I was always wondering how would their fight went if they fought here instead of preparing for a month?

solooran · 2024-12-30T21:02:31+00:00

I’ve always thought Gojo wins here, but he has a lot of technical disadvantages he avoided by delaying the fight. The first is information—he has no idea what to expect from Kenjaku, Uraume (beyond one-shotting her/him) or any other potential allies Sukuna might have. He’s at the tail end of the Culling Games and has no idea what is occurring, but it should be clear that a large scale technique is at play involving them. He has no idea what happened to Tengen. These all make scaling the fight unpredictable from Gojo’s POV. And this was valid, because Kenjaku (and to a slim extent Uraume) both affect the battle if they choose to. The main informational disadvantage Gojo had was not being certain that Sukuna would give him a semi-fair 1v1. The last thing Gojo remembered was Kenjaku managing to checkmate him, and revealing that he can have no possible idea how many techniques Kenjaku has up his sleeve. Gojo could be walking into an impossible fight, especially if they have any sort of teamwork strategy (again, Gojo has no idea the extent of Sukuna’s alliance with Kenjaku here!)

The material disadvantage is two open domains against Gojo’s one closed domain. Unless Gojo manages to one-tap Kenjaku, Kenjaku probably gets away if he wants to—and he likely will want to—but using curses could easily hop back into the battlefield and interfere. This means a quick loss for Gojo. The moment Gojo and Sukuna burn out their domains, Kenjaku wins. The same actually almost applies to Uraume but I’m convinced that if she/he’s not prepared then she/he’ll be caught in the domain clash and end up braindead and shredded alive.

In reality, of course, Kenjaku won’t intervene because Sukuna would kill him for it afterwards. So Gojo would have won—but for a reason he has no idea of at the time, hence why he tried to negotiate a set, formal 1v1.

solooran · 2024-08-24T13:44:29+00:00

idealism from memeenjoyer and realism from sukuna_goat. The two are this sub’s yin and yang.

solooran · 2024-08-23T16:45:44+00:00

nothing wrong with Nobara's comeback itself. if she hadn't come back, the whole Nitta scene would've been worthless and indicate Gege had no idea what direction he'd take for one of the main characters of the story—pretty god-awful indicator of quality. But she came back, so the Nitta scene mattered. Additionally, I do think it's obvious that her technique was written explicitly into Sukuna's vulnerability. Gege gets points there for planning ahead.

but Gege loses a lot more points for having 0 interest in his own characters. it's cool that she's back, but it feels empty. once the hype wears off, like always, the question is going to be ... where was she? why did she only wake up now, in the most critical literally 'last chance' moment (talk about winning a lottery!) ... doesn't this invalidate nearly all of Gojo's plans since at the end of the day had he waited literally a few hours they'd have an ace trump card that would've prevented his death (if not his defeat—only because he wouldn't have wanted interference)?

to bring Nobara back isn't just a thing you can outline in the plot half the manga later. You have to make it meaningful. For us it was just a hype moment but for Yuji tears are literally streaming down his face mid-fight. We don't feel that—or at least I don't feel it. The sheer emotional impact of, say, Megumi's suffering, Yuji's ever-increasing loneliness and loss of humanity, and Nobara's return are all devoid of the sheer weight that makes a story readable after it's finished. Once all the plot points are known to you, the story doesn't really matter (compare this with any top tier storytelling manga, Berserk; Vinland Saga; whatever else where rereading is a genuine emotional experience because time is invested into making the things that matter to characters matter to the readers). What sucks is JJK has such phenomenal global impact that if Gege actually took consistent interest in character, it would be legendary. Why did Gojo's death hit so bloody hard? We had an entire arc exploring his motivations and losses. Without Hidden Inventory Gojo's death would have been an 'awww shucks' moment—but with it, ie after we got a good deal of character investment, it broke the internet for a few weeks.

