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hxhhasmysoul · 25 days

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Hello, hello, have you seen the newest update of JJK? I'm so proud of my best boy, Yuuji....

Can, I ask, why do you think Yuuji is one of the character that is so underated in JJK? He is the mc, but many people (in fandom) treat him like a side character? At first, I don't think so, but I love many shounen, and somehow Yuuji is one of the mc that is underated in their own story....

Sorry if I'm wrong, just I love Yuuji and want him to get the spotlight he deserve....

Sorry it took me so fucking long to reply to this.

If you think that the story doesn’t focus on him enough then I don’t really agree with that but I don’t think it’s wrong of you to feel like that. But I’m not sure this is even what you meant, I just wanted to move this out of the way. And the following paragraphs will explain that a bit. That will be the nice part of this reply.

JJK isn’t a story that mainly follows one character and the plot happens only where that character is. For example, as much as I watched of Demon Slayer (I think up to season 3 and I have no interest in picking it up again ) or read of the Chainsaw Man (first part, I got bored a few chapters into the second), made me think that those stories are too focused on one character. Villains did villain things on the side but the story always came back to the main character and focused on him in the end and plot usually happened where he happened to be, and he was the one to kill the bosses. In JJK even if the story lines feed into each other, they have much more independence and it doesn’t feel that Yuuji is the centre of the universe and the story just waits for him to move. And my personal preference is for the JJK kind of story, as I said CSM and Demon Slayer didn’t manage to hold my interest.

It’s just a matter of preference. And If you’d like the story to be more streamlined around him there’s nothing wrong with that.

That being said, I think that the JJK story still strongly centres around Yuuji.

He’s connected to all the most memorable and important villains of his time (aka those that didn’t die before he became a sorcerer). He’s one of the linchpins of Kenjaku’s plan and the only one of their experiments that they seem attached to, he’s Mahito’s obsession, he’s Sukuna’s nightmare and now also obsession.

Yuuji is also strongly connected to all the major JJK themes: weakness vs strength, human connection vs loneliness, the value of life, bodily autonomy, humanity vs dehumanisation, oppressive systems of power, tradition, gender stereotypes, drive and agency, jujutsu world vs the normie world, family, love and friendship, new vs old.

I think only Kenjaku also really connects to all of these to the same degree as Yuuji does, though some of the other characters are close like Sukuna, Maki or Megumi. Gojou or Nobara aren’t that strongly connected to some of them. And characters like Getou or Yuuta are even more tangentially connected to some of them or not at all. Yuuji really is the one who brings it all together.

Here ends the nice part of this answer. Everything that follows will be rather bitter and unkind towards the JJK fandom. Because I’m really fed up with it as a larger group.

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So why does the fandom treat Yuuji like shit? There are a few reasons that can be pointed to and they apply to varying degrees to the behaviour of individual fans.

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Part 1 - This fandom is the fucking pits

The fandom in itself is absolute fucking garbage. Like interacting with it will make you lose faith in humanity and give you brain damage.

Casual fans

JJK is a fairly popular title in the west and the fandom is quite big and loud. It’s an ongoing title with a hype anime and there are a lot of casual fans. It’s full of:

People who also like many other things and don’t really follow the story closely and don’t really know the lore.

People who read/watched JJK once and haven’t really taken the time to understand the story and its world.

People who as @/cursedvibes says have issues with object permanence and don’t remember what happened a few chapters earlier, and who feel that if the character isn’t in the frame that means that they are dead and/or forgotten and/or were always irrelevant.

People who don’t really like stories like JJK but have never understood the idea of saying “this is not for me” and moving on. Instead they take it as a personal offence that this popular title doesn’t cater to their specific tastes. And they often have the delusion that their personal taste is the mark of objective quality.

People who only want flashy fights and/or power scaling.

A lot of these people feel that they need to shit out content about JJK on social media because that’ll get them into the trending tags. And since they don’t really have any opinions of their own apart from not being satisfied with JJK they find some cold take that sounds clever to them and regurgitate it over and over again until a new clever-sounding cold take becomes popular, rinse repeat.

Those people should be ignored, blocked or muted. They’re just riding some pathetic bandwagon and clout chasing.

___

Righteous Haters

The cold takes the casual fans regurgitate usually come from people who just thrive on criticising popular things. Those divide into:

The “Intellectuals” who think they are better than the plebs who like popular things. In their mind popular things can do nothing right and are by default shallow and stupid.

The “Enlightened” who will jump at any opportunity to call something problematic and emerge as the morally pure person.

It’s hard to tell whether these people actually read the story and know it well. Their takes are usually very divorced from the text and I’m always on the fence whether it’s due to genuine lack of reading comprehension or willful misinterpretation.

