Read on MangaPlus
Shonen manga are generally not known for good endings because most mangaka tend to focus on the concepts, the characters and the journey rather than plan out the plot. This becomes especially difficult when you’re writing works that span decades and have to think over how to end your works. Hell, even accomplished, award winning authors have trouble with this. But to my memory, no manga has reached such heights and have fallen so far and failed so monumentally as Jujutsu Kaisen.
The beginnings of the manga were very tropey shonen fare. You have your orphaned high school kid who suddenly comes into great power and is initially guided by a mentor figure, he is introduced to a team of other high schoolers with whom he has to get along, they go on a few missions to protect the weak and defeat the enemies, and there’s an obligatory tournament arc even if it barely makes sense for the setting. And of course, there’s a Big Bad Boss with their nefarious schemes. But then, Jujutsu Kaisen starts taking a few darker turns and evolves into an honest exploration of this cutthroat world of sorcerers, with characters facing off against some fairly tough enemies and facing actual consequences for certain actions. All of this culminates into two spectacular and brutal arcs; the Hidden Inventory Arc which delves into the backstory for the mentor figure and how he came to be what he is, and the Shibuya Arc which appropriately set world ending stakes with the Big Bad Boss setting their plans in motion and a fair few beloved characters who were very well developed, facing consequences. The entire manga and anime community were elated at the quality with a fair few declaring this to be potentially one of the best shonen of all time with seemingly well-rounded female characters to boot.
Manga, and especially shonen manga, have deep problems with female characters. Usually there is at least one female character introduced as a love interest and portrayed very poorly with deeply sexualised physical characteristics and secondary to the main character, generally a boy, and following them around as a love interest. The manga Bleach is a particularly egregious example of this with the character Orihime Inoue relegated to being a damsel in distress for most of the runtime. Jujutsu Kaisen was initially lauded for having active women combatants and fighters within its roster. And spoiler alert, it basically ruined this reputation with the writing further on.
And this is the height from which Jujutsu Kaisen had its inglorious fall.
The problem with the mangaka, Akutame Gege, and their writing style is the tendency to focus on flashy fights and powers and power systems to the detriment of everything else. This means plots and character development take back seats in favour of ridiculously complicated abilities that require reams of pages to explain. One comparison is the manga Hunter x Hunter where characters have similarly ridiculous powers necessitating entire pages of text to try and establish the rules. The fights in HxH tend to become battles of wit and cleverness with the resourceful ones coming out on top. The stark difference is the powers in HxH are generally well rounded and thought out with established rules and methods. Jujutsu Kaisen uses these complicated rules to try to make the fights more interesting but unfortunately also devolves into pedestrian fisticuffs a lot of the time with the power system giving the characters plenty of outs like the Black Flashes replenishing cursed energy which is required to use their powers. But the worse sin is that the fights tend to become overly boring, more interested in explaining and theorising about powers and having them look flashy than properly resolving them with climaxes and denouements.
The worst issues of the ridiculous power scaling and the empty, convoluted fights begin to rear their ugly heads immediately after the Shibuya Arc when the Culling Games Arc begins. A country wide “Culling Game” with the actual arena set in the city of Tokyo is initiated, orchestrated by the Big Bad Boss. Numerous sorcerers and curses are brought together to let loose their worst natures and kill others to gain points. This is where the main cast decide to participate and face off against these numerous enemies but all of it feels boring and the pacing grinds to a halt. The reasons for participating in these games become mired in drawn out matches with more and more head-spinning powers and plots and a laundry list of throwaway uninteresting tertiary characters.
As if this wasn’t enough, the end of this arc leads to the final battle where almost every single surviving member of the “good guys” all gang up on one extremely powerful enemy… and this is one of the most stretched out finales of any manga I’ve read or any anime I’ve watched. Characters come in, have a flashback to explain to the reader what they’re supposed to do in the fights, do something inconsequential and then are taken out off-screen leaving space for the next character to come in and this repeats ad nauseam. The flashbacks not being enough, we need play-by-plays from characters and the narrator to explain what the hell is going on and why the fight does not resolve in any timely manner. It reminds one of a child bashing action figures together, making rules up on the fly and utterly unconcerned about making any sense and instead having fun with their imagination. But this isn’t a child we’re talking about. This is a “writer” of one of the most popular manga being paid to write this drivel. This big fight that takes up almost 45 chapters is suddenly ended in the span of two chapters. If that description sounds abrupt, then… yeah.
The Culling Games Arc and the final Arc take up HALF the manga which makes for such a huge chunk of it being an extremely dull affair and it ends with an entire final epilogue chapter dedicated to the characters doing a retrospective on why their plan was the only way it could have happened. This is such unbelievable self-indulgence to try and justify the poor writing and wastefulness when massive plot points are left dangling with no resolution or addressed in throwaway lines or characters unceremoniously completely ignored because the mangaka couldn’t be bothered to come up with a satisfactory ending. Earth shattering plot events like
For what was once lauded as one of the best running action shonen manga, to see it reduced to such a poor state at the very end with so many characters not being given their due and writing that goes down the gutter is a shame. In my personal opinion, there’s no salvaging this mess and I will not ever revisit or think about this series ever again other than to denounce the writing. Any time something shows promise and fails is always a disappointment. This is by no means an outright bad manga but it is certainly one of the worst endings I’ve ever experienced, simply due to the fact that I tend to drop things I find boring or bad long before they end. I respect the heights that Jujutsu Kaisen reaches but cannot bring myself to think fondly of the experience reading it anymore. This is a mediocre manga with an average start, an explosive middle and a dull and tedious end and endings are very important to me so I cannot think of this as anything more than a middling affair.
Comments