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© 芥見下々／集英社・呪術廻戦製作委員会
I feel like I’m risking a hot take here with my reactions to the latest episode of Jujutsu Kaisen, what with how hyped this Shibuya Arc has been over the last couple of years by all the manga readers I know, but I’m starting to feel just a little underwhelmed by this storyline. I know that I shouldn’t be letting myself get too excited over fandom hype, but it has been hard to ignore all the voices telling me that this entire story was just going to straight up blow my mind when, so far, it’s simply been a perfectly fine start to a Big Battle Story. Compared to the tight, compelling, and emotionally satisfying Flashback Arc, though? I dunno, y’all. I was expecting more.
To be fair to “Pandemonium”, the episode does contain some material that elevates the whole of what we’ve gotten from the Shibuya Arc so far. The flash of violent rebellion from Brain-Monster!Geto’s hand is proof enough that the original Geto is still in there, somewhere, which goes a long way toward making me care about BM!G a lot more, as a villain. Also, we get the return (kind of?) of Mechamaru! He’s a cute little ghostie earpiece thing, now, which is another development that retroactively makes the beginning of this arc stronger. His fatal defeat at the hands of Mahito feels less arbitrary, for one, and it provides an ever-so-slightly improved emotional connection to the battle at hand since we at least know MechaMaru better than Mei Mei’s weird little child butler, or the beanie guy who’s been hanging with Nanami and Megumi. Since all of the other sorcerers are presumably going to have to band together and fight for their lives while Gojo is trapped in that sealing cube, the story is going to need to lean on those characters to whom we have a connection to sell the stakes of this whole battle.
Still, I’m worried that my biggest issue — my general lack of emotional investment in anything that is happening right now — isn’t something that JJK can fix so easily. There are just so many characters, at this point, both good and evil, and I can count on one hand the number of them that could hold my attention for an entire season’s worth of gobbledygook exposition and big, loud fight scenes. I don’t know how much development the new faces are going to manage amid all this chaos, either. I’m not trying to say that Jujutsu Kaisen has suddenly gotten bad, or anything. I was just hoping that it would be a lot better, by now.
Rating:
Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.
James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.