If you engage with these people they will argue with fucking manga panels, like they will not accept the text even if it’s presented to them. They are honestly a joke. But a lot of them will die on the hill of discrediting Yuuji and spread that opinion around wrapped in pseudointellectual language. Some of them will even put on the airs of academia without knowing how to academia a text in any of the many possible academic analysis ways. Or how to academia about social issues. It’s an intimidation tactic that makes me disrespect them.

Among the JJK enlightened you will find a lot of terfy pseudo feminism. It will be very conservative flavoured and really misogynistic, usually not overtly queerphobic but the vibe will be there, and it will aggressively bring up the general fandom opinion that Gege is a man (which may even be true but Gege doesn’t officially gender themself) to attack and discredit Gege and their work, according to the terfy belief that all men are dangerous and evil. There will also be a lot of intellectualised transphobia especially in relation to Kenjaku, but also Uraume, Tengen and Kirara. And all so funny homophobia about how in their opinion Gege is attracted to their male characters.

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The thirsters

JJK surprisingly aggressively caters to the female and queer gaze in ways that most shounen just don’t. I once wanted to make a joke post titled “The Masculine Forearm, the true main character of JJK” just consisting of panel after panel that is angled in such a way to put the skillfully drawn male hands and strong forearms front and centre. (The masculine hand and forearm are often mentioned in relation to the female gaze.)

I gave up, there’s just too many of those, simply look at the covers. It’s really funny because Gege does not hide the forearms of Yuuji or Megumi, but at least in the earlier manga that I analysed from that perspective, the forearm angles of those two are much tamer than for example when Sukuna or Nanami are shown. It almost feels like Gege knows or subconsciously senses that the forearm is thirst, is fanservice, and Gege is very consistent about not sexualising the teenage girls and likely also the boys.

The forearm is of course the tip of the fanservice iceberg. Everything about the JJK men is very that to the point that JJK is widely known for its sexymen. There are people, including fan creators, in the fandom who have never read or watched JJK, they just learned of the sexymen thirsted hard enough to join the fandom.

These are the people who usually won’t actively attack Yuuji, they will just flood the fandom with the posts about their favs and make it seem that few people care for Yuuji.

There are also Yuuji thirsters but there aren't that many of them.

Yuuji is 15 years old in canon and some people just draw a line at thirsting over a character that is underage in canon. And as long as they don’t insult or harass others about that I don’t give a shit what they do.

But also even if Yuuji was of age, Yuuji is not a prime thirst object. He’s for a slightly more refined palette. And he becomes more desirable if you understand his character better.

On the surface Yuuji is a himbo, a dumb jock with a heart of gold and a cute face. There’s no mystique to him, no edge. This view of him is very widespread. For some thirsters that is enough but it’s not a popular thirst worthy type.

There are some thirsters who actually know the source material and know who Yuuji is but those are people who are in the JJK fandom for more than just thirst.

Generally I don’t have a problem with thirsters but the more ignorant ones contribute to the general fandom idea that there’s nothing interesting to Yuuji.

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Gojou and SatoSugu fans

I ranted about those people a lot and everything I’ve written about them holds up. A large and loud subset of them will spam all the tags, will create posts that boil down to “JJK is about Gojou (and Getou) actually and everything that happens in JJK is about him (them), regardless if it happens to other characters”. If you don’t actually block them on sight, wading through the main JJK tags is nigh impossible.

Gojou really won the internets and is truly the “strongest” of the JJK sexymen.

The overabundance of content about him exposes a lot of people to the “meta” his fans produce in droves. I put it in quotation marks because fuck, so many of these people are allergic to canon and what they write is deranged fanfiction tagged as meta or discourse. Gojou exists in the western fandom more as headcanon than canon. And to people who aren’t really invested in JJK, he seems like the main and most important character.

There are both shippers, thirsters, casual fans and righteous haters (they hate everything about JJK but Gojou (and Getou) in this group.

And of course they influence the perception of what JJK is, including the perception of Yuuji.

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Sukuna fans

There are some of them who will spread takes that reduce Yuuji to Sukuna’s skin suit and will generally treat Yuuji as a function of Sukuna, not a separate character. Interestingly enough, Kusakabe is one of them but he pretends to be a Sukuna hater.

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People who think Kusakabe speaks the truth straight from Gege’s brain

Because the reading comprehension in the fandom is very poor, there are people who take whatever Kusakabe says at face value and will ignore everything else that has happened in the manga thus far. They also haven’t picked up on the fact that Kusakabe has always been deeply biassed against Yuuji.

