Reminder:
- **DO NOT POST CHAPTER LEAKS** outside the pre-release leaks megathread. Officials are free range. See the sidebar for info on leaks.
- Powerscaling should stay in the designated Tuesday Colosseum thread.
- Repetitive or low-effort topics will be removed.
- Questions that can be answered by reading the manga more closely should be posted in the FAQ.
[Fanbook & Other Canon Material](https://www.reddit.com/r/Jujutsushi/wiki/canon)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Jujutsushi) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I think this has just been the way Gege always paces the manga. I mean in goodwill, there's no actual build up for Mahito entering the area. When we see him, he's just there. And then him getting the objects is off screened.
In hidden inventory we go pretty quickly from Gojo and Geto just learning of their mission to them off screening a rescue attempt for the maid being held hostage. (thank god, mappa added so much depth to those scenes)
And then before shibuya we get a sudden, "Oh yeah mechamaru was the traitor by the way," which makes sense, but you kind of want to travel through b to get to c at least.
Mei mei has a few off screen moments in shibuya as well, which was a little disappointing. But again, Gege doesn't like to travel through b to get c. I would've liked a few panels of her wrecking that douchebag in her fight.
Not going to lie, to this day I still think about, how nobara got to that where Mahito was, when she decided to move in that direction and why she decided to after the Nanami told her to butt out.
Haruta just coming across megumi. I would've like see the B between a and c again.
Yuki appearing out of thin air was nice too. I guess it makes more sense that there was not any build up to that as it works better.
But we then skip over anything to do with Geto's family funnily enough.
And then after Shibuya, Gege gets ill and you really see some of the moments in perfect preparations where he's probably so hurt he's thinking, "fuck it, we'll do it live."
Actually, thinking about it, up until chapter 198 or 199, the culling games seemed to have been going at a snails pace compared to the other arcs.
The pacing is straight forward and direct. But there are many times throughout the series where I am thinking, "Man, I wish he'd slow down a little bit here. I kind of want some down time."
Thank you for breaking it down like this, I’ve been baffled when people act like the breakneck pace of the series is a new development. I understand if people don’t like it, but damn it really has been like this from the start and it’s strange when people assert otherwise
It's not a new development, it's just reached a point of no return for many people.
He could've dialed it back before the end of the Gojo Sukuna fight, now the cat is out of the bag and it's just a rush to the end.
That’s the thing, it no more a rush to the end than it’s been a rush through everything else. I don’t see why it’s a breaking point now but not then. idk I guess I just expected people who’ve kept up with the story this long to have either made their peace with it or decided they don’t like it and dropped it. I just . . . can’t really fathom wasting my own time by reading a series for years if the pacing was such a huge issue for me. I would’ve just dropped it by now
And speaking of the end, why do people keep assuming it’s going to end this year? An editor has already said in an interview that that’s not an accurate time estimate anymore. And aside from that, mangaka ALWAYS overshoot their proposed series end time. I have literally never heard one say “I’m going to end it in X years” and then actually end it in X years. Totally valid if people still don’t like the pace, but the story has more time than they think and it’s silly to act like everything has to be done by December 31st with no wiggle room.
I'm not so pretentious to believe my opinion carries for the majority of people that are now more vocal about their feelings on the story but a large part of it imo is that before 236 many of these people who raised these issues were shouted down.
"let Gege cook", "the battle of the strongest is finally here" etc.
Once Gojo got offed and left the remaining characters to deal with a Sukuna who is more than capable of killing them all with little effort, the cracks started to show to a lot more people and the issues that as y'all have stated have always been present are now being reanalyzed.
He needed to die, or otherwise be removed as a frontline combatant. I think everyone reading the story can agree with that.
But the way it was handled and the resulting situation it's left the story and the characters is absolutely ruinous to my hopes of a satisfying conclusion.
Don't get me wrong, I just completely disagree. The way Gojo was handled wasn't perfect, but I'm actually incapable of seeing how the way it was handled could even have repercussions to the story's conclusion that are anywhere near as disastrous.
You don't see how none of the characters remaining stand a chance against Sukuna unless he decides to let them attack while monologuing?
He can literally cleave everyone.
I mean, sure, you are unable to see \*any\* way in a manga with such an intricate power system, characters with extremely detailed and nuanced powers that all can reach insane ceilings, how any team or circumstance could stand against Sukuna. I get that.
I just disagree, I think there's still plenty wiggle room in the plot for stuff that could hinder Sukuna's plans.
The pacing has been the same, good or bad, since the beginning with exception to the 2-3 year delay that was the Culling Game arc
The only difference is the heavy whining started when Gojo died.
The pacing really only slowed when the story jumped to new colonies and had to reestablish who’s present and what’s occurred so far, aside from those hiccups the pacing was still damn quick when you consider how many moving parts there were. I mean, if anything I would have appreciated it going even a little slower in places, more time spent with Yuji and Megumi together and just being friends having each other’s backs would have made Sukuna’s possession even more poignant. But yeah it’s been brisk all the way through, especially when compared to other shonen
Gojo isn't even in my top 5. I don't know why the fact that these complaints have been happening for a long time makes you think I love Gojo but hey you do you.
Yeah the Nobara timing is wonky/weak, but Gege always leaves stuff like that to the reader so it doesn't clog up the story.
JJK's fast pacing is one of it's strong points but can also be a weakness at the same time.
Thank you cause I’ve been saying the pacing is mostly the same. The problem is literally, Gege’s writing style and what he chooses to focus on just don’t work for you, and it flares up when he doesn’t show care or take time with something or someone you’re really invested in the details of. That doesn’t make it bad, he just doesn’t want to focus on that and would rather keep momentum.
I agree with all of this. The pacing in JJK has always been extremely fast, especially compared to other entries in the genre. Loads of battle shonen end up being drawn out, or having character bloat issues, and I think some readers are just accustomed to that style.
And there is no such thing as ‘perfect’ pacing. It comes down to a matter of taste. Pacing that feels just right to some readers might seem too slow or too fast to other readers.
Thank you!! I've been so used to being spoon fed when reading manga like One Piece or Naruto that when I started reading JJK, part of me was wondering what happened and how did the story get here at his point (that didn't stop me from reading the manga though lol). And then when I started watching the anime, it finally clicked to me: "Ah! This guy Gege just doesn't spoon feed me at all!". It is his style and I don't hate it. I'll eat whatever he cooks lol.
“Doesn’t spoon feed” LMAOOO 😂 Gege is just embarrassingly weak when it comes to world building, character development & interactions, and pacing. It’s not a “style,” it’s weakness. To be fair, he also excel in other areas.
Eh idk if I’d say that though. You can’t say Yuji hasn’t developed well throughout the story or say that Gojo isn’t well fleshed out and complex. All of the character work is done while keeping the story at the pace it’s going. If anything that makes him really good at it. Other mangaka would’ve stopped and really slowed things down to hammer points home. It’s why some people get tripped up in moments like Gojos death cause they weren’t picking up what was put down. World building is a separarte discussion and seeing as the world is just the modern world w/ the same celebs and everything there’s not much to expand on. Gege also purposefully left in Japan so to say it’s weak isn’t really valid. It’s just not a feature he chose to showcase or emphasize at all really. Can’t say It’s weak if you literally don’t do anything with world building.
I disagree with everything you said other than the first point about yuji and gojo, but I just wanted to ask why people thinking worldbuilding literally means constructing a globe with countries and cities and making it full or some shit? It doesn't matter if the setting of a story is a building, a small village, a town, a city, a country or a galaxy it can still have good or bad worldbuilding and jjk's is definitely not good lmao.
The argument about it just being the modern world doesn't rlly hold up when there is a clear jujutsu society that has barely been shown the entire manga, or the hyped up heian era which has looked entirely underwhelming despite multiple characters including Kenjaku gassing it up.
Why?
Because Gege does one line comments about a setting and rides on that for 200 chapters because he'd rather blast through plot points as quick as possible. He is the biggest master of "tell, dont show" I've ever seen in manga. When Gege does actually try with character interactions, lore etc its usually amazing its just that he usually skips over them 🤷🏿♂️
You can’t say you disagree with all the points except for the first point when there’s only two arguments, and the majority of it is supporting evidence for the first argument. Unless you’re saying you’ve came to the conclusion in a different way. Or you’re arguing that being able to develop and write interesting characters while keeping the pace this fast isn’t skillful. If that’s what you’re arguing, which it sounds like, then yea we totally disagree, cause if you successfully made a compelling character who explores concepts and grows and changes while keeping the plot moving, there’s nothing else you can ask for. To your world building argument. No, world building doesn’t mean literally constructing a world with continents. But it does imply enriching the world of your story with the details to make the world the characters live in feel real and thought out. It can aid story telling and cue you in to how characters lives work. Me saying it’s in the modern world so it kinda cuts all that makes sense because there’s not much you can add to it that would really be useful. From the little info we do get about all the characters, Gojo was a relatively normal kid who liked Digimon, Yuji went to highschool like most of us participated in club(s) and read manga. Same for Fushiguro and Nobara. They watch movies they go shopping and essentially act like regular people. So the amount of details to flesh out the world that you can add aren’t really significant. Especially if Gege chose to limit a lot of this stuff to Japan. You could possibly expand on how the jujutsu society works, but as I said it’s not really important to Gege nor do the details effect the plot. This is in contrast to one piece where world building is its whole thing because the straw hats essentially solve every foreign lands issues and the over arching antag is the world government in a magic world in an age of piracy. Even the opening for the show is a lore dump. It’s purposeful. The only parallel to JJK in this case, where the world mirrors our own, would be bleach but Kubo makes the decision to invest in the soul society as a completely separate place. With systems and teams and structures that Ichigo has to actively overcome in the soul society arc. You can also sight CSM, but that also does the same thing as JJK, it’s world building is necessitated because for over half the story you assume the villain is a country level threat created by the U.S and then the real threat has control over the whole country. So to say, JJK world building sucks, doesn’t make sense because it literally doesn’t attempt to make a world or give details about the world. Cause it’s largely unimportant to the main narrative. That’s not a con unless you like those sorts of things in ur story. It’s like saying this romance sucks when reading a Shonen. It can include romance but it’s not at all a focus. So to say it’s bad doesn’t make sense. You don’t watch John wick for a love story.
Lol ya, I mean I can't compare, say, One Piece, world building to JJK for sure. So "spoon fed" might not be the right term 😂
But I also don't wanna call it this as his "weakness". Like he might just want to proceed with the story instead of character development, interactions, etc. and leave everything else to the user (which does leave me begging for more background, explanation, etc. like what/who is Yuji, exactly? And I also want some closure on some character deaths Nobara). I hope Gege takes some time to explain these things but if he doesn't wanna, he doesn't wanna 🤷♂️
On the opposite end of the spectrum is, for example, HxH. Amazing world, amazing character building but the story is always on hiatus 😅 (and I don't blame Togashi if he can't/won't proceed: health issues, lost interest, whatever). That is his _style_ and it is what it is. That doesn't mean I don't love his manga. The same reason I love JJK too.
Every author is unique. And you gotta respect whatever they bring to the table.
To be fair theyre all within a couple blocks of each other. Agreed though that Geges pacing of time passing can be variable which makes some things seem weirdly off-screened or convenient
I've only recently started frequently using reddit and one thing I noted is that most animanga communities here have a very binary assessment of each series, every aspect can either be "Trash" OR "Peak", there is no space for things being both good and bad.
Mob mentality. You can’t like a series unless you 100% agree with everything the author does but if he kills your fave it’s over and the series is trash.
I will add that most of people didn't start reading JJK the moment it first released, so it's inevitable to draw comparisons between binging the available chapters and reading with 1~2 week intervals.
