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SUKUNA FANS RISE OUR KING MIGHT BE BACK (part one btw)

Maki Zenin: What Lies Ahead?

Note: I don't normally write meta posts, so apologies if this seems all over the place. For that reason, I would consider this to be more of a ramble of ideas. Also, if you are not caught up with Jujutsu Kaisen's latest chapter, I must advise you that there will be major spoilers ahead!

The Aftermath of the Zenin Massacre

To say I was surprised to see Maki so soon would be an understatement. I honestly though we wouldn't see her for quite some time, but I think what surprised me was the attitude she still carried. For someone who claims not to have a heart, her playful/snide comments towards Noritoshi's hair and continuously protecting him speaks otherwise.

The one thing that didn't surprise me with her reemergence was that she seemed to be going on a rampage of killing after tracking down the remaining clan members, and by the look on her face, she seems to be enjoying every bit of her newfound abilities. I also think it's safe to assume that this includes both curses and culling game players.

Either way, she still seems to be working along side her former classmates, using her ability to pass through barriers to help aid them. I think a part of me thought she'd become a lone wolf, cutting any and all ties to her past self. Perhaps that's the problem.

2. Daido, Maki, & Experience.

Chapter 155 has introduced a new character by the name of Daido, a regular human being who has superhuman abilities, and is clearly a master at swordsmanship. At the end of the chapter, Maki watches in awe as he slices through Naoya with ease using her sword. From there, she thinks about the time she saw Toji when he was reincarnated as a puppet of carnage.

This brings me to my first and most obvious prediction as to what could happen, and what many others are thinking as well. This is that Daido will serve as a sensei to Maki, teaching her how to properly wield her sword, thus giving her the experience she both needs and lacks.

❝ What is the difference between me and him? ❞

That seems to be the million dollar question. While it's still being speculated and debated by many, it seems that physically, Maki and Toji are now up to par with each other. Thus, one difference that falls between them is the amount of experience one holds over the other.

Whereas Maki was born with a low presence of cursed energy, Toji was born with none at all. This means that since birth, Toji has had to train his senses in order to "see" curses. Maki, on the other hand, has only been free from her cursed energy for a couple of days.

Not only that, but we don't know much about Toji's past prior to Megumi and his mother. All we know is that he was ostracized by the clan, and didn't end up leaving until he was much older.

We don't know who trained him, or if he trained himself when it came to using weaponry. We also don't know his initial reasons for leaving, nor what unleashed his full awakening. My theory is the death of Fushiguro's biological mother, but since we don't have a solid timeline of things yet, it can only be considered an assumption. I'll come back to this idea later.

Point is, Maki is a sixteen year old girl whose only experience in sword combat comes from exorcising curses and planned school events. Prior to the massacre, when she did fight someone with better abilities (Geto) she was easily beat. This means that she needs someone to train her and help her utilize her sword to its fullest potential. What better person than Daido?

Of course, this is the most obvious outcome to all of this. It's where things seem to pointing towards meaning I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being the answer to Maki's question. But perhaps there's a different answer, one that requires a deeper look into things.

3. Toji, The One Who Left it All Behind.

Toji, Toji, Toji. Oh what an interesting character you are. While some believe the difference between Maki and Toji falls on experience, others (including me) believe that it also has to do a lot with the psyche of both characters.

Toji, as we know, was born as an anomaly in a hierarchy that values tradition and order, over raw strength and power. Ostracized and berated since he was a kid, Toji Zenin had grown up to despise those he considered to be "gifted".

While living with the Zenin clan, Toji had become unstable. Whether this means he had become to the Sorcerer Killer by then or not, it was clear that the damage had been done...

That is until he met Megumi's mother.

Now, many are still unsure about whose who when it comes to Megumi's biological mother and his step-mother (Tsumiki's biological mother) and where the last name Fushiguro comes from.

I believe that throughout Toji relationship with Megumi's mother, he was always "Toji Zenin." Once she passed, he went through a spiral for a couple of years. Realizing he wasn't fit to be a single parent, he got hitched off with Tsumiki's mother who carried the last name "Fushiguro."