Why is Kusakabe still alive?

And honestly not only Kusakabe, to them any character that discredits Yuuji is always correct and spot on.

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Megumi and ItaFushi, SukuFushi fans

There is a subset of those fans that despise Yuuji with a passion. They think that Megumi either should be or is the main character of JJK. They think that Sukuna has been obsessed with Megumi from the start because Megumi is special and has incredible potential. They will pretend that the main JJK storyline revolves around Megumi, they will often ignore Kenjaku completely and pretend they are not the main driver of the story. Because admitting that Kenjaku, not Sukuna was the main villain of the story, would just by itself completely discredit Megumi as the main character, because Megumi barely any connection to Kenjaku, only through Tsumiki and Yorozu, and has only a weak, practical, plot related and not thematic connection to Sukuna. He became Sukuna’s escape plan and a tool to kill Gojou.

He has no connection to any other major villains or antagonists in current day JJK. He’s only connected to Touji and Naoya, but it can be argued that Yuuji had more dealings with Naoya than Megumi.

Yuuji’s connections to Sukuna are:

Practical - being Sukuna’s vessel and cage.

Plot related - he is Kenjaku’s way of controlling Sukuna and being Sukuna’s vessel influences everything about how Yuuji functions in the story and how he relates to other characters.

Emotional - they both harbour strong negative feelings for each other, Sukuna even more than Yuuji.

Familial - they are related. Yuuji doesn’t know and would just likely compartmentalise it. Sukuna pretends he doesn’t care but it’s clear he cares very much actually.

Philosophical - Yuuji by merely being himself challenges Sukuna’s whole worldview.

Thematic - strength vs weakness, sorcerer vs normie, humanity, value of human life, family, love, connection and loneliness, tradition, new vs old, bodily autonomy.

If those Megumi fans are shippers they will often push the dumb himbo stereotype on Yuuji. There are a lot of fics in the ItaFushi and FushiIta tags that will treat Yuuji as the necessary evil but you can really feel that the authors dislike him. Finding fics there from his POV or at least exploring him is a fucking chore. And that is or at least used to be the most popular ship tag for Yuuji. Pages upon pages of stereotyping or downright character assassination working hard to replace the canon Yuuji with the fanon one in the general fandom consciousness.

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Part 2 - People say one thing and do/think another

Basically a lot of people are not really self aware or are hypocrites or just repeat things they read and never put any thought into them.

You will see a lot of people criticising shounen tropes. That shounen is formulaic, that the shounen main characters are all the same, that shounen battles are all the same, that shounen main characters are overpowered… and so on and so forth.

Those same people will latch onto Gojou and crown him the main character.

Because faced with Yuuji … they have no fucking clue what to do with Yuuji. They finally got a shounen main character that at first glance might seem like the same old shounen main but very quickly it becomes clear he absolutely isn’t that.

So there are three reactions to that.

Denial

No, Yuuji actually is a stereotypical shounen main. He’s got colourful hair, he’s strong, he fights with his fist, he’s super dumb and kind of a pervert but nice and everyone instantly loves him. He gets power ups and learns everything too easily and too quickly, fights the bosses and breaks the story. And of course he has a sob story and is related to the villain. And his mum has a braid.. She doesn’t, well she does have a ponytail, kinda, in two of her bodies anyway…

And that’s it, there’s all there is to him, there’s nothing more to see.

Faced with canon they will reject all arguments or block you.

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Rage

Yuuji is so fucking weak, why is he so weak? Why are there other characters in this story that get focus? Why is everyone more powerful than him? Why doesn’t he power up and destroy all the bosses, what kind of fucking shit is this? Well at least there’s Gojou the fucking GOAT, let’s go the strongest!!!

Gojou died? Why? Didn’t he say he was the strongest? Why the fuck is Yuuji there? What can he even do? He wasn’t powering up and bodying opponents so we didn’t really pay attention to whatever was happening with him. This is some fucking ass pull.

They also can’t accept that the final battle isn’t a one vs one, that there’s actually a plan with many aspects and contingencies. That the characters are trying to be rational about this thing, they aren’t driven by their egos and desire for glory, well apart from two, and they just want to do everything they can to get rid of Sukuna and stop Kenjaku.

This is not acceptable. If it’s not hard hits and energy flashes but plans and strategy then it’s not a real shounen fight. Gojou vs Sukuna was kinda a fight like that, of course Sukuna was not doing it right because he was scheming too much. But it should’ve ended there, Gojou’s energy balls should’ve concluded the manga.

