WARNING: This article contains spoilers for the entirety of the Jujutsu Kaisen manga, including plot points that have not been shown in the anime as of 2024.
Look, Jujutsu Kaisen is an excellent concept and we all have our favorite characters, but the manga has a huge glaring issue that’s killing a lot of people’s enjoyment of it. That issue is pretty obvious for anyone who’s been reading for a while: pacing.
Do You Remember Where You Were When Chapter 223 Dropped?
Chapter 223 released on May 22, 2024, which you’ll note is around 14 months ago at this point, which is a long old time when it comes to something you’ve been reading weekly since then.
What happens in 223 though?
Inhuman Makyo Shinjuku Showdown, Part 1 is the chapter in which Gojo and Sukuna finally start fighting. It was an incredibly exciting time to be one of the people up to date with the manga, and we were all expecting a blisteringly fast fight with plenty of back and forth between the two mythical beings, which might take a while, sure, but would ultimately come to a close when one of them died.
Instead, what’s happened is that 40 chapters later things are still going on. Sure, Gojo is dead now, and a bunch of other people too, but the fight is literally still going on. It’s been 40 chapters of battle since then, with a lot of those being action, but also a lot of those being pure exposition about theories behind the characters, which might be relevant if you’re itching to know the ins and outs of sorcery, but which feel like filler in the middle of the fight.
To say it’s been agonizingly slow would be an immense understatement. One of the longest fights in anime history is Gjoku vs Frieza on Namek, and that only lasted 20 episodes. We’re approaching unholy levels of length here, the kind of long that’s just not enjoyable for anyone. It has to stop.
Reversed Cursed Technique Can Only Do So Much
You could easily argue that My Hero Academia has had a similar pacing issue in its dying days, with the All For One fight dragging on and on for an age, but the manga is now wrapping up, and it means that we’re getting a nice dose of the character drama and interactions that help make MHA such an enjoyable time.
Jujutsu Kaisen is going to need to do something similar. However, we know that the last rumored end date for JJK was fall 2024. That means we’ve still got a few months of this dragging on to get through. Even if you were to read the last year’s worth of manga in a single day, you’d still have to take breaks and go walk outside because of the sheer amount of time required for each individual section of the fight. The aim here is for the fight to feel epic, and we understand that, but dragging it on for this long and having no real progress in the last year isn’t the way to do that. So many of the characters have died and failed fighting Sukuna, and it’s gotten to the point where we’re currently watching Gojo’s reanimated self fighting Sukuna once more. It’s not fun, it’s not entertaining, and worst of all, it doesn’t even feel meaningful.
It’s not even clear if we’re near the end of the fight either, because every time it seems to be going that way some nonsense happens like Sukuna secretly having more cursed energy than anyone realised, and then we’re back to square one.
It’s possible that JJK nails the ending and somehow redeems itself, but how it would go about that is far beyond us. We’re expecting to feel soured on the whole thing for a long time to come. Maybe the anime will fix the pacing? We can but hope that’s the answer.
Published: Jul 28, 2024 09:00 am