I say this because by the time Shiu Kong (the man who contracted Toji for the Star Plasma Assassination) comes into the story, he's surprised to hear that Toji doesn't go by Zenin anymore. Later on, he goes on to ask about Megumi and his wellbeing. To add onto this, in the fan book it's stated that Shiu Kong had gone to visit Toji when Megumi was very young, and that it was clear he did not know how to take care of a child.

This means that even when Megumi was an infant Toji was still known as "Toji Zenin," and didn't get hitched off with Tsumiki's mother until Megumi was around 3-4 years old, as Megumi is 6 when he meets Gojo (two years after star plasma arc).

The reason I'm emphasizing all this is because the version of Toji that Maki sees isn't "Toji Fushiguro" but "Toji Zenin," the one who set himself free from the Zenin curse. This is Toji's strongest form.

Granny Ogami makes sure to summon "Toji Zenin" as this was peak of power. I guess this makes it even all more surprising that a "rusty" version of himself could defeat an unawakened Gojo and Geto with ease.

Anyways, Toji was obviously his strongest when he was still living with the Zenin clan, and I can only imagine the spiral he went on after the death of Megumi's mother. To have the one person you love most, the person who has made you feel accepted after a life of rejection, be taken away from you is a grief like no other.

This is why I believe Toji, like Maki, had his final "awakening" after her death.

This is also where we enter the grounds of theories and speculation. While one could say that maybe Toji let the Zenin clan live on a whim prior to meeting Megumi's mother, I think it'd be more tragic had it been after her death. I think that after her death he had gone back to the clan compound with the idea of finally fulfilling the massacre, allowing his rage and grief to overcome him....

And yet, unlike Maki, he let them live.

That's what makes them so different.

Even after the years of abuse, at the end of the day, Toji still yearned to be accepted by the very same family who rejected him. He still wanted there to be a place for his son to thrive and live a better life than he ever did, even if it meant selling him off to the very same people who traumatized him.

This brings me to my next point. I believe that the biggest difference between Maki and Toji isn't bloodshed, but .... restraint.

Toji, before and after the death of Megumi's mother, had every reason to want the Zenin clan dead, and yet he never went through with it . Maki, on the other hand, couldn't bear the thought of letting her sister's biggest tormenters go unscathed, finally fulfilling one of her darkest desires. And now she's paying the price with the emergence of Naoya and his cursed form.

Either way, Maki no longer has anything to live for. She's a monster without a goal, not living herself but also not for others. There is no fire in her, no selfish need to want more, she's just there. It's almost as if she's floating in air.

While there is no denying that she's strong, her mental will is all over the place, and it's acting as her downfall.

When Naoya mentions that her mother was the one who killed him, there's a visible reaction from Maki.

Though Maki claims to be heartless, it seems that she still holds a number of complex feelings for her family, ranging from anger to sadness. She hasn't "left it all behind", meaning she'll never truly be free.

What makes Toji so complex is that he was able to do exactly that. He left his pride and resentment for the Zenin family behind. He left his past behind, marrying into a different name and starting a new life. And most importantly, he left his his love for his son, the product of he and his soulmate, go, forcing himself not to care until his death.

❝ I wanted to deny it, to go against it. Against the Zenin family that denied me, against the apex of the Jujutsu World.❞

Prior to this statement, Toji talks about his selfishness and that most of the time he wouldn't exert energy unless required. He even states that he doesn't work for free. meaning he only does things for his own benefit.

It seems that after the death of Megumi's mother, Toji had let go of any and all feelings for others, choosing a life of gambling, womanizing, and selfishness.

Of course, in the end, we see that it's all a farce. Toji's cared from the very beginning, but for years he forced himself to leave such feelings behind, thus making him "free." It isn't until his fight with Gojo Satoru that these feelings reemerge, both his love for his son and his desire to prove himself worthy to his family.

It's the one time he doesn't show restraint.

It's the one time he listened to that little voice in his ear.

And it's the first and final time he loses.

