Jujutsu Kaisen

"Nah, I'd Win." -A man who famously did not win

Artwork for the show, with all the less important characters removed

Jujutsu Kaisen, also known as Gojo's Bizarre Adventure, is a Japanese manga about a group of high schoolers whose irresponsible teachers put them in various dangerous situations to get them killed. The manga is written and illustrated by Gregory the Dreadful, an individual that falls somewhere between Oda and Fujimoto on the weird scale.

Jujutsu Kaisen rapidly rose to popularity after the animated adaptation of Jujutsu Kaisen was produced by MAPPA studios in 2020, which was a stunning success for MAPPA financially and luckily didn't result in the studio taking on increasingly impossible workloads from here on out. The manga continued to garner traction following the animation of the prequel series Jujutsu Kaisen 0 and peaked in popularity in 2023 following the second season of the anime releasing in conjunction with the Gojo vs. Sukuna fight. The series concluded in September 2024 following an ending that makes Attack on Titan fans look greedy by comparison and makes the average audience member wonder how an author using Bleach as heavy inspiration for their series managed to make the same mistakes as Bleach did in its conclusion. In spite of this, a third season of the animated adaptation is set to release in 2026 with immense anticipation.

Premise

The story begins with Yuji Itadori, a fifteen year-old high schooler that is known for his underutilized athletic skills and interest in the occult. Since it's a shonen his parents have to be absent either literally or figuratively, so instead his grandfather raises him...until he dies in the first chapter. From then on he becomes increasingly oriented with the cursed spirit world after he gets fingered by Sukuna, an ancient sorcerer so powerful he chopped himself up hundreds of years ago so that he could come back to be just as much of a fucking hater towards his niece.

Characters

Primary protagonists

Satoru Gojo

Gojo's eyes are a little more ambitious than the rest of the visuals.

Despite not being the main character, Gojo comes first in this list because everyone who has ever watched the show likes him as their favorite character. Anyway, Gojo is a laid-back teacher with Saitama-level abilities. Gojo constantly hides his eyes because they are very pretty and the animation budget couldn't cover their being in frame for more than two seconds per episode. Unfortunately, due to the fact he is indeed not the main character while also being not the strongest anymore ‘The Strongest’, he suffers from the fact he must be completely useless in almost all situations, including one’s that are relevant to the plot. Gojo is also a raging homosexual friends with Suguru Geto, someone who like Gojo is completely useless throughout his existence and ironically enough did more with his corpse than he actually did with his life.

Gojo’s ability, known as “infinity”, has become so well-known that power-scalers now have to save a bottle of Jack Daniels for when someone comes to tell them Gojo low-diffs their favorite anime character. It should be noted that infinity only managed to kill a glorified potting plant and that one Pitbull your neighbor swears is actually the nicest thing ever, but most are too encapsulated with Gojo’s eyes to care anyways.

Yuji Itadori

The least main-character main character imaginable, for both the better and worse. Originally from no one, it is later revealed that he is Sukuna's nephew, which is to the srurp

Megumi Fushiguro

If and when, but never is.

Megumi Fushiguro, son of famed homeless man Toji Zenin, is a chronically useless character that only serves as an outlet for the author to release frustration on by constantly shitting on him. Despite being a total prodigy of the Zenin clan, the son of the best Heavenly Restriction user in the entire series, and having Gojo has his mentor, his only win was against someone that most people cannot name. He was also fingered by Sukuna.

Megumi is most remembered for his divine dogs that appear less effective than the NYPD’s K-9 unit and Mahoraga, who is the only part of Megumi that is relevant in the plot past the exposition arcs.

Nobara Kugisaki

(editor’s note: who is this? There is no Nobara Kugisaki, and she definitely doesn’t get retconned back into the story because Gege didn’t know how to write an ending…)

Yuta Okkotsu

"Do nothing, win" if it were an anime protagonist. The main character of Jujutsu Kaisen:0 re-introduced into the mainline series, Yuta is blessed with the most brokenly overpowered ability in the series...by being able to just copy other abilities with very minimal requirements. Truly riveting writing. Not only this, but he has his former six year-old girlfriend follow him around as a cursed spirit for his entire life that gives him his insane abilities, but not actually because he told her to fuck off at the end of his movie. Now he just has a corpse of her that still does the exact same shit but with a disadvantage that is never actually exploited by any of the opponents he fights...so yeah. Yuta also never lost a single fight in the series at any given point and would have even beat Sukuna like halfway through Shinjuku Showdown if not for Megumi being a total fucking bum. He also no-diffed Kenjaku by sneaking up on him after the entire narrative alluded to both a physical confrontation as well as a clash of ideologies, which only makes the whole "thousand-year schemer" part of Kenjaku feel like completely slightly dogshit writing. Truly the Gary Stu of our era.

