Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2

Episode 43

I'm going to be honest: I knew this was coming for a while now. I try to avoid manga spoilers as much as I can for the series I'm reviewing. Still, given that the events of the Shibuya Incident Arc happened three years ago in print, it's not surprising that I found out about Nobara's fate around the time Season 1 of the anime ended. I was bummed, I'm not going to lie, but I managed to avoid getting spoiled on the "hows" and "whys" of her death; I only knew that it was going to happen during the Shibuya Incident Arc and that it'd be at Mahito's hands. So, despite my disappointment, I didn't lose hope completely. Some of my favorite series of all time —LOST, Breaking Bad, Attack on Titan, and so on— made a regular habit of killing off my favorite characters, and yet I never begrudged them for it. Good writing is good writing, so I went into the anime adaptation of the Shibuya Incident Arc with the notion that, if Nobara had to die, then it would at least probably make for one hell of an episode. Jujutsu Kaisen would surely afford that much for one of its standout main characters, right?

So, you can imagine my feelings when I finished "Right and Wrong, Part 2" with only one thought on my mind: "Wait…seriously? That's it?” We get a few minutes of a decent fight with Mahito's clone, followed by a minute or two of a decent continuation of Mahito's fight with Yuji. Then there's nothing else before her sudden death aside from an infuriatingly saccharine and presumptuous pre-death flashback for Nobara that lasts for goddamned ever? I never thought I'd say this, but the Shibuya Arc makes me wonder if I was too harsh on Demon Slayer's Swordsmith Village season. At least that show didn't trick me into thinking that any of its characters would be interesting and likable before it wasted my time with all of its unearned melodrama.

That's the thing, too. I wouldn't have a problem with Nobara's death if it felt earned in the slightest way. For goodness' sake, even Nanami was allowed to get some cool standout moments before being gruesomely exploded for Yuji's character development. Nobara is one of the core friends that Yuji has been with since the beginning of the show, and all she has to show for that in this entire season is over three months' time either spent on the sidelines or getting her ass kicked by that blonde twerp that Sukuna salami'd a couple of weeks ago. Then, in her last hurrah, she, what, kind of helps Yuji out in this fight before getting taken out for literally no other reason than to provide Yuji for even more emotional torment to fuel his inevitable power up? I guess the deaths of hundreds of innocent people and watching one of his mentors die right in front of him wasn't enough, huh? Give me a break.

I have a hard enough time with the "play an overly sentimental flashback for a character in their very last moments of life to manipulate the audience into feeling sad" move that anime likes to pull so often. Still, it becomes doubly frustrating when that trope is weaponized for a death that had no narrative buildup whatsoever. Sure, JJK, show us a cutesy memory of Nobara's childhood and even get her old pal Fumi to narrate it. That will get us to forget that you just randomly fridged a well-liked and compelling young woman so that your hero could suffer even more than he already has in the last, like, forty minutes of endless torment and death.

I haven't been shy about expressing my mixed feelings about this half of JJK's second season, which has indulged in an exhausting parade of nonstop spectacle at the cost of whatever emotional or intellectual engagement I had in its story. Even if Nobara magically survived getting her eyeballs juiced out of her skull, it wouldn't change the fact that this is just amateurish writing, plain and simple. Over the past thirteen weeks, I've experienced plenty of curiosity, excitement, confusion, disappointment—and, yes, boredom. However, this episode is the first time that Jujutsu Kaisen has made me angry.

In that sense, I suppose, I can at least be glad that this arc has finally made me feel something new.

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.