#a lot of the Zenin’s abuse was hidden because while it still hurt it wasn’t leaving marks | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup · 4 months

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I don’t know if you already said this elsewhere, but did the Zenin ever hurt Megumi in a way it simply wasn’t possible for them to explain? Like being poisoned or bitten by one of the dozens curses? Did Gojo catch them red handed (the red is literally megumi’s blood💀)?

The first time that they hurt him in a way that they couldn’t explain away was the last time they hurt him, because Gojo immediately cut them off and refused to ever let them ever get near Megumi again. The Zenin didn't fully realize this at the time they had custody, but legitimately the only reason why it got as far as it did was because Gojo didn't know.

They weren’t exactly advertising “yeah we beat him when we have him” to him, but it wasn’t exactly because they thought gojo would put a stop to it, per se. They didn’t tell Gojo anything they did to Megumi because they felt absolutely entitled to him. They didn’t want Gojo’s input or interference, and they didn’t like feeling like they had to ask for permission around this with Megumi. But they didn’t think he actually would cut them off from him.

In the Zenin’s mind, Gojo doesn’t love Megumi. He’s never loved Megumi. Megumi’s just a political pawn to him, a way to insult the Zenin and steal their most valuable technique for his own. And he got way more value from letting them see him. He got to have his influence on someone who was very likely to be clan head one day—if Megumi’s cut off from them entirely, he’s not moving towards being clan head. He got a bargaining chip with the Zenin—he could further his own goals by offering them more time with him. Megumi’s a powerful piece of leverage but only if Gojo actually uses him. Him intervening to protect Megumi by severing all contact doesn’t further his own goals, so when it all came to a head, they pretty blindly assumed that he wouldn’t give a shit about what they had just done to Megumi, because at the end of the day, they thought he was going to keep using Megumi for his own ends, which meant giving them access.

Instead, Gojo immediately pulled the plug on the entire situation. They never touched or saw him again. The first time that Megumi saw them after the incident that made them go no contact was when Naoya came to pick him up at his school.

#sea glass gardens #in my mind jujutsu sorcerer kids are sturdier #like Sukuna punted Megumi through multiple buildings in their fight #so it must be /hard/ to do something that causes a bruise #a lot of the Zenin’s abuse was hidden because while it still hurt it wasn’t leaving marks #or it was abuse that wouldn’t leave marks anyway like how they’d work him to the point of collapse or control his every action #but if they hit him hard enough to leave marks then they had the built in excuse that megumi was fighting with other kids #or had just had one of those normal little kid bumps. like I have a baby nieces and nephews and those kids will just hurl their bodies #around. kids collect bruises. they’re figuring out what their limits are and even if you watch them carefully a few bumps is normal.#they hurt him badly but they always had a way to hide it until they went too far and didn’t anymore. and the second gojo realized that #the adults on the compound had been beating megumi he never let them so much as look at him again. he legitimately put his foot down and #refused to budge an inch no matter how much hell he caught for it #I’ve definitively decided that the incident that made them go no contact is not going to be revealed in sea glass gardens #it just isn’t something that would come out through yuutas pov #if I wrote other works in the series it would probably come out through one of them but it’s a big big if #I make no promises as to other works in the universe (though I have started writing some of them. completion is another thing entirely).#if you guys want to know the incident that made them go no contact I wouldn’t be opposed to revealing it over ask but it’s y’all’s #preference. usually the stuff I talk about in ask is stuff I’ll know isn’t going to be revealed in sea glass gardens itself. this is kind of #in purgatory because I know it’s coming out in sea glass gardens but there’s a smaller chance of it being revealed in a different work #so it’s up to y’all. if you want to know I’ll answer it behind a cut or something but if you want to gamble on it actually being written out #one day that’s fine too

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linkspooky · 3 years

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Megumi and Toji

Megumi knows almost nothing about his father, his early memories are of being abandoned. His only family is Tsumiki as far as he’s concerned. It’s clear he doesn’t regard himself as a Zenin, or Toji’s son. He doesn’t even recognize Toji when they meet again briefly. However, though Megumi’s not even aware of it there’s a lot of story parallels between father and son. Toji serves as a cautionary tale of what Megumi could become if he does not grow up and learn to handle his emotions properly. MORE UNDER THE CUT.

1. Inherited Trauma

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this yet, but the Zenin family definitely has issues. They exclude anything which does not fit their arbitrary standards as an outsider. We don’t really know Toji’s backstory. We don’t have to know either, it obviously doesn’t excuse his actions. However, we see the after-effects of him being thrown out and scapegoated by his own family by the time we see him in the hidden inventory arc. Not only that, but from the clan’s treatment of Maki, we can theorize a little ibt of what Toji has been through.

Maki and Toji were both born without cursed energy and labeled as defective and wrong because of it. It’s clear both of them developed bad, hostile, even downright violent personalities in order to cope with a home environment that was constantly hostile to them.

In Maki’s case, it’s not that Maki is a hateful person it’s that she’s conditioned not to accept any kind of love because she was never shown the unconditional love of a family she was owed. When Yuta tries to accept her, Maki rejects him because she doesn’t know what that feeling of acceptance and security is like if it’s unearned. She ties it to strength, she has to be stronger than the Zenin clan, she has to prove she’s better than them and that they were wrong about her in order to earn it.

Maki is so busy trying to reject everything that the Zenin clan stands for, that she can’t really accept other people’s feelings at all positive or negative. She’s too busy thinking about herself, protecting about herself, trying not to hate herself that even the feelings of Mai who loves her, but in a more complicated way is something she can’t accept. She doesn’t want to think about mai’s feelings because she’s too busy with her own, Mai is an afterthought to her.

Maki has a complicated way of dealing with the abuse of the Zenin family, and I assume Toji did too. The only difference is that Toji is an adult, whereas Maki is still an adolescent. Toji was set in his ways, Maki is still in the middle of changing.

Toji is labeled as “the one who is left behind, the one who is free”, it’s very likely especially considering the way he treats Megumi and distances himself from anyone related to him, that Toji’s way of dealing with the Zenin family was to simply reject all of it. He couldn’t accept the hatred of his family, but at the same time he also couldn’t accept any kind of positive emotions too, like love between a father and son. It’s likely Toji can’t even accept the idea of having a family, or the unconditional love of a family because he’s never had it - not that any of that is Megumi’s fault.

Toji grew up completely isolated from his own family until he was eventually thrown out, and he probably had no idea how to raise a family, but he turned around and inflicted those same circumstances on Megumi. Toji grows up alone, Toji makes Megumi grow up alone because he fails to provide for him as a father.

Toji deliberately made a choice to throw out Megumi along with the rest of his family trauma, that’s his self reflection upon the moment of death. He wanted to throw away everything and live for hismelf, but he threw away Megumi too.

However, from Meugmi’s perspective his father gave him the name ‘Megumi’ and left. Apparently Toji was around so little that Megumi doesn’t even recognize his face whent hey meet again as a teenager. He married Tusmiki’s mom, got a divorce, and presumably left Megumi there.

Megumi grew up with no idea of what a family was, except for his step sister, and also completely isolated from others. He grew up with the same sense of isolation and distance from his family that Toji did, lacking totally in the unconditional love a child needs from his parents in order to grow up, because Toji was never even around for Megumi. Megumi just by default assumes that his father either didn’t love him, or just plain forgot about him.

2. Like Father, Like Son.

However, despite the fact Toji wasn’t even around to raise his son, Megumi turned out a lot like Toji. There’s a lot of parallels between father and son, probably because as stated above Megumi grew up in isolated circumstances, completely cut off, never truly receiving the parental love or guidance that he needed to help him mature into a emotionally healthy adolescent able to process his feelings and handle them properly.

Both Megumi and Toji respond to their emotional trauma in the same way, by suppressing themselves and all their feelings, and rejecting the feelings of everyone around him. Megumi isn’t even able to hear the news that his dad died, because he insists that already in first grade, he doesn’t care about his dad or even want him around.

This is you know, a lie of course. Megumi’s a first grader. All children want a parent. It’s just, Megumi’s way of dealing with his feelings is to just pretend that they’re not there, to pretend he doesn’t care. A first grader is not really mature enough to think of his family situation in these terms, or cope with these feelings. Megumi is simply pretending to be mature as a way of pretending to deal with his hurt feelings.

We as the audience know that Megumi is a deeply caring, and deeply feeling person. However, Megumi himself seesm to be in denial of this fact.

Megumi’s response to all of thes icky gross feelings he has for people, soft feelings that makes him feel vulnerable because while Megumi cares deeply, circumstances have taught him that people do not care about him, or at least Toji didn’t care enough in Megumi’s eyes to stick around. Megumi’s response is the same as Toji’s, he shuts everyone out, he insists he doesn’t care about anyone.

He can’t accept anyone’s feelings because he’s too busy rejecting everyone. He can’t even accept the positive feelings of familial love his sister has for him, he almost begrudges her for it. Tsumiki chose to see him as family, different from Toji who he feels didn’t choose him and Megumi just couldn’t realize that until it was too late. He’s so used to being abandoned and unchosen that he doesn’t know what familial love even looks like in Tsumiki.

