Review of Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2
The visual presentation of the first episode was so strong, I was in awe of MAPPA’s balls of steel – they really expected me to pretend like I believe they’ll be able to keep up this level of production value for the rest of the series. Of course they didn’t. It was such obvious bait, I was almost amused. The cheek – the absolute cheek! Episode 1 felt as though it were directed by Akiyuki Shinbou. I cannot emphasize enough how fantastic it looked – fully built 3D environments that allowed for immersive camera movements, a Ghibli-esque amount of everchanging facial expressions, the whole 9 yards.It’s not even just a question of amazing sakuga for nerds on Sakuga Booru to masturbate over. Towards the end of the episode, there’s a shot of Gojo and Geto walking, literally just walking in the street, and it’s one of the most blessed pieces of animation ever made.
The season starts with a 5-episode long flashback arc about Gojo’s history as a Jujutsu High student. This is where you get to see his and Geto’s backstory. I have 3 things of note to mention about this arc.
Number one, it easily represents the best narrative writing in the entire franchise. Of the entirety of JJK, this is the only time the actual story captivated me. The whole Dumbledore & Grindelwald dynamic that Gojo and Geto had going on was an order of magnitude more interesting than any dynamic the main trio ever even hinted at having. Whether that’s to say that the Gojo’s past arc is just that good, or the rest of JJK’s story is just that bad, I’ll leave it up to you to decide.
Number 2, with the sole exception of the movie, these 5 episodes also have easily the highest quality of visual presentation in the franchise. There are isolated exceptions to this, such as episodes 16 and 17 of S2, hilariously named Thunderclap and Thunderclap, Part 2, and episode 17 of S1, but the visual presentation of the Gojo’s past arc is consistently spectacular throughout the entire nearly 2 hours of its runtime. Mind you, again, we’re not just talking about action sakuga, but also really smart camera movements and direction tricks. One scene in particular reminded me of the rotating camera PoV used during Jason Statham’s fight with Dwayne Johnson in (Fast and) Furious 7.
Number 3, like I already said in my essay about JJK 0, I will once more reiterate that I advise you to watch the Gojo’s past arc before the movie. To be sure, you should watch the movie before the rest of S2, because there are parts of the rest of S2 you will appreciate more that way, but definitely Gojo’s past before the movie, because you will appreciate the entire movie more that way. Certain objects and characters in the movie are callbacks to things featured in the past arc. Without having seen it first, the callbacks would mean nothing to you. Additionally, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, without knowing his backstory, Geto in the movie comes off as just an evil dude doing evil things for the sake of being evil. As it stands, his backstory made him my second favorite character in the franchise.
As for my #1 favorite, Fushiguro Touji is the GOAT. I wish we had a spin-off prequel anime about Megumi’s dad! Hmm, I feel a Boruto’s dad joke lurking in the shadows.
Also, I just realized this, but Gojo’s voice actor is the same as Toyohisa Shimazu’s from Drifters – Nakamura Yuuichi! It’s neither here, nor there, but to my mind, it’s a fun piece of trivia, ‘cause I love that show.
Look, I’ll come right out and say it. I stand corrected. My mind has been changed about the quality of JJK. Having now seen the movie and season 2, I’m sold. It hooked me. I still stand by my critique of S1, but I’ll give credit where credit is due. I get it now.
Something that really struck me about JJK, while watching the second ending, is that, whereas most shounen try to make up fictional worlds and settings for their action to take place in, JJK fully embraces its urban setting. Even Bleach fails to do this, an anime in which the protagonist, Ichigo, is not some magical guy living in a fantasy world, such as Naruto. He’s a regular dude living in the real world, our world. Still, it was pretty transparent to me that Kubo-sensei wanted to, as much as possible, escape the real world setting, and instead invent fictional settings to make the action feel cooler, more fantastical, such as the Soul Society, Hueco Mundo, etc.
In stark contrast to the Soul Reaper story, our Sorcerer story not only doesn’t reject the real world, but it is fairly evident to me that it outright loves it. The argument can be made that Gege-sensei settled for the real world setting out of a lack of creativity, which would make all of this just one big cope, and that's certainly possible, but I lean towards believing it was a deliberate decision, because rather than trying to distract you from its setting, the show simply doubles down on it and attempts to make it as integral and attractive a part of its aesthetic as possible. A friend recently shared an Instagram reel with me. Someone had made a montage lining up stills from JJK against the real life places they’re based on, and the result was beautiful in a way that I was not prepared for. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it’s an aesthetic that is very popular nowadays with the advent of lofi hip-hop, and as far as Gege-sensei is concerned, attention often equals love.
Though I will also say, I got the distinct impression that the reason S2 was so engaging and entertaining... is because none of the major events had anything to do directly with the main trio. The events they were involved in were either just straight up trash – just you wait until Yuuji’s locust fight – or if they were interesting, they were interesting because of the other characters involved.