Primary antagonists

Noritoshi Kamo (Kenjaku)

One of two primary antagonists of the series, Kenjaku is a sorcerer from over a thousand years ago that is a certified freak. For how horrible he is described as, the only major plot point about him that is brought up by fans of the series is that he took backshots from Yuji’s father and raised Yuji to birth, which wasn’t even really necessary in hindsight because his plans still didn’t need Sukuna anyways.

Kenjaku’s first apperance was at the start of the story, where he had stolen Suguru Geto’s corpse after he was defeated by Yuta in JJK0. While many believe he had stolen the corpse so that he could obtain Geto’s cursed technique as well as ambush Gojo at some point, the real reason was that he was convinced that if he showed up to Gojo’s doorstep again he would be able to get infinite backshots (just like Geto did). His true identity was not revealed until the Shibuya Arc however when he revealed to Gojo that Geto didn’t even like him like that fr, and then promptly sealed him in the Prison Realm.

Truly one of the biggest narrative cockblocks of all time.

Kenjaku’s primary goal was to enact the merger through the use of the Culling Games, which he enacted by doing BDSM on Mahito until he agreed extracting Mahito’s technique. Kenjaku later explains that his main goal with the Culling Games is to start a merger with all individuals that have cursed energy that would combine everyone in Japan into a single ‘thing’; what this would mean or what this would create if the merger was activated was unfortunately blocked by a cursed technique known as “Gege can’t do world-building”.

Ryomen Sukuna

A cursed spirit that is arguably the biggest hater in modern manga, Ryonmen Sukuna is the other antagonist that spans the entire duration of the manga. Introduced in the first chapter following Yuji getting fingered by Sukuna in the throat, Sukuna plays a fairly passive role in the majority of the manga until the final arc where Gege decided he didn't even want to write this shit anymore and just let him take over Megumi instead. Using a cursed technique that is way more complex than it should be considering it's just cutting shit in half, Sukuna is effectively able to beat every sorcerer he has ever encountered with little to no difficulty with the exception of Satoru Gojo.

Sukuna, like Kenjaku, is also from the distant past. While Kenjaku is significantly older than Sukuna, both are hundreds of years old and represent the pinnacle of sorcery in their own respective manner. Unlike Kenjaku however, Sukuna is more similar to Gojo than he is to Kenjaku due to his disinterested attitude towards the world as well as viewing Kenjaku as a morally bankrupt individual due to Kenjaku's various acts of rape and torture throughout his existence; this is definitely above the 'cannibal rapist' tier of moral bankruptcy apparently that Sukuna happily resides in.

Unlike Kenjaku, Sukuna also has actual friends, that being Uraume. Befriending them in his own time, Uraume has become a quintessential aspect of Sukuna's life, which for Sukuna means being a being a fat fuck and needing someone to cook and store food for him. While the nature of their relationship is somewhat ambiguous due to the lack of panels with the two, the fact that Uraume was male originally coinciding with the distinct possibility they are romantically involved somehow makes this the most gay aspect of the entire series (which is really something when you have half the fan-base shoving Gojo/Geto garbage down your throat).

Mahito

A cursed spirit born from mankind’s hatred of the Patriots’ dynasty in the 2010’s. Because of the amount of hatred said dynasty has accumulated, Mahito is given one of the most powerful abilities in the series known as Idle Transfiguration. Idle Transfiguration gives Mahito the ability to change being’s physical body at will, which unfortunately for Mahito only comes into use against characters that are completely useless anyways.

Mahito is considered a disaster curse like Jogo, Hanami, and Dagon. Unlike the others however, he isn’t stupid enough to fight a homeless man or the strongest characters in the series. Unfortunately this also means he needs to have a bullshit weakness to the main character so that he can get his ass beat, namely that the only people who can be affected by his ability are people who aren’t Patriots fans; Yuji being from the Boston Metropolitan area means that he is fully resistant to Mahito’s technique and is eventually able to defeat him in the end of the Shibuya Arc.

Secondary protagonists

Toge Inumaki

Tuna.

Aoi Todo

An in-series example that half of the people with cursed techniques just fucking suck at using them, Aoi Todo is the only useful student at Kyoto that doesn't immediately get murdered. Todo's technique, "Boogie Woogie", allows him to clap his ass-cheeks to switch the positions of objects with cursed energy; he is also the only person in the series to figure out that the main antagonists are totally helpless when it comes to planning beyond what's right in front of them and used his 530,000 IQ to assist in defeating all three main antagonists over the course of the plot.

Todo is hated by most other characters in the series to some extent due to his brash and unapologetic nature; in his first meeting of Yuji Itadori he challenges him to a fight to prove his worth. After Todo begins to fight someone that isn't from Kyoto however, Todo realizes that his entire school is filled with the equivalent of my ranked teammates in Call of Duty and immediately befriended him to prevent himself from getting killed off by the main antagonists.

Maki Zen’in

Gege's way of ensuring that Toji is still essentially in the plot for the entire duration of the series, Maki Zenin is a Heavenly Restriction user that attends Tokyo as a second year. Unlike her sister who would be better off just listening to Naoya from how useless she is, Maki is often held back in the series due to misogyny within the Zenin clan as well as the Zenin clan being ran by what seems like a combination of the people working at the DMV and Al-Qaeda. Like Toji, she completely lacks cursed energy; unlike Toji however she doesn't have a bum of a child to raise, so she isn't tarnished by having a disappointment directly related to her.

Maki is revealed to be weaker than Toji at first due to her being a twin sister of Mai; once Mai gets dunked on by her father and realizes she's not built for this, she allows herself to die in exchange for Maki to gain Mai's strength. This allows Maki to beat the AliExpress Toji allegations and go on a killing spree of the Zenin clan that makes Kill Bill look tame by comparison.

Unlike most of the other characters in the series, she is heavily implied to have romantic interests with Yuta Okkotsu. While the average audience member is often wondering how a kid that looks like he has shell-shock is dating someone like Maki, one must remind themselves that Yuta is also a total freak as well and canonically has the only kisses in the series with cursed spirits.

Nanami Kento

A man with a love for sandwiches and working an office job, this jujutsu sorcerer has a great deal of power. His powers include Tie-Wrapped-Around-Hand, Spotty Sword, and Overtime.

Secondary Antagonists

Jogo

A cursed spirit that was likely Gege’s self-insert since they’re constantly getting touched by Gojo and Sukuna, his only major contribution to the narrative was ensuring that the strongest are shown as the strongest by getting violated horribly every time he had to throw hands. While he is indeed a strong character in the story with his technique and even featuring a domain expansion, it didn’t matter because every fight he was in was Coughing Baby vs. Hydrogen Bomb where he was featured as the former. Jogo is also the reason that Nanami gets turned into Two Face, but really his only contribution otherwise was a yapping session about ‘morals’ and ‘life’, whatever that means.

Hanami

While many believe Hanami is a Cursed Spirit, they are actually a byproduct of the Fukishima Nuclear Accident of 2011 via radiation turning a tree rogue. Like Jogo, most of their appearance is relegated to being fodder for our protagonists so that they can improve. Unlike Jogo however, Hanami just fucking sucked at fighting and had extremely mediocre abilities so they don't even get glazed to hell and back by power-scalers. Hanami is actually so embarrassing at fighting that Yuji and Todo were able to dispact them prior to Yuji gaining a single technique, which kind of feels like someone losing an F1 race to someone who hasn't even gotten their license yet.

Suguru Geto

A former Jujutsu High Student along with Gojo Satoru, Geto is most known for having a biblical-level crashout following Toji bringing belt-to-ass to him in the Hidden Inventory Arc. While originally a collected, morally-upstanding individual that aimed to protect all with his jujitsu abilities, Geto's interaction with a single homeless man made him realize that maybe he wasn't that much of a fan of social welfare and immediately turned into a flagrant racist against the entirety of humankind. Due to Geto being a bum on the levels of Megumi Fushiguro however, he also lost to Yuta Okkotsu (who mind you was a novice at best at this point in time) in his only other narrative fight. Ironically enough Geto is also considered a special grade; this isn't because he can actually beat anyone else that even comes close to Gojo or Sukuna's power ('I have no domain, wallahi I'm finished'), but because Gojo was too busy gagging on it to deny him and therefore had the strongest always on his side.

Yorozu

Wow, Gege really just fucking hated Megumi. The incarnated sorcerer within Megumi's sister that was in a coma for uh...some period of time that manifested into someone from Sukuna's era. A chronic glazer of Sukuna to the point that she wanted to marry him, she unfortunately forgot that Sukuna is only into femboys and got violated by Ten Shadows. She apparently beat the Five Empty Generals of the Toh, which means absolutely fucking nothing since we don't even know who or what that is! Bravo Gege! Yorozu also falls into the catagory of characters that would oblierate the entire original cast barring Gojo and Sukuna and therefore had to die prior to Shinjuku, as Gege having to actually manipulate the plot in a meaningful manner to accommodate for more than three special grades at once was probably his personal hellscape.

Major arcs and plot points

Everything before Shibuya

Most of this is standard Shonen exposition that only exists to tell you who is important and why the abilities are what they are. You meet your apparent trio of Yuji, Megumi, and Nobara who complete a few missions together, which for all intents and purposes is only a trio when someone tries to justify Gege not rushing his character development since we have a combined total of maybe five non-fighting interactions between the three of them. You also are introduced to Gojo, who only looks like Kakashi...and has abilities of similar strength as Kakashi...and becomes an incredibly obvious figurative martyr like Kakashi....where was I again? Oh right, rushing the exposition. Following all of this they eventually do the classic 'major institution of ability users gets ambushed while training' arc, which is only really notable because of Todo calling Megumi gay and Yuji giving Todo enough psychic CTE to rival Antonio Brown and think he's his brother.

Hidden Inventory Arc

Not even going to hate in this section, this is Gege's best writing by far. This hateful bastard locked in for like six chapters and made one of the most complete, meaningful, and gutsy arcs of modern manga. You're introduced to Gojo and Geto back in their years of high school, but with Shoko and just enough homo-eroticism to cause flame-wars on the internet for the foreseeable future. Add to that Toji's simple-but-effective character design causing total chaos and resulting in Geto turning into an honorary KKK member and you got yourself the most popular shonen arc of the next five years.

Shibuya Incident Arc

This is the arc that everyone will tell you is the equivalent of twenty 9/11's happening all at once despite only like one relevant person dying. Shibuya was Gege's successful attempt at combining concise writing with gutsy twists that made this series as it is today. The main focus of the arc is the special-grade spirits attempting to remove Gojo from the equation so they can regain the balance over Jujutsu society, which were aided by Kenjaku; most people would call it hindsight that Gojo was going to bring belt against some naive-ass cursed spirits, but really it falls into foresight since Jogo already got shellacked in the exposition. Gojo almost prevents the entire rest of the story from unfolding by activating his domain, which makes it feel like you're watching YouTube Shorts is capable of completely disabling his opponents brains in mere seconds; unfortunately for him, Kenjaku pulls up in Geto's corpse and gives him flashbacks of the most intense backshots he's ever received in his life. This results in Gojo getting distracted enough to be sealed in the Prison Realm, which was definitely not a future MacGuffin to allow Gege to choose if Gojo ever comes back or not.

The Culling Game arc

Actually all filler; just skip chapters 143–220. During this arc 285 characters are introduced, coming to about five characters per chapter. With more convoluted abilities and explanations than Hirohiko Araki could ever dream of, this arc proves to be harder to read than Finnegans Wake. Megumi and Yuji play the teenager sex game "Seven Minutes in Heaven" and Sukuna takes the opportunity to stick Yuji's finger in Megumi's mouth, causing him to switch hosts. Contrary to popular belief this wasn't a strategic move, because even Sukuna has his limits, and Yuji has a seriously grotesque and vile mind. If Yuji ever acted out his sick fantasies, Sukuna would not want his name associated with such acts.

Reception

Despite it's numerous flaws in its later writing, Jujutsu Kaisen has become a cornerstone of modern manga and anime. In part due to leak culture causing any casual reader to be spoiled within the first nanosecond of them browsing any social media, the manga in its final year of release gained extreme traction even outside of traditional circles. While originally contained to the simple hype of chapter releases, brainrot culture found within subreddits such as r/jujutsufolk created an entire ecosystem of shitposting strictly dedicated towards putting characters on 'fraud watch' and prophesying Gojo's return to the manga. Now normally you would wonder how a bunch of dedicated fans would be convinced that a character that was bisected in a two-panel, detailed spread would come back, but something to keep in mind is that the main mantra of any Jujutsu Kaisen fan is that they cannot read their own source material.

Power-scaling

The powerscaling communities first victim.

Like most other shonen mangas, power-scaling has become a key facet of Jujutsu Kaisen. And just like other shonen mangas, the most insufferable humans beings you know will cosplay fundamentalist Christians to try and convince you that every single word in the text has no implied meaning and that this is actually just a coloring book with character stats in it. Some common victims of power-scaling in the series are Kashimo (who was victimized so bad he was turned into a femboy by the Jujutsu fanbase), Megumi for aforementioned potential man status, and Yuji for not actually beating anyone on his own other than the grasshopper from It's a Bug's Life.

Shipping wars

You all know the drill. When a shonen releases with romantically ambiguous characters, the Law of Gay Shipping will inevitably occur in the same way the entropy of the universe will gradually consume us all. In Jujutsu Kaisen, the narrative validity of each 'ship' can generally be ranked from "reasonable media interpretation" (Gojo and Geto) to "I respect your ability to stretch the narrative" (Yuji and Megumi) to finally "The words on the page are not just there for decoration" (Nobara and Maki). At least it's not as bad as My Hero Academia shipping wars though...

Spin-offs and collaborations

Jujustsu No Kaisen

On January 1st, 2025, Jujustsu No Kaisen was released by some random fuck on Twitter, which entails an alternate ending. Originally created as a fan-response to issues within the series, it has shown definitively that the average reader of manga cannot write better than a kindergartner and can’t draw better than a double-arm amputee.

Running On Empty Food Review adaptation

Popular Fortnite Streamer TheReportOfTheWeek reviewed deep-fried Sukuna's finger in 1799. He commented that it was a bit dry.