. If his comedy is about connecting to others, about understanding others and having others understand him then he can't just give up on Kenjaku and say it's Kenjaku's fault that Kenjaku can't relate to his sense of humor. He's got to try even harder to make Kenjaku laugh.

This is also pretty much the opposite of Kenjaku's point of view. For Kenjaku it's everyone else's fault for being so boring that's why he can't relate to them. Wheras, Takaba takes personal responsibility, he wasn't funny enough, he has to try harder, he's the one who's going to make Kenjaku laugh by improving himself. Takaba looks inward, and Kenjaku looks outwards because there's nothing inside Kenjaku.

This is a parallel to this.

The difference however, is that Sukuna did not betray his ideology. Sukuna lives for the kicks that battle provides him and wants to face strong opponents so he can eventually devoured them and be momentarily entertained.

Like Sukuna is not bored the way Kenjaku is. The world is his playground. He may refer to living as just killing time until you die, but he also says that there's an infinite variety of humans to entertain yourself with. The world is Sukuna's toybox and he's satisfied with just that. In fact he doesn't even care about the merger, until his frustration with Yuji makes him think a little deeper about himself.

Kenjaku is not the Sukuna in this scene, he's the Gojo. He believed he was above others, only to be reminded suddenly that he was just the same as everyone else and brought back down to humanity. I mean, they even die off panel the same anticlimactic way. Gojo's infinity meant nothing in the face of one surprise attack a world-cleaving slash Gojo didn't see coming. All of Kenjaku's backup plans meant nothing in the face of Yuta camping and kill-stealing.

Kenjaku didn't lose because Yuta's plan of camping and killstealing was simply too brilliant for him to prepare for however, we're given the exact reason kenjaku lost - because he was having too much fun with Takaba.

Which meant what Takaba said earlier was true, if Kenjaku found something funnier, something other than the merger that could make him laugh there'd be no need to go through with the merger to begin with.

Kenjaku loses because all along he could have related to people, formed meaningful relationships with others, looked for meaning in life outside of Jujutsu but just chose not to. Which is also a parallel to this.

Sukuna says that Kashimo and Gojo both lost because they were greedy. They already received love in a way, they had the love of everyone who regarded them as the strongest, they had people who earnestly wanted to challenge them and respected them - which Sukuna sees as a form of love, and yet they still wanted more.

They were the ones who put themselves up on that pedestal and decided to stand above all of humanity, they don't get to whine about being lonely on top of that.

To add my interpretation to Sukuna's speech, what he's outlining is a general conflict in Jujutsu Kaisen, you can choose to be all ego to put personal development above everything else but it comes at the cost of not being able to form relationships. Maki's as powerful as Toji now, but the sister she always wanted to protect is dead and basically committed suicide. Meanwhile Noritoshi Kamo didn't participate in the final battle, but he reconnected with his mother and half-brother.

There are plenty of characters who die and suffer in jujutsu kaisen because they chose to value other people above themselves, because Jujutsu Kaisen rewards selfishness and punishes selflessness / having an underdeveloped sense of self.

I'll pick Mechamaru as my biggest example, he lived to protect Miwa, and not only does he die an unsatisfying death, he also breaks her heart.

However, at least Mechamaru experienced love. His desire to protect Miwa is granted, because Miwa is also out of the final conflict. Mechamaru is one of the most miserable characters in the manga, and yet he experienced love in his life for someone else that made his brief life meaningful. The characters who choose love, and other people over strength tend to get stepped on, but they at least had that love in their life to begin with.

It's a having your cake and eating it too situation. Kashimo chose strength over love, and he got to be so strong he was unbeatable and lived to old age, but not only is he unfulfilled but he whines about being unable to relate to the people around him - you're the one who chose to step on everyone like bugs.

Characters in Jujutsu Kaisen don't just experience death when they try to be selfless however, like yeah there's a disproportionate amont of selfless minor characters who die, but like Yuji is the most selfless character in the manga and he's continually punished for it and yet he's the one referred to as a person with an unbreakable will.

Rather instead of Jujutsu Kiasen preferring the selfish side on the scale of selfishness / selflessness, the kind of messy, deaths that get handed out to people like Mechamaru happen when you betray the ideals you were living for. Whether they were selfish or selfless.

It goes back to Toji's internal monologue. You lose when you lose sight of yourself - like there's some deaths that don't fit the mould but for the most part, Gojo, Kashimo, Toji's and then Kenjaku's deaths all follow this pattern. By coincidence they also all take place offscreen for the most part (I suppose we see Yuta cut off Kenjaku's head but it's quick and unsatisfying compared to all the rest).

Kenjaku died because he betrayed what he was living for and he temporarily lost sight of himself. As I said Kenjaku's airtight principles were that everyone was boring and people weren't worth relating too so the only way to find enertainment in life is to cause chaos - but he found himself relating to some nobody he wrote off as a minor character Takaba and having fun with him. Which meant the belief he was false, he could have tried relating to other people all along he just didn't.

He warped his sense of self to reaffirm his identity. Takaba almost did that too, he tried to blame other people for not finding him funny to protect himself, but he moved past that and redoubled his efforts to make Kenjaku laugh.

There's also the added layer of irony that Kenjaku's sudden death brings about, the person who spent a thousand years trying to make the merger happen doesn't get to see it.

However, here's my assertion on why Kenjaku's death before the merger always had to happen.

Because, even if Kenjaku had seen the merger he still would have been bored.

Literally everything about Kenjaku's character and previous actions shows that even if he made his big scheme come true, he would have gone "meh" and moved onto the next scheme because that's how he always reacts.

He got bored of the death painting siblings, he presumably got bored of Yuji, he got bored of all the ancient sorcerers and new sorcerers he made for the culling game, he worked with the disaster curses and got bored of them and dismissed them as inferior primitive curses, he goes out of the way to engineer these chaotic situations and then never feels any satisfaction from them so why would the Merger be any different?

Not only did Kenjaku die before he saw the merger, he was basically doomed to never see the merger, because it would not have fixed whatever is wrong inside of him.

Because it's not the world that's boring, it's Kenjaku himself.

He gets a brief glimpse of what he could have done in life, that he could have tried to forge connections with the people around him and related to them on a personal level - and then he dies the way he lived, in a kind of boring and unsatisfying way.

It's the narrative punishing him in a way, the same way it punished Gojo, and Kashimo, by not letting him see the big explosion after he went to all the trouble rigging the bombs. It's punishing him for the same reason too - by deviating from his true self and showing what he thought were his reasons were shallow all along. Gojo could have always related to people he just chose to stand on his pedestal alone, and Kenjaku could have always found the world to be more enertaining he was the one dismissing other people as boring without giving them a chance to grow.

Takaba confronted his beliefs and then stayed true to his ideology of making everyone, 100% of the people in the crowd laugh. Kenjaku didn't confront his beliefs, he strayed from them because he didn't have the strength of character to evaluate himself the way Takaba did.

Hence, he's finished off by one of those boring people who used their power in a way he never expected. The main villain is defeated by the comic relief character and it's hilarious.

#jujutsu kaisen #jjk analysis #kenjaku #jjk meta

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yggdraseed · 8 days

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Honestly, there's a big Toga analysis I'm trying to figure out how to write, and Curious figures pretty heavily in it. When we see that vision of her being the devil on Himiko's shoulder during the fight with Ochako, I think a lot of people kind of assumed that her analysis of Toga was correct.

But I think the point was actually that Curious was completely off the mark. Himiko doesn't transform into other people because she hates herself, but because she loves others and being more like them for a while is part of how she expresses her love. Her Quirk is how she expresses love, both drinking blood and turning into people.

However, that the fight with her and everything that happened after made Toga doubt herself and gaslight herself into thinking that everyone who called her a monster was right when they weren't. I think her identity was corroding from the trauma and not knowing what was right anymore or who she could turn to.

In essence, Ochako saved Himiko from totally losing her sense of self and kept her from convincing herself that she was all the awful things she'd been called her entire life. That's my reading.

There's a parallel to be made between:

Curious trying to turn Toga into a martyr girl for the Meta Liberation Army, using her as a prop and not a living human being.

AFO using Tenko's identity, body and trauma as a weapon against the heroes; turning him into a mere toy to play with and discard once it got too broken.

Enji basing Touya's value on his quirk and his ability to surpass All Might, then throwing him aside when Touya couldn't be his perfect little soldier.

I'm just saying people really underestimate what Curious meant in Toga's plotline and the impact she had. Curious is the female counterpart of the abuser who dehumanizes a kid/teen in order to further their social agenda and personal goals. Yet, I haven't seen many posts talking about it.

#my hero academia #boku no hero academia #himiko toga #curious #ochako uraraka

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yggdraseed · 8 days

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Tamsy you mothERFUCKER SHARE THAT WITH HER

#gachiakuta #tamsy caines #amo #tamsy the motherfucker #tamsy the rat #tamsy the unforgivable cake hoarder #oooooh tamsy #ooooooooooh tamsy #you make me angry tamsy #gachiakuta spoilers

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yggdraseed · 23 days

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I'd also add that beating up villains is a very easy solution for heroes. Much easier than solving the systemic problems behind inequality, discrimination, and apathy to the suffering of others that have endured just under the surface from the pre-superpowers world into the current one.

You can see right from early criticisms of UA's entrance exams that flashy and powerful Quirks are given privilege over actual usefulness. Shinso's Quirk would be extremely useful, just not in these sorts of blown-out superpower fights ripped straight from the front page of a comic book.

Heroes are basically glorified police officers and first responders, yet they're still encouraged to uphold the at times empty aesthetics of big powers and big fights by the culture, the advertising, and the general self-righteousness of the justice system. They're symbols of justice and hope, and that carries responsibilities with it, too.

But a lot of heroes don't uphold the systemic or symbolic responsibilities outside of what's necessary to sign their paychecks. You've got outliers like Mirko, who's got this incredible spirit that goes so far beyond just doing a job, and there are cases like Death Arms where he thought it was just a job to him, but realized between quitting and saving the people caught in that crash during the current arc that something inside of him couldn't allow him to take the easy way out and ignore people who are in need of rescue.

Not to mention that this sort of irresponsibility trickles down into the populace, where they're encouraged to ignore a bad situation since that's the job for heroes. It goes beyond public safety to a cancerous and obligatory apathy that Deku and his classmates are on the bleeding edge of pushing past.

When the series says "anyone can be a hero" or "how we all became the greatest heroes," I think it's not about getting superpowers and hitting purse-snatchers real hard. I think it's about radical empathy and making sure everyone does their part to not let anyone get left alone to suffer. We're all in this together, and a rising tide lifts all ships. That sort of thing.

what does "If a hero doesn't or won't save you and you don't somehow rise above your circumstances yourself then you're screwed...But don't you dare make it anybody else's problem!!" mean?

Basically:

That if a hero "doesn't" save you, in that there's no hero presently around and never finds you.

If a hero "won't" save you, due to the hero's circumstances or the person that needs help, an example being like how izuku didn't save Eri the first time they met, prioritizing the mission and other factors over helping the girl that clearly needed it (though he did acknowledge that later), another example is endeavor, seeing that touya was burning himself and not prioritizing getting him help over his hero work or his ambitions.

And the "rise above your own circumstances" part is, there are examples like shoji, izuku and shinso who had been dealt a bad hand in life and they did manage through effort and luck to become better and get to a better place.

The problem and flaw in that way of thinking though is that many people wouldn't be as strong or as lucky as they were in those circumstances, and some face even worst aspects of their quirk/life that they can't get out of without help, no matter how hard they try.

The last part "But don't make it anybody else's problem" is that those who refuse to just accept their circumstances, which would pretty much mean rolling over and suffering/dying, wind up fighting back and/or taking revenge against all the factors (hero society) that lead to their current suffering, and the heroes don't like that because it's their job and ideal to protect the innocent people in their society, even if those same innocent people would:

1. Discriminate against the heteromorphs to the point of extreme violence.

2. Abandon and hurt their own children if they're born with a villainous quirk, giving no real aid to them until they break.