Now, to be completely fair, Yuuji has 2 fights in S2 that were pretty amazing. One takes place midway through. I’ll be frank. It was a cool fight, but I honestly couldn’t hype myself up for it as much as I would have liked, because it had already been meaningfully spectacle crept by other, much cooler things that had happened earlier in the arc. Yuuji’s second fight, though, had everything it needed to succeed, a long-standing villain we’re itching to see get destroyed, eccentric sakuga, powerful emotional motivation, and it was the literal climax of the season – the big kahuna. However, this one fell flat for me because it was hopelessly spectacle crept into absolute oblivion by the aforementioned episodes 16 and 17.
A conversation that has been steadily advancing ever closer to the forefront of the shounen fandom in recent years has been that of the escalation problem. This has been an amorphous frustration for a long time now, with whispers here and there, but it was given a proper voice in 2017 by YouTuber Stephan Krosecz when he made the now iconic video, Shounen Anime’s Biggest Problem. The subject is fairly nuanced and there are loads of arguments going back and forth to consider – it would take me 10 pages to disambiguate it properly – but the essence of it is that there is an increasing exhaustion within the fandom regarding the ridiculous godlike power levels that most shounen eventually reach. There’s a particular comment that has become a slogan of sorts, given how much it has been repeated. “Naruto started out as a story about ninjas using subtlety and strategy to win fights, and now it’s all about reincarnated demigods and Madara throwing meteors around.” Chances are you’ve read some variation of that sentiment at least once in a random comment section somewhere. I have my own extensive thoughts on the topic of escalation, but this is neither the time, nor the place.
I want to zero in on a particular idea that has gained a lot of traction since YouTuber Garnt, formerly known as Gigguk, made a response video to that of Stephan Krosecz. In his video titled How to Fix Shonen Anime's Biggest Problem, among other things, Garnt argues that shounen series ought to introduce a power ceiling early on. That is to say, we ought to see a full-on fight between top tier characters somewhere close to the beginning of the story, so as to have some kind of realistic expectation of what an endgame fight would look like and how far the power escalation would ultimately go, hence, a power ceiling.
Personally, I find that to be an ill-conceived solution, and again, I have extensive thoughts as to why I believe it’s a bad idea, but for the purposes of this essay, I’ll boil them down to their most fundamental thesis. Unless you know exactly how long your story is going to run, and you’re confident you’ve already got it all figured out – but sometimes even if you do – the likelihood that you will violate that power ceiling by way of either spectacle creep, power creep, or both, is overwhelming. Point in case, the principal example Garnt gives in his video, the All Might vs. Nomu fight from season 1 of My Hero Academia, was immediately spectacle crept by the Deku vs. Todoroki fight barely 10 episodes later, and easily power crept by the Endeavor vs. High-End Nomu fight. The same can be said for every single other time the attempt is made to introduce a power ceiling, though, from Orochimaru vs. Hiruzen, to Ace vs. Blackbeard, and even Whitebeard’s feats in the Marineford arc are retroactively questionable. You get the point.
JJK S2 reveals an additional problem, however. If you abuse power ceiling displays, then even if you don’t power creep or spectacle creep said ceiling, or perhaps precisely because you don’t, you still end up killing your story, because everything thereafter feels unimpressive and underwhelming. The 2 fights depicted in episodes 16 and 17 are so massively spectacular, that they make everything else in the franchise look like dogshit by comparison. Whilst my personal favorite was the episode 16 fight – due to my categoric attraction to the specific aesthetic of it – episode 17’s fight was on a whole other level I had not seen in shounen for a good long while. It shits on anything from The Seven Deadly Sins in terms of scale, even the battles with the Gods, Escanor can kiss my ass, and it gives Bleach’s endgame fights a run for their money.
I want to be crystal clear on this point. I absolutely loved both of these fights. I’m not hating on them. They were amazing – some of the best and most exhilarating action sakuga I’ve seen in years. I’m simply saying that they made me not really give a shit about anything that happened afterwards in the show. I wanted to care about Yuuji’s finale fight. I did, I really did. I wanted to invest. I wanted to be impressed – I just wasn’t. We were coming off the back of 2, arguably 3 endgame fights. At that point, the conclusion just didn’t grip me anymore. Is this what it means to suffer from success? Think about the post-Toguro Yuu Yuu Hakusho villains and you’ll understand what I mean.
In a sense, it felt reminiscent of the Legion expansion’s effect on the rest of the World of Warcraft narrative, Battle for Azeroth’s in particular. You mean to tell me that after we’ve been to space, defeated the primary force of evil that we’ve been looking forward to facing off against for over 20 years - ever since Warcraft: Orcs & Humans - eradicated the Burning Legion, conquered their planet, vanquished the titan-soul of their homeworld, and imprisoned literally Satan forever, you now expect me to go back to giving a shit about red and blue politics? I think not.