In order to truly be free, one must be willing to detach themselves from any and all emotions, both the good and bad ones. One must be willing to leave behind memories and attachments. Especially if you're going to a commit a clan massacre.

Of course, that's not to say the Zenin clan didn't have it coming, but at the end of day, no mass killing can ever truly be justified. The fact that Maki still holds onto such feelings after the event means she should've never done it in the first place. In the end, it was nothing more than temporary relief.

This is also why I was surprised to see Maki working along side Noritoshi. Honestly, I expected her to be closed off to the world, perhaps even adapting Toji's own mentality towards life.

All in all, Maki's biggest problem psychologically is that she isn't letting go. Instead, she's holding onto her feelings of resentment and its bringing her down. Not only that, but she continues to compare herself to Toji. I mean, remember what Sukuna said to Jogo during their fight.

❝ Humans flocking together. Curses flocking together. Comparing themselves to those around them leads to weakness and stunts their growth. You should have burnt everything you desired to a cinder without thinking. To reach the height of Satoru Gojo and not worry about the future or identity. But you lacked the hunger to take hold of your desires.❞

I'm definitely excited to see the aftermath of this fight with Naoya and where Maki goes from here. Will she continue to help her Jujutsu High kids or will she realize that perhaps she's better off alone...

4. Yuta and Maki

I'll probably write a whole separate post for this one day, but to say that Yuta and Maki's stories are weaved with each other would be an understatement.

Maki is the girl who sparked Yuta's will to live, so I wouldn't be surprised if Yuta finds himself wanting to return the favor. The only problem is that it's no coincidence that Yuta and Maki parallel Toji and Gojo, meaning I could see them clashing heads.

Of course, unlike Toji and Gojo, I could see them resolving their conflict, especially given that the two already have history with one another. Yuta is one of the very few people who accepts Maki for who she is, even offering his own words of support. He's also the first person to believe in her and look up to her, not finding her dream to be foolish in any way.

Ship wars aside, I'm excited to see this pair's reunion. Same goes for Maki and Nobara (crossing my fingers she's alive) as she's also someone who looks up to Maki.

To conclude, I think Maki has yet to process what she's done and is purposely repressing any feelings of regret with anger and violence. Until she acknowledges that what she did was wrong, and that maybe she should've gone things a different way, she will never truly be free, and the curse of the Zenin family will always follow her wherever she goes.

And just like Toji, if she's not careful, it'll ultimately lead to her death.

I’m crying now

YUTA WAS ALWAYS SELFISH

I was originally going to make this post the week the big twist with Yuta in Gojo's body happened, because of the massive subversion that it was. It was the kind of twist that made you question if everything you ever knew about the character was wrong. Namely, Yuta one of the most empathic sorcerers we see in the series - the character who seems to lack the selfishness of the other sorcerers that make up jujutsu society. The kid who fights with the literal power of love.

Was Yuta a monster to begin with and we just didn't see?

So ignore the clickbaity tagline, Yuta is one of my favorite characters I'm not going to start calling him a terrible person. Rather that Yuta is dismissed as a soft kid or a wifeguy, when he's actually more cunning and cutthroat than anyone gives him credit for.

If a sorcerer is nothing more than a con-artist, then if the talent for trickery he displayed in the Sukuna fight is anything to go by Yuta is a true sorcerer down to his bones. Yuta turning Gojo's body into a puppet seems like a massive twist, and almost out of character for Yuta who was so devoted to Gojo.

His earlier fight in the culling game even seemed to hint that Yuta was too soft and he didn't truly have the attitude to fight someone like Ryomen Sukuna who was the embodiment of a calamity.

These panels seemed like a prophecy that Yuta was doomed to fall short against Sukuna. That he could never live up to his title as the next Satoru Gojo, because unlike Gojo and Sukuna who can stand on the top alone Yuta clings to his loved ones.

Sukuna got to where he is by rejecting love. Sukuna is Sukuna because he's never needed anyone to satisfy him. So how can Yuta who needs to be surrounded by his loved ones at all time to validate him and tell him it's okay for him to be alive even compete?