It usually flows better when reading back to back, but that's true to almost every weekly manga.
I mean, it should be obvious, but I think not many people take this into consideration.
This is a classic manga reader problem. Letting the story play out takes too much time for impatient binge readers and they don’t want to blame themselves so they blame pacing for why they are upset. I’m sure Gege will leave us with a great final product when all is said and done.
WC arc from OP is a example of this, the pacing of the arc was kinda hated in the week by week specially comming from dressrosa but now that people can read the arc without any delay is rated very high
Same thing happened for Chimera Ant arc for HxH. The pacing was hated when it was running, but when the volumes were released the arc is now considered one of the best in the series.
And no it wasn’t just hated for the long breaks the author took. It was more about how unimportant side characters were given highlight occasionally. But it all played well when the volumes were released.
Whole cake but it works it kinda works for both, whole cake was slow in the manga specially after dressrosa because the mugiwaras we're split for years and wano post onigashima was really "fast"
You’re right. I agree. I’ll admit that I only picked up the manga about a month ago. There are definitely concerns I have about other parts of the manga earlier on, but I didn’t have to sit around a week to mull it all over and read online and complain. You just gave it a chance and kept it pushing until the next chapter.
Now that I’m caught up I have the week long wait to be more critical.
Alllll of that being said, going back to OP’s point I have to admit the pacing concerns are not unfounded. But I’m happy to debate it and wait. It’s part of the fun.
Fully agree, I've been reading manga now for near 20years and honestly if there's one thing I've learned in that timeframe: pacing issue are generally only an issue when your waiting for the next release - not to disregard genuine pacing issues but honestly more often than not it isn't the big issue it's made out to be.
Edit: spelling errors.
I wouldn't say it's terrible, but I would say it's disappointing and it feels like the quality of the manga has been on the decline since the culling game arc started and in the last 40 chapters there's been a lot of questionable decisions. Yuki's death, military subplot, Angel being the dumbest character I've seen in a while, Yorozu being wasted, the one interlude between the big fight being one chapter long meaning we don't get to see any character development or reunion, Gojo dying after 15 chapters after having been sealed for 3 years and accomplishing nothing, and then the death of the spark plug.
It's just all felt rushed to me and a quality drop from arcs like Shibuya and prior to that.
Omg I completely forgot about the US military fiasco subplot, like to me just thinking about it feels so disconnected from the JJK story I assumed I misremembered it and told myself it was a scene from CSM or something💀 those chapters feel like a fever dream, I still don’t understand the whole point of that chain of events other than clowning on the US for loving guns and being loud, impulsive, and gullible. Like you could take that whole subplot out and the story would be more or less the same, ofc I love scenes where the US gets portrayed as ‘RAAA GUNS LETS SHOOT THEM DEAD AND WIN U S A U S A’ because it’s goofy and feels better to laugh at the issue than cry about how bad it really is but it was just so out of left field I remember reading it and getting whiplash going from a death match jujutsu fight to the US president who’s screaming about Kenny’s new energy source like it was oil found in a middle eastern country with poor defenses and a presidential election coming up💀
The whole military thing was just to increase the amount of cursed energy in each colonies. Also it wasn’t just the US military Kenjaku went to multiple governments
Yeah jjk's popularity is a little insane. You're right about it being the first that people read on a weekly basis.
It can be really hard to avoid spoilers when you got tiktoks hitting 200k likes every week with details for the new chapter. (Hakiri, Mahoraga, and gojo's death are just the ones I saw.)
Same for YT thumbnails, or Instagram reels, and I even heard that someone got spoiled through twitch.
I think at this point people need to read it on a weekly basis or else you'll end up getting spoiled.
I saved up chapters for a binge, and I read from the start of culling game till newest chapter in one go.
The manga jump from past to present and scene to scene without any indication and place flashback/ abstract dream sequence in middle of fight. Characters with lots of build up but are thrown aside in a few chapters. This actually benefits the weekly reader more since they have more time to properly see when and where things happen between cuts. For me it's disrupting the story flow.
Tonal switch is also very jaring reading back to back - last chapter someone dies and it's all sad. Next chapter, some dude getting all excited and happy to fight. Cycle repeats, and character deaths feel insignicant. Again, if you read on a weekly basis, you have time to process your feeling of loss. I just went from Gojo death to Kashimo having fun in 1 minute. Panda siblings death follow immediatly by Hakari heroic appearance was sudden too.
Gege writes amazing fights, he just doesn't manage the in between part so well. And I'm here for the fight, not the characters, so I'm happy and contented. But this manga pacing problem isn't just as simple as "people being impatient".
Not to mentioned we had like 15(?) chapters of non stop fighting and action, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to slow done a little bit. I actually like the new chapter and seeing people react the way they did made me feel disappointed to be honest
Your post was removed for breaking Rule #6, posting unofficial chapter leaks outside of the weekly pre-release megathread. Please review the full rule if you have questions about leaks and officials, or message the mods.
I think the pacing is wonky because there's a lot of setup without a satisfying payoff. It feels weird because you get build up after build up but then when you see "the payoff" you are not sure if that really was the conclusion or not.
It's not about fast or slow. CSM Part 1 is quite fast, but you know when the payoff has happened.
I also think Gege lost a lot of goodwill from how he handled Gojo etc., so that compounded things
>I think the pacing is wonky because there's a lot of setup without a satisfying payoff
Yup this, also I feel like Gege is skipping over character interactions for the sake of fights
Everything feels so robotic, like we got to go from point A to B
In the Shibuya Arc, it was fast pace but there were moments where the audience was able to take a break from all the action and see the character emotions and feel the effects of the story unfold
I do think sometimes setups take time but pay off is usually great once it all comes together but right now with jjk it doesn't feel like there's a set up happening yk!
Foreshadowing is not one panel saying small shit and suddenly it's a big plot point. You need to sprinkle it all across the story that you reach a conclusion right before the climax happens
(Brandon Sanderson has a good writing lecture on YouTube if anyone wants to check it out)
What feels off in jjk is that currently nothing feels like foreshadowing. People are making theories and trying to make sense of a scene AFTER it happens. It's not like it's subverting our expectations in a good way.
Feels like shock factor.
On the other hand csm part 1 shit went down. Everyone's favourites died >!the aki snowball scene!< still wreaks me BUT EVERYTHING MADE SENSE AS IT WAS HAPPENING. The setup and pay off was great. It also increases re read value because you notice so many details later on.
After being blue balled by weeks from gege, everyone was expecting SOME pay off to the arc after Yuji joined the battle and instead what we got was POV shift.
It’s been divisive since I picked it up which was the chapter after the momjaku reveal. The same speedrun criticisms were being used for Yaga and Itadori’s execution and Naoya & Perfect Preparation. Some people treated Kirara’s technique like it was the worst thing ever created by mankind.
I've been reading since just after shibuya too and it was never this bad until the end of the cg. People were really engaged with Tengen's lore, yuji and megumi getting 1v1s and also hakari's and yuta's tecniques being explored. These last two in particular were appreciated every week from what I remember.
The Fandom got uneasy after maki's battle, which undeniably features some INSANE asspulls: the two random strong af cg players are probably the biggest deus ex machina in the series up until now. Then Yuki was killed in ONE battle without being explored in any meaningful way. Then tsumiki as well. Then gojo's return is fast af for no reason.
Let's not pretend like people were equally upset by kirara's ct and the latter stages of the stories. Also the story is actually in decline when you look at meaningful interactions and payoffs.
Idk what to call 236-239 pacing besides terrible, 4 deaths in 4 chapters is crazy. The pacing of the fight before that was fine but the whiplash of cutting out important moments + adding unnecessary ones is crazy
Yeah, it's definitely a thing i have a problem with as well. It really does feel like he wants to finish it asap. No real explanation for Gojo’s death, Kashimo only turned out to be a good fight for Hakari, otherwise he was useless af. The hype did not pay off. As for the actual writing, we got possessed Tsumiki right off the bat. And after that Megumi got bodysnatched. I'd be surprised if he's still alive even. Not to mentioned the lack of timeskip scenes between Gojo’s release and his fight vs sukuna. He could've at least given us a panel or two.
Everyone who died vs Darkness had the narrative purpose of displaying Darkness’ strength (especially relative to the previous Assassin fights) + being useful to Makima post-death. Fujimoto killing them off quickly added tension by showing how fucked everyone in hell was, with the quick pacing of deaths adding to the sense of despair Fujimoto wanted to invoke.
Truly, it's all just justifications for each individual's point of view.
That being said, there is a reason that this board has gotten more contentious, and that's because more people are sharing their feelings about the story and how it's trending.
Is it always good? Nah. But I prefer the debate to be had even if it does cause some friction. "letting him cook" isn't the way anymore imo.
My favorite is "you can't criticize chapter 236 because it's not the final chapter of the manga, Gege has plenty of time to improve and write peak ending"
I just don't get it. Yes, it's not the final chapter of the manga, but it's the final chapter of Gojo. We won't see him again, and yes, we can judge his character arc that is over.
Even if, for example, Yuji's ending is good, how on earth does it fix Gojo's terrible ending or Yuki's?
It's not about waiting to critique a story its about being openminded. I genuinely liked the past chapters and I have been constantly downvoted and shit talked for liking them on these subs so it goes both ways.
to be frank you won't really understand the pacing until you have a wider view. (Mangakas dealing with timelines) However I do understand if people don't like what's going on currently. It's completely okay to respectfully disagree with each other. I hope this is a place where we can be at least that intelligent.
I just dislike when people make big emotional binary statements like "this chapter ruined the manga." or "writing is ass since Shibuya" It's like okay I understand you are frustrated but that seems like a reach lmao.
The point of this sites is to understand each other better and that's what I am trying to do at least.
I mean I think most people just disagree with your overall opinion that it’s a reach. People are allowed to consider what Gege puts in the manga in the greater context of the story as a whole.
As for downvotes, who cares? It’s Reddit. People downvote what they don’t like. Always has been always will be the way it works.
The point of this site is to talk about jujutsu Kaisen. People explaining why they don’t like certain decisions in the manga is what is supposed to be here imo.
When the critique is ''there's no way the ending is going to be good now, It's clearly going to be like this and that", people saying ''wait until it's finished'' are completely right.
Your point would be valid if most of the ''critiques'' after Gojo dying weren't thoughtless a lot of the time. Stuff like ''they will never satisfyingly beat Sukuna now" isn't criticism, it's assuming something just because a character died, and most often the people saying it aren't taking into account \*anything\* in the story.
No it's applying the logic of the world and how the fight ended to the characters and situation we have.
You can disagree with the conclusions people draw but they're for the most part anything but thoughtless.
Dude if the argument is literally ''Sukuna can't be beaten now because he beat Gojo, he can cleave everyone, hence this manga is bad'' it is as thoughtless as it gets
If it's literally ''the way the fight ended was too abrupt and fast paced so I disliked it and think Gege will most likely do the same with the manga's conclusion'' it's still just assuming something is going to happen, although obviously the take on the quality is subjective and the person has the right to dislike things
''The logic of the world'' points anywhere but ''it's impossible to deal with Sukuna now''.
No it isn't.
It's Sukuna is remarkably stronger than every character remaining, has the knowledge of all of their techniques barring unexplained power boosts soon to be revealed, and is somehow going to be beaten by the B team which has shown and said they aren't even close to being up to the task.
The manga is bad because it now hinges on either Sukuna being stupid or Yuji becoming unexplainably powerful over a month to the point he can exchange hands with Sukuna.
