General Anime/Manga Discussion 16: In Another Thread With My Smartphone

[uncool]

So what exactly is it that everyone sees in Jujutsu Kaisen? Don't get me wrong, I find it enjoyable enough, but when people throw around words like "great", I expect a bit more than...fine. For all the hype about the fights, they seem to be all spectacle, no substance. Pretty lights and decent animation but nothing else to it; just bigger power flex on smaller power with no strategy or technique involved whatsoever.

Spoiler: Details

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Gojo in particular seems to be holding the series back in a big way. There's a reason shonen series either explicitly (like History's Mightiest Disciple Kenichi) or implicitly have a "masters shall not get involved in their student's fights" clause; it takes every single bit of tension out of any conflict when you know that Gojo is strong enough to beat anybody that's currently been introduced (I'm up to episode 8), and explicitly considers demonstrably powerful creatures (roughly half as strong as Sukuna, who is supposedly a threat when at full power, or at least we're supposed to believe so) "weak" and seemingly has the ability to teleport or at least super speed vast distances in a blink.

When you give a power scaling system based on twentieths of the main character's "power source"/series main villain and then immediately undercut it, it doesn't really do much to get the reader invested in fights.

My one hope at this point is that the bad guys actually succeed at "sealing" Gojo like they mentioned, which would fix several narrative issues, but would be disappointing if it removes him from the series entirely, since outside of the way he warps the entire series around himself he's quite a likeable character.

While I agree with you that that's the current state of the "battles" in JJK - decent, nothing really special - I personally am ok with it because it's generally using the time well to set up the characters and their personal conflicts, as well as the world and some of its peculiarities (and bizarreness). In some ways, you could see it as the show shortening the common "adversity/introduction arc" to lengthen the "training arc"; I expect little in the way of true climactic battles; more likely for now are small revelations as setups for later payoffs.

Spoiler: Episode 8

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For Gojo, they do have a kinda-implicit "Gojo's not here" thing going most of the time - he's kept busy by sorcerers being overstretched plus higher-up politics. It's not as strong as in most shounen, but he's rarely actually there.

I fully agree with you that it has ramped up way too fast; I was expecting Jougo to say 3, 4, maybe 5 if they had an amazing mid-cour fight. 8 or 9 is far too high, and the fight was nowhere near good enough to justify the rating.

I see JJK so far as kinda a mix between One Piece, Shokugeki no Soma and a perfectly generic "battle shounen"; a lot of emphasis is on the bizarreness of the characters and more importantly the world, with character development second and the battles themselves a close third.