This is also something that Toji does to Megumi. It’s said in a bonus in volume 8 or volume 9 that after the death of Megumi’s mother, Toji insisted that he “stopped caring about everything.” We see this repeat when he’s about to sell Megumi to the Zenin clan.

Toji insists he doesn’t care, while Megumi tries to creep back into his thoughts, and he keeps trying to help him in indirect ways. Toji wishing for a better future for his son than he had, while at the same time, selling him off for the money he plans to gamble away at the race track. Toji forgetting his son’s name, and then remembering it on the brink of death and asking his enemy to do something about it. These are all compeltely contradictory behaviors because Toji has no healthy, adult way of processing his emotions.

He’s just used to pretending he doesn’t care about things, that even when he obviously does care it’s what he keeps falling back on. It’s the same as Megumi’s complex with saving people, he insists he hates people, that he doesn’t want to save them, and then he goes far out of his way to save people like Yuji.

3. Growing Out of Your Father’s Shadow

They process emotions the same way, both insisting that they don’t care about anything around them, the only real difference is their priorities. Toji is a self centered person who prioritizes himself above all others. Megumi’s a self sacrificing person, he’s continually belittling himself for the sake of other people. Megumi belittles himself to the point where he insits he could never be strong enough to challenge Gojo. Being the strongest individual is just never his priority.

Toji however is someone who climbed to the top of the Jujutsu World to try to prove he could become a better fighter than them without any cursed energy. Megumi is someone who ran away from the challenge of becoming stronger than Gojo, but Toji wanted to prove himself stronger than Gojo so badly he stayed and fought a fight he knew he couldn’t win.

However, even though their priorities are total opposites, Toji prioritizing himself, and Megumi prioritizing other people above himself they both end up in the same place. They’re both incredibly self destructive people. Toji stayed and fought with Gojo, knowing that he would die. When Megumi is pushed to his limit in Shibuya, rather than try to run away he also sacrifices himself in order to summon Mahoraga in a suicidal move against his opponent. They are even paralleled in the way they’re drawn.

I think the takeaway from all these connections set up between Toji and Megumi is that even though Megumi doesn’t know his father well he’s a lot like him. They both handle their emotions in the same way, insisting that they don’t care when they in fact care deeply. They both repress all of their emotions until they go crazy from it.

Toji literally springs from Megumi’s shadow. The shadow is the symbol of repressed emotions. Emotions that people are conscious of, the ones they acknowledge are usually represented by light, deeper emotions, the ones they repress and refuse to acknowledge are then referred to as the shadow. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. The more Megumi pretends not to care about his father or his family situation, the deeper the shadow underneath his feet grows.

Being underneath your father’s shadow is even a common phrase used to describe people who are unable to escape from their parents, and become their own person. There is a connection between Megumi and his father between Megumi and the Zenin, even if Megumi likes to pretend it’s not there, like when he denies any similarity between himself and Kamo Noritoshi.

A lot of Megumi’s life is dictated by his family circumstances too, he’s just in denial about it. Kamo’s aware to sympathize with people because he’s far more aware fo himself and his family circumstances, Megumi denies sympathizing with other people, because he doesn’t have any sympathy for himself either.

Zombie Megumi is colored in pure shadow. He’s even referred to as a manifestation of the repressed feelings of the Zenin clan. Those who are restrained by their connection to the Zenin clan, all look in awe at the one who broke free from the Zenin, and free from everything.

Megumi exhibits the act same behavir as Toji. He suppresses himself, suppresses himself, and suprresses himself and then he just goes crazy. Megumi claims he’s not the strongest, he doesn’t care about being strong, but then he pulls moves like summoning the Mahoraga and Domain Expansion. Megumi just holds himself in until he violently lashes out on everything around him too, he’s hurt feelings waiting to explode.

Which is why Megumi learning more about his father and the connection between them could be a good thing, not because Megumi necessarily owes Toji anything, but that he could learn from Toji’s mistakes. When Megumi sees his own unhealthy behavior exhibited in another, he can learn to accept the things that Toji could not accept. He could learn to accept connections like family, and friednship, before they become chains that hold him down too hard, until he breaks everything and himself trying to be free. Megumi dosen’t have to become the strongest like Gojo, he doesn’t have to surpass or fight against the Zenin clan. He doesn’t have to save everyone in the whole world like Yuji. The best thing for Megumi’s character development would be for him to learn to accept his own feelings and the feelings of others without going crazy. That’s a strength that neither Toji, nor Gojo could never find in themselves.

#megumi fushiguro #fushiguro megumi #toji fushiguro #fushiguro toji #zenin toji #toji zenin #zenin family #zenin maki #jjk meta #jujutsu kaisen meta #jujutsu kaisen theory

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