By: Ro’Mel Bryant-Oliveraz

‘Jujitsu Kaisen’ is a popular anime that has been trending for a long time, recently at a peak with season 3 releasing, building up to an arc of the story that was arguably the best of the manga.

The base power is Cursed Energy which comes from negative emotions of people, and when high in an area it manifests as Curses, which are entities that threaten society. This is the very base of what ‘JJK’ is about. There are Sorcerers, who are trained humans that harness, control, and manipulate the same energy curses are made of, Cursed Energy, to battle them.

Though, it’s not that simple.

My favorite part is how complicated harnessing and controlling cursed energy as a human gets. All humans have innate techniques which is a unique ability engraved into someone’s brain at birth. It’s a way your brain automatically manipulates cursed energy to use it. There are infinite and endless ways, ranging from straightforward and weak, to straightforward and strong, to very very complicated, to anything in between.

A straightforward but extremely strong one is Satoru Gojo’s Limitless. It lets him manipulate space, that is the default way his brain manipulates CE. Straightforward. But he combines it with an ability to have molecular perception and precision of Cursed energy he was born with called the Six Eyes, allowing him to manipulate space not just basically in ways like having a permanent invisible force field to make him untouchable, but also launching an orb of space that pulls things together forcefully called Blue, and even reversing it to make an orb of space that violently repels things called Red. He even figured out how to combine Red and Blue making Purple, which is an imaginary mass that erases anything fundamentally from space.

Another innate technique is Suguru Getos. Instead of manipulating space his is Cursed spirit Manipulation. A type of technique that can allow you to manipulate cures. Specifically, his technique lets him absorb a curse that he defeated in battle by swallowing them. Once he swallows them and absorbs them he can store them in his body and summon them and use their abilities at will. This is very very powerful, turning the enemies into his own, completely under his control. The only downside is that he needs to first beat the curse in battle himself, then absorb them by swallowing them. He describes the process of absorbing a curse to be very very excruciatingly disgusting and painful psychologically. This eventually led him to a very bad depression until he turned evil. Even though he was one of the strongest and most loyal, his own ability on top of the harshness of life destroyed his mental health completely.

I could talk about the many many characters and their techniques also, everyone’s techniques are just as complicated as each others in completely different ways.

The true beauty of ‘JJk’ to me is the amount of characters and how central everyone is. There is no true main character because the story is about everyone and everything. One extra person being there, no matter how weak, would change the entire outcome. It bounces between eras, showing the current modern era like Yuji, Nobara, and Megumi handling school life chaos in Tokyo, then showing thousand long year plans in the making from ancient sorcerer myths like Sukuna, and Kenjaku. No one steals the spotlight permanently, every character development is through other characters.

‘JJK’ doesn’t hold back with the characters you’ve known from the start from dying. Characters turn evil, get cheated by the system, hated by their families for being different, and even complete noobs to Jujitsu but got pulled in and now have to compete with the best.

The diversity, with humor, tragedy, philosophy, character psychology, unpredictability, and complex themes and power system is why this anime is trending so much.

You can watch ‘JJK’ on Netflix and Crunchyroll