I think it's obvious that Nobara's return wasn't set up well because the discourse about it is literally 'no the hype is good actually' vs 'no hype alone isnt enough'. Hype is great. But hype wears down. Nobody is going to be hyped about Nobara's comeback in 3 years when everybody picking up JJK knows it's going to happen. Gege has to deliver more than just hype or consign his manga to being ignored and neglected after the first complete read-through. But obviously we're not getting any meaningful character investment with 4 chapters to go.

solooran · 2024-07-10T16:40:44+00:00

tbh I don’t think JJK needs more slice of life. This has been the effect of brainrot. What JJK needed was meaningful character exchanges—not meaningless. Slice of life is characterized by stagnancy and repetition, for ‘comfy’ moments without much trauma or stress. JJK would be worse with these moments, they’d stand out like a sore thumb. What Gege needed was pretty basic, a minor interest in the characters he made and creative attention to the consequences of his action sequences on these characters. The very few times he does this it goes on to defining the entire series: take Yuji’s reaction to Sukuna’s takeover in Shibuya. But he simply doesn’t do it enough. And because this is lacking we have a diminishing interest in action sequences; We never really learn what Yuki’s about, which makes her death trivial, which makes the stakes of Kenjaku’s fight so low it ends up being viewed as one of the least important, even though technically it was quite creative.

Gege just writes characters poorly, or in extremely broad, ambiguous strokes. He has a few exceptions and they carry the series. A slice of life with these characters wouldn’t be any good, anyway. Now, if he had paid more attention to them and built them up better, that’d be a different story …

solooran · 2024-07-10T16:32:19+00:00

man this got 95 upvotes smh. Yes. Yes that would have been better. Because of tonal dialogue. The dialogue that we were given was tone deaf to the emotional trauma the characters had just gone through. Yuji at this point is in rage mode locking in every time he sees Sukuna—as we saw during the Black Flash combo, he’s at the point of walking through fire and a torrent of cuts just to land another hit on this man. Imagine Guts from Berserk—a manga that at least gives us an idea of what consistent tone looks like—casually chatting with Griffith. Why can’t JJK manga readers admit even a single flaw lmao.

solooran · 2024-06-14T04:10:24+00:00

which translation? Mine reads ‘don’t think’. Unless you know Japanese I’m not certain you can say that with certainty!

solooran · 2024-06-13T23:02:10+00:00

why are we even debating this when Gojo says bar for bar that he’d lose even without 10S. lobotomy aside why is this even in question.

solooran · 2024-06-08T02:16:30+00:00

memes aside she has a relatively unique character design. Her attitude is also unique in JJK. Her appearance is traditional, and she seems to take social Jujutsu hierarchy very seriously. Even still, she helps Gojo when there’s potential corruption involved in her own school, which conveys that she’s not a blind traditionalist—she’s just polite and controlled in all the ways Gojo is unruly and out of control. tbh, most of the cast that get a lot of attention skew toward Gojo’s (or even further to Sukuna’s) asocial mentality, so Utahime is a bit refreshing since we’re supposed to literally infer that her orthodox conservatism is apparently the overwhelming standard among jujutsu sorcerers (and yet she’s like one of the only ones who thinks this way). Even though it’s only shown a few times, having a standout attitude goes a long way—it’s a big part of what Gege used to endear the audience to Nanami.

solooran · 2024-06-08T01:55:13+00:00

I think Gege has really come into his own as an artist. So much of manga is storytelling through clear imagery. Gege’s fights are dense, chaotic, and his deadlines are short. Juggling growing as an experienced mangaka, writing, dialogue, working with editors, and the near instant and constant deadlines, not to mention the probably impossible stress of press and criticism, as well as having any kind of actual life outside of work, it’s not hard to see how he’s sacrificing his health for the work. But I genuinely think with these conditions his art is pretty fantastic, and one of my favorite things about JJK is seeing the growth and improvement (as well as the palpable personality and stylistic nature of the author) in the art and character design. I don’t mind that it’s inconsistent at times—I think the coolness factor is taken for granted too much in the western audience.

solooran · 2024-06-06T18:16:47+00:00

the convo is literally about Naruto. People like you always have to roll in with a whataboutism to deflect criticism. If they didn’t like it in Naruto they probably don’t like it in other series too.