However, even in JJK zero Yuta's love is questioned on whether or not it's as selfless and "pure" as it seems. To begin with, Maki calls him out early on for attracting bullies by playing the victim a lot. He pretends to be a good and innocent person put upon by his circumstances and bullies when really he doesn't want to help himself. Instead of standing up to the bullies he's always let Rika protect him and then condemned her for being a monster. He's let Rika take the blame for all the destruction, even though Rika is HIS cursed technique, created by HIS emotions, and is protecting him.

Yuta doesn't make any attempt to try to learn to control Rika, or even work with her, he just shrivels away in fear.

"You act like a good person, but it feels fake..." Yuta has always adopted the facade of a good person. He seems soft, socially anxious and withdrawn, even after he gains confidence as a sorcerer those traits don't go away because they're a part of his outward persona. Jung divides the psyche into two parts, the persona a mask that faces the world the parts of yourself that come out in your social interaction with people and then there's the shadow your repressed personality.

Yuta's shadow is a literal monster that declares her love for him and then expresses that love by violently destroying everything around him.

Yes, Rika initially contained the soul of someone else but Rika the curse was created by his technique, her power corresponds to his emotions, she comes from his shadow, and even after the real Rika passes on the Shikigami RIKA still remains completely under Yuta's control. Rika is Yuta, the embodiment of his twisted definition of love that would curse his loved ones to keep them by his side forever because he can't live without them. All of Rika's insane possessiveness? That's Yuta's too. Rika's violent overprotectiveness? That's Yuta.

How poetic is it really that Yuta and Rika are so codependent that Yuta's shadow, the other half of his personality is literally RIKA. Yuta cannot exist without love, and without someone too love, he's so terrified of being alone that he cursed Rika and then turned her corpse into a puppet after death. He uses his loved one as a weapon to fight his enemies.

If you think about it for more than five minutes Yuta's cursed technique and Rika has some seriously messed up implications, but it's hard too because as messed up as Yuta's love is it's still genuine.

Love is a curse, but in 236 Nanami speculates that sometimes curses can save people too, just like how Jujutsu Sorcerers use curses to fight and protect others.

So Yuta's love is a screaming, raging, overprotective monster, but it's also what give shim the motivation to fight ofr others. Yuta's love is a curse, but curses can save people too.

Yuta on the other hand isn't aware of his own darker nature most of the time.

The big twist in Jujutsu kaisen Zero is that just as Maki accused him of from the beginning, Yuta was playing the victim all along. He acted like Rika cursed him with her dying breath, but Yuta was the one who cursed her because he couldn't bear to live without her.

However, even this apology is a bit telling of Yuta's self-centered nature. He immediately turns everything into his fault and starts beating himself up over it. He doesn't look at anyone else's perspectives or that other people had a role to play. He deliberately ignores Rika's feelings on the past few years, which Rika is quick to point out for him.

This scene has a parallel later where Yuta ultimately, only thinks about himself first and foremost. In spite of wanting so badly to be surrounded by his loved ones, it's more about him loving them, and less about their feelings for him.

After all he's completely willing to commit a double suicide with Rika to protect his friends, ignoring the fact Rika doesn't want him to pass on just yet, and Maki, Inumaki and Panda wouldn't want him to disappear either. This scene has a direct parallel a year later in the fight against Sukuna when Yuta gives up his body.

Maki almost breaks character from her usual culling game arcs stoicity to fight and argue with Yuta to stop him form doing this, and Rika who one year earlier told Yuta to live a long life so she wouldn't have to see him on the other side so soon is reduced to screaming and sobbing while holding his dead body.

Yuta loves people, or at least he feels an intense amount of love for people, but he can be as self-centered as the other sorcerers we see in the story. Geto even points this out right away, that Yuta is selfish, that he's seeking self-affirmation first and foremost. He needs other people's approval, their love, to feel like he deserves to exist. He'll do anything to earn that love, and once he has it he'll do anything to protect it but it's ultimately for himself.