3. Ignore suffering, bleeding children wandering alone in their streets.

The heroes either don't realize that this is happening or just accept it and keep fighting the villains anyway because it's the right thing to do, with few final Arc (ochako, deku, shoto) exceptions.

#my hero academia #boku no hero academia #kohei horikoshi

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yggdraseed · 23 days

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Reflecting on Ichigo vs. Grimmjow

This past week, we lost electricity and internet for a few days. In addition to engendering a much deeper appreciation for modern amenities in me, it led me to dust off a bunch of old Shonen Jump issues I bought at Kroger when I was a kid! Someday I'd like to collect a copy of every English monthly and weekly Shonen Jump anthology, but that's not the point of this post.

No, the point is that while thumbing through them, I encountered the last chapter of Ichigo's fight with Grimmjow, and I was struck by how much of the subtext and emotion I missed as a dumb teenager. That's not to say all teenagers are dumb, I don't think they are and I think the way that adults in general look down on and bully adolescents is stupid and wrong; I'm just saying I, myself, was a teenager once, and back then, I was dumb as hell.

Anywho, I remember really, really being struck by that flashback to when Grimmjow was still an Adjuchas and running with his pack that all eventually became his Numeros. When I was a teen, I don't think I had the mental framework to understand why, but now I do. The whole concept of the Arrancar is a hell of a lot more fascinating with all the things I've learned and opened myself up to since then, and looking with fresh eyes at this one chapter of Grimmjow and his interactions with his underlings and Ichigo was a real thrill.

It's interesting how, while Shinigami get stronger by cloaking themselves in Hollow powers, Hollows get stronger by becoming more like Shinigami. They tear off their masks, assume more-or-less human forms, and store their full Hollow form as zanpakuto for the renewal and empowerment of Resurrección. And I've started to reflect a lot on what monsters taking on humanoid form means for the story's themes.

When I look at the Espada, I see these once animalistic phantoms who exist only to consume and perpetuate their own existence who have now taken on human form and the very human search for meaning in some form. Yammy's a bad example of this like he is for fucking everything, but maybe the point is that he's such a big lug with so much power to throw around that he doesn't need to try to give his life meaning? But that's a reach.

Starting from Number 9 instead, we have Aaroniero, the only Gillian in the Espada. The Gillian are the first stage of Menos Granda, resulting from the hunger that defines all Hollows becoming so great that human souls no longer can satiate them, and so they cannibalize each other in a huge feeding frenzy that eventually produces a Gillian. As a result of smashing all these Hollow personalities together, they lose their individual identity, as seen with how Gillian all have the same appearance until they metamorphose into the next phase, an Adjuchas. When this happens, an individual identity asserts itself.

I don't believe that Adjuchas are actually representative of any one living human's former identity like non-Menos Hollow are. Rather, I think that an Adjuchas is a whole new identity that originates from that congealed mess of interfeeding and assimilation that produces a Gillian. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I don't think any of the Arrancar were once living humans, in that I think their experience as individuals begins at their emergence as Adjuchas.

Getting back to Aaroniero, he (they? it?) was probably just on the borderline between Gilian and Adjuchas. So you have this sort of very broad strokes, half-animal consciousness that's only starting to become self-aware again. Aaroniero only has a little more going on in his/their inner life than the primal desire all Hollows have to feed, and I think that bears out in how Aaroniero takes the identity of what's eaten and lives to eat. Aaroniero only has a little more than hunger, but is using that hunger as a basis for meaning and trying to create an identity by eating otthers and integrating them. Perhaps unfortunately, Aaroniero dies before completing self-actualization.

Szayel Aporro, the next rung on the ladder, is also defined by desire in a more broad sense. It's not only hunger, but also lust and more complicated forms of greed that drive him. He's a scientist, but in the sense that he's possessed of avarice for knowledge. And his Resurrección reflects a desire for power over others - over their bodies and over their fates. In that way, following his desires leads to meaning for him, to some sort of goal: acquiring knowledge and more complex, effective means to then acquire more knowledge and satisfy other desires.

Zommari is marked by fanatical love. Love is interesting in that it's simultaneously a desire and a virtue: to love someone or something is to desire them, but also to desire their wellbeing. It's a need to meet the needs of someone or something besides yourself. And yet, Zommari has this very immature, incomplete love: he makes all of these adulations towards love, but in the end, his Resurreción forces others to love him and serve him. He's unable to go outside of himself at this stage, but while he's beginning to see the big picture, it all still comes down to his own primal desire to have, to possess, even if not necessarily to consume.

I could keep going up the list, but I'm going to stop at Grimmjow for now because he's the one on my mind the most due to recency bias. He and his pack of Adjuchas ended up settling on a very different desire from any of the foregoing Arrancar: power. Not consumption, not possession, but growth and evolution. Obviously the latter is attained by and makes it easier to attain more of the former, but the point is that it's a very different relationship to the world and the self from what Aaroniero, Szayel Aporro, and Zommari have going on.

Grimmjow and his underlings have as their primary, guiding objective not to fill their stomachs or secure possessions, but to evolve further and realize their latent potential. This is no longer in the realm of meeting some primal need like hunger, security, or some other form of tangible, useful abundance. Self-improvement for its own sake is something very abstract and symbolic, something downright esoteric if you're only looking at biological utility. It's something almost unspeakably human, to do something not for the benefit of survival, but because you've decided it's meaningful.

That's Grimmjow and his pack. They've declared that strength has meaning even if it doesn't meet your needs and desires, and so they make sacrifices on the altar of strength. And it's why his subordinate Adjuchas are so distraught when they realize they can't go further. Strength is their meaning, their tether guiding them through the dark desert of existence, and now they've obtained all of it that they can. Not for lack of trying, but because they had a built-in limit. I think you could argue that wanting Grimmjow to eat them is partly a suicidal response to realizing they're at the end point of their chosen meaning and can't proceed further with it.

However, it's also fascinating that rather than just ending it themselves in some way, they all choose to offer themselves up to Grimmjow. They see him as the embodiment of strength and of the law of the jungle, the might makes right philosophy that gave their existence meaning and let them continue to try and live. And so they want to sacrifice themselves so that he can reach his full potential and go further beyond, to the frontiers of strength they know they can never reach. It's visceral, animalistic, and short-sighted, but you can't call it anything else than compassion. They choose to give up their needs and desires for the needs and desires of someone else.

And so when Grimmjow's always pushing himself to assert his pride and to get as strong as possible, to defeat anyone and everyone that he can, sure, it's his ego motivating him. However, it's also the fact that now, he's the one carrying the symbolic meaning of strength on his back for his Numeros. Getting stronger is no longer just his own meaning, but it's a responsibility he owes to his comrades who weren't able to get stronger with him. And that meaning keeps him moving forward on a collision force with greater challenges.

Like one Ichigo Kurosaki. When you look back at Ichigo's characterization in early Bleach, it starts to click why he makes this connection with Grimmjow. He sees himself in him - or maybe just a person he could have become if things went differently. Ichigo's kind of a punk who likes to fight and flex his muscles, but he became that way because his natural orange hair he inherited from his mom made him look like a delinquent and turned him into a lightning rod for conflict. Some people see a nail that sticks out and can't rest until they hammer it down, and Ichigo had to learn to fight and to enjoy fighting in order to protect himself and his self-respect. He could just do something as simple as dye his hair black, but then, that would be hiding something he inherited from his dead mother just to make life go a little smoother. It would be stepping on something important to himself just so he could take the easy way out.

Grimmjow is someone who finds meaning in conflict and strength for its own sake. Ichigo finds meaning in conflict and strength only to assert his own self-worth and, with time, to protect the friends who have gradually gathered around him. He's not just some punk slugging people for getting on his case over something as stupid as hair color, his strength represents a responsibility to the people he loves. And that element of strength as meaning, strength as a responsibility to others, ties him and Grimmjow to each other.

It's why Ichigo frustrates Grimmjow so much. He sees himself in Ichigo, but he also sees something not-himself. He sees someone who has pushed himself to get stronger, but someone who doesn't worship at the altar of strength like he does. Instead, he sees someone with this over-abundance of strength who doesn't assert it, doesn't make more sacrifices than necessary for it, but just uses it as a means to an end: that end being the safety of people he cares for.

This creates friction inside of Grimmjow because strength is his rock, his one singular meaning in a dark, barren, stupid world. For strength to just be the means to an end is hard to process. Yet in Ichigo, he starts to see what lies beyond strength for its own sake: a way that strength can form bonds and maintain them, act as the seedbed for new meanings without losing its meaning in itself.

When Ichigo pleads with Grimmjow, "We don't need to fight to the death. Isn't it enough for us to fight each other again and again?" It's him extending an olive branch. He doesn't want to see more death and destruction than necessary anymore, but he knows now that the world of Arrancar like Grimmjow is defined by those things. If he wants to end this conflict without killing an opponent he respects, then he has to meet Grimmjow in the middle. He has to make a commitment to get stronger and fight Grimmjow again, as many times as he wants, if it means Grimmjow will lay down his arms and stop trying to get to him through his friends.

Of course, Nnoitra has to show up and fuck it all up like he does most things he involves himself with. I've come to find Nnoitra an interesting character in his own right and might have more to say about him in the future, but for now, I'll say that I think the fact that Grimmjow ends up helping Ichigo and Co. during the final arc indicates he's accepted Ichigo's terms and is expanding his horizons beyond fighting and killing to grow and assert his strength and nothing else besides that.

He's definitely evolved his fashion sense. Did you see those boots? Faboo! To die for! Or, perhaps, to live for?

#bleach #grimmjow jaegerjaquez #ichigo kurosaki #tite kubo #bleach spoilers #existentialism #existentialism in my shonen manga yippee

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yggdraseed · 24 days

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5:30 AM Kurogiri Thoughts

I know that Horikoshi isn't entirely going this route, but I really like the idea of Kurogiri being treated as a separate person from Shirakumo. As in, Shirakumo is gone, and Kurogiri may have his body and a small sliver of his identity left, but he's not the same person. Having his own identity, his own destiny.

That's an idea I really like. Someone's identity dies, but their body becomes the host for something new. The "old them" is gone for good, and the person or entity or whatever residing in their body now is given a chance to live their own independent existence. It's kind of like what's vaguely implied to have happened to Tera at the end of Teen Titans, or sort of like what happens to Kite after being "reincarnated" as a Chimera Ant in Hunter X Hunter.

Y'know, I really hope that horror manga that Horikoshi said he wants to write becomes a playground for him to explore ideas like this that don't have room to grow inside of an old style Shonen. I'd love to get a closer look at an idea like this aspect to Kurogiri, or the themes and emotional beats with Toga, explored through a secondary or even lead character instead of through an antagonist or supporting role.

#my hero academia #boku no hero academia #toga himiko #himiko toga #kurogiri #oboro shirakumo #mha shirakumo #kohei horikoshi

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yggdraseed · 1 month

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Unassorted Toga Thoughts

Because God knows I haven't emitted enough of those on Tumblr or at people in my social circle over the past few months.

I really like how Toga fills the role of a femme fatale character like you see in a ton of comic books and manga, but only the broad strokes. The female villain who's got sexual overtones, like with Toga needing to strip to use her Quirk.

But in Toga's case, Horikoshi really went out of his way to avoid making her the typical sex bomb, supermodal villainess. She's got a very average body, usually covers herself up quite a bit when she isn't using Transform, and her appearance can be legitimately unsettling.

Like when you go for the "misunderstood monster" archetype in a female character, it's easy to write other characters demonizing them right down to their appearance, but then make them conventionally attractive. I like how Toga is only going to be charming to some people. For others, her big, tooth grins and the shadows under and around her eyes will make it harder to see her that way.