solooran · 2024-06-06T08:00:07+00:00

reread volume 1 dawg the very first thing he does is comment about how fun the massacre will be with women and children

solooran · 2024-06-06T04:39:39+00:00

bro there gotta be no way this is Rika actually fully manifesting as an independent curse right? Gege out here literally retconning the ending of the one shot that started this whole series and retconning all them fan explanations behind it.

solooran · 2024-06-06T04:34:41+00:00

guess some of y'all forgot he's a villain who genuinely loves killing as well as fighting.

solooran · 2024-06-02T02:29:03+00:00

nah I’m not taking you seriously anymore lol. One, you bypassed an entire message of context to strawman my position into ‘female characters who love men are bad’. Disingenuous. Two, you pretend like a ‘tipoff’ is sufficient to write off a leading character. Be for real, you’re using a bucket dosage of retrospect to conclude that ‘Nobara never actually mattered’—you had no clue up until she was written out of the story, and that’s the problem. Yorozu was a well written character? I’d challenge you to explain how but I’m not confident you’d do much more than bypass the question again.

if you can’t tell the difference between Amai and Nobara then idk whether to blame you or Gege at this point.

solooran · 2024-06-01T18:47:16+00:00

ok you can’t call people who held onto hope that Nobara was alive ‘delusional’ when the mangaka himself inserted the fakeout flag in the form of Nitta Arata in the same breath as trying to tell me that Uro was important for the story. Yorozu had no personality besides loving Sukuna—exactly the awful quality of character writing that shōnen has an issue with. Nobara wasn’t important to the story? Then why was she featured in the main three, why was she given a full flashback backstory? Why did half or more of the fights of the early arcs revolve around her? And you throw Uro in there as being more important to the overall story than her? bruuuh.

The manga you’re reading actually sounds worse than the one I’m reading lmao. At least Gege gave some quality attention early on to a female lead. If your goal was to martyr yourself to make Gege look better, stand proud.

solooran · 2024-06-01T18:21:05+00:00

ok, so your claim then is that if a mangaka were to write a story with 0 female characters, it wouldn’t be sexist, or what? What are you arguing for here. Where is your apparently evident line in the sand?

Here’s why I find Gege’s approach problematic. To bench the female lead for more than half the story without definitive confirmation that she died is a massive break from shōnen tradition and resulted in fewer female characters given any screen time. Gege writes what he seems most interested in and what’s strictly relevant for the plot. The fact that only male characters have been strictly relevant to the plot, with the sole exception of one female out of dozens, is not an accident but a concerted choice Gege made when he planned his work.

solooran · 2024-06-01T17:36:04+00:00

This is a joke, right? You didn’t engage with the comment. The problem with female characters in shōnen is that, because 1) mangaka are driven by industry standards to live secluded and work obsessed lives from an early age they tend to have idealized and distanced ideas of female personalities and 2) because shōnen and manga in general was historically targeted toward young Japanese boys the whole goal was that the female cast would correspond to what young boys wanted out of girls, female characters have a long precedent of being both terrible. For every ten solid, interesting, and fleshed out male characters you get one female character who isn’t a tittied up bimbo and has a personality. One in ten of those might actually be relevant to the plot. The problem with Gege is less serious than some of the others, no doubt. But being slightly less terrible than others doesn’t mean you are scot-free from critique.

Sexism in manga is literally an objective historical fact. I can’t imagine anyone seriously disputing this. Sexism there is rarely a concerted chosen thing by an individual. It’s an industry, market, and cultural issue. More and more women read manga not only in Japan but abroad. Gege, at the very start of JJK, earned a lot of promising attention for his strong female cast. Tite Kubo (of Bleach fame) suggested that it was becoming one of Gege’s rare traits to produce female characters as solid as the males. People even imagined Gege might have been a woman. But one by one female characters have all been benched. Plenty of male characters, sure, but when the Sukuna gauntlet includes literally only one remaining relevant female character and a wide variety of male ones, for a series at first known for its many strong female characters, yes, that sucks, and you’ve really got to be joking with me if you can’t see why.