It manifests in Yuta's technique itself copy, which first and foremost requires Yuta to consume parts of his loved ones that can never be healed if he wants to keep their copied technique. Yuta gets stronger by literally eating his loved ones. We have canon confirmation that Yuta fed part of Inumaki's severed arm to Rika.

Yuta's cursed technique is to emulate the strengths of all of his loved ones copying them and making them a part of his oqn technique, because Yuta will take any shape and form in order to be loved. It's also the perfect technique for fighting as a part of a group, because someone like Sukuna will naturally assume that Yuta's technique STEALS instead of COPYING so he'll forget that the original still retains their technique.

Yuta's not only selfish and has a very selfish, overprotective love for others, but it's those exact qualities that make him an effective sorcerer strong in the area that Gojo is the weakest. Group coordination.

Gojo is in his element when he's alone, but Yuta is so codependent that he literally cannot exist unless other people are looking at him. His strength comes from the things he copies and takes from his friend, and he turned his loved one into a puppet to fight others. Is it really that surprising that this kid would willingly use Gojo's body as a weapon after death when that's literally what he did to Rika.

How telling is it that like Yuta learned that Rika was cursed by him, went so far to exorcise her spirit, and then after finally letting go after her spirit passed on he made a second Shikigami named Rika a few months later made out of the small remnants of cursed energy that Rika left behind as a gift after passing on. The dude is not over Rika, he's like, Geto and Gojo levels of not over Rika.

Yuta's cursed technique being the literal weaponization of his love and his loved ones makes him the best character for group coordination in the entire series. Yuta even adopts apsects of hakari's persona when making his plans against Sukuna since he decides to gamble at several key points in the plan.

Several of the key moments in the fight are all Yuta's plans, with some collaboration from Angel. He makes several bets too like Hakari would. The first being going to finish Kenjaku by himself and using both Todo and Takaba in conjunction to trick him. The second is the bet that he'd be able to make it back in time to rejoin the fight in case Higuruma's plan fail.

It was Yuta who let his own domain barrier down on purpose to let Sukuna think he had the victory so he would let his guard down and make it easy for Maki to ambush him. Something that also required perfect coordination between Yuta and Maki working in tandem with one another.

Yuta set up Hana to do one large jacob's ladder when Sukuna least expected it because he knew Sukuna would forget that his technique is COPY and not steal. He also made the biggest bluff which was leading Sukuna to believe that he fed Rika his last finger.

These aren't just good bluffs, they require near perfect coordination with your allies and taking several chances on them. Nobara might not have even woken up so the last finger / resonance Gambit was perhaps the biggest gamble. Maki and Yuta had to coordinate with each other well so Maki would be there when Yuta dropped the barrier. Yuta needed Takaba a relatively new and inexperienced sorcerer to survive against the threat that was Kenjaku, and he needed all of his allies to stay alive while he was prioritizing Kenjaku.

These are all plans Satoru Gojo would never have been able to pull off, because Gojo only ever relies on himself. If Yuta and Hakari had intervened in the Gojo and Sukuna fight then he would not have been able to go all out, whereas Yuta REQUIRES people collaborating with him in order TO GO ALL OUT.

This is Yuta. This is his strength. Yuta is nothing without love, so he takes on the forms of the people he loves and takes things from the people he loves in order to gain the power to protect him. Yuta copies everything from the people he loves, so is it really that much of a surprise that he'd become a monster just like Gojo.

In some ways, Geto and Yuuta were the same. Geto was too sincere. To someone like him, the reality that the world of sorcerers presented to him was just too cruel. ’…that in a world like this, I couldn’t be truly happy from the bottom of my heart.’ To live for the purpose of being yourself. And for that goal, Geto could only continue to pursue his twisted dream, drowning himself in the curse that lies in the gap between ideal and reality.

Love is a weapon for Yuta. Just like his curse technique can take any form, so does Yuta's love, and so does Yuta himself. Love always wins, and in order to do so Yuta will take any shape necessary, no matter how twisted.

Love is the worst curse of them all, and Yuta will become the worst monster of them all if it means protecting his love ones.