Because the whole point is that a person's worth isn't in their appearance or how neatly they conform. Having aspects to her appearance that are unsettling doesn't justify how Toga was treated by her parents, just like the blood fixation that came with her Quirk did not, on its own, make her a bad person - and certainly not deserving of abuse. I think that to have made Toga too easy on the eyes would have damaged the message, that things she was born with and can't control are not her fault. Some of her actions are, but those actions were informed by people mistreating her and distancing themselves from her over things she couldn't control before she ever started to act out in any way.

I also feel like the exhibitionist aspect is an expression of how Toga wants to be seen, wants to be understood in her entirety, and wants to be wanted just for what she is. No masks, no disguises.

I know it's easy to see it as justification for a horny writing decision, and on one level it is just Horikoshi's horny side bleeding through the page, but I think there is still a creative thought process behind it. That being a sort of psychological outlet for how badly Toga wants people to see the genuine her, wants to form an intimate connection, and I think baring herself like that specifically and her overbearing, inappropriate shows of affection in general are the result of her needs for a deeper connection and to be desired not being met until she can't moderate them in a healthy way anymore.

I also just like the way Toga can be an allegory for so many different things without being locked into any one thing. The way her Quirk and the way it influences how she perceives and interacts with other people and the world in general can really resonate for a neurodivergent reader just as much as it can for a lesbian or bi reader.

Even though I don't think this is the strongest connection, I'm trans and felt a little of my own experiences reflected back at me through how Toga feels so unwanted and wants so much for someone to love her. Plus, you know... the transformation thing.

I've also got a much more organized little essay in mind for how Toga's parents and society in general have gaslit her into believing she's something she's not - i.e., a bad person. I'll get around to that one sometime soon.

#toga himiko #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #character analysis #himiko toga

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yggdraseed · 4 months

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Women in Jujutsu Kaisen, Part 2: Sacrificial Lioness

This is the second part in a series of three posts. If you haven’t read the original, I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to do so, but it might provide some helpful context.

I’ll be the first to admit I may have buried the lead, in a way, with my first post on this subject. When people criticize GeGe Akutami’s portrayal of women, they don’t really target the Shibuya Incident and what came before. They level their criticisms at the events post-Shibuya, and so the events post-Shibuya are what I’ll be mainly talking about here.

I had intended to cover all of that in one post, but the first part of this analysis was already so long that about twenty very funny free-thinkers on Reddit all rolled their sleeves up and commented some variation of “Too long, won’t read.” It still cuts me like a knife, to this very day.

Now to everyone else, let’s review. Jujutsu Kaisen received a lot of praise early on for its portrayal of women, but over the duration of the manga’s run, there have been a very vocal segment of the fanbase who have problems with how that portrayal has developed into the current state of the story. Not only that, some even go so far as to say that GeGe didn’t just get worse at writing women, that GeGe secretly hates women, either because of conscious misogyny or passive, culturally-ingrained sexism that they just aren’t aware of.

So, I have quite a few problems with this take. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, of course, but when it goes from having differing interpretations of the text in front of us to people speculating about the moral character of the author… well, you need to really work for that one. It’s one thing to say “Oh, the author meant well, but this just wasn’t quite good enough” — but to say the author had malicious intent is a different can of worms entirely.

How does an author go from writing women with such care as I have illustrated in my first post analyzing the subject to suddenly just bumbling around, screwing everything up? Why would an author who’s a misogynist write such vibrant, strong-willed, even inspirational characters like Nobara and Maki? Did GeGe randomly decide they want to sabotage their own success for mysterious reasons? Did someone secretly replace GeGe with an evil robot clone of GeGe to fulfill some secret plan to ruin the whole manga? Well, maybe. Or maybe this manga isn’t what a lot of its readers initially thought it was.

Everything But the Text To try and explain what I think about all of this, it’s going to be necessary to discuss things outside of Jujutsu Kaisen’s story. We’ve already started asking questions about GeGe Akutami’s values as a person, so the conversation can’t just stay limited to the characters, worldbuilding, themes, and other elements specific just to what’s within the manga’s pages. I tried to avoid doing this as much as possible in my first post, because once you start examining influences on the writing or reading of a story from outside of the story itself, things get messy. People are complicated, and often a locked box; that goes for readers and writers alike. Nobody can peer inside of another person’s heart or mind, so it’s hard to say anything concrete. Suffice to say that I am not going to make a habit out of trying to read tea leaves and divine an author’s thoughts and values, and I encourage you to not make a habit out of it either. That being said, let’s dip our toes into it just this once, and proceed with caution.

Even when you look to author interviews, it’s difficult to say for sure if an author can recall every single thing that was consciously or unconsciously influencing them when designing a character or planning a story’s structure. On top of that, good author won’t give away twists or reveals planned for the story’s future. They want you to read the damn thing, after all, not use substitutes for reading it. For example: would GeGe really tell us if Nobara was dead or not if the intention was to have her be revealed to have survive?. Would GeGe tell us if she’s alive or dead if the intention was for it to be ambiguous? And beyond that, while this is just my own interpretation, GeGe seems to be very closed-lipped about what the story’s themes are so they don’t color the reader’s experience. It’s a story that doesn’t give you neatly arranged answers to every question, so of course GeGe doesn’t want to make the audience thing there’s a “correct” or “incorrect” way to interpret what characters say and do.

Of course, there’s a corollary to all this subjective interpretation talk. It’s one thing to look at a character’s actions and try to interpret what motivates those actions, what they’ll do in the future, and what ideas are being worked out through that character. It’s something very different to try and use the story like reading tea leaves, to act like you can divine the author’s personality and moral values outside of what they choose to give away.

…On the other hand, every author puts a little bit of themselves in what they write. Their beliefs, their tastes, their assumptions about other people and life in general. For instance, GeGe clearly has a taste for horror, Japanese mythology, Buddhism, martial arts movies, and pro wrestling. We can see this in the way that Jujutsu Kaisen doesn’t just borrow Buddhist imagery like the names of bodhisattvas or how they’re depicted in art, but in how the themes of the story are heavily informed by the way Buddhism emphasizes death and the relationship of the self to the whole. You can see GeGe’s love for martial arts movies in references to said movies, e.g., the references to The Raid in Yuji’s fight with Choso. And you can see GeGe likes pro wrestling or at least has respect for it by the way that Yuki’s technique is named Bom Ba Ye.

A slight tangent: I hate Viz. Viz has bungled the official English release for Jujutsu Kaisen in ways I didn’t think were possible. Clunky, out-of-character dialogue and outright mistranslations aside, they completely failed to get the name of Yuki’s technique across. See, in Shonen Jump’s publications and in other manga, there’s this thing called furigana. Most Japanese is written in kanji, but for readers who struggle with kanji, furigana are included as a postscript spelling out the same word in hiragana so it’s easier to read. However, lots of authors — including GeGe — will use furigana to add extra meanings in how you pronounce something. For another example within Jujutsu Kaisen, the name of Todo’s technique is spelled in kanji as 不義遊戯, which translates to “Immorality” or “Unjust Game.” But the furigana are ブギウギ, or Bugi Ugi — Boogie Woogie. When adapted to the anime, they default to the furigana, so we get the wonder and the majesty that is Boogie Woogie.

Yuki’s technique is the same. The kanji read 星の怒り, which can be translated in a few different ways. TCB went with “Fury of the Stars,” which if you ask me is a hell of a lot cooler than going wiith “Star Rage.” But once again, the furigana are read differently. ボンバイエ — Bom Ba Ye.

The term Bom Ba Ye originates from the championship match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, held in Zaire and popularly dubbed The Rumble in the Jungle. At one point the crowd began chanting “Ali, bombaye! Ali, bombaye!” Which more-or-less translates to “Ali, finish him! Ali, finish him!” It became heavily associated with Ali after that. And after a match they had with each other in Japan, Ali gave Antonio Inoki his blessing to use a variation on the bombaye chant for his ring entrance music. Given how Inoki passed away last year, it seems that GeGe intended this to be, in part, an homage to the architect of Japan’s pro wrestling scene. So yeah, fuck Viz.

Tangent over. So yes, there are ways to get a feel for an author’s sensibilities from what they write, but it’s not some telescope into their psyche. And unless someone can give me evidence that GeGe Akutami looks down on or hates women outside of hot takes about the outcome of certain fights in this manga, you are never going to convince me.

People try to assign metrics to this series to gauge GeGe’s seriousness about female characters, and those have never impressed me either. I already touched on this in my last post, but the outcome of a fight does not determine a character’s value. To step outside the pages of Jujutsu Kaisen once again, let’s look to other Shonen Jump luminaries for some helpful examples that might be easier to digest.

In Naruto, we have the iconic fight at the Valley of the End when Naruto tries to stop Sasuke from leaving the village to join Orochimaru. Naruto loses, but in the long run, Sasuke is proven wrong and a mountain of misfortune befalls him and the village as a result of his selfish, obsessive actions. He ultimately comes back to join the village in the final act, after having his assumptions about the world and the people around him disproven.

My point is that despite Shonen manga being so heavily focused on battle and getting stronger, there has always been a throughline where being strong by itself doesn’t make a character right. And Jujutsu Kaisen riffs on that by having lots of cases where strong characters are dethroned by intelligent tactics, teamwork, or simply a blind spot created by their own limited, strength-oriented view of the world. Strength and winning fights are not the sole criteria for a character’s value, and that’s not just true for Jujutsu Kaisen, but for more conventional Shonen as a whole.

The other metric I see people attempt to use is screentime. If one character gets 50 pages and another character gets 70 pages, that means GeGe values the character who got 70 pages more and the character who got 50 pages is a bum, is worthless to the story, and GeGe hates that character, is how the argument goes.

I hate math in general, but especially when people try to use it as a shortcut or a way around actually engaging with a story. This is like a more insidious version of the power levels problem some Shonen and their fan communities have, where people use something so arbitrary as the number of pages or panels a character appears in to evaluate their importance — both to their subjective experience, and from the perspective of the writer.

Let’s do what we did with strength and fight outcomes again.

In One Piece, Shanks is a character who almost never appears. Hundreds of chapters will go by with no insights into what Shanks is doing. But if you would say that Shanks doesn’t matter to the story of One Piece, you would be laughed out of the entire One Piece fan community for just how stupid that take is. Shanks is the reason the story of One Piece happened, because he saved Luffy’s life and entrusted him with a goal: “Take this straw hat, keep it safe for me, and return it to me when you’ve become a great pirate someday.” He doesn’t need to appear very often, he is never far from the reader’s mind and casts an immense shadow over the story.

Now, characters the author doesn’t consider important do often appear. One Piece has a number of examples, like Tilestone. Tilestone is as minor as minor characters get, in terms of hissignificance to the story and in terms of how many pages of that story they appear in. So, what’s the difference? Well, Tilestone is a gag character. He exists to bolster the number of colorful characters who appear in the story; worldbuilding and set dressing as a person. Other than that, he adds a bit of comedy and texture — Tilestone is incapable of speaking without yelling, and this creates friction with other characters and complicates things involving him. An equivalent in Jujutsu Kaisen could be the trio of curse users that Megumi, Itadori, and Ino fight in Shibuya. Minor, extremely minor characters that serve a bit role.

All Things Tsukumo Yuki I think it’s time to bring this fully back around to Jujutsu Kaisen. We’ve gotten some context, now, by looking at other Shonen Jump series and some clear cut examples of how a character’s value is not determined by win-loss ratios or page counts. We’ve seen how even in these goofy Japanese comics for teenage boys, there are things going on under the surface that aren’t immediately apparent if you only look at what characters say and do and what happens to them. There are ideas being worked on under the surface. Let’s take this understanding, and apply it to the most contentious fight in all of Jujutsu Kaisen and ground zero for arguments that GeGe can’t write or doesn’t respect women.

That’s right, no more hemming and hawing at ringside. We’re crossing the top rope and mixing it up with Yuki Tsukumo vs. Kenjaku. It’s Yukimania! Snap into a Slim Jim!