If you try to suggest to them that he’s just a different kind of character and JJK isn’t that kind of shounen and that it's actually okay for it to take a different route, the rage will spill. They will not accept that shounen can be many things but they will complain that all shounens are the same and predictable.

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Condescension

Yuuji isn’t what they want him to be and that’s “objectively” bad writing. That’s it. They will actually list how Yuuji should’ve been written but more importantly how everything should’ve been written and generally Yuuji should’ve never been put forward as the main character because he really doesn’t make sense as one. Gege is just a bad writer and it’s all mid and doesn’t make sense.

What’s even the point? Is there even a story in JJK, what is it even about? The magic system surely doesn’t make any sense, who even understands that? Everyone who says they understand is lying.

Sure, there were some interesting parts in it, so people got hyped, like the Hidden Inventory arc and Shibuya but only until Gojou got sealed, everything after that is just boring and awful and did I mention bad writing?

And all those deaths of fandom sweethearts, pointless. Either they are just for shock value because there was nothing absolutely nothing in the writing that suggested that they might die, od Gege just being mean to the fandom and hating their own characters and Gege should honestly *insert violent ideation*. Or the deaths are too predictable, generally everything is so predictable in JJK, and stereotypical.

Why do people even care or like it, they are objectively wrong if they do. Because hello the writing is so fucking bad, people have no fucking taste honestly. Who even reads that shit anymore?

Why are those people still in the fandom? Fuck knows.. They will spam the tags though, incessantly. The world must know how much they are better than JJK, Gege and those losers who have anything positive to say about JJK.

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Honestly there is no winning with any of these people. What they claim they want is not what they are ready to embrace or even tolerate. They can’t also accept that maybe JJK just isn’t for them. There must be something wrong with JJK and with Gege because their tastes are universal and objective.

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Part 3 - JJK may be a shounen but Yuuji is a shoujo main character

I’ve written about it before (some of it is a bit outdated now due to what was revealed in the manga) but I will always stand by this. Because it really explains everything.

Yuuji isn’t a typical shounen protagonist but if you look at shoujo protagonists you’ll see his type of protagonist. He is of course a mix of both and in the recent chapters he’s leaning a little more shounen but not too much.

He’s not indulging Sukuna, look how little he even speaks in this fight. He’s not revelling in this fight like Gojou had because he’s not fighting for himself. The outcome, not the fight matters. He’s still not ego driven, still two of his win conditions apart from his fighting abilities are his personality and strength of convictions that so deeply unsettle and upset Sukuna.

Recently everyone in the story, apart from Chousou, Higuruma and Toudou puts Yuuji down, discredits all his accomplishments. He even is starting to believe it. Sukuna is continuing to take everyone away from him. And yet Yuuji is still fighting because this is not about his ego. This is about removing the threat that is Sukuna and hopefully saving Megumi. He really puts himself last and isn’t even given the space to feel bad. All of this will just be there to crush him later.

And the fandom just takes every single insult hurled at Yuuji by the other characters at face value, as if the jujutsu world hasn’t always been hostile to him, treated him as less than human. As if those characters were impartial and haven’t been showing their bias towards Yuuji. They don't pick up on the fact that the jujutsu world is rotten to its core and Gege has consistently used the story to question the values of that world.

So lastly the fandom can’t stomach that Yuuji isn’t 100% stereotypically masculine, that his arc isn’t an alpha male power fantasy. That he isn’t written to perfectly embody the conservative gender norms. This is what the weakness accusation is all about, even if the people hurling it would swear up and down that they aren’t misogynists. Because Yuuji isn’t only accused of losing but also of crying, of breaking down, of being scared. This slight proximity to what is considered stereotypically feminine is a vice. One that for many discredits him completely, makes him not worthy of being the main character.

And if you think that I’m reaching with this… It’s a pattern that repeats itself in the fandom. You will see criticism of the JJK girls for not being soft enough, girly enough. Any proximity for masculinity will be zeroed in on and criticised under the guise of “feminism” with the terfy sentiment that female characters can’t be girly anymore. But girly characters like Hana or Yorozu will be hated for their proximity to stereotypical femininity because that’s considered feeble and shallow and unworthy. And just look how the fandom reacted to Megumi having an ugly and hysterical mental breakdown. To him showing weakness and not manning up. To him showing his emotions in such a visceral way.

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These are the three main reasons why I think Yuuji is so underrated and why so many people will go to great lengths to just shit on him.

#answering asks #jjk #jujutsu kaisen #jjk spoilers #jjk manga #itadori yuuji #this fucking fandom hurt me today deeply on a personal level #so well no holds barred #jjk meta #my ramblings #fandom wank #but also i say nothing new here #it's just a compilation of my greatest hits

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