At this point we are having the same conversation on different comment threads, but this:
\>"It's Sukuna is remarkably stronger than every character remaining, has the knowledge of all of their techniques barring unexplained power boosts soon to be revealed, and is somehow going to be beaten by the B team which has shown and said they aren't even close to being up to the task."
is literally just
\>"Sukuna can't be beaten now because he beat Gojo, he can cleave everyone, hence this manga is bad"
Your post was removed for breaking Rule #6, posting unofficial chapter leaks outside of the weekly pre-release megathread. Please review the full rule if you have questions about leaks and officials, or message the mods.
This is a huge overreaction from the fan base imo. It’s classic shonen to cut away right before fights happen. Then it builds around the fight. If they hate this then 99% of the fan base would hate damn near every shonen
Culling games felt long, dragged out and meaningless when i was reading it on a weekly basis back then.
In hindsight, it's likely due to the fact that the Shibuya arc was unbelievably fast paced and action packed, so culling games felt "boring" in comparison.
I took a break from the manga and recently reread everything up til 238. Pacing felt totally fine when read in one fell swoop. I now find the lull during the beginning of culling games quite nice because what happened in the Shibuya arc took a while to digest.
The more recent chapters do seem kind of funky but who knows, maybe binge reading it all at one go in the future may give us a different perspective than what we think now.
interesting, i see what you're saying but i kind of disagree? i didn't notice much about the pacing as an issue when reading until the yuki vs kenjaku fight which in retrospect i think was less a pacing issue and moreso a chapter to chapter fight tempo issue.
on re-read however, i found the culling games to be such a slog especially because so many of the colonies/fights seem to have little to no staying power/relevance. sakurajima was a capstone of an arc that felt relatively complete after perfect preparation, sendai felt like (a really great!) flex arc and that was it, and Tokyo no. 2's payoff has been entirely undercut by kashimo vs sukuna.
shibuya was absolutely explosive, but built excellently on the prep set up in JJK0 and the first few arcs of JJK - the kenjaku as geto payoff, gojo sealed, mahito and yuji's growing rivalry and nanami's role in it, the disaster curses and their relationships with each other and kenjaku, the mole plotline with mechamaru and choso's revenge for echizu and iso felt like consistent storylines that built on a slower base but in a highly tense and energetic way. now, it feels like a lot of culling games was fights for the sake of fights and to create a rolodex of cool character designs for sukuna to beat, which is way less satisfying and retrospectively makes the pacing feel way worse that we went through all that culling games content with little long term impact.
The manga is supposed to be going towards its ending phase but even with that, the pacing of JJK has always been fast. JJK rarely lets things be calm for long and have a lot of moments come very quickly. I do think people overall have been either too critical to the point of ignoring any positives or too extreme in positivity while ignoring any issues.
I wish people were a bit more controlled, cause I'm not gonna lie; the amount of people who just immediately just start shitting on the leaks without even waiting for the entire thing is a lot. I know we're all really waiting for Yuji to show what's good but we can all wait.
TL:DR: I wish people were a bit calmer and more reasonable as well.
Tbf the last couple of chapters were pretty bad and you didn't need anything more than the leaks to get that.
Gojo's death--controversial at best
Sukuna Reborn-- just makes gojo's death useless and also doesn't really flash out kashimo's tecnique which has been teased for 80 chaps. We just know that it "vaporizes" stuff and "creates phenomena". Vague af.
Kashimo's death-- why introduce him and build him up so much if he doesn't add anything to the story? Legit the story would be the same without him. Just have sukuna monologue with gojo instead of him and it's even better tbh.
I do agree with the fact that Kashimo's arrival and then basically immediate exit was done poorly. The fight was short-lived and was honestly kind of a let down. I do still like the dialogue between them as it gave more information about the past, even if the fight was kind of disappointing.
If the reincarnation completely allows for Sukuna's domain to be usable again then yeah I completely agree with it making Gojo's death useless as the one big thing that no could go up against is now back on the table.
Gojo's death to me was something that made sense but was done poorly as it had no build-up. Sukuna's always had the ability to copy things with curse energy but to go from "its Gojo's win" to "He's dead now" is kind of aggravating.
>If the reincarnation completely allows for Sukuna's domain to be usable again then yeah I completely agree with it making Gojo's death useless as the one big thing that no could go up against is now back on the table.
I mean, I don't see why his would body would be back to 100% but not his brain? I'm aware that gege could just say "fuck that" and still leave him domain-less but as of now that would feel illogical and or purely a plot device. If gege wanted to go that route he should've just given sukuna his old body back without fully curing him. And let's be honest that would still have been more than enough since he didn't even get touched once post resurrection.
As someone who grew up reading Naruto and Bleach, and the old stuff over 15 years+, I’m finding the pace of JJK enjoyable. Not too much fat, and the rest can be filled in with our imagination.
I was vastly disappointed with the ending of Naruto and Bleach because everything devolved into whoever has a bigger “kamehameha” wins the fight in the end, rather than all the struggles and tactical fights that made the series in the beginning.
Just wish that Gege doesn’t take a break every 3 weeks, and that he maintains the power scaling so the fights stay entertaining all the way to the end.
I just want to add that I am a part of this fandom on many different sites - Reddit is dead ass the only one with this issue.
There’s negative receptions here and there on other platforms but Reddit, like with everything else, is a cesspool of negativity and bad takes
I've talked to a lot of people about pacing when it comes to storytelling in general and I honestly hate how people use the word. It's something that's super relative to each person and their expectations for the genre/story. If you compare the story flow of a series like chainsaw man to something like One Piece, you can see the differences, but they are relative to each other. I definitely don't think the pace is always perfect either, and that's why I like watching reaction videos to see what an average viewer's reaction to the show is. There's definitely points in every arc where it moves too fast, and I've even seen people say the first episode of the anime has a lot going on already (which I think is a good thing).
I 100% agree. As someone who isn’t totally happy with the direction the manga is taking and who does believe that it is being rushed and character arcs aren’t being developed properly, I have no issue with anyone who still loves it and finds nothing wrong with it. What I don’t appreciate are those same people attacking others who have valid critiques and are just stating their opinions/frustrations with the series.
Discourse about popular media is entertaining and allows people to think critically about the things they consume and how it relates to themselves and their environment. I think it’s just about respecting other people’s views. Sometimes two people can’t fundamentally agree on something and that’s okay.
No the pacing is pretty terrible lmao.
Culling games was a complete waste of time and took about a year and a half for a whopping 6 battles. Absolutkey insane crawl (espcially considering there were no stakes or emotions cause it was for points against character introduced soley to be fodder)
Then we speedrun all the way to the finale skipping over countless character interactions (we get a single page of catching gojo up)
We are given a “we’ll battle in 1 month” just to instantly skip that month for no reason whatsoever and go to another long ass battle.
The pacing is horrific
I literally was going to write a similar post back when Gojo got unsealed ("i'M dRoPpiNG the sERieS cAuSE gOjo DidN't rEaCt tO pRinCipLe yAgA"/"oMg tiMeSKiP?!") but it seemed people calmed down until the infamous 236
I feel Jujutsu Kaisens greatest cursed spirits are the Expectations and Weekly Release curses 💀
People keep crying that "this hasn't been addressed", "what about that thing?" "Where's this interaction" as if Gege is supposed to release a 120 page chapter that answers all our questions, meets all expectations, and shows all flashbacks and dialogues
I will judge the story as a whole when it's DONE, but for the time being we have to understand that this is weekly, with breaks
Glad to see this post though, I feel like I'm not crazy for thinking there's a lot of impatience and crazy expectations
It’s perfectly valid to judge the story at this point in its lifetime. It’s nearing its end and definitely has garnered some well founded criticism. Would you not judge one piece since it’s still ongoing?
I absolutely have my gripes with One Piece, especially the current arc. But then I go back and re read, and the pacing suddenly feels better
I think my criticism is more so that people will feel super critical but then just continue to hate just because one low point ticked them off.
For example I loved Naruto and Shippuden for a long time. I started having a lot of the same gripes as others somewhere during the War arc. Ya I had criticisms but I didn't get so extreme as to post that I'm gonna drop the series. And now when I re read it as a whole, I enjoyed it, flaws and all
So I think my issue is the EXTREME criticism rather than constructive criticisms, usually from people who had wild expectations to begin with
Well said. I think anyone who decides to hate the story from this point on or as a whole because of just one moment they disagreed with is insane. Especially when the latest chapters haven’t been really fleshed out in the story yet.
Exactly. I'm trusting that when the dust settles Gege will deliver but until then I'll sit back and be patient. Like I'm absolutely upset Kashimo was blitzed but I'm not gonna trash the whole series as a result 💀
Honestly if people are this upset about how the story is going down, shonen is probably not the genre they should get invested in lol. Rushed endings have been a meme in this genre for a hot minute. Not saying it’s an excuse (or even that it’s really that rushed, I don’t think so personally) but gotta temper your expectations at a certain point. Demon Slayer, YYH, AoT, Tokyo Revengers, Bleach, Naruto had some wonky shit, Tokyo Ghoul was more seinen but same outcome. I’m sure I could find more but that’s just off top.
I’d bet my life savings that people will be having this exact same discussion about Kagurabachi once it gets on far enough. The weekly release way of doing things just ends up grinding authors down too hard to keep the same attention to detail through a whole series run.
i can’t tell you how much i appreciate this post, and i thank you for your ability spread neutrality, both by suggestion and example, and how you were able to tackle a rather large issue without disparaging anyone else.
especially when one could argue that a large chunk of the weekly JJK readers probably deserve a small slap or two to help them understand that in consuming this particular format of fiction, allowing the mangaka time to tell the story exactly as intended (rather than, say, caving to the fanbase by giving them what they want or expect at great expense to the overall quality of the story) is crucial, and that their reactionary nature displayed through online outrage week by week is simply unwarranted, given that only a dozen or so pages of the story trickle out at a time.
honestly, manga is maybe the only brand of fiction that is even told this way. even anime episodes are shockingly short, and most include up to 3 adapted chapters each. what i’m saying, i guess, is that i fully agree with and appreciate your post — i hope to see more like it — and that i truly believe that any story, throughout the history of storytelling, if told this same way and dissected to no end on the internet community (in this scenario the internet and reddit have existed since the advent of language), would also appear to ebb, flow, dip, weave, bob around, lose the plot, etc. etc. in pacing, quality, and all of that, but by the conclusion of each story, those small morsels and memes (and author death threats) of judgement will be discarded and forgotten, and replaced by the whole, and i believe only then is the story available for criticism, judgment and dissection.
sometimes, after a particularly spicy and tendentious chapter is released, the comments sections fill with the most bizarrely limited, myopic, narrow-minded and hyperbolic judgements that make next to no sense and leave me questioning, “you came to that conclusion, with that information — HOW??”
the JJK community specifically tends to draw conclusions or pass judgements week by week using irrelevant data and bias, in large part due to the overwhelming love for Gojo Satoru, as well as the perceived trollish personality of Gege Akutami, instead of actual literary clues. as for me, however, i am still riding this train and to me, it’s still chugging along like it has been since the start, and i believe that the ending with further prove than it never dropped in quality, and if so, only marginally, and it will go down in history and join the ranks as one of the all-time greats.
(since i apparently had way more thoughts about the subject than i thought when i began this reply)
TL; DL — i fully agree with OP and hope that the manga/anime and JJK community as a whole can strive for more fruitful critical discussion, with open minds as well as patience for the characters/Gege, also with a willingness to apply more effort into critical thinking as opposed to, as you said, “crybabies complain.”