So, let’s start by pulling together a profile of Yuki purely off of what the story gives us. She’s one of the older active characters when you don’t include life spans extended by unnatural methods, as she was already an established sorcerer and making a name for herself when Geto and Gojo were on the verge of graduating from high school. Already considered a Special Grade, she was notorious for not accepting missions and for generally thumbing her nose at the jujutsu sorcery establishment.

Her only real involvement with the wider sorcery world was mentoring Aoi Todo, her only known student. Yuki’s habit of asking people their type — a personality test that lets her gather info on other sorcerers without them realizing it — unabashed confidence and sincerity, and general flair for theatrics all have rubbed off on him, and we can assume it’s her tutelage that moulded Todo into such a stand-out, being able to reach First Grade as a sorcerer despite still being a student at the Kyoto Jujutsu Technical School, not coming from a sorcery family, and not having an inherently powerful technique. Fun fact: Todo’s scar comes from one of his training sessions with her. She got around by motorcycle and spent a lot of time overseas, researching sorcery and the soul with the aim to completely overturn the established order: she wanted to break the deadlock between sorcerers, humans, and cursed spirits.

The conclusion Geto had reached about the futility of trying to exorcise curses when human emotion was constantly creating more was old news to her by the time of Hidden Inventory and Premature Death, and she was searching for a way to prevent cursed spirits from being born. After Toji’s death posed a dead end for erasing cursed energy from the human race completely, she gravitated to the idea of making all human beings sorcerers, thus giving them the control over their cursed energy that prevents sorcerers from creating cursed spirits. Now, while Geto had the idea of killing all non-sorcerers, Yuki never actually condoned this. But she didn’t shut Geto down for this thought of his, either. She told him that he was going to have to make a choice whether to keep going down that line of thought and where it would lead him, or to reject that line of thought entirely. This is something that I think people get confused on, so let's put a pin in it for now.

We learn during the events leading up to her fight with Kenjaku that Yuki is a former Star Plasma Vessel, and we see that she is openly hostile to Tengen. Once the fight itself unfolds, we learn that Yuki’s cursed technique is Bom Ba Ye — the ability to increase her virtual mass.

Virtual mass is a phenomenon where an object behaves as if it has more or less mass than it actually does. So, Yuki’s technique doesn’t cause a perceptible change in mass for her — but her surroundings will be affected like her mass is increased. This means she can still move and fight unburdened while adding the devastating force of a huge mass increase to her attacks. As part of a Binding Vow to improve the effect of Bom Ba Ye further, the only viable targets for this virtual mass increase are Yuki and her shikigami-cursed tool hybrid, Garuda. It also seems that, due to the fluctuations in virtual mass occurring around her, Yuki can’t be targeted by conceptual techniques like what Kenjaku’s most powerful cursed spirits use. Her virtual mass changes so much that it’s as if the definition of who and what “Tsukumo Yuki” is becomes subject to change, meaning that techniques that interact with concepts on a metaphysical level can’t affect her.

As for her personality, Yuki is very direct and straightforward. She doesn’t mince words or hide her intentions — if she likes you, she’ll tell you. If she wants you dead, she’ll tell you that, too. She’s a rebel, and you can see that in everything from her choice of transportation to how she talks to what she occupies herself with. Gojo wanted to reform jujutsu society, but Tsukumo wanted to tear it down entirely. She’s an ethical anarchist who wants to create true equality — either making it so everyone’s a sorcerer, or so nobody is a sorcerer — and cut right to the chase with fixing the problems in the world. There’s a sense of urgency that propels her to fight hard, live hard, and make sure the world changes in a profound way before another generation has to climb up through the muck that the old guard has burdened them with.

During the run-up to the fateful fight with Kenjaku, we see Yuki’s interactions with Tengen and Choso unfold. She takes a liking to Choso — he’s her type, after all. A hard-working guy who may not have a lot of charisma, but makes up for with dedication and a willingness to fight for what he believes in. Choso confides in her about the guilt he feels for inadvertently making his brothers fight each other to the death, breaking down crying at the fact that he not only sent Eso and Kechizu to die, but that he made Yuji, the baby brother they didn’t know they had, land the killing blow. We also see the animosity Yuki has for Tengen, and how she sympathizes with the other Star Plasma Vessels who merged with Tengen. It’s implied that she’s able to sense their presence and get some idea of their thoughts and emotions within Tengen, but she refuses to share that knowledge.

Once we get to the fight, Yuki puts Kenjaku through the wringer. Kenjaku has mostly skated by through every fight with a combination of Geto’s cursed technique and crafty tactics that always give them the advantage. Choso goes out first to gather information for Yuki before she tags in, and although he’s on the verge of death, he forces Kenjaku to use a technique besides Cursed Spirit Manipulation. Knowing now that one of Kenjaku’s saved up techniques is related to gravity, Yuki enters the fray. She ends up immediately putting pressure on Kenjaku that we haven’t seen anyone else come close to managing, one-shotting a Special Grade cursed spirit and breaking Kenjaku’s arm with one punch — a punch so strong that it breaks through a barrier put up by Tengen, the foremost expert on barriers. From there, Yuki and Kenjaku engage in mind games, close-quarters combat, and Choso even joins in another fine round of Jujumptsu Kaisen before Kenjaku calls one of Yuki’s bluffs, expands their domain, and chips away at her until Yuki is dealt a blow to the stomach, destroying her body’s ability to produce cursed energy. She has Tengen move Choso to safety, then sends her cursed technique out of control, increasing her density until she turns into a black hole. Between her willpower and Tengen’s use of barrier techniques, they restrict the black hole’s growth so that it loses momentum and fades. Kenjaku survives by revealing that the technique they retained from using Kaori Itadori as a host is actually Anti-Gravity System, that they’ve been using technique inversion, and that they managed to endure with Anti-Gravity System until the black hole dissipated. But before she died, Yuki left Kenjaku with these last words: “You control gravity, but aren’t you thinking too small!? Gravity, mass, time, it all boils down to…”

Aside from a brief appearance in Todo’s flashback and in the Hidden Inventory/Premature Death arcs covering Gojo’s past, showing up to save the students trapped by Uraume’s ice in Shibuya, and helping to set up the plan to combat the Culling Games, that’s all she wrote for Yuki’s appearances in the story. However, that’s not the end of her influence. We’ve got Choso carrying on her will by surviving because she protected him, we’ve got her research into the soul that Choso passed along to Itadori, and we’ve got those last words to Kenjaku. It all boils down to… what, exactly? Kenjaku is someone who prides themselves on these plans spanning centuries and these ambitious designs for a new form of cursed energy-based life, and yet, Yuki mocked them for still “thinking too small.” This might be one of those things that’s left up to interpretation, or it might be we’ll learn the rest of what Yuki said to Kenjaku at a pivotal moment — but setting her last words aside, she’s still got a lasting influence. Time will tell what will come of the things she’s left behind.

Subtext, More Than Words So, that’s the text. We’ve covered everything we can get out of just looking at the events of the story and the words and actions of the characters. But, that’s not the whole story. There’s still a lot of subtext left, and a huge part of Yuki’s story plays out entirely in subtext.

Let me pose a question. Why have Yuki fight Kenjaku? Matching up Choso to fight Kenjaku is pretty obvious: Kenjaku tortured and experimented on Choso’s mother, manipulated him and the other Death Paintings, and ultimately abandoned them. Classic revenge fight.

But while there isn’t a clear reason for Yuki to fight Kenjaku other than to guard Tengen on the surface, there’s a very interesting reason in the story’s subtext. Yuki is a former Star Plasma Vessel — as in, one of the candidates who didn’t merge with Tengen. This doesn’t seem to convey any special abilities onto her, but it does give her a very unique relationship with sorcerer society as a whole and Tengen specifically — which, when you really get down to it, are the same thing.

Tengen isn’t some secret traitor, and isn’t some malicious conservative presence. Tengen is the system, and is the passive stand-in for all the people who benefit from or participate in the system whether they realize it or not. It’s why Tengen doesn’t have a distinct human appearance. With her mastery of barriers, Tengen keeps the whole of jujutsu society functioning — and in order to prevent her from evolving to something beyond and potentially hostile to humanity, the Star Plasma Vessel merger is held every few hundred years. Young people, human beings, have their future and their unique, independent identity stolen in order to hold up the status quo. Used up like raw materials just so that the system doesn’t change or face any challenges to it.

Yuki narrowly avoided that fate, and you don’t need to squint very hard to see that having this potential outcome foisted onto her has heavily influenced her view on life. The point of her being a Star Plasma Vessel wasn’t to set up some sort of future plot point where the Star Plasma Vessel would be used to stop Kenjaku or something, it was to contextualize why she is an ethical anarchist. She came face to face with the possibility of being reduced to material so the system can keep going, and she wants to tear the system down to protect future Star Plasma Vessels from being used up like she almost was. It’s her self-imposed responsibility to the future. Not something forced onto her, but a fate and a mission she chose.

It’s why she doesn’t dissuade Geto directly when he proposes killing all non-sorcerers. She can’t in good conscience pursue a future of freedom and indivduality if she makes a young person’s choices for him. Remember, she’s well into adulthood while Geto is just late into his adolescence during their conversation together; to her, he’s still a kid. And so, she gives him her advice, and tells him he has to make his own decision at some point, then commit to it. It ended up being one of the contributing factors to Geto’s downfall, but the alternative was for Yuki to take his freedom of choice away by pressuring him to do what she thinks is right. The outcome wasn’t clear at the time, but what was clear was what Yuki’s personal ethics told her to tell him. It’s why she sympathizes with Choso. She probably went through a similar crisis as Choso, a feeling of being dehumanized: her by being told she might have to surrender her individual existence as a human being to merge with Tengen, Choso by being half-human, half-curse. Even though Choso wants to die for her, she tells him that he’s only died as a curse, and has Tengen protect him so he can live as a human. Yuki won’t allow someone to die to protect her. She won’t use other people to further her goals or escape the consequences of her choices.

It’s why, finally, she has her first and final fight with Kenjaku. Because when you get right down to it, the ultimate goal of the Culling Games — to merge the non-sorcerers of Japan with Tengen after she’s been allowed to evolve beyond humanity, all in order to create a new form of cursed energy-based life — is very similar to the way the Star Plasma Vessel merger was used to sustain the status quo through Tengen. They both rob human beings of life and agency in order to further the goals of an individual or small cadre who seek to benefit from it. Yuki isn’t fighting to protect Tengen, Yuki is fighting to protect the people of Japan from being consolidated into a single non-identity by Kenjaku’s experiment. Yuki is fighting to protect every non-sorcerer from having their individuality and, indeed, their lives stolen like hers almost was.

And in the end, she loses the fight to kill Kenjaku, but preserves her ideals even in death. If Black Hole hadn’t had its growth contained by her willpower and Tengen’s barriers, it would have killed Kenjaku, without a doubt. Anti-Gravity System would have eventually used up all of Kenjaku’s cursed energy, leaving them unprotected from the ravages of the singularity. But at the same time, it would have meant destroying the planet and all life on Earth — and killing Kenjaku at that great a cost would have been such a Pyrrhic victory that it might as well have not been a victory at all. So Yuki gave it her best shot, and bet on the people she had protected to finish the fight if her final gambit didn’t succeed.

If I may indulge in a pet theory, I suspect that Yuki is going to get the last laugh. I suspect that the ultimate downfall of Kenjaku’s plan will, either before or after the merger, be the conversion of every non-sorcerer in Japan into a sorcerer. Sorcerers can protect themselves from the merger while non-sorcerers can’t, and it would be the ultimate refutation of the way Kenjaku sneers at modern humans and sorcerers as weak and helpless. Give them all cursed techniques and see what fresh hell they create. Imagine Sasaki, Yuki, Saori, and all the non-sorcerer humans we’ve seen awakening innate techniques all at once, and what kind of chaos and new possibilities that would create. We’d get Yuki’s goal of a world without cursed spirits and Gojo’s vision of an age where the term “Special Grade” can’t do justice to the level of sorcerer running around. It would make the Golden Age of Sorcery in the Heian era look like a god damn clown college by comparison, if you gave nuclear physicists, philosophers, CEOs, stay-at-home moms, historians, mathematicians, bakery owners, NEET otaku, and every other shade of human being in Japan their own unique cursed technique to use, it would prove just how small Kenjaku was thinking by limiting their view point to just themselves and their ideals — even a thousand years of experiences wouldn’t prepare them for that.

But I digress. My point is that there is a lot more to Yuki than just what’s shown on the pages of the manga, and it’s a disservice to her to act like she had no point as a character. Did she only get one fight? Yes, and it’s one of the most bombastic, high octane fights in the series, packed with strategy, style, and the top shelf violent action GeGe is known for. Were her appearances limited? Yes, and each appearance makes the most efficient use of time possible to make her stand out, as well as giving the reader food for thought — if they’ll just try a taste. Did she die violently? Yes, and that’s not a problem.

Pain, Suffering, and What Lies Beyond Pain and Suffering Let’s step out of the series one more time. When left with no further recourse, people will often argue that the way women are written in Jujutsu Kaisen is bad and wrong because of the violent injuries or deaths they suffer. I’m here to tell you that this is the worst argument of all because of the alternative it implies. Saying this implies “Women can only fight if they win. Women shouldn’t die in manga, and if they do, they have to die pretty without any ugly injuries.”

Now there is absolutely a precedent for the suffering of women being used for cheap, borderline pornographic exploitation. One of the great problems of the Shonen genre is how the deaths of female characters are used purely to motivate the male main character by holding a woman hostage, injuring, killing, or doing even worse to her to force him to fight. One of the great problems of the horror genre is maiming women for cheap shock value. Given that Jujutsu Kaisen sits at the intersection of Shonen and horror, there’s good reason to be concerned about how often women die in Jujutsu Kaisen.

I’m sorry to once again harangue you about other manga in a post about Jujutsu Kaisen, but the Big Three of Shonen manga are all notorious for having subpar depictions of female characters. One Piece’s writing for female characters isn’t terrible, but their visual designs almost invariably fall into the sex bomb supermodel type or the fat and dumpy, borderline meanspirited parody of an old woman type with very, very little in-between. Bleach has the audacity to set up two arcs back-to-back where the goal of the entire arc is to rescue a damsel in distress. Naruto is notorious for sidelining female characters, marrying off 90% of them at the end, and making jokes out of the female characters who don’t get married. Sakura spends the whole series chasing after Sasuke, who has shown indifference at best and open animosity to her at worst, and her ultimate reward is getting married off to an absentee husband and father.

Once again, however, context is everything. The above examples are problematic for robbing women of agency and using them as tools to further a male character’s growth. People accuse Nobara’s death of being this, but when you look at the context, this isn’t the case at all. She isn’t taken hostage, she chooses to chase Mahito and secure the kill, because it’s what she does. She goes for the kill when she’s got her target on the ropes. Her dying doesn’t lead Yuji to get some power up like some people claim it does. It breaks him. Yuji ultimately ends up defeating Mahito, but people always leave out everything between Nobara’s death and his win. He breaks down, his soul crushed, the Black Flash that he’s used to such great effect being used on him by Mahito — a turnaround that not only crushes any feeling Yuji may have had of being special, but that also helps make Mahito’s case that he and Yuji are just the same. It’s only Todo’s intervention and Arata putting Nobara’s condition into stasis, thereby giving Yuji faint hope she might make it, that saves him from giving up and letting himself die. He ultimately defeats Mahito not because of Nobara’s death giving him some power-up, but because Mahito got too comfortable with winning and gave Yuji a reason to never stop seeking his destruction. Yuji wins the fight not because Nobara dying sent him into a quasi-Super Saiyan rage of power, but because he refused to let her death or Nanami’s death be meaningless, and that meaning gave him the enduring core of inner strength that a flimsy nihilist like Mahito lacks.

The Shonen genre is defined by battle — often violent battle — or other challenges that the characters have to overcome. Growth through adversity is the name of the game, and a bad Shonen will only have growth, never adversity. It’s why overpowered isekai protagonists often evoke so much disgust from the broader community of Shonen enthusiasts: they’re a vehicle for cheap, easy wish-fulfillment that asks for nothing in return.

In a series where fighting is the norm, if women aren’t put on the front lines of those defining battles, that immediately creates a sense of inequality. It carries the implication that the author believes women can’t fight, or shouldn’t fight. If women do fight, but always lose, then it implies the author believes women are weak and need men to protect them. If women fight, but always win, on the other hand, then they don’t have a chance to face the same growth through adversity that makes their male counterparts interesting and fulfilling to watch. The best Shonen battle manga are so enjoyable because you get to see characters face challenges they’re not guaranteed to come out of victorious (or even alive), dig deep, and grow as people in order to overcome the adversity that they face. So, what do we get in Jujutsu Kaisen? Well, for one thing, we see Nobara facing a weak, but crafty cursed spirit early on. It takes a child as a hostage to manipulate her into not fighting it directly. This near failure on her part is not due to her being a woman, it’s explicitly due to her being from the countryside, where curses tend to be more animalistic and less inclined to strategy due to the lower population density and, thus, lower concentration of cursed energy. Nobara quickly learns from her mistake, and uses the cursed spirit’s severed arm (courtesy of Yuji) to kill it before it escapes. We see her get split off from the main trio twice: once in the juvenile detention center, once during the fight with the Fingerbearer and the Death Painting brothers. Both times, she doesn’t just let herself be taken captive, she immediately starts fighting. She’s got a mountain of dead cursed spirits underfoot before she runs out of nails in the first case, and in the second, she’s putting up so much of a fight that Eso tries to run away from her before Yuji and Kechizu show up. She then proceeds to turn the whole two-on-two fight around by using Resonance to turn Eso’s technique against him and Kechizu, eventually forcing him to deactivate it.

And we see Yuki, allowed to fight and die for what she believes in. The sacrificial lioness who bared her fangs at injustice and chose to die for her ideals, never letting others go to the slaughter in her stead, never using them as stepping stones. Sexism doesn’t just come in the form of putting women down — it also comes in the form of sanitizing and idealizing the idea of a woman, putting her on a pedestal where she has no agency. A golden cage is still a cage, and nobody can truly be happy unless they have the freedom of choice to take risks, fail sometimes, and keep learning and growing through it all. To hand female characters easy victories without a challenge is as much of a disservice as to give them no victories at all. And a woman’s wish fulfillment power fantasy amounts to about as much as a man’s wish fulfillment power fantasy: everyone is entitled to wish things were easier, to have whatever they want, and to seek out stories where just that happens, but at the end of the day, it’s going to crumble when you’re met with the bittersweet milieu of reality. Personally, I am always going to be more interested in watching people fight, take risks, learn, self-actualize, and overcome challenges.

Jujutsu Kaisen’s appeal is that no victories come easily, the losses mount, the scars deepen, and the wounds never heal. But there’s meaning in fighting even if you lose, and the more bitter the failures you face along the way, the sweeter victory will taste if you get there. It would be disingenous if GeGe Akutami put so much effort into making the female characters self-driven, independent, and formidable, only to then leave them untested and hand them victories without subjecting them to the same adversity as the male characters. Willpower means nothing unless it’s tested, and success is meaningless unless the risk of failure is also a possibility.

Here we arrive at the end, on the far side of a post more than twice the length of my last one. I’m not going to apologize, but I am grateful to those of you who kept reading through all of that. I don’t have any grand concluding statements, because I think that this whole beast speaks for itself. Hopefully this will all be worth the investment of time and energy on my part and yours. My next and final post in this series is going to be much shorter, much more focused, and much more personal. Look forward to it!

#jujutsu kaisen #nobara kugisaki #yuki tsukumo #akutami gege #feminist literary analysis #shonen #thematic analysis #manga analysis #spoilers #jjk manga spoilers

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yggdraseed · 6 months

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Toga's Cat-like Traits

I hadn't thought much of it at first, but I saw some people talking about the ways Toga is similar to a cat a while ago, and it got me to thinking about it more. She does have a lot in common with cats, in her appearance as well as in personality and, I would say, even thematically with how she's written.

Her narrow golden eyes are definitely similar to cats, and her hair buns very vaguely resemble cat ears. The way she wears clothes with baggy sleeves halfway covering her hands, paired with how she'll sometimes sort of curl her palms around the cuffs of her sleeves, kind of remind me of cat paws. When she's smiling with her fangs fully displayed, it even resembles the happy expression cats will sometimes get when you're scritching the space between the ears. I noticed one of my cats had his eyes closed and his teeth showing in a really relaxed sort of look when I was doing that yesterday.

When it comes to her personality, Toga is simultaneously very affectionate and very contrary. She's kind of fickle, without a lot of impulse control; she gets very interested in people, and becomes pushy when she wants to get to know someone. The way she shows affection is alien to most people, and they take it as a show of aggression or malicious intent. Cats tend to show affection by physical proximity without actual contact, just sitting nearby, and things like play biting; which can make them seem aloof or hostile, respectively, when you're not used to it.

And I think that's very similar to what Toga's place in the story is about. She's very sincere in expressing her unique qualities, and because her form of love is unusual, people reject her out of hand. It's very much a "don't judge a book by its cover" situation, where Toga's ways of showing expression are strange and get this kneejerk fear reaction, but don't have any malice behind them.

#toga himiko #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #cats #character analysis

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yggdraseed · 7 months

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Women in Jujutsu Kaisen

Let’s get this out of the way first: if you’re reading this because you enjoy reading posts by people who hate Jujutsu Kaisen, you’re going to be disappointed. I actually like Jujutsu Kaisen a lot, I have a lot of positive things to say about it, and I’m going to be explaining my reasoning here. You should probably move on if you want trash talk. But if you have a negative view point that you’re nevertheless willing to reevaluate or recontextualize by looking at things from a new perspective, please read on.

A lot has been said about how women are written in Jujutsu Kaisen. A lot of good, and a lot of bad. I think a lot of the bad comes from how Jujutsu Kaisen was praised so early on for how it’s women were written, only for people to either not see it or have their expectations not be met due to events in Shibuya and the Culling Games. However, while I try to respect diversity of opinion, I feel like a lot of people aren’t really grasping why the way GeGe Akutami writes women was lauded. I think a people have lots of different ideas of what makes for a well-written female character, and don’t find what they’re looking for in Jujutsu Kaisen, thus they get angry and they post online about how GeGe Akutamisogyny isn’t going to beat “the allegations.”

I’ve never liked the justifications put forth for that argument. There’s a lot of subtext to how the female cast of Jujutsu Kaisen are written that can’t fit neatly into the simple world of page and panel counts or win-loss ratios. And, fortunately, there are tools for feminist literary analysis that I am going to employ in what will hopefully be a short trilogy of posts, starting here.

When I see people criticizing how women are written in Jujutsu Kaisen, I usually only see them using one point of interest: the outcome of a fight. If a female character doesn’t win a fight, then some people in the audience take that to mean that GeGe Akutami hates that character, hates women, and doesn’t want them to succeed — or some variation of that, perhaps less extreme.

This is a product of Jujutsu Kaisen being a Shonen, and thus being on the radar of Shonen fans who — let’s be honest — are not known widely for consuming anime or manga outside of the Shonen demographic. Shonen is heavily focused on conflict and competition as storytelling, it’s why the term “battle shonen” is used so prevalently. And Jujutsu Kaisen doesn’t try to deny its own Shonen heritage: it uses fights for storytelling all the time, sometimes even more than other Shonen seem to do.

I think this might also be a cultural thing. Anime and manga are written very differently from Western movies or comic books, with very different cultural background and different artistic sensibilities. However, that’s a topic that I’ll unpack another time, maybe not even in Part 2 or 3 of this post.