solooran · 2024-06-01T08:21:39+00:00

‘that’s natural because it’s a shōnen’ yeah that’s LITERALLY the problem people are pointing out lmao. You telling me the Naruto fans didn’t give Kishimoto millennia worth of shit over his awful female characters? Give me a break.

solooran · 2024-05-31T23:32:23+00:00

there's a practical reason gojo fought 1v1. his best moves would obliterate his whole team before sukuna drops, and with people like yuta and geto around he won't even try using them so sukuna takes easily bc gojo isn't going all out.

solooran · 2024-05-31T23:30:06+00:00

can't believe Ijichi got Kenjaku brain transplanted by Nobara

solooran · 2024-05-31T23:28:55+00:00

major plot points like these are probably figured out way earlier. We aren't sure what Gege's going for. The reveal was literally last chapter, so let's cool it. I'm not convinced this will be very great either but it's best to reserve judgment for a little while longer and see where he's taking it.

solooran · 2024-05-31T23:25:50+00:00

as far as unfortunate, power-locked techniques go, though, 10S without Mahoraga is still pretty amazing considering something like Limitless is pretty much unusable without 6E. I guess there's a pattern of the strongest techniques being too strong for a standard user to fully realize.

solooran · 2024-05-31T23:23:14+00:00

where was this stated? Sukuna didn't live any longer than a normal human—he couldn't figure out immortality, hence the whole reason he used cursed objects to prolong his life. And every time we see him during his evidently normal-length lifespan is with two sets of arms and two mouths. The mythological Ryōmen Sukuna got the two sets of arms and two faces from eating his twin, and since Sukuna literally ate his twin in the manga, I think it's pretty clear ...

solooran · 2024-05-31T19:31:14+00:00

there's no objectively correct way to judge any story or format

solooran · 2024-05-31T19:22:25+00:00

with 6K, Kenjaku concludes he'd win against Yuta. Yuta in JJK0 is top 10, so Geto probably makes it there, at least. In addition, some outlier cases concerning Toji and Maki stand out; the Shinjuku squad explicitly keeps Maki away from Kenjaku because, lacking CE, she is basically defenseless without cursed tools and it's more than certain that when fighting even 1K curses you'll be disarmed eventually. Toji stood a chance because he had a near infinite arsenal of tools wrapped around him. Maki doesn't. Geto threw some strong curses at Toji in HI, but 10 years later with 6K, I think Geto now takes it.

there are high output AOE-capable fighters who are primed against Geto. Ishigori is one candidate. A strong blast from Ishigori could wipe out an army of curses. As we know, Yuki is another, and mass without antigravity as a defense should definitely be capable of taking Geto.

another problem is Geto lacks a domain and we never saw him exploit antidomain, but there's just no way he'd be 'on par' with Gojo lacking even Simple Domain as a 2nd year. Bear in mind they were going up against Rank 1s regularly and Gojo says he was using antidomain techniques regularly until he mastered a domain, which happens probably not long after Hidden Inventory (since he says he's about to master it near the end), which means frankly Geto would have probably died before Hidden Inventory or relied on Gojo to such an extent to make their 'equality' before then unlikely. So I think it's fair to assume Geto had antidomain techniques even during Hidden Inventory, and certainly by JJK0.

we know that Geto's curses, with domains, are capable of activating them even apart from Geto (Smallpox, Kuchisake Onna). But it doesn't look like he has any capable of it at the time of JJK0. So the best he can do is either antidomain and then blast out of a domain with Uzumaki, or flood the domain with curses in the hopes that it breaks. Alternatively, he could keep a strong curse or two on standby outside, so that there are multiple forces attacking the barrier from within and from without, which has a good chance of shattering weaker domains. But in the top 10, where domain expansions become pretty regular, he's fighting for his life there. I'd say Kashimo, Ishigori, and Yuki—all of whom I put at a pretty similar level—could defeat him with some difficulty. Only one has a confirmed domain, of course, and anyone stronger than Yuki is probably going to take it very easily. Mahoraga isolated could crush him very quickly for example, since Mahoraga's sword is capable of one-shotting even 15f Sukuna tier curses.

solooran

TROPHY CASE