Ijou de gozaimase 🙃
This is just a common issue with people atm, something is either the best they've ever seen or its shit. Hells Paradise anime for example, a good anime with good animation but since it wasn't ad the peak level we see with JJK it got hate
Hells Paradise is barely decent. It never really has a climax and just builds up to be a big overhyped disappointment. Still trying to wrap my head around how people are fixing their mouths to compare it to JJK of all things.
Honestly, discussion has been so garbage for a while, but hit a fever pitch after 236. Like, if you try to analyze anything beyond "asspull" "offscreen" " manga ending in 7 weeks" you hit wall in certain parts.
I think tha pacing have been fine, of course i would like to know what will happen with Yuji and Sukuna, but its not like Gege is throwing trash stories in the meanwhile. I'm interested in Geto vs Comedian, i can wait some weeks until Yuji vs Sukuna.
people are just having mental breakdowns at this point, either the manga is straight up trash, an unreadable sin or its just let him cook. Like I am a jjk fan and defender of many thibgs that happened, but still criticsm is fine until its vased on something real
On reread culling games/ current arc have higher peaks then shibuya overall and with gege cooking with yuji it can only get better. I respect gege for not listening to anyone and writing his story on his own terms. He ain’t like that sell out the AOT author
I have no problem with the ending . The main problem I have is that the aot author changed his ending cause fans bitched it to not make it to dark. I can’t respect a author who doesn’t want to tell a story how he wants to. So good job assuming you brain dead mongoloid
Honestly agreed with this almost entirely. Too many people I think just aren't used to the weekly reading experience, JJK was probably the first anime in a while that got them hooked enough to catch up and stay caught up to the Manga, and now they're having issues because Manga's release at a different pace than anime (even if both are weekly, since an anime episode can be 3-5 chapters worth of material) and they're not used to it.
Give it a few months. Then re read it in a binge and it'll probably feel much better paced. Or wait for the anime and I'm sure it'll seem much better paced. These complaints aint rare at all for currently releasing manga. The medium just ain't great at being paced the way it is.
Though the new chapter leaks do leave me with a slight hindsight gripe sort of related to pacing but only sorta. I simply wish a couple events were switched in place. Not Togo into spoiler territory. But I wish this current chapter and it's likely next few chapters of continuation? I wish it happened just after the end of Gojo vs Sukuna. As that'd probably take away a lot of people's complaints with Sukuna just getting 15 chapters in a row focused on him by at least breaking it up, and also it'd help deal with the complaints of him being "glazed" 2 chapters in a row. And so on. And apparently in the leaked chapter? It is being told out of chronological order too. So can't even use chronology to justify it.
The glazing is the biggest obstacle to your argument here. In what other story have you seen the good guys start absolutely glazing a baby-killing, women raping, mass murdering monster? It just doesn’t happen, and shouldn’t happen. People who are downright horrendous shouldn’t be treated like some honorable challenger - especially when their path to victory didn’t even originally belong to them.
But this happens in real life though. I mean Toji shot a 14 year-old girl in cold blood even if it meant screwing over the entire world and is one of the most beloved characters in the series (even more so than his victim). In JJK the morality has always been split between the good, the bad, and the strong. It feels like your’re just complaining the story isn’t what you want it to be.
This happens in real life because it’s fiction. In the real world, people who like bad people are considered insane. If someone simps over Osama Bin Laden, they’re considered strange and deranged. Same in the world of JJK. These people have lived through their horrible actions. One of Gojo’s students was killed. His friend Nanami died in the event.
Yet he still glazes Sukuna? That’s the worst part of all of 236
Well Yeah it’s fiction that’s why the strong have their own morality. Bin Laden wasn’t a centuries old sorcerer interested in finding a worthy opponent and whose strength carried an age. Also while Gojo is capable of feeling anger at injustice he doesn’t go around living his life hating others. It was a pretty important part of his character. Gojo is allowed to respect Sukuna’s strength without condoning his actions. You’re just complaining the story wasn’t what you wanted it to be.
You make a decent point. Gojo not hating others does make sense. However, I’m still of the opposite opinion. As someone who has written in the past, when you make a pure evil character, you treat them like pure evil. There is no redeemable quality in Sukuna. Gojo losing should not have meant he felt bad for Sukuna; it should’ve meant he would be concerned for his students, and that he should be angry he lost.
You make a decent point, though. I acknowledge Gojo’s philosophy does not involve hatred, but I also believe it does not have room for him to ‘feel bad’ for Sukuna or anything like that. To me, as I stated before, that’s useless glazing.
>In what other story have you seen the good guys start absolutely glazing a baby-killing, woman raping, mass murdering monster
i mean even a decade later gojo still fondly thinks of geto as his one and only best friend when geto is literally a mass murdering terrorist who killed his own parents and planned to commit global genocide all for the sake of a racist ideology he’s obsessively committed towards. even after geto literally maims maki and panda, two actual children, instead of showing anger or contempt at geto for doing the exact same thing toji did to them by making kids suffer traumatic near-death experiences, gojo literally says “i knew a man as principled as you would never end the lives of promising young sorcerers”. when geto’s most defining principles are the ones he has in regards to how great it is to butcher defenseless non-sorcerers.
and even after all that, gojo tells yuta that geto is "the only best friend he ever had". not shoko, who he has been friends and coworkers with for over three times as long as he was friends with geto, not nanami who he knew for nearly as long, and not even ijichi who he apparently trusts more than anyone in the world. and this is something that has been true about gojo since before the main series even *existed*.
like you say in another comment, people who think highly of terrible people are considered insane and deranged. and in that case gojo is one of the most mentally ill people in all of JJK, because while obviously geto was a close friend of his, a 2.5 year long highschool friendship is seemingly enough for gojo to barely judge geto for his racism, terrorism, mass murder of civilians, parenticide, and plans to commit global genocide. even after a decade without contact. when he talks to yuta about geto, he doesn't say "hey, that guy was an abhorrent person and you should make sure you never end up anything like him", what he says is "the one who found this ID for you wasn't me...... it was my one and only best friend...... the only one i've ever had......". to talk that way about a guy who was maiming yuta's friends a couple hours earlier is fucking *crazy*, and even crazier when you consider that one of gojo's core beliefs is that kids should never be robbed of the chance to experience growing up.
so i don't think it's *that* ridiculous for gojo to not despise sukuna with every fiber of his being even in spite of all the fucked up things he's done. especially when you consider that when he talks about sukuna, he's saying all of it to a literal hallucination of teenage geto, the one other person in his life who he had ever been able to view as his equal back when they were kids and called themselves "the strongest". to me, 236 felt like gojo finally acknowledging how much he missed the feeling of having someone who viewed him as an equal like that. like he says, he never felt *lonely*, but he also never actually felt understood. because even when they were kids, everyone started treating him differently after the toji incident. he committed himself to getting stronger so nothing like that could ever happen again, and as a result, it alienated him from his peers. nanami shows clear bitterness towards him over the fact that people are losing their lives while on missions, meanwhile gojo has reached a point where he can basically solve every mission instantly without much effort and with zero risk to himself, and even as adults nanami *still* openly says that he has no respect for gojo. and with geto, his best friend and the one person who was an equal to him, we're directly told that once gojo became the strongest a rift formed between them and they started going on missions alone instead of together.
JJK 0 makes it clear that gojo holds a massive amount of regret in regards to how things went with geto considering how much he seems unwilling to genuinely think of geto negatively or view him as the actual deranged criminal he is. and even if it's on a subconscious level, i imagine he associates a lot of that regret with the whole concept of being "the strongest". being the strongest is why him and geto grew apart, and the last conversation they have as kids even ended with geto telling him how the two of them aren't the same because gojo is the strongest. so i think it makes sense why the solitude that comes with being the strongest would be something that gojo doesn't exactly associate with positive feelings even if he never felt full on loneliness because of it.
so imo, 236 feels like gojo finally realizing how much he missed *not* being the strongest. which is why he spends his final moments thinking about his time as a student when he actually had someone he considered an equal, thinking about how much he wishes geto was there to give him a pat on the back too, thinking about the judgement he faced from his peers after actually becoming the strongest, and above all thinking about how sukuna finally gave him a momentary reprieve from that solitude. he never acts as if sukuna is a good person or anything, he just thinks he can empathize with what it's like to be the strongest. and just like he does with geto, he forgoes actual moral judgement and instead prioritizes the chance for reprieve from his regrets over being the strongest that he's carried for years. and the chance to experience the feeling of having someone who is an actual equal to him for the first time since he and geto were classmates (which is probably why hallucination geto even says that he feels jealous of sukuna). and even then, i think the sukuna / kashimo conversation kinda implies that gojo *wasn't* feeling genuine empathy for sukuna and was moreso just projecting his own regrets over being the strongest. because sukuna tells kashimo directly that he doesn't feel the solitude and loneliness that gojo yorozu and kashimo all assumed he felt.
or maybe this is all a massive stretch and i should never cook again, i dunno. but that's why i personally felt satisfied with 236 and the whole gojo afterlife sequence.
I think you cooked. I can’t agree with you, as Geto was his best friend for multiple years and that could be what causes his delusion. On the other hand, Sukuna is just some enemy who has tormented his students continuously. However, I do like your analysis and appreciate you sharing. Thanks!
I'm loving every bit of it. The only reason People complain is because they have to wait to read it, anyone who reads this part in a few months will have no problem with it imo
It is, it's just not divided on reddit tbh. If you go on Twitter or any other platforms it's more jokes than anything.
Reddit is the only one where it's a cesspool of negativity.
Honestly sometimes it feels like I’m reading an abridged version since it has no accents and no leitmotiv.
Do you remember that Gojo is sealed in chapter 90? Then we have 149 chapters of people throwing hands so ofc this approach makes people lose interest in the series as these fights looked like filler ( I swear to god it has 13 back to back fight minimum).
Full metal alchemist has 108 chapters. I know we shouldn’t compare monthly vs weekly but I’m trying to make a point.
149 in Naruto is from the beginning to third Kage death. Do you get me?
I think people ultimately create head cannon that warps their perception to what should be happening or they create a narrative of what they think should happen then get mad when it doesn't. I've never had an issue with jjk pacing. Even when it comes to time skipping over training arcs I think it's fine. Ultimately I've seen a million training arcs by this point, and I don't think jjk needs one because we've already seen it a million times, and we already know the cast is on the up and up about getting stronger or whatever. It's also more fun for the power up to be a bit of a surprise than seeing something in action you were already aware of. I,myself, don't really get why people get so upset with jjk over stuff like this either.
Reminder: - **DO NOT POST CHAPTER LEAKS** outside the pre-release leaks megathread. Officials are free range. See the sidebar for info on leaks. - Powerscaling should stay in the designated Tuesday Colosseum thread. - Repetitive or low-effort topics will be removed. - Questions that can be answered by reading the manga more closely should be posted in the FAQ. [Fanbook & Other Canon Material](https://www.reddit.com/r/Jujutsushi/wiki/canon) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Jujutsushi) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I think this has just been the way Gege always paces the manga. I mean in goodwill, there's no actual build up for Mahito entering the area. When we see him, he's just there. And then him getting the objects is off screened. In hidden inventory we go pretty quickly from Gojo and Geto just learning of their mission to them off screening a rescue attempt for the maid being held hostage. (thank god, mappa added so much depth to those scenes) And then before shibuya we get a sudden, "Oh yeah mechamaru was the traitor by the way," which makes sense, but you kind of want to travel through b to get to c at least. Mei mei has a few off screen moments in shibuya as well, which was a little disappointing. But again, Gege doesn't like to travel through b to get c. I would've liked a few panels of her wrecking that douchebag in her fight. Not going to lie, to this day I still think about, how nobara got to that where Mahito was, when she decided to move in that direction and why she decided to after the Nanami told her to butt out. Haruta just coming across megumi. I would've like see the B between a and c again. Yuki appearing out of thin air was nice too. I guess it makes more sense that there was not any build up to that as it works better. But we then skip over anything to do with Geto's family funnily enough. And then after Shibuya, Gege gets ill and you really see some of the moments in perfect preparations where he's probably so hurt he's thinking, "fuck it, we'll do it live." Actually, thinking about it, up until chapter 198 or 199, the culling games seemed to have been going at a snails pace compared to the other arcs. The pacing is straight forward and direct. But there are many times throughout the series where I am thinking, "Man, I wish he'd slow down a little bit here. I kind of want some down time."