Point is, we need to step back and get some perspective. People who use the losses or deaths among the female cast as evidence that GeGe hates women, or sees women as inferior, or has some sort of passive, culturally-inherited sexism in their worldview are suffering from tunnel vision. You need to look at the story as a whole sometimes, not just the one subject in question.

Go back to the Goodwill Event, and the fight between Nobara and Momo. Their whole conversation is a huge part of why Jujutsu Kaisen was praised early on for how Akutami writes women, and I think the subtext of it really went over some people’s heads. It did mine, the first time around: to me, it just felt like a competent, if tired “girl power” moment for Nobara. But as I invested more time and thought into reading the series, and as I learned more since first viewing that scene, I started to realize what I wasn’t seeing in that scene.

Momo shares something in common with all of the Kyoto Students, Todo and Miwa being the exception. In addition to seemingly coming from a more-or-less established sorcerer pedigree, Momo shares the general pessimism that hangs over the Kyoto Students like a dark cloud. There’s this very morosely Japanese sense of “woe is me, but there’s nothing to be done” about Momo, Mai, Noritoshi, and Mechamaru, in one sense or another. These four are people who will complain about a problem, then just sit while it washes over them and batters them like a wave. They just accept the unfair hand they’re dealt in life, and while they don’t like it, they treat it as something no one can overcome. Furthermore, on some level, I think these four don’t necessarily want to overcome the misfortunes and injustices they face.

See, Momo pours her heart out at length about how hard it is being a woman and being a sorcerer. And the way she talks about it is a very different critique of society than you’d see in a lot of Shonen. She talks about how women are expected to be perfect: beautiful, graceful, exquisite, the model of femininity, while also keeping up with the macho “might makes right” sensibilities that dominate sorcery. In her words, “men have to be strong, women have to be perfect.”

This isn’t something that’s just being plucked out of thin air, this is a criticism of the girlboss culture that arose through the 2000s and 2010s up to now. Women are expected to battle sexism alone, in their own lives, by being exceptional: rather than reforming cultural structures that put women at a disadvantage to men, girlboss culture says women just need to always wear perfect makeup, always be fashionable, always work 2.5 times harder than men, and find time to raise children and have a side-hustle at the same time. Instead of fixing the problem, it’s telling women, “Just work harder. Just be better.” As if women haven’t been having to work harder for nothing in return for the past 50 years, holding down jobs that they have to go above and beyond to prove themselves in as compared to male coworkers for whom the job might as well be a guarantee by comparison, having a ceiling put on their promotion while men who didn’t put in as much work get to move up the company ladder, and frequently having to juggle having a child and taking care of housework in addition to the expectations of jobs that often don’t afford maternity leave. And then, on top of all of that, the expectation is then foisted on to have the time and energy to perfectly craft your hair, makeup, and outfit for the day, and if you miss a single step of the whole stupid dance, you’re seen as an underachiever. That’s girlboss culture, and that’s what Momo is indirectly criticizing when she laments the contradictory and unfair expectations women in the sorcery world have to uphold. They need to fight just as hard as the men, while wearing skirts and not getting a single scar on that pretty face.

(Just as an aside, I love the way this conversation comes about. Momo and Mai are pretty close to each other, to the point that it sometimes feels like nobody else in the Kyoto school likes or respects Mai like Momo does. And Momo targets Nobara with this whole speech because of the friction between Mai and Nobara, and because she wants to stand up for Mai. I like that element of both solidarity and conflict between women, about being a woman, and I’ve always gotten sapphic vibes from Momo and Mai, so I’m glad that she’s the one giving this whole speech and why she’s doing it. But I digress.)

And the thing is, she’s not wrong. Neither Nobara nor the story as an overall entity refutes anything she says. However, Nobara points out something else about Momo that she shares in common with the other Kyoto Students who were raised to be sorcerers: the way she treats her whole life like a job. Momo has internalized the culture she despises, and instead of trying to rebel, she just accepts all of it as “the way the world works.” She soldiers on, just as Noritoshi soldiers on with his family’s expectations, Mai soldiers on with her pain and feeling of being abanoned, and Mechamaru soldiers on with the isolation, unfairness, and general misery that comes with his Heavenly Pact. Soldiering on, as if soldiering on has inherent value when it leads nowhere and accomplishes nothing. Never addressing the problem, or trying to find a way around it; simply rolling that boulder up the hill, grumbling all the way. She and the other Kyoto Students have this sense of treating their own misfortune as a badge of honor. To them, they’re justified and validated because they have experienced more than their fair share of suffering. They’re always eager to flaunt the crosses they have to bear.

Momo treats being a woman as a curse. Funny how that ties into the rest of the narrative, huh?

For Nobara, being a woman is not some great burden she has to live with. Being a woman in general and being Nobara Kugisaki in particular is something she revels in, and it’s just the fault of everyone else if they think otherwise.

Let’s talk about Nobara, and let’s not reduce her to her death scene. When we meet Nobara, she’s immersing herself in the Tokyo way of life after moving from the countryside to the big city. She encounters a sleazy talent agency recruiter who’s pestering women on the street with his hand-rubbing, obviously nefarious ways… only for Nobara to stop him, turn him around, and say, “What about me?” He gets intimidated, tries to run, and she drags him back. From her perspective, he should be happy to have her, and the fact he isn’t means he’s ignorant of her beauty and wit and needs to be corrected. If he won’t convert to Kugisakism, then her charms are wasted on him, and he’s doomed to the dim world that is Nobaralessness. When she meets Yuji and Megumi, she introduces herself with a line that’s translated into English as, “I’m the only woman in your group.” But from what I’ve been able to gather, her line in Japanese is, “I’m the red mark.” The phrase “red mark” can mean “the one who’s different from the others” — like the one girl in a group of boys — or it can mean “the one who stands out.” So you can also read it as her saying, “I’m the stand-out of the group.” Nobara Kugisaki, everybody.

If you want to talk about how literary circles analyze how women are writing, let’s leave the topics of fight outcomes and feats to one side. One thing you immediately look for is motivation. What’s motivating a character? This is important for how female characters are written, and especially in Shonen, which revolves so much around characters with some goal or belief that the story pursues through fights and other forms of adversity.

Now poorly-written women will tend to be motivated by men. They’ll be attracted to a man, or trying to support or protect a man, or trying to find a man. This by itself isn’t a death sentence for a woman’s characterization, but it is a red flag. It’s also not as if women have to never interact with or think about men to be well-written. It’s not an on-off switch, a bad writing-good writing switch. It’s a meter, like Mahoraga steadily adapting to a technique. Just a little bit is fine, and can be even turned into good writing in capable hands. But if it becomes too prevalent and is never examined, then you get a situation where a story’s women are not permitted lives outside of being in a male character’s orbit.

How do we gauge this? Well, there are lots of ways, but one of the more well-known and simple techniques is the Bechdel test. The name is derived from Alison Bechdel, feminist author who penned such classics as Dykes to Watch Out For. Bechdel proposed a simple litmus test for how to tell an author’s seriousness about writing women, and it goes like this: 1.) Look for scenes where women talk to each other. 2.) In those scenes, check for how often they’re talking about things besides male characters.

This isn’t the only way to tell if women are written well or not, and some will say it isn’t even the best way, but it’s a good foot in the door to get us thinking about what divides well-written female characters from poorly-written female characters. I’m not going to go back and scan through the whole manga just yet, but let’s look at some examples.

— The aforementioned conversation between Nobara and Momo, where the two pit their different view of what it means to be a woman and a sorcerer against one another. — Maki and Nobara talking to each other after the encounter with Mai and Todo. Curious by meeting Maki’s sister, Nobara talks to Maki a bit about their upbringing. Having gained more insights into Maki’s past and personality, Nobara leans on her and tells her how much she respects her. — Miwa and Mai discussing the upcoming Goodwill Event in a flashback. Mai tells Miwa that Maki is weak, which leaves Miwa unprepared for their fight. — Maki and Mai arguing and coming to terms with what drove them apart. Mai just wanted a peaceful life with Maki, but Maki couldn’t be happy and authentic with herself if she just left things the way they were. She was forced to choose between herself and Mai, and Maki chose herself, knowing that Mai would suffer and that she’d shoulder some of the guilt for that.

This indicates that GeGe found it important to divorce the identities of the female characters from male characters. And this holds true in what drives and motivates the female cast.

Nobara is motivated by her own goals. She hates the countryside, and she loves the city; becoming a sorcerer is a way she can make a lot of money, live in the city, and pursue the kind of lifestyle she values. She wants to be a true blue Tokyoite, wearing trendy clothes and eating crepes and taking selfies by the statue of Hachiko outside Shibuya Station. She’s not doing this to avenge her dead brother, she’s not doing this to find her father, she’s not searching for a strong man to sire strong children — yuck. Nobara has aesthetic values and strongly held beliefs, and becoming a sorcerer lets her pursue those values and beliefs.

And if you really want to analyze the action side of Jujutsu Kaisen as an indicator for how GeGe feels about female characters, consider how Nobara takes to sorcery like a fish to water. Both Megumi and Yuji have their own internal dilemmas with being a sorcerer, but not Nobara. In a series where mindset is so important, Nobara has the mindset. Uro describes the model sorcerer as having “no concern for others and an overwhelming sense of self.” There is no one with a more overwhelming sense of self than Nobara. She’s loud, opinionated, loves to argue, flaunts herself, and demands other people give her more than what they think she’s due. She’s narcissistic, but that faith in herself makes her mentally strong.

She lacks experience, but even then, she learns and grows rapidly through the series. Due to running out of nails to fend off cursed spirits during the first stretch of Fearsome Womb chapters, she invents Hairpin as a way to reuse nails she’s already launched and embedded in a surface. She manages to land a Black Flash during the tag team fight with Yuji, and it’s her oppressive use of Resonance on Eso and Kechizu that turns the tides — a tactic which required her to hammer nails into her own arm. She takes it on the chin and gets her brain rattled around in her skull during the fight with Haruta, but even while borderline unconscious and suffering from a concussion, she forces herself to keep him talking in hopes Nitta can escape and manages to get to her feet and keep fighting despite the total disorientation and inability to summon her strength. While she didn’t win the fight, she showed more fighting spirit than half of the male cast tends to, and I find it kind of gross that people will ignore all of that and mock someone who kept fighting against the odds. That’s like laughing at Mumen Rider when he’s hopelessly trying to fight Sea King even as his body is breaking. I don’t exactly see what about either case is so funny or worthy of ridicule.

Even in the showdown with Mahito, people always fixate on how she dies, but never consider what led to it. She crosses paths with Mahito, and even knowing from Yuji what he’s capable of, she goes in — partially because he hurt Yuji, her friend, and she wants to make him suffer for it. And her technique turns out to be a worst case scenario for Mahito. She’s hammering his clone with Resonance and sending the blowback to the original while he’s fighting Yuji, dividing his attention and weakening him. Her only mistake was chasing him down, and even then, this isn’t the story punishing her. It’s the story being consistent with who Nobara is. She’s got a dangerous enemy on the ropes, her pride is bruised after the fight with Haruta, and she has a chance to get vengeance on someone who’s hurt her friend while helping said friend in the process. If she hadn’t followed Mahito into the subway, then she wouldn’t be Nobara Kugisaki.

And in her final moments, Nobara achieves something that’s considered to be out of reach of most sorcerers. She dies content, with a smile on her face. Nobara may not have realized her potential to be a great sorcerer, but she got what she, personally, wanted. Sorcery was a means to an end, and she got to live the Tokyo life and meet interesting people that she considers her friends. She got to fill out that finite number of seats in her life, and even meet a few people who pulled up a chair when she didn’t expect it. In her words, “It wasn’t so bad.” Nobody else but Toji and Gojo have gotten to die this satisfied — Toji because Megumi had grown up free of the Zen’in curse, Gojo because he was authentic to himself right to the end and left it all on the field. Nobara was authentic to herself right to the end, and that’s worthy of high praise. If she is definitely dead and not coming back, then she managed to accomplish what it was she wanted before dying. Not many get that luxury in Jujutsu Kaisen. It hurts because I liked her and admired her and appreciate the way she was written, and her dying doesn’t make the value of her character disappear from the story entirely. It’s the character’s death, it’s everything that led to that death and what that death means to them and to those who are left behind. And if it’s manga that explore death, nobody does it better than GeGe Akutami.

