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Aside from all my complaining about the tragedy of JJK, I do want to say that Gege is absolutely incredible when it comes to constructing parallels between characters and their relationships. There’s Itadori and Geto down to the ingestion of curses/cursed items in order to gain their power, wanting to be the hero in a story that prevents them from doing so (i.e. wanting so badly to do good but their power is inherently destructive, causing them to unravel), and Gojo and Fushiguro are also a given, with their narratives deconstructing the typical trope of the “chosen one”.

[id: it’s two screenshot of jujutsu kaisen panels, the first of Sukuna grabbing his neck as Itadori takes his body back, and the second of Kenjaku grabbing his neck as Geto tries to take his body back. /end id]

[id: it’s a screenshot of Gojo and Fushiguro from jujutsu kaisen when they’re first meeting. Megumi is young, about six years old, and Gojo is his eighteen-year-old self with his hair down and sunglasses on his nose. /end id]

But then you look further and you get stuff like Getou and Nanami, who were both heavily impacted by the death of a close, mutual friend, and how they dealt with that. They both stray off their paths, but their response to their disillusionment is vastly different: Geto fully plunges into a delusional quest for justice (finding the twins was just the final straw that he needed) whereas Nanami does the opposite and runs away. And then there’s Toji vs Maki, where they’re both scorned despite their immense power and considered outcasts. Toji had something to hold him back from killing the entirety of the Zen’in clan (Megumi) but Maki had lost hers (her heart had been taken from her, after all).

[id: it’s two screenshots of the jujutsu kaisen manga. The first is of the panels where Maki and Toji are drawn in the same stances, and the second is of Naoya asking Maki whether she has a human heart, to which she replies “No… it was taken from me.” /end id]

There’s so much to unpack even down to the framework of the relationships that Gege sets up, like Satosugu versus Itafushi, and how it’s set up to a point where Fushiguro will likely be the one to either a) kill Itadori, or b) break the cycle that started with Geto and Gojo. You can even look at Nanami and Haibara vs Nanami and Itadori, and how Itadori is almost a reflection of Haibara, at least through the eyes of Nanami, and how Haibara’s death influenced how Nanami treated Itadori. I could ramble for ages about this, but honestly, the bottom line is it’s actually really impressive, especially for a shonen manga where the genre doesn’t typically focus on that sort of thing.

madara and obito in that cave

Y'all mind if I

disappear permanently

JUJUTSU KAISEN - SEASON 2

au where everything is the same except the joui 3 meet sakamoto when they’re 13~15 yo n they Suffer because he towers over them

Bleach TYBW

Season 1 (Episode 5)

Anime in 2019 »» Select Titles + Highlights

While catching up with the recent chapters, I got to this panel in chapter 533, and something about it made me pause. It’s the almost offhand way Katsura slips into an old memory of the war and discloses it to Kondo, offering it up like some sort of badge of friendship, as though implying, “You’re a comrade now, so I can tell you things about my comrades from before.”

And the memory itself paints such a vivid image: Gintoki as a tactician, burning his own ships, sacrificing whatever is necessary for the war effort; Sakamoto, in contrast, still in love with ships, still holding onto dreams that exist outside of war. You can see why Gintoki and Takasugi got along so well back then. You can also see, in that one phrase, the inclinations that would later lead Sakamoto to literally leave the planet and swap his burnt boats for spaceships.

The most significant thing about this panel, though, is what it says about Katsura. I can’t recall any other moment in this series when a member of the Joui talked about the war with someone who had not fought in it. But Katsura is able to offer up this recollection so easily. Once upon a time, yes, they fought a hopeless war and suffered catastrophic losses, but he also remembers the camaraderie and banter in the midst of that; he can face the past while also looking towards the future. In contrast, Gintoki bottles it up and can’t bring himself to talk about it. In contrast, Takasugi never even managed to leave the war zone. Out of Shouyou’s three students, Katsura ended up being the strongest emotionally.

Jogging around the shinobi nations with Take on Me