Still, not all of the climactic fight's problems can be laid at the feet of the escalation. Let's not mince words about this. Mahito is just a straight up shit fucking villain. His design, his powers, and his personality do not fit together at all. He has the design of the Undertaker from Black Butler, the powers of Harry Potter's Voldemort (more or less, pasty-faced nimrod you can't kill because you can't destroy his soul), and the personality of Jared Leto's Joker. Compared to him – and I know I gush about him a lot, but he's just that good – Mashle's Abel is the gold standard villain all mangaka ought to aim for. By that I don't mean that they should make their villains be clones of him. I mean that they should aim to create characters where everything, from their faces, to their clothing, to their hair styles, to their voice actors, to their ideologies, to their motivations, all the way down to their powers, it should all flow and fit together so well, that you can tell exactly what these guys are about just by looking at them, for that is the essence of good character design. That is the essence of show, don't tell.
Granted, there is a time and place for characters with contrasting attributes, say, a character with a flamboyant design, but who is actually really shy and quiet. That sort of thing can work, but you gotta know what you're doing. Mahito is honestly just a fucking mess. He feels much more appropriate as the #1 henchman of the main bad guy, not the main bad guy himself. That is not to say that he didn't come off as a threat – he did. Unfortunately, his powers are legitimately just a fucking gimmick, and a dumb one at that. "Haha, I'm literally invincible and immune to anything and everything any of you throw at me because you can't affect my soul, but if I touch you even once, you're dead." Riveting. Rather than terrifyingly powerful, he came off as annoyingly powerful.
Whenever any of the good guys encountered him, instead of thinking "Oh, shit! He's up against Mahito! That good guy is gonna die!", I found myself thinking "Ugh... He's up against Mahito... That good guy is gonna die..." and there's a qualitative difference between those 2 reactions.
The de facto ending of the season is also questionable in and of itself. My friend described it as a certified “huh” ending. Manga connoisseurs would be able to address this more intelligently, but insofar as I am concerned, the last episode left me extremely ambivalent about the future of the series. Naturally, I can’t really talk about it without spoiling, but in a nutshell, actual geopolitics get brought into the mix, and I have no faith whatsoever that Akutami Gege-sensei can believably incorporate something as multifarious as realistic politics into his story. I’ll call a spade a spade. JJK lives and dies with its fights. The story is by far not the pièce de résistance, much in the same way that no one goes to McDonald’s for the salads. Gege-sensei is simply not good enough of a narrative writer to make this work. It's too complicated – too many moving parts. I’m basically expecting something on The God of High School’s level of an absurdly retarded geopolitical landscape. Who knows?
Perhaps S3 will prove me wrong – I look forward to it.
And that should be your main takeaway. In spite of my complaints, I am on tenterhooks looking forward to the next installment. I am, in fact, so hyped that I am seriously considering reading the manga to find out what happens next. Imagine that – me, the animation chauvinist!
Moreover, JJK starts doing something in S2 that is quite unusual for mainstream shounen. It kills off a bunch of important characters. Think Red Wedding and you’ll have roughly the right idea. The difference is, of course, that, unlike George R. R. Martin, Gege-sensei doesn’t kill anyone out of spite just to affirm his power over his own audience. I would only point out that stacking important deaths one after the other can cause audiences to go numb, and it lessens their impact, but then again, my perspective is probably colored by the fact that I had been spoiled. Granted, other series kill off a whole bunch of people in their final arcs, too, but this is nowhere near JJK’s final arc, and yet the message is clear. Anyone can die. I simply couldn’t help but admire Akutami’s guts.
As I think I’ve already amply explained, you are not to expect an overly compelling story from JJK, maybe with the exception of Gojo’s past, but not even there – not really. Point being, if you’re expecting a story arc on the level of a One Piece arc, or even Bleach’s Soul Society arc, then you will be disappointed. It’s just not that kind of show. It’s a show with relatively simple stories that lend themselves to loads of cool fights – and oh, are they ever cool.
I was a JJK hater at the end of S1, but this cured me. I have used it to cure other haters to great effect, too. As such, you could say that I have conducted a scientific experiment to test the sequel’s quality on more than just myself. The experiment was a success! Season 2 is objectively good/better. Watch it. You’d be doing yourself a disservice otherwise! Even if you disliked S1, chances are good to fair this will redeem the show for you, and if you already like S1, you will love this.
P.S.: MAPPA outsourced the animation of episode 7 to Trigger. They must have. There’s no shot they didn’t. You cannot change my mind.
P.S. II: Mei Mei is still my wife. You still can’t have her.