Lots of people will point to an interview where GeGe said that Nobara was not originally considered part of the cast, and they’ll use that as evidence that secretly, GeGe’s a big stupid misogynist who hates women and likes killing them in stories and blah blah blah blah blah. You know, first of all, I doubt that the editor held a gun to GeGe’s head and said “Put in a female main character or die.” Secondly, if GeGe really didn’t care, Nobara would just be a two-dimensional copy of Sakura who dies in the first arc or two. GeGe would not have put in the effort to set her apart from other female leads, or given her so many stand-out moments, or given her such an interesting motivation and world view. In short, if GeGe didn’t want to write a female character, they’d do what Kishimoto did: write Sakura. But that comparison is a can of worms I’ll need to pry open another time.

To sum up for the time being, no, GeGe Akutami does not hate women. Losing a fight does not make a female character worthless, and does not indicate a disdain for them on the part of the author. I don’t know about you, but I don’t read Shonen just to see who punches harder. I want to see characters be challenged, sometimes fail, learn, grow, and overcome adversity — and it wouldn’t be adversity if all the characters I like win and survive easily. I love Kashimo and will continue to love Kashimo, and Kashimo being super ultra dead doesn’t change that.

Look out for Part 2, in which I’m going to unpack some really contentious stuff when it comes to challenges and female characters in Jujutsu Kaisen. We’re gonna talk about the concept of screen time, we’re gonna talk about subtext, we’re gonna talk about great expectations and the great unexpected in Jujutsu Kaisen, and we’re gonna talk more in-depth about the narrative outside the narrative of Jujutsu Kaisen in a vacuum. If your sense for danger is giving you a bad feeling about this, then it should be: we’re talking about that. Switch on your Anti-Gravity System, it’s going to get messy.

#jujutsu kaisen #literary analysis #analysis #jjk analysis #feminism #feminist literature #feminist literary analysis #nobara kugisaki #maki zenin #akutami gege

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yggdraseed · 7 months

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One of my favorite thing about Tite Kubo is how he names characters purely off of aesthetic and next to nothing else.

Giselle Gewelle is lowkey my favorite fictional character name just off of aesthetics. I love all the names of the Femritters, but especially hers and Meninas McAllon.

I get the feeling BG9 is a reference to a music player or something. Äs Nödt is such an unusual-sounding, but elegant and almost logical name, if that makes sense.

What the fuck is a Waccabrada? I don't know, but it's arguably the only halfway decent thing about PePe.

Kubo is very good at taking nonsense and made-up or mashed-together words and shaping them into something that sounds right even if it isn't.

It's a skill I admire and aspire to.

#bleach #tite kubo #giselle gewelle #meninas mcallon #bg9 #as nodt #pepe waccabrada #very convincing and artistic nonsense #my favorite kind

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yggdraseed · 7 months

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My Deal with Giselle Gewelle

So, let me preface this by saying that I'm trans. I'm not saying that to invalidate the feelings of other trans people, just to specify that mine isn't some outsider's perspective. There's also spoilers for Bleach: TYBW, but I'm guessing that there aren't a lot of interested parties left who don't know about this. You probably also know this goes into transphobia, necrophilia, and rape, but if you don't, uh... trigger warning! Reader beware, you're in for a scare!

Recently, an episode of Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War came out in which noted bitchy asshole who uses too much product Yumichika Ayasegawa misgendered darling, sweet murderous trans babygirl Giselle Gewelle. It's also implied that upon necromancing Bambietta's corpse, Giselle had sex with her, probably against her will. That's all pretty fucked up, and I want to talk about it.

I started my transition about ten years ago, and exposure to trans or gender non-conforming anime and manga characters in general went a long way towards me accepting I was trans. Looking back, Giselle was one of the most significant characters to me at that early stage. I've always loved her design, and she was the first legit trans character I ever really saw and resonated with in anime and manga.

Get this: there used to be this thing in Shonen Jump's manga line-up called the Big Three. The most influential, bestselling manga in the bunch. One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach. And you wanna know something? Bleach was the first one to have a trans woman character. We can debate whether or not Giselle was good representation, but you know what? At the time, the closest we ever got was Haku pulling the "Oh, by the way, I'm a boy" card in Naruto's first major arc back in the early 2000s and a constant bombardment of okama jokes in One Piece. Okama is a derogatory term for gay men and drag queens, and for a long time, Oda could not get enough of making jokes about big, hairy men in women's clothing.

Now there was also Alluka Zoldyck in Hunter X Hunter, but the vast stretches of time Hunter X Hunter spends on hiatus makes it unclear to me whether she or Giselle came first. But within the Big Three - a designation which doesn't mean much now, but meant a ton back then - Giselle was first. Hunter X Hunter was never quite considered part of the Big 3. But either way, I think Alluka is the better character in terms of how her being trans is written. She's cute, she's precious, she's perfect in every way, and I'll make you pay if you say a single bad thing about her.

Years and years later, Oda would go on to write Kikunojo and Yamato. I still have complicated thoughts about Yamato as trans rep, but Kiku is great trans rep for being a relatively minor character. Oda has also phased the okama jokes out of the story over time. Jujutsu Kaisen also has a subtle, but well-handled example of a trans woman in Kirara Hoshi. She doesn't get nearly enough time in the story, and her identity hasn't been explored yet, but I hope GeGe will unpack that before the story's conclusion.

I tell you all of that so you realize that even if Giselle could have been handled better, Kubo was the first of the Big 3 authors to even try to write a trans girl. Not a femboy, not an okama - a trans woman/girl. He also gave us Charlotte Cuulhorne, and while Charlotte's depiction flirts with being just an okama gag and nothing more, she's so fabulous and so positive in her outlook on life that I can't bring myself to be mad.

So let's look at Giselle as a character. She's very cute, with her big eyes and goofy, purposefully adorable mannerisms. None of the other Sternritter girls try to be cute in quite the way Giselle does. Meninas likes cute things, but doesn't act cute, and that's as close as it gets. Unlike the other Femritters, Giselle wears clothes that cover up as much as possible. Even Liltotto's outfit shows off her shoulders and thighs some; Giselle keeps her shoulders and neck completely covered by a baggy sweater, and her legs covered by tights. Kubo drew a swimsuit picture with the Bambis all together, and he opted to put Giselle in a swimsuit with a skirt. It's pretty apparent that Giselle has concerns about how she looks and covers up as much as she can out of dysphoria. As a card-carrying member of the big jacket-long pants-closed toe shoes gang, I can tell you that when you're not very progressed with your transition, it's like that.

I think you can also make the argument that part of why Giselle acts so cutesy is because of her insecurities and feeling like she has to make up for them by being extra, overtly feminine and adorable. It's like that.

There's not a doubt in my mind that Kubo intended for Giselle to be trans. But is she good trans rep? Probably not, but she might not be as bad as she's made out to be.

People who criticize how Giselle is depicted as a trans character have two or three go-to arguments. Three points of interest to say that she's being written in a transphobic way.

1.) Yumichika scopes her out as trans and misgenders her.

2.) Charlotte says she and Giselle have a lot in common.

3.) The most damning: what Giselle does to Bambietta.

So, I've never liked people using Yumichika as a litmus test for how Kubo feels about trans people. Let me explain something to you: Yumichika is a bitch, an asshole, and the consummate gadfly. One of his defining traits is his awful personality and his inability to resist saying cruel, petty things to others. He's awful to Charlotte and he's awful to GiGi, and he's pretty much awful to anyone besides Ikkaku and Kenpachi, but especially Charlotte and GiGi.

Yumichika is an allegory for a closeted gay man. He has this deep admiration, respect, loyalty, and arguably love for Kenpachi and Ikkaku that's led him to stay in the 11th Division even though it's not where his talents are best put to work. He's adept at kido and his zanpakuto is based in kido, but he refuses to use the former or reveal the latter to his squad because he doesn't want them to reject him. The 11th Division is the manly man squad, all testosterone and sweat and bulging muscles and... ahem. Sorry, I got a little carried away. It's all very erotic. Anyways, Yumichika wants to be close to the men with whom he shares a bond of emotion and martial loyalty alike, and he refuses to embrace his gifts because of it. He's afraid his friends in the boys' club will kick him out for having interests and inclinations that most of them look down on.

I think you can make the argument that Yumichika hates Charlotte and Giselle precisely because they're being true to themselves, meaning they've made a leap he hasn't yet. He's too scared of what might happen if he doesn't keep the lie going about his zanpakuto, and he resents Giselle and Charlotte because they overcame a similar fear of rejection. And he expresses that by rejecting their truth, i.e., misgendering them. This is the interpretation I like the best. It's a sad fact that lots of gay men, closeted or otherwise, refuse to accept trans women.

Charlotte says she and Giselle have a lot in common, and honestly, I don't think this is transphobic either. If you choose to read Charlotte as a trans woman who isn't stereotypically feminine, but is true to herself, then what she's stating is just a fact. She and Giselle may not look the same, and Giselle may have an easier time passing, but they're both trans women if you ask me. And I think Giselle reacting with discomfort isn't innaccurate, either. Charlotte's confidence is admirable in some ways, but I think it sets of Giselle's alarm bells that she's going to be outed and rejected. Lots of trans women - myself included - are haunted by this fear that we'll never pass, never be accepted, or will be incapable of retaining our desired presentation as we get older. It's like that.

So, that brings us to the Bambietta Incident. Not quite as wide-reaching as the Shibuya Incident, but about as traumatizing for some, apparently. Full disclosure, I don't believe any heinous acts should be censored from fiction. If it makes you uncomfortable or awakens traumatic memories, then I'm sympathetic to that, but I do not believe that the right answer is to sanitize every work of fiction of every immoral act that could have that effect. You know where your limits are, so don't count on authors to protect you. Most of them won't, and I think you're stronger and smarter and more able to navigate a world with fictitious depictions like that in it than you realize.

I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, Giselle probably sexually assaulted Bambi. And is that right of her to do? Fuck no, it isn't. But nobody's really debating if that's right or wrong. The problem is that if you look at it a certain way, this is just reinforcing the old, awful stereotype of trans women being predators in disguise. Lots of shitty writers have done that, and it sucks.

However, those depictions assume that trans women are predators, by definition. Or at least sexual deviants. We could go down the rabbit hole of how sexual deviancy has historically been defined by people who use sex as a form of control anyway, but I'm not well-read enough to do that and - well, you've seen how long this post is. Be honest, you wouldn't want me to even try.

The point is that a depiction like that assumes trans woman = deviant. I don't want to make that logical leap here, because that means you need to assume that Kubo wrote Giselle with the intention that she assaulted Bambi because she's trans. I'm not a mind reader, so I'm uncomfortable with acting like I can know Kubo's intentions. It's a bad look to us in the Western sphere of the anime fandom, but I'm not sure how Kubo saw it. He might have not realized how it would look until that chapter was out there and he couldn't undo it, but given the fact they kept it in the anime, he either probably doesn't see a problem with it or there were other rewrites he saw as more important to allocate his mental energies to. Writing Bleach burned this man out, so I'll cut him some slack if so.

My point is, I'm not sure if you can say for sure that the story intends you to believe that Giselle assaulted Bambi because she's trans. When you look at it, Kubo seems to have a more in-depth understanding of trans people than some of you might have first realized. And I mean, shit man, he gave her biology manipulation powers. Every trans girl's first pick for super powers is shapeshifting or some form of biology manipulation. He knows. He's onto us. He's familiar with our ways. The jig is up, girls.

