Fights, Fights, and More Fights. Has Jujutsu Kaisen Got Nothing Else to Offer?

Summary:

• Jujutsu Kaisen has so many fights, that there is a question of whether it has anything else.
• Jujutsu Kaisen raises various important topics.
• The fights are also crucial for the series, and it wouldn’t be the same without them.

Jujutsu Kaisen is a very action-focused series. Epic fights start right in the first episode of the anime, and seem to be a recurring theme throughout the entire show. What more could you expect from a series with this premise, after all? But there’s got to be something else that attracts so many fans to this anime.

Fans joke that Gege Akutami writes Jujutsu Kaisen fights first and then adds pieces of story around them.

“He's not a manga writer, but a death battle writer,” they say.

And this joke doesn’t feel too far from reality when you start watching the series. A fight is over, but you know what would be fun to see next? Another fight, of course!

Yes, it does have a lot of fights, so what?

But jokes aside, there truly is a lot of action in Jujutsu Kaisen. Sometimes it feels like the entire series is just about curses who want to kill people, and people who don’t want to be killed, thus they have to defend themselves. There is no higher purpose in the battles, like in Naruto, where him fighting Sasuke was to explore their friendship and how to stop a dear person from going astray. But Jujutsu Kaisen’s fights are not like that. They’re just battles to see who survives and who is the strongest.

No matter how shallow all of that makes Jujutsu Kaisen sound, we do not agree that the series is this simple. It having a lot of fights is just a way of paying respect to its genre. It’s an action shounen series, after all!

It’s got so much more, too

Jujutsu Kaisen explores various themes such as power, trauma, friendship, gender roles, selflessness, burden, etc. It develops its characters and tries to make their stories entertaining. Characters are usually the core of a series, and they can make a story worth your time even if the overall plot is pretty simple. And Jujutsu Kaisen’s central plot is indeed simple: the greater evil (Sukuna) has to be stopped. But it’s the journey that matters. Numerous fights just make this journey more visually pleasing.

On top of that, fights are important for the pacing of a series. If an anime has just talking and no action, it’s easy to get bored. Especially now, when people can’t take even a second of nothing happening on their screen. Besides, fights are just awesome to watch! You may argue that anime such as Death Note manage to be phenomenal with little to no action, but these are two completely different series, and Jujutsu Kaisen is not like that.