The Hater's Guide to Jujutsu Kaisen

My antipathy to shonen started with buying Dragonball Z VHS tapes with my brother just to have Goku and Vegeta growl at each other for 3 episodes. Wasted money. So when I bought or rented the first tapes of Yu Yu Hakusho or Rurouni Kenshin and figured out, "oh, this is one of those shows that goes on forever and nothing happens" I forcefully snuffed out my interest and moved on. So even today when I probably like the same amount of shonen as most other people, my lizard brain still considers it with complete distrust.

Jujutsu Kaisen first came to my attention with the anime. Seemingly horror themes, with business about eating monster fingers and what appeared to be a Yankee girl who fought with nails, it looked like it could potentially be interesting. Is it any good I asked?

"It's a shonen jump anime," I was told. "It's better than Demon Slayer."

So it was not worth watching. This was sufficient, and I moved on.

Chainsaw Man avoided most shonen problems by being short and to the point. Battles typically lasted around three chapters without complex exposition. Actually, long, explanatory monologues never happened at all, making what was happening in some arcs kind of a confusing puzzle to put together, the way Evangelion or FLCL used to work. It was a series you could reread to try and figure out. Best of all, it was horror. Bedridden after surgery and too woozy on painkillers to read the Book of the New Sun that I'd bought for myself, reading and rereading the simply written but nuanced Chainsaw Man was perfect. To my mind it synthesized Devilman and FLCL but surpassed both.

With the Chainsaw Man anime upcoming I dived into the series' online fan culture. Here Jujutsu Kaisen reared its head again. Fans of Chainsaw Man were typically also fans of JJK since they were both shonen jump horror series. But haters of Chainsaw Man also drew on JJK, this time as being the origin of things Chainsaw Man ripped off: a world where demons born from human emotions ran rampant, a trio of main characters including a dour dog summoner and a girl with a bad attitude, binding vows that when broken cause death, having to collect pieces of an impossibly strong for, and a mysterious overpowered character that works alongside the heroes. Adding to this authors Tatsuki Fujimoto and Gege Akutami crediting each other with inspiration, it sure seemed like JJK was the logical place for a Chainsaw Man fan to go.

I took a look at the manga and found the art style to be almost as off putting as Attack on Titan's. So I decided the anime was the way to go. I gradually watched the first 12 episodes, and they absolutely sucked. The main character, Yuji Itadori was a goody two shoes inspired by a single throwaway line his grandpa said before immediately dying. On top of this, he was impossibly strong for absolutely no reason. His mentor, Gojo, was even stronger and tediously smug. So we had two Isekai style self insert characters, and I knew these two were the popular ones. Itadori's cool occult club was immediately abandoned to take him to a jujutsu high school, a tediously shonen locale compared to the novel Public Safety setting of CSM.

Other characters didn't fare much better. Megumi was dour to the point of having no personality. Nobara was arrogant and rude. All of the second years were jerks except for a panda who was a talking panda for no reason. These were the beloved popular characters? Assholes to a one. And I have no problem with unlikable characters in a story but this is not how it was presented by fans at all. Worse still were the villains, Sukuna and Mahito, who seemed the joker edgelord type of villains that I've long been tired of seeing.

The structure of the series also seemed broken. A simple introductory battle was immediately followed by one in which the main character was killed. But then he came back to life and was fine. Then it was time for a school tournament? But before that the bad guys wanted to fight Gojo for some reason and he had convoluted magic powers that fans found thrilling. Then there was a long arc about a bullied kid who meets Mahito, who hangs out with monsters. When the kid's mom is killed due to a monster finger, he doesn't put together that his new monster buddy might be at fault but blames his school bully. It's frustratingly illogical.

What makes it more frustrating is that this poor character writing happens alongside the introduction of Nanami, a truly great character. A former day trader who returned to the curse fighting world after being disillusioned, he distrusts Gojo and hates the jujutsu world. He treats Itadori as a child and has an actual personality. He was the fully fleshed out character the series has offered me. Surely, if Jujutsu Kaisen had Nanami, better things could come.

The school bully arc ended with the bullied kid being killed and this being treated as a huge tragedy. Why hadn't an Occult Club member been used instead of a new random character? Sukuna and Mahito doubled down on their Joker personalities, making them even more insufferable. And coming up was a tournament arc with the Kyoto school, which would just bring back the sister with a gun and the guy into big butts that had been briefly introduced as the series' new crop of assholes.

Despite some good ideas, and a fun character like Nanami, there did not seem to be anything in this series for me. But it was incredibly frustrating, since the ideas could have been deployed better, and others clearly had influenced chainsaw man. Why did people like this series? Why did people consider this the greatest anime of all time? I googled answers. People loved the characters like Gojo (asshole) and the main trio (they were hardly on screen together!!) And they loved the battles and power system, things like domain expansion which could yield some cool visuals but seemed overrated as an actual fight technique.

So people loved the series with two massively overpowered Isekai style heroes, with battles where people were thrown through buildings Marvel-style, or were explained with tedious technobabble. (The mangaka had even made it a plot point that if you explained your power it just made it stronger.)

This was clearly a series designed to antagonize me. It was time to shut the book on Jujutsu Kaisen for good.