Looking at the broader scope of the narrative, Bleach is littered with characters who perform heinous actions and are not just shoved out the "All Villains Die" airlock. Chief example being Mayuri. The man committed war crimes, experiments on human beings, turns his own subordinates into bombs, and is heavily implied to have performed some very sexual deeds to reconstitute his daughter Nemu after Szayel parasitized her. Yet he still saves the day multiple times and he isn't gotten rid of, because he's more useful to the side of overall good alive than dead. Bleach is one of very few series to have characters who perform heinous deeds and still be treated as humans, rather than reducing them to those deeds and nothing else.

Plus, nobody really treats it as an issue with Kubo's writing that Bambietta killed one of her own fellow Quincies in cold blood just to vent her frustrations. I think because it's sexual and because Giselle is trans, she ends up being the lightning rod when... let's be honest, compared to what some of the Shinigami have done, what Giselle did is kind of quaint. She even helps rescue Candice and I think Meninas after they're taken captive by Mayuri in the novels, and she's considering releasing Bambietta from her control.

Given what we've seen, I think it's less accurate to pick on Giselle and try to say she's a case of Kubo being transphobic, and more accurate to say that living in the Shadow Realm under Yhwach's cruel, exploitative regime has made all the Sternritters fucked up in their own unique, vibrant ways. And for that matter, Kubo never kills her off. He clearly likes her enough to want her to still be around after the end of the series.

When you look at how Kubo draws Giselle in the manga and in illustrations after the manga's conclusion, you can tell he enjoys himself when he's drawing her. He always lavishes her facial expressions with detail, and you can feel love radiating off the page. That's more than you can say for a lot of the Quincies. I think Kubo was overjoyed to not have to draw PePe and his Vollständig anymore.

So like, yeah, Giselle is my problematic fave transgender character. And I don't think she's even as problematic as people's kneejerk reactions are to think she is. If you disagree, I don't care, I don't value your opinion. Particularly if you're not trans. If you're an ally, then that's sweet and all, but never try to speak for trans people about depictions of trans characters. If you are trans and Giselle made you uncomfortable, then I'm sorry you feel that way.

#giselle gewelle #bleach #bleach tybw #tybw #tybw spoilers #bleach spoilers #transgender #problematic fave #if you misgender charlotte cuulhorne then god will take seven years off your life and make you go bald #fuck yumichika #but he still has a fresh style #giselle's little dance when she made dead boy dance party skeletons attack ichigo watered my crops and cleared my skin

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yggdraseed · 9 months

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Nothing pisses me off more than people who don't create art going on social media and shitting out uncharitable assumptions about an artist's character when updates aren't as fast as "fans" want them to be. Like people who accuse artists of being lazy, or only in it for the money.

If you're one of those people and you think someone gets into an art profession for the money, then you are so fucking stupid I'm shocked you can even remember to breathe, you drooling nematode. Fuck you. Nobody gets into art with money being their main motivator, you stupid, slimy toad. They get into art because something they want to express is important to them.

Like if you want to jump on social media and bitch about it, how about we all string you up for not posting your own art? Why aren't you going out there and pumping out 20 pages a day, if you're so willing to attack professionals for not updating frequently? Why don't you show us all what an artist who isn't lazy looks like?

It's because it's the easiest goddamn thing in the world to sit and bitch about something someone else is doing that you won't do yourself. If you're going to bitch and moan and not put your money where your mouth is, shut the fuck up, everything you say is worthless and nobody has enough time for your uninformed piss baby whining session. Eat shit, asshole, fall off your horse.

#angry #rant post #screaming into the void

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yggdraseed · 9 months

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Crime, Punishment, and Himiko Toga

I've seen a lot of people take umbrage with what they're erroneously claiming is a case of "Talk no Jutsu" with regards to how Uraraka approached the situation with Himiko. If you're one of those people, or have had conversations with those people that have left you with questions, this post is probably for you.

The whole thesis with HeroAca's villains is that "bad people" aren't born, they're made. People don't just roll out of bed one day, rub their hands together, and decide arbitrarily to hurt others. When a person steals or commits an act of violence, it is almost invariably because their needs aren't met and they believe they can't meet their needs any other way. This is the whole driving force behind the League of Villains: they're rejects, misfits, survivors of trauma, and turned to crime because society didn't leave them another way. Or at least, the people around them made them feel like society wouldn't.

With Toga, people will sometimes lean on the "psychopath" angle, akin to an insanity plea, or they'll appeal to it being a work of fiction and say you have to make concessions for that. I don't like either of these arguments because they don't really demonstrate an understanding of what Toga's arc is about.

First of all, Toga isn't a psychopath. She wasn't born with some mental defect that made her kill. In fact, outside of the way that her Quirk meant she needs to drink blood in order to process her love for other people, she seems like her mental state was perfectly normal and healthy as a child. She seemed curious, interested in others, caring for others - one of the flashbacks has dialogue about her parents yelling at her for drinking her friend's blood, and she replies that she was trying to kiss it better. Implying her friend probably cut her finger and Toga began to suck the blood only after.

But instead of finding a way to translate that compulsion towards blood into a healthy form of interacting with others, Toga's parents rejected her, treated her with disgust, and forced her to repress her feelings. It's only after years and years of being raised like this that Toga snapped, drank the blood of that boy she liked, and ran away.

Two things to note here. First of all, Toga would almost certainly have not ended up on this path if her parents had properly taking care of her. Telling a child not to smile, telling a child she's not human - can you even begin to imagine how damaging that is? She's made to feel like her love is wrong, that she's a monster and will never be loved or be able to express her love properly. Her parents doomed her; they made her feel like damaged goods without any hope of repair. When you see Toga crying while drinking her crush's blood, it's because she's lost all hope of being loved. She knows what she's doing is wrong, but her heart and her desires can't just be smashed down and ignored anymore.

Secondly, think about all the times we've seen Toga cut or injure someone and/or drink their blood. A bird that was already injured. A friend who got hurt. Her crush. Ochako. Izuku. Camie. Rock Lock. The PLF grunts under Curious, and Curious herself. Twice. The heroes raiding the PLF base after Twice died. The various heroes whose blood had been spilt on the battlefield in the most recent chapters.

So the first two are self evident: the bird and the friend of hers, who she didn't injure herself, only drank their blood after. She took Ochako's blood, but other than a few knife swings at the start of the scuffle, she didn't try to do anymore harm than necessary. She was drawn to Deku after he'd been injured during the Summer Training Camp raid, and nabbed his blood after the License Exams without doing lethal harm to him. We know that she didn't kill Camie when she took her blood, and even released Camie after the License Exams. She didn't kill Rock Lock to impersonate him, either. Curious and her goon patrol were going to kill her if she didn't kill them. Twice was already dead and likely would have wanted to either leave his blood to her or would have given it willingly if he'd survived. She attacked the heroes invading the PLF base only after Twice had died; both because she was emotionally shattered and seeking revenge, and because this had proven to her that all the talk of heroes not killing, only apprehending no longer applied. She was in a death spiral of hopelessness, pain, and rage when she was using Sad Man's Death Parade, and most of the heroes whose blood she took had already been injured anyway.

Even when it comes to the guy she had a crush on, we never see her actually injure him. We only hear second-hand accounts of classmates who say she did. And her parents are clearly untrustworthy as they immediately assume the worst of her. This sets up a precedent that people assume she'll be violent if she doesn't get her way. However, when we actually get her side of the story or see her actions for ourselves, Toga always opts to take blood non-lethally and only fights to kill if she thinks she'll be killed or has lost control due to a traumatic circumstance. I wouldn't be shocked if the boy she liked - who we see getting into a fight once or twice - actually got hurt in a fight and she drank his blood after. Possibly even a fight he got into to stand up for her. Remember that blood and love go hand-in-hand for Toga. Maybe the reason she drank his blood that time on that day was because he got into a fight for her sake and her love became too much to repress. Speculation, know, but there's already a trend of Horikoshi elaborating on flashbacks with Toga to show details we weren't privy to before.

Context is crucial. You can look at an injury or death connected to someone's actions, and it's easy to just blame them. But what if they were defending themselves? What if they had blood on their hands because they were trying to staunch their wounds? A wife who kills her husband to get his money is not the same as a wife who kills her husband to escape a relationship of abuse and entrapment. Context is everything. Intention is everything. Even if you point to that corpse we see Toga with when she's introduced, ask yourself this: what's a grown man in a suit doing in an alleyway with a teenage girl on the run from her parents? Toga is a sensitive, crafty person who does what it takes to survive. Who's to say she didn't spot perverts who wanted to prey on a defenseless girl, lured them off to where no one would see, then killed them and took their money?

Even setting all that aside, you need to try to understand the state that Toga is in. She was forced to choose between being true to her feelings, or being accepted. This isn't just Toga lashing out, this is Toga acting on what she's been taught: that she's unlovable, and so it's either just selfishly follow her heart without ever being wanted, or live a lie and have a falsified version of her be accepted.

Quirks don't just affect the body, they affect the mind and heart. Drinking blood and transforming into people isn't just something Toga can do, it's a necessary part of her experiencing love and expressing love to others. Taking that away from her is like taking away the ability to hug or kiss someone you love. It's isolating, it's traumatizing, and it's ripping a part of her away and prohibiting her from exploring and validating it.

Let's play make believe for just a moment. Here's how things could play out: Toga walks into class, having had a letter about her Quirk be delivered to the school. The teacher sets time aside to explain how her Quirk works and how it affects her personality, and asks the other kids to be understanding to her. Some of them won't, but at least a few of them will. She grows up, and makes crushes, and finds a few who she can trust and be trusted by enough to ask them for blood, after explaining the context of her Quirk. She'll be rejected by some, but she'll probably find at least one boy or girl who'll accept her. And she grows up communicating with others about what makes her different and building ways to be loved while being true to herself.

If you're going to take a hard line and say "Nope, murder is murder," then that means Shigaraki, Dabi, and the rest of the League have to die. That means Hawk has to die, too; he killed Jin, not in self-defense, but to expedite the mission. Endeavor has to die, too; doesn't matter how hard he's worked to atone for his sins, die die die. Bakugo has to be punished, too. The whole class except for Jirou, Tsuyu, and... Aoyama, I think? Will need to be expelled since nobody stopped Izuku and friends from going to save Bakugo. While we're at it, why don't you punish All Might for putting Deku in danger even though it was what Deku dreamed of and wanted? How about you punish Deku like those pros were in chapter one for rushing to save Bakugo from the mud man?

Not only would that interpretation run counter to everything the story has done about these sorts of gray areas, it's just a depressing, cruel way to think of things. Crimes won't be undone if you kill the criminal. You gain nothing. Redemption can't be earned by dying, but it can be earned through living and trying to atone.

I don't know how many American or European fans are aware of this, but Japan has a 99.9% conviction rate. Generally speaking, the Japanese courts will deem you as guilty until proven innocent, and the justice system will punish you in really excessive ways even for minor offenses at times. I think part of Horikoshi's intentions are to push back against the myopic, self-righteous culture that gives rise to that kind of excessive desire to punish.

And Ochako never lets Toga off the hook for what she did. The story doesn't just give her a free pass. Ochako literally says that she can't just wipe Toga's crimes away. However, she also acknowledges that if she ignores what she's seen of the pain and hopelessness that led Toga to this point, then she'll have failed as a hero.

Heroes don't win when people die. They win when people live. If you want to ignore context and insist that an abused teenage girl needs to die, it doesn't matter what she did, you are the problem. You are the problem. You are Toga's parents, and you are the one who needs to learn to be a hero. Don't sit and squawk and act like you were ever a good enough person to pass judgment on other people. Reach out your god damn hand and start helping instead of expecting other people to do it for you. Give kindness, not cruelty, and the world will start to become a kinder place.

#toga himiko #himiko toga #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #kohei horikoshi #media analysis #spoilers #i guess

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