Warning: Spoilers up to and including Jujutsu Kaisen Chapter #205.Jujutsu Kaisen‘s fourth season is on the way, but one death will reignite a fan debate that’s been ongoing for four years. The production committee behind the blockbuster shōnen’s anime adaptation recently released the first trailer for Jujutsu Kaisen season 4, and suffice to say, it looks incredible. MAPPA, as per usual, leaves few notes to be taken, and the series continues to only climb in quality and execution.

Nonetheless, one thing the trailer confirms—and which manga readers already know—is that, in the second half of the Culling Game arc the fourth season is set to cover, there’s a particularly divisive fight that takes the life of a character who is, subtly, one of Jujutsu Kaisen‘s most pivotal personalities.

While Yuki and Choso’s fight against Kenjaku is one of Jujutsu Kaisen‘s best, it’s historically been a major pain point for the community since it concludes with the death of Yuki Tsukumo, a beloved and highly-anticipated character who had very little time on-screen in the end. Fans have interpreted this in a number of ways, but the fact remains that Yuki’s death is one of Jujutsu Kaisen‘s biggest missteps.

Why Yuki Became Crucial To Jujutsu Kaisen

At the beginning of the Culling Game arc, when the jujutsu sorcerers gather to meet Tengen, there’s some surprise that Yuki will be joining them. This perfectly encapsulates not just the air of mystique that had built around her character, but also the unique relationship she holds with jujutsu society that drew fans to her in the first place.

Yuki’s role was established earlier in the series when she becomes the sounding board for a wavering Suguru Geto. More accurately, she revealed herself to be one of the few people who could understand disillusionment with the norms of jujutsu sorcery.

If Geto and Gojo’s relationship represents the instability of jujutsu society’s moral binary, Yuki starts to represent a surprising third option: she would intