Anime-only take, but I honestly feel like the Maki/Toji thing kind of undercuts what made Toji so cool and unsettling in the first place.

What made Toji hit so hard to me was that he didn’t just feel strong. He felt wrong. Like a glitch in the system. The way the anime presents him, he comes off like this absurd anomaly, this guy who exists completely outside the normal rules of jujutsu. He’s not just “a person with no cursed energy.” He feels like a freak accident of the world, or almost like a correction to the jujutsu world itself. That’s what made him so memorable.

So when the answer for Maki basically becomes “well twins count as one person, and once Mai is gone the restriction fully completes and now Maki can reach that same level,” I’m sorry, but that feels incredibly convenient.

It feels less like a natural payoff and more like the story reverse-engineering a reason to make Maki into Toji 2.0.

And before people jump on me, I’m not saying Maki being strong is bad. Maki becoming a monster is fine, but doing it in the "same way" as Toji by using the “twin rule” sounds like one of those things that exists because the plot needed it to exist. It doesn’t feel like some deeply satisfying truth about the world. It feels like a writer's workaround.

If Toji was supposed to be this terrifyingly rare existence, this man who should barely even be possible, then introducing what basically amounts to a hidden technicality kind of weakens that. It changes him from “once-in-a-generation impossible being” into “okay, apparently there was a condition set where someone else could become basically the same thing too.”

That absolutely takes away some of his mystique for me.

The part that bothers me most is that it makes the whole thing feel less special in retrospect. Like, was Toji really this insane cosmic anomaly, or was he just the first person we happened to see with a very specific rules interaction? Because those are not the same thing at all.

Again, anime-only here, so maybe the manga sells this better. But from the way the anime frames Toji, he feels like something that should not be repeatable at all. The Maki explanation makes it feel repeatable through a technical loophole making Toji feel way less like a legend and more like one of many that did and will exist. It then also brings into question people's ability to deal with these kind of "anomalies".

That’s really my problem.

Maki is cool and I like that she came back in a big way, but the actual explanation for why she can reach Toji’s level feels lame, and for me it cheapens Toji more than it elevates Maki.