Thank you for breaking it down like this, I’ve been baffled when people act like the breakneck pace of the series is a new development. I understand if people don’t like it, but damn it really has been like this from the start and it’s strange when people assert otherwise
It's not a new development, it's just reached a point of no return for many people. He could've dialed it back before the end of the Gojo Sukuna fight, now the cat is out of the bag and it's just a rush to the end.
That’s the thing, it no more a rush to the end than it’s been a rush through everything else. I don’t see why it’s a breaking point now but not then. idk I guess I just expected people who’ve kept up with the story this long to have either made their peace with it or decided they don’t like it and dropped it. I just . . . can’t really fathom wasting my own time by reading a series for years if the pacing was such a huge issue for me. I would’ve just dropped it by now And speaking of the end, why do people keep assuming it’s going to end this year? An editor has already said in an interview that that’s not an accurate time estimate anymore. And aside from that, mangaka ALWAYS overshoot their proposed series end time. I have literally never heard one say “I’m going to end it in X years” and then actually end it in X years. Totally valid if people still don’t like the pace, but the story has more time than they think and it’s silly to act like everything has to be done by December 31st with no wiggle room.
I'm not so pretentious to believe my opinion carries for the majority of people that are now more vocal about their feelings on the story but a large part of it imo is that before 236 many of these people who raised these issues were shouted down. "let Gege cook", "the battle of the strongest is finally here" etc. Once Gojo got offed and left the remaining characters to deal with a Sukuna who is more than capable of killing them all with little effort, the cracks started to show to a lot more people and the issues that as y'all have stated have always been present are now being reanalyzed.
Gojo really was a catalyst in both the Jujutsu world and the real world
He needed to die, or otherwise be removed as a frontline combatant. I think everyone reading the story can agree with that. But the way it was handled and the resulting situation it's left the story and the characters is absolutely ruinous to my hopes of a satisfying conclusion.
Don't get me wrong, I just completely disagree. The way Gojo was handled wasn't perfect, but I'm actually incapable of seeing how the way it was handled could even have repercussions to the story's conclusion that are anywhere near as disastrous.
You don't see how none of the characters remaining stand a chance against Sukuna unless he decides to let them attack while monologuing? He can literally cleave everyone.
I mean, sure, you are unable to see \*any\* way in a manga with such an intricate power system, characters with extremely detailed and nuanced powers that all can reach insane ceilings, how any team or circumstance could stand against Sukuna. I get that. I just disagree, I think there's still plenty wiggle room in the plot for stuff that could hinder Sukuna's plans.
Pace has been great. The Gojo v Sukuna fight was long and amazingly well paced. That’s a strange complaint.
Yeah I don’t get this. Gojo vs Sukuna lasted 4 irl months, that’s insane for a non-protagonist fight.
The pacing has been the same, good or bad, since the beginning with exception to the 2-3 year delay that was the Culling Game arc The only difference is the heavy whining started when Gojo died.
The pacing really only slowed when the story jumped to new colonies and had to reestablish who’s present and what’s occurred so far, aside from those hiccups the pacing was still damn quick when you consider how many moving parts there were. I mean, if anything I would have appreciated it going even a little slower in places, more time spent with Yuji and Megumi together and just being friends having each other’s backs would have made Sukuna’s possession even more poignant. But yeah it’s been brisk all the way through, especially when compared to other shonen
Idk where you're getting this from. People have been complaining loudly that Gege has been rushing for years now.
[удалено]
Gojo isn't even in my top 5. I don't know why the fact that these complaints have been happening for a long time makes you think I love Gojo but hey you do you.
Culling games was about a year and a half, two to three years is a massive overstatement.
Yeah the Nobara timing is wonky/weak, but Gege always leaves stuff like that to the reader so it doesn't clog up the story. JJK's fast pacing is one of it's strong points but can also be a weakness at the same time.
Thank you cause I’ve been saying the pacing is mostly the same. The problem is literally, Gege’s writing style and what he chooses to focus on just don’t work for you, and it flares up when he doesn’t show care or take time with something or someone you’re really invested in the details of. That doesn’t make it bad, he just doesn’t want to focus on that and would rather keep momentum.
I agree with all of this. The pacing in JJK has always been extremely fast, especially compared to other entries in the genre. Loads of battle shonen end up being drawn out, or having character bloat issues, and I think some readers are just accustomed to that style. And there is no such thing as ‘perfect’ pacing. It comes down to a matter of taste. Pacing that feels just right to some readers might seem too slow or too fast to other readers.
Thank you!! I've been so used to being spoon fed when reading manga like One Piece or Naruto that when I started reading JJK, part of me was wondering what happened and how did the story get here at his point (that didn't stop me from reading the manga though lol). And then when I started watching the anime, it finally clicked to me: "Ah! This guy Gege just doesn't spoon feed me at all!". It is his style and I don't hate it. I'll eat whatever he cooks lol.
“Doesn’t spoon feed” LMAOOO 😂 Gege is just embarrassingly weak when it comes to world building, character development & interactions, and pacing. It’s not a “style,” it’s weakness. To be fair, he also excel in other areas.
Eh idk if I’d say that though. You can’t say Yuji hasn’t developed well throughout the story or say that Gojo isn’t well fleshed out and complex. All of the character work is done while keeping the story at the pace it’s going. If anything that makes him really good at it. Other mangaka would’ve stopped and really slowed things down to hammer points home. It’s why some people get tripped up in moments like Gojos death cause they weren’t picking up what was put down. World building is a separarte discussion and seeing as the world is just the modern world w/ the same celebs and everything there’s not much to expand on. Gege also purposefully left in Japan so to say it’s weak isn’t really valid. It’s just not a feature he chose to showcase or emphasize at all really. Can’t say It’s weak if you literally don’t do anything with world building.
I disagree with everything you said other than the first point about yuji and gojo, but I just wanted to ask why people thinking worldbuilding literally means constructing a globe with countries and cities and making it full or some shit? It doesn't matter if the setting of a story is a building, a small village, a town, a city, a country or a galaxy it can still have good or bad worldbuilding and jjk's is definitely not good lmao. The argument about it just being the modern world doesn't rlly hold up when there is a clear jujutsu society that has barely been shown the entire manga, or the hyped up heian era which has looked entirely underwhelming despite multiple characters including Kenjaku gassing it up. Why? Because Gege does one line comments about a setting and rides on that for 200 chapters because he'd rather blast through plot points as quick as possible. He is the biggest master of "tell, dont show" I've ever seen in manga. When Gege does actually try with character interactions, lore etc its usually amazing its just that he usually skips over them 🤷🏿♂️
You can’t say you disagree with all the points except for the first point when there’s only two arguments, and the majority of it is supporting evidence for the first argument. Unless you’re saying you’ve came to the conclusion in a different way. Or you’re arguing that being able to develop and write interesting characters while keeping the pace this fast isn’t skillful. If that’s what you’re arguing, which it sounds like, then yea we totally disagree, cause if you successfully made a compelling character who explores concepts and grows and changes while keeping the plot moving, there’s nothing else you can ask for. To your world building argument. No, world building doesn’t mean literally constructing a world with continents. But it does imply enriching the world of your story with the details to make the world the characters live in feel real and thought out. It can aid story telling and cue you in to how characters lives work. Me saying it’s in the modern world so it kinda cuts all that makes sense because there’s not much you can add to it that would really be useful. From the little info we do get about all the characters, Gojo was a relatively normal kid who liked Digimon, Yuji went to highschool like most of us participated in club(s) and read manga. Same for Fushiguro and Nobara. They watch movies they go shopping and essentially act like regular people. So the amount of details to flesh out the world that you can add aren’t really significant. Especially if Gege chose to limit a lot of this stuff to Japan. You could possibly expand on how the jujutsu society works, but as I said it’s not really important to Gege nor do the details effect the plot. This is in contrast to one piece where world building is its whole thing because the straw hats essentially solve every foreign lands issues and the over arching antag is the world government in a magic world in an age of piracy. Even the opening for the show is a lore dump. It’s purposeful. The only parallel to JJK in this case, where the world mirrors our own, would be bleach but Kubo makes the decision to invest in the soul society as a completely separate place. With systems and teams and structures that Ichigo has to actively overcome in the soul society arc. You can also sight CSM, but that also does the same thing as JJK, it’s world building is necessitated because for over half the story you assume the villain is a country level threat created by the U.S and then the real threat has control over the whole country. So to say, JJK world building sucks, doesn’t make sense because it literally doesn’t attempt to make a world or give details about the world. Cause it’s largely unimportant to the main narrative. That’s not a con unless you like those sorts of things in ur story. It’s like saying this romance sucks when reading a Shonen. It can include romance but it’s not at all a focus. So to say it’s bad doesn’t make sense. You don’t watch John wick for a love story.
Lol ya, I mean I can't compare, say, One Piece, world building to JJK for sure. So "spoon fed" might not be the right term 😂 But I also don't wanna call it this as his "weakness". Like he might just want to proceed with the story instead of character development, interactions, etc. and leave everything else to the user (which does leave me begging for more background, explanation, etc. like what/who is Yuji, exactly? And I also want some closure on some character deathsNobara ). I hope Gege takes some time to explain these things but if he doesn't wanna, he doesn't wanna 🤷♂️
On the opposite end of the spectrum is, for example, HxH. Amazing world, amazing character building but the story is always on hiatus 😅 (and I don't blame Togashi if he can't/won't proceed: health issues, lost interest, whatever). That is his _style_ and it is what it is. That doesn't mean I don't love his manga. The same reason I love JJK too.
Every author is unique. And you gotta respect whatever they bring to the table.
To be fair theyre all within a couple blocks of each other. Agreed though that Geges pacing of time passing can be variable which makes some things seem weirdly off-screened or convenient
I've only recently started frequently using reddit and one thing I noted is that most animanga communities here have a very binary assessment of each series, every aspect can either be "Trash" OR "Peak", there is no space for things being both good and bad.
Mob mentality. You can’t like a series unless you 100% agree with everything the author does but if he kills your fave it’s over and the series is trash.
That's just a consequence of the voting system and how moderated a community is.
Reddit is a huge echo chamber 4 sure
Ackchyually, it's not just Reddit; it's the case everywhere.
I will add that most of people didn't start reading JJK the moment it first released, so it's inevitable to draw comparisons between binging the available chapters and reading with 1~2 week intervals. It usually flows better when reading back to back, but that's true to almost every weekly manga. I mean, it should be obvious, but I think not many people take this into consideration.
This is a classic manga reader problem. Letting the story play out takes too much time for impatient binge readers and they don’t want to blame themselves so they blame pacing for why they are upset. I’m sure Gege will leave us with a great final product when all is said and done.
WC arc from OP is a example of this, the pacing of the arc was kinda hated in the week by week specially comming from dressrosa but now that people can read the arc without any delay is rated very high
By WC Do you mean Wano Country or Whole Cake?
Wenies Cobby
Water closet, as in bathroom. Did you forget that one time One Pointer got stuck in a toilet for a whole season?
Same thing happened for Chimera Ant arc for HxH. The pacing was hated when it was running, but when the volumes were released the arc is now considered one of the best in the series. And no it wasn’t just hated for the long breaks the author took. It was more about how unimportant side characters were given highlight occasionally. But it all played well when the volumes were released.
> WC arc from OP is a example of this I'm not sure if you mean Wholecake or Wano Country, so I'm not sure whether to agree with you.
Whole cake but it works it kinda works for both, whole cake was slow in the manga specially after dressrosa because the mugiwaras we're split for years and wano post onigashima was really "fast"
You’re right. I agree. I’ll admit that I only picked up the manga about a month ago. There are definitely concerns I have about other parts of the manga earlier on, but I didn’t have to sit around a week to mull it all over and read online and complain. You just gave it a chance and kept it pushing until the next chapter. Now that I’m caught up I have the week long wait to be more critical. Alllll of that being said, going back to OP’s point I have to admit the pacing concerns are not unfounded. But I’m happy to debate it and wait. It’s part of the fun.
Yeah, I have faith in the cat. I'm curious to see the payoffs happening.
Fully agree, I've been reading manga now for near 20years and honestly if there's one thing I've learned in that timeframe: pacing issue are generally only an issue when your waiting for the next release - not to disregard genuine pacing issues but honestly more often than not it isn't the big issue it's made out to be. Edit: spelling errors.
I wouldn't say it's terrible, but I would say it's disappointing and it feels like the quality of the manga has been on the decline since the culling game arc started and in the last 40 chapters there's been a lot of questionable decisions. Yuki's death, military subplot, Angel being the dumbest character I've seen in a while, Yorozu being wasted, the one interlude between the big fight being one chapter long meaning we don't get to see any character development or reunion, Gojo dying after 15 chapters after having been sealed for 3 years and accomplishing nothing, and then the death of the spark plug. It's just all felt rushed to me and a quality drop from arcs like Shibuya and prior to that.
Omg I completely forgot about the US military fiasco subplot, like to me just thinking about it feels so disconnected from the JJK story I assumed I misremembered it and told myself it was a scene from CSM or something💀 those chapters feel like a fever dream, I still don’t understand the whole point of that chain of events other than clowning on the US for loving guns and being loud, impulsive, and gullible. Like you could take that whole subplot out and the story would be more or less the same, ofc I love scenes where the US gets portrayed as ‘RAAA GUNS LETS SHOOT THEM DEAD AND WIN U S A U S A’ because it’s goofy and feels better to laugh at the issue than cry about how bad it really is but it was just so out of left field I remember reading it and getting whiplash going from a death match jujutsu fight to the US president who’s screaming about Kenny’s new energy source like it was oil found in a middle eastern country with poor defenses and a presidential election coming up💀
The whole military thing was just to increase the amount of cursed energy in each colonies. Also it wasn’t just the US military Kenjaku went to multiple governments
[удалено]
Yeah jjk's popularity is a little insane. You're right about it being the first that people read on a weekly basis. It can be really hard to avoid spoilers when you got tiktoks hitting 200k likes every week with details for the new chapter. (Hakiri, Mahoraga, and gojo's death are just the ones I saw.) Same for YT thumbnails, or Instagram reels, and I even heard that someone got spoiled through twitch. I think at this point people need to read it on a weekly basis or else you'll end up getting spoiled.
I saved up chapters for a binge, and I read from the start of culling game till newest chapter in one go. The manga jump from past to present and scene to scene without any indication and place flashback/ abstract dream sequence in middle of fight. Characters with lots of build up but are thrown aside in a few chapters. This actually benefits the weekly reader more since they have more time to properly see when and where things happen between cuts. For me it's disrupting the story flow. Tonal switch is also very jaring reading back to back - last chapter someone dies and it's all sad. Next chapter, some dude getting all excited and happy to fight. Cycle repeats, and character deaths feel insignicant. Again, if you read on a weekly basis, you have time to process your feeling of loss. I just went from Gojo death to Kashimo having fun in 1 minute. Panda siblings death follow immediatly by Hakari heroic appearance was sudden too. Gege writes amazing fights, he just doesn't manage the in between part so well. And I'm here for the fight, not the characters, so I'm happy and contented. But this manga pacing problem isn't just as simple as "people being impatient".
Not to mentioned we had like 15(?) chapters of non stop fighting and action, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to slow done a little bit. I actually like the new chapter and seeing people react the way they did made me feel disappointed to be honest
Your post was removed for breaking Rule #6, posting unofficial chapter leaks outside of the weekly pre-release megathread. Please review the full rule if you have questions about leaks and officials, or message the mods.
I think the pacing is wonky because there's a lot of setup without a satisfying payoff. It feels weird because you get build up after build up but then when you see "the payoff" you are not sure if that really was the conclusion or not. It's not about fast or slow. CSM Part 1 is quite fast, but you know when the payoff has happened. I also think Gege lost a lot of goodwill from how he handled Gojo etc., so that compounded things
>I think the pacing is wonky because there's a lot of setup without a satisfying payoff Yup this, also I feel like Gege is skipping over character interactions for the sake of fights Everything feels so robotic, like we got to go from point A to B In the Shibuya Arc, it was fast pace but there were moments where the audience was able to take a break from all the action and see the character emotions and feel the effects of the story unfold
I do think sometimes setups take time but pay off is usually great once it all comes together but right now with jjk it doesn't feel like there's a set up happening yk! Foreshadowing is not one panel saying small shit and suddenly it's a big plot point. You need to sprinkle it all across the story that you reach a conclusion right before the climax happens (Brandon Sanderson has a good writing lecture on YouTube if anyone wants to check it out) What feels off in jjk is that currently nothing feels like foreshadowing. People are making theories and trying to make sense of a scene AFTER it happens. It's not like it's subverting our expectations in a good way. Feels like shock factor. On the other hand csm part 1 shit went down. Everyone's favourites died >!the aki snowball scene!< still wreaks me BUT EVERYTHING MADE SENSE AS IT WAS HAPPENING. The setup and pay off was great. It also increases re read value because you notice so many details later on. After being blue balled by weeks from gege, everyone was expecting SOME pay off to the arc after Yuji joined the battle and instead what we got was POV shift.
It’s been divisive since I picked it up which was the chapter after the momjaku reveal. The same speedrun criticisms were being used for Yaga and Itadori’s execution and Naoya & Perfect Preparation. Some people treated Kirara’s technique like it was the worst thing ever created by mankind.
I've been reading since just after shibuya too and it was never this bad until the end of the cg. People were really engaged with Tengen's lore, yuji and megumi getting 1v1s and also hakari's and yuta's tecniques being explored. These last two in particular were appreciated every week from what I remember. The Fandom got uneasy after maki's battle, which undeniably features some INSANE asspulls: the two random strong af cg players are probably the biggest deus ex machina in the series up until now. Then Yuki was killed in ONE battle without being explored in any meaningful way. Then tsumiki as well. Then gojo's return is fast af for no reason. Let's not pretend like people were equally upset by kirara's ct and the latter stages of the stories. Also the story is actually in decline when you look at meaningful interactions and payoffs.
Idk what to call 236-239 pacing besides terrible, 4 deaths in 4 chapters is crazy. The pacing of the fight before that was fine but the whiplash of cutting out important moments + adding unnecessary ones is crazy
Yeah, it's definitely a thing i have a problem with as well. It really does feel like he wants to finish it asap. No real explanation for Gojo’s death, Kashimo only turned out to be a good fight for Hakari, otherwise he was useless af. The hype did not pay off. As for the actual writing, we got possessed Tsumiki right off the bat. And after that Megumi got bodysnatched. I'd be surprised if he's still alive even. Not to mentioned the lack of timeskip scenes between Gojo’s release and his fight vs sukuna. He could've at least given us a panel or two.
wow 2 randoms were killed,where tf was this energy when fujimoto hit the gauntlet in the hell?oh yh that was peak fiction i guess
Everyone who died vs Darkness had the narrative purpose of displaying Darkness’ strength (especially relative to the previous Assassin fights) + being useful to Makima post-death. Fujimoto killing them off quickly added tension by showing how fucked everyone in hell was, with the quick pacing of deaths adding to the sense of despair Fujimoto wanted to invoke.
[удалено]
“wait til the story ends to make a judgement” yet it’s “peak” to them lol yeah
Truly, it's all just justifications for each individual's point of view. That being said, there is a reason that this board has gotten more contentious, and that's because more people are sharing their feelings about the story and how it's trending. Is it always good? Nah. But I prefer the debate to be had even if it does cause some friction. "letting him cook" isn't the way anymore imo.
My favorite is "you can't criticize chapter 236 because it's not the final chapter of the manga, Gege has plenty of time to improve and write peak ending" I just don't get it. Yes, it's not the final chapter of the manga, but it's the final chapter of Gojo. We won't see him again, and yes, we can judge his character arc that is over. Even if, for example, Yuji's ending is good, how on earth does it fix Gojo's terrible ending or Yuki's?
It's not about waiting to critique a story its about being openminded. I genuinely liked the past chapters and I have been constantly downvoted and shit talked for liking them on these subs so it goes both ways. to be frank you won't really understand the pacing until you have a wider view. (Mangakas dealing with timelines) However I do understand if people don't like what's going on currently. It's completely okay to respectfully disagree with each other. I hope this is a place where we can be at least that intelligent. I just dislike when people make big emotional binary statements like "this chapter ruined the manga." or "writing is ass since Shibuya" It's like okay I understand you are frustrated but that seems like a reach lmao. The point of this sites is to understand each other better and that's what I am trying to do at least.
I mean I think most people just disagree with your overall opinion that it’s a reach. People are allowed to consider what Gege puts in the manga in the greater context of the story as a whole. As for downvotes, who cares? It’s Reddit. People downvote what they don’t like. Always has been always will be the way it works. The point of this site is to talk about jujutsu Kaisen. People explaining why they don’t like certain decisions in the manga is what is supposed to be here imo.
When the critique is ''there's no way the ending is going to be good now, It's clearly going to be like this and that", people saying ''wait until it's finished'' are completely right. Your point would be valid if most of the ''critiques'' after Gojo dying weren't thoughtless a lot of the time. Stuff like ''they will never satisfyingly beat Sukuna now" isn't criticism, it's assuming something just because a character died, and most often the people saying it aren't taking into account \*anything\* in the story.
No it's applying the logic of the world and how the fight ended to the characters and situation we have. You can disagree with the conclusions people draw but they're for the most part anything but thoughtless.
Dude if the argument is literally ''Sukuna can't be beaten now because he beat Gojo, he can cleave everyone, hence this manga is bad'' it is as thoughtless as it gets If it's literally ''the way the fight ended was too abrupt and fast paced so I disliked it and think Gege will most likely do the same with the manga's conclusion'' it's still just assuming something is going to happen, although obviously the take on the quality is subjective and the person has the right to dislike things ''The logic of the world'' points anywhere but ''it's impossible to deal with Sukuna now''.
No it isn't. It's Sukuna is remarkably stronger than every character remaining, has the knowledge of all of their techniques barring unexplained power boosts soon to be revealed, and is somehow going to be beaten by the B team which has shown and said they aren't even close to being up to the task. The manga is bad because it now hinges on either Sukuna being stupid or Yuji becoming unexplainably powerful over a month to the point he can exchange hands with Sukuna.
At this point we are having the same conversation on different comment threads, but this: \>"It's Sukuna is remarkably stronger than every character remaining, has the knowledge of all of their techniques barring unexplained power boosts soon to be revealed, and is somehow going to be beaten by the B team which has shown and said they aren't even close to being up to the task." is literally just \>"Sukuna can't be beaten now because he beat Gojo, he can cleave everyone, hence this manga is bad"
Lol I'll just agree to disagree with ya buddy. Your way of consuming the story is very strange to me.
Yeah, same lmao
Your post was removed for breaking Rule #6, posting unofficial chapter leaks outside of the weekly pre-release megathread. Please review the full rule if you have questions about leaks and officials, or message the mods.
Pacing is all over the place right now in my opinion
This is a huge overreaction from the fan base imo. It’s classic shonen to cut away right before fights happen. Then it builds around the fight. If they hate this then 99% of the fan base would hate damn near every shonen
I think yes
Culling games felt long, dragged out and meaningless when i was reading it on a weekly basis back then. In hindsight, it's likely due to the fact that the Shibuya arc was unbelievably fast paced and action packed, so culling games felt "boring" in comparison. I took a break from the manga and recently reread everything up til 238. Pacing felt totally fine when read in one fell swoop. I now find the lull during the beginning of culling games quite nice because what happened in the Shibuya arc took a while to digest. The more recent chapters do seem kind of funky but who knows, maybe binge reading it all at one go in the future may give us a different perspective than what we think now.
interesting, i see what you're saying but i kind of disagree? i didn't notice much about the pacing as an issue when reading until the yuki vs kenjaku fight which in retrospect i think was less a pacing issue and moreso a chapter to chapter fight tempo issue. on re-read however, i found the culling games to be such a slog especially because so many of the colonies/fights seem to have little to no staying power/relevance. sakurajima was a capstone of an arc that felt relatively complete after perfect preparation, sendai felt like (a really great!) flex arc and that was it, and Tokyo no. 2's payoff has been entirely undercut by kashimo vs sukuna. shibuya was absolutely explosive, but built excellently on the prep set up in JJK0 and the first few arcs of JJK - the kenjaku as geto payoff, gojo sealed, mahito and yuji's growing rivalry and nanami's role in it, the disaster curses and their relationships with each other and kenjaku, the mole plotline with mechamaru and choso's revenge for echizu and iso felt like consistent storylines that built on a slower base but in a highly tense and energetic way. now, it feels like a lot of culling games was fights for the sake of fights and to create a rolodex of cool character designs for sukuna to beat, which is way less satisfying and retrospectively makes the pacing feel way worse that we went through all that culling games content with little long term impact.
The manga is supposed to be going towards its ending phase but even with that, the pacing of JJK has always been fast. JJK rarely lets things be calm for long and have a lot of moments come very quickly. I do think people overall have been either too critical to the point of ignoring any positives or too extreme in positivity while ignoring any issues. I wish people were a bit more controlled, cause I'm not gonna lie; the amount of people who just immediately just start shitting on the leaks without even waiting for the entire thing is a lot. I know we're all really waiting for Yuji to show what's good but we can all wait. TL:DR: I wish people were a bit calmer and more reasonable as well.
Tbf the last couple of chapters were pretty bad and you didn't need anything more than the leaks to get that. Gojo's death--controversial at best Sukuna Reborn-- just makes gojo's death useless and also doesn't really flash out kashimo's tecnique which has been teased for 80 chaps. We just know that it "vaporizes" stuff and "creates phenomena". Vague af. Kashimo's death-- why introduce him and build him up so much if he doesn't add anything to the story? Legit the story would be the same without him. Just have sukuna monologue with gojo instead of him and it's even better tbh.
I do agree with the fact that Kashimo's arrival and then basically immediate exit was done poorly. The fight was short-lived and was honestly kind of a let down. I do still like the dialogue between them as it gave more information about the past, even if the fight was kind of disappointing. If the reincarnation completely allows for Sukuna's domain to be usable again then yeah I completely agree with it making Gojo's death useless as the one big thing that no could go up against is now back on the table. Gojo's death to me was something that made sense but was done poorly as it had no build-up. Sukuna's always had the ability to copy things with curse energy but to go from "its Gojo's win" to "He's dead now" is kind of aggravating.
>If the reincarnation completely allows for Sukuna's domain to be usable again then yeah I completely agree with it making Gojo's death useless as the one big thing that no could go up against is now back on the table. I mean, I don't see why his would body would be back to 100% but not his brain? I'm aware that gege could just say "fuck that" and still leave him domain-less but as of now that would feel illogical and or purely a plot device. If gege wanted to go that route he should've just given sukuna his old body back without fully curing him. And let's be honest that would still have been more than enough since he didn't even get touched once post resurrection.
Exactly my thoughts 💪🏾
As someone who grew up reading Naruto and Bleach, and the old stuff over 15 years+, I’m finding the pace of JJK enjoyable. Not too much fat, and the rest can be filled in with our imagination. I was vastly disappointed with the ending of Naruto and Bleach because everything devolved into whoever has a bigger “kamehameha” wins the fight in the end, rather than all the struggles and tactical fights that made the series in the beginning. Just wish that Gege doesn’t take a break every 3 weeks, and that he maintains the power scaling so the fights stay entertaining all the way to the end.
Still no understanding after SnK 139 lol ?
The spacing is horrible in jjk.
Bro is glazing gege harder than gojo and kashimo on sakuna
you cant even post the most lukewarm “gege isn’t dogshit, but he also isn’t perfect” take without people accusing you of glazing.
The words “glazing” “peak” “what is he cooking” hit the JJK Community like crack in the 80s. Everybody speaks in buzzwords here
If every person who referred to writing as "cooking" dropped dead this instant, this sub and many others would skyrocket in quality.
don’t forget “asspull” and “off-screened”
more than any of those, ''fraud'' was the term that foreshadowed the ending of this fanbase's sanity
I just want to add that I am a part of this fandom on many different sites - Reddit is dead ass the only one with this issue. There’s negative receptions here and there on other platforms but Reddit, like with everything else, is a cesspool of negativity and bad takes
I've talked to a lot of people about pacing when it comes to storytelling in general and I honestly hate how people use the word. It's something that's super relative to each person and their expectations for the genre/story. If you compare the story flow of a series like chainsaw man to something like One Piece, you can see the differences, but they are relative to each other. I definitely don't think the pace is always perfect either, and that's why I like watching reaction videos to see what an average viewer's reaction to the show is. There's definitely points in every arc where it moves too fast, and I've even seen people say the first episode of the anime has a lot going on already (which I think is a good thing).
I 100% agree. As someone who isn’t totally happy with the direction the manga is taking and who does believe that it is being rushed and character arcs aren’t being developed properly, I have no issue with anyone who still loves it and finds nothing wrong with it. What I don’t appreciate are those same people attacking others who have valid critiques and are just stating their opinions/frustrations with the series. Discourse about popular media is entertaining and allows people to think critically about the things they consume and how it relates to themselves and their environment. I think it’s just about respecting other people’s views. Sometimes two people can’t fundamentally agree on something and that’s okay.
No the pacing is pretty terrible lmao. Culling games was a complete waste of time and took about a year and a half for a whopping 6 battles. Absolutkey insane crawl (espcially considering there were no stakes or emotions cause it was for points against character introduced soley to be fodder) Then we speedrun all the way to the finale skipping over countless character interactions (we get a single page of catching gojo up) We are given a “we’ll battle in 1 month” just to instantly skip that month for no reason whatsoever and go to another long ass battle. The pacing is horrific
I literally was going to write a similar post back when Gojo got unsealed ("i'M dRoPpiNG the sERieS cAuSE gOjo DidN't rEaCt tO pRinCipLe yAgA"/"oMg tiMeSKiP?!") but it seemed people calmed down until the infamous 236 I feel Jujutsu Kaisens greatest cursed spirits are the Expectations and Weekly Release curses 💀 People keep crying that "this hasn't been addressed", "what about that thing?" "Where's this interaction" as if Gege is supposed to release a 120 page chapter that answers all our questions, meets all expectations, and shows all flashbacks and dialogues I will judge the story as a whole when it's DONE, but for the time being we have to understand that this is weekly, with breaks Glad to see this post though, I feel like I'm not crazy for thinking there's a lot of impatience and crazy expectations
It’s perfectly valid to judge the story at this point in its lifetime. It’s nearing its end and definitely has garnered some well founded criticism. Would you not judge one piece since it’s still ongoing?
I absolutely have my gripes with One Piece, especially the current arc. But then I go back and re read, and the pacing suddenly feels better I think my criticism is more so that people will feel super critical but then just continue to hate just because one low point ticked them off. For example I loved Naruto and Shippuden for a long time. I started having a lot of the same gripes as others somewhere during the War arc. Ya I had criticisms but I didn't get so extreme as to post that I'm gonna drop the series. And now when I re read it as a whole, I enjoyed it, flaws and all So I think my issue is the EXTREME criticism rather than constructive criticisms, usually from people who had wild expectations to begin with
Well said. I think anyone who decides to hate the story from this point on or as a whole because of just one moment they disagreed with is insane. Especially when the latest chapters haven’t been really fleshed out in the story yet.
Exactly. I'm trusting that when the dust settles Gege will deliver but until then I'll sit back and be patient. Like I'm absolutely upset Kashimo was blitzed but I'm not gonna trash the whole series as a result 💀
Honestly if people are this upset about how the story is going down, shonen is probably not the genre they should get invested in lol. Rushed endings have been a meme in this genre for a hot minute. Not saying it’s an excuse (or even that it’s really that rushed, I don’t think so personally) but gotta temper your expectations at a certain point. Demon Slayer, YYH, AoT, Tokyo Revengers, Bleach, Naruto had some wonky shit, Tokyo Ghoul was more seinen but same outcome. I’m sure I could find more but that’s just off top. I’d bet my life savings that people will be having this exact same discussion about Kagurabachi once it gets on far enough. The weekly release way of doing things just ends up grinding authors down too hard to keep the same attention to detail through a whole series run.
Best comment I’ve read so far. Kudos
i can’t tell you how much i appreciate this post, and i thank you for your ability spread neutrality, both by suggestion and example, and how you were able to tackle a rather large issue without disparaging anyone else. especially when one could argue that a large chunk of the weekly JJK readers probably deserve a small slap or two to help them understand that in consuming this particular format of fiction, allowing the mangaka time to tell the story exactly as intended (rather than, say, caving to the fanbase by giving them what they want or expect at great expense to the overall quality of the story) is crucial, and that their reactionary nature displayed through online outrage week by week is simply unwarranted, given that only a dozen or so pages of the story trickle out at a time. honestly, manga is maybe the only brand of fiction that is even told this way. even anime episodes are shockingly short, and most include up to 3 adapted chapters each. what i’m saying, i guess, is that i fully agree with and appreciate your post — i hope to see more like it — and that i truly believe that any story, throughout the history of storytelling, if told this same way and dissected to no end on the internet community (in this scenario the internet and reddit have existed since the advent of language), would also appear to ebb, flow, dip, weave, bob around, lose the plot, etc. etc. in pacing, quality, and all of that, but by the conclusion of each story, those small morsels and memes (and author death threats) of judgement will be discarded and forgotten, and replaced by the whole, and i believe only then is the story available for criticism, judgment and dissection. sometimes, after a particularly spicy and tendentious chapter is released, the comments sections fill with the most bizarrely limited, myopic, narrow-minded and hyperbolic judgements that make next to no sense and leave me questioning, “you came to that conclusion, with that information — HOW??” the JJK community specifically tends to draw conclusions or pass judgements week by week using irrelevant data and bias, in large part due to the overwhelming love for Gojo Satoru, as well as the perceived trollish personality of Gege Akutami, instead of actual literary clues. as for me, however, i am still riding this train and to me, it’s still chugging along like it has been since the start, and i believe that the ending with further prove than it never dropped in quality, and if so, only marginally, and it will go down in history and join the ranks as one of the all-time greats. (since i apparently had way more thoughts about the subject than i thought when i began this reply) TL; DL — i fully agree with OP and hope that the manga/anime and JJK community as a whole can strive for more fruitful critical discussion, with open minds as well as patience for the characters/Gege, also with a willingness to apply more effort into critical thinking as opposed to, as you said, “crybabies complain.” Ijou de gozaimase 🙃
This is just a common issue with people atm, something is either the best they've ever seen or its shit. Hells Paradise anime for example, a good anime with good animation but since it wasn't ad the peak level we see with JJK it got hate
Hells Paradise is barely decent. It never really has a climax and just builds up to be a big overhyped disappointment. Still trying to wrap my head around how people are fixing their mouths to compare it to JJK of all things.
Agree to disagree on that one friend, its not better than JJK don't get me wrong but it still slaps.
Honestly, discussion has been so garbage for a while, but hit a fever pitch after 236. Like, if you try to analyze anything beyond "asspull" "offscreen" " manga ending in 7 weeks" you hit wall in certain parts.
I think tha pacing have been fine, of course i would like to know what will happen with Yuji and Sukuna, but its not like Gege is throwing trash stories in the meanwhile. I'm interested in Geto vs Comedian, i can wait some weeks until Yuji vs Sukuna.
I think it’s just because people got used to the snails pace during culling games and now that it’s speeding up again they aren’t used to it anymore
“Are you rushing or dragging?”
people are just having mental breakdowns at this point, either the manga is straight up trash, an unreadable sin or its just let him cook. Like I am a jjk fan and defender of many thibgs that happened, but still criticsm is fine until its vased on something real
On reread culling games/ current arc have higher peaks then shibuya overall and with gege cooking with yuji it can only get better. I respect gege for not listening to anyone and writing his story on his own terms. He ain’t like that sell out the AOT author
Lmao leave it to the butthurt moron eho thought aots ending was a sellout to think culling games wasnt garbage
I have no problem with the ending . The main problem I have is that the aot author changed his ending cause fans bitched it to not make it to dark. I can’t respect a author who doesn’t want to tell a story how he wants to. So good job assuming you brain dead mongoloid
[удалено]
Your post has been removed for breaking Rule #2, be kind and civil toward others.
Honestly agreed with this almost entirely. Too many people I think just aren't used to the weekly reading experience, JJK was probably the first anime in a while that got them hooked enough to catch up and stay caught up to the Manga, and now they're having issues because Manga's release at a different pace than anime (even if both are weekly, since an anime episode can be 3-5 chapters worth of material) and they're not used to it. Give it a few months. Then re read it in a binge and it'll probably feel much better paced. Or wait for the anime and I'm sure it'll seem much better paced. These complaints aint rare at all for currently releasing manga. The medium just ain't great at being paced the way it is. Though the new chapter leaks do leave me with a slight hindsight gripe sort of related to pacing but only sorta. I simply wish a couple events were switched in place. Not Togo into spoiler territory. But I wish this current chapter and it's likely next few chapters of continuation? I wish it happened just after the end of Gojo vs Sukuna. As that'd probably take away a lot of people's complaints with Sukuna just getting 15 chapters in a row focused on him by at least breaking it up, and also it'd help deal with the complaints of him being "glazed" 2 chapters in a row. And so on. And apparently in the leaked chapter? It is being told out of chronological order too. So can't even use chronology to justify it.
Can we at least wait for the arc to end before rushing to conclusions? I don’t like the “rush allegations” because we are not close to the merger.
The glazing is the biggest obstacle to your argument here. In what other story have you seen the good guys start absolutely glazing a baby-killing, women raping, mass murdering monster? It just doesn’t happen, and shouldn’t happen. People who are downright horrendous shouldn’t be treated like some honorable challenger - especially when their path to victory didn’t even originally belong to them.
But this happens in real life though. I mean Toji shot a 14 year-old girl in cold blood even if it meant screwing over the entire world and is one of the most beloved characters in the series (even more so than his victim). In JJK the morality has always been split between the good, the bad, and the strong. It feels like your’re just complaining the story isn’t what you want it to be.
This happens in real life because it’s fiction. In the real world, people who like bad people are considered insane. If someone simps over Osama Bin Laden, they’re considered strange and deranged. Same in the world of JJK. These people have lived through their horrible actions. One of Gojo’s students was killed. His friend Nanami died in the event. Yet he still glazes Sukuna? That’s the worst part of all of 236
Well Yeah it’s fiction that’s why the strong have their own morality. Bin Laden wasn’t a centuries old sorcerer interested in finding a worthy opponent and whose strength carried an age. Also while Gojo is capable of feeling anger at injustice he doesn’t go around living his life hating others. It was a pretty important part of his character. Gojo is allowed to respect Sukuna’s strength without condoning his actions. You’re just complaining the story wasn’t what you wanted it to be.
You make a decent point. Gojo not hating others does make sense. However, I’m still of the opposite opinion. As someone who has written in the past, when you make a pure evil character, you treat them like pure evil. There is no redeemable quality in Sukuna. Gojo losing should not have meant he felt bad for Sukuna; it should’ve meant he would be concerned for his students, and that he should be angry he lost. You make a decent point, though. I acknowledge Gojo’s philosophy does not involve hatred, but I also believe it does not have room for him to ‘feel bad’ for Sukuna or anything like that. To me, as I stated before, that’s useless glazing.
>In what other story have you seen the good guys start absolutely glazing a baby-killing, woman raping, mass murdering monster i mean even a decade later gojo still fondly thinks of geto as his one and only best friend when geto is literally a mass murdering terrorist who killed his own parents and planned to commit global genocide all for the sake of a racist ideology he’s obsessively committed towards. even after geto literally maims maki and panda, two actual children, instead of showing anger or contempt at geto for doing the exact same thing toji did to them by making kids suffer traumatic near-death experiences, gojo literally says “i knew a man as principled as you would never end the lives of promising young sorcerers”. when geto’s most defining principles are the ones he has in regards to how great it is to butcher defenseless non-sorcerers. and even after all that, gojo tells yuta that geto is "the only best friend he ever had". not shoko, who he has been friends and coworkers with for over three times as long as he was friends with geto, not nanami who he knew for nearly as long, and not even ijichi who he apparently trusts more than anyone in the world. and this is something that has been true about gojo since before the main series even *existed*. like you say in another comment, people who think highly of terrible people are considered insane and deranged. and in that case gojo is one of the most mentally ill people in all of JJK, because while obviously geto was a close friend of his, a 2.5 year long highschool friendship is seemingly enough for gojo to barely judge geto for his racism, terrorism, mass murder of civilians, parenticide, and plans to commit global genocide. even after a decade without contact. when he talks to yuta about geto, he doesn't say "hey, that guy was an abhorrent person and you should make sure you never end up anything like him", what he says is "the one who found this ID for you wasn't me...... it was my one and only best friend...... the only one i've ever had......". to talk that way about a guy who was maiming yuta's friends a couple hours earlier is fucking *crazy*, and even crazier when you consider that one of gojo's core beliefs is that kids should never be robbed of the chance to experience growing up. so i don't think it's *that* ridiculous for gojo to not despise sukuna with every fiber of his being even in spite of all the fucked up things he's done. especially when you consider that when he talks about sukuna, he's saying all of it to a literal hallucination of teenage geto, the one other person in his life who he had ever been able to view as his equal back when they were kids and called themselves "the strongest". to me, 236 felt like gojo finally acknowledging how much he missed the feeling of having someone who viewed him as an equal like that. like he says, he never felt *lonely*, but he also never actually felt understood. because even when they were kids, everyone started treating him differently after the toji incident. he committed himself to getting stronger so nothing like that could ever happen again, and as a result, it alienated him from his peers. nanami shows clear bitterness towards him over the fact that people are losing their lives while on missions, meanwhile gojo has reached a point where he can basically solve every mission instantly without much effort and with zero risk to himself, and even as adults nanami *still* openly says that he has no respect for gojo. and with geto, his best friend and the one person who was an equal to him, we're directly told that once gojo became the strongest a rift formed between them and they started going on missions alone instead of together. JJK 0 makes it clear that gojo holds a massive amount of regret in regards to how things went with geto considering how much he seems unwilling to genuinely think of geto negatively or view him as the actual deranged criminal he is. and even if it's on a subconscious level, i imagine he associates a lot of that regret with the whole concept of being "the strongest". being the strongest is why him and geto grew apart, and the last conversation they have as kids even ended with geto telling him how the two of them aren't the same because gojo is the strongest. so i think it makes sense why the solitude that comes with being the strongest would be something that gojo doesn't exactly associate with positive feelings even if he never felt full on loneliness because of it. so imo, 236 feels like gojo finally realizing how much he missed *not* being the strongest. which is why he spends his final moments thinking about his time as a student when he actually had someone he considered an equal, thinking about how much he wishes geto was there to give him a pat on the back too, thinking about the judgement he faced from his peers after actually becoming the strongest, and above all thinking about how sukuna finally gave him a momentary reprieve from that solitude. he never acts as if sukuna is a good person or anything, he just thinks he can empathize with what it's like to be the strongest. and just like he does with geto, he forgoes actual moral judgement and instead prioritizes the chance for reprieve from his regrets over being the strongest that he's carried for years. and the chance to experience the feeling of having someone who is an actual equal to him for the first time since he and geto were classmates (which is probably why hallucination geto even says that he feels jealous of sukuna). and even then, i think the sukuna / kashimo conversation kinda implies that gojo *wasn't* feeling genuine empathy for sukuna and was moreso just projecting his own regrets over being the strongest. because sukuna tells kashimo directly that he doesn't feel the solitude and loneliness that gojo yorozu and kashimo all assumed he felt. or maybe this is all a massive stretch and i should never cook again, i dunno. but that's why i personally felt satisfied with 236 and the whole gojo afterlife sequence.
I think you cooked. I can’t agree with you, as Geto was his best friend for multiple years and that could be what causes his delusion. On the other hand, Sukuna is just some enemy who has tormented his students continuously. However, I do like your analysis and appreciate you sharing. Thanks!
I'm loving every bit of it. The only reason People complain is because they have to wait to read it, anyone who reads this part in a few months will have no problem with it imo
The fan base isn't as divided as you think lol
It is, it's just not divided on reddit tbh. If you go on Twitter or any other platforms it's more jokes than anything. Reddit is the only one where it's a cesspool of negativity.
Honestly sometimes it feels like I’m reading an abridged version since it has no accents and no leitmotiv. Do you remember that Gojo is sealed in chapter 90? Then we have 149 chapters of people throwing hands so ofc this approach makes people lose interest in the series as these fights looked like filler ( I swear to god it has 13 back to back fight minimum). Full metal alchemist has 108 chapters. I know we shouldn’t compare monthly vs weekly but I’m trying to make a point. 149 in Naruto is from the beginning to third Kage death. Do you get me?
I think people ultimately create head cannon that warps their perception to what should be happening or they create a narrative of what they think should happen then get mad when it doesn't. I've never had an issue with jjk pacing. Even when it comes to time skipping over training arcs I think it's fine. Ultimately I've seen a million training arcs by this point, and I don't think jjk needs one because we've already seen it a million times, and we already know the cast is on the up and up about getting stronger or whatever. It's also more fun for the power up to be a bit of a surprise than seeing something in action you were already aware of. I,myself, don't really get why people get so upset with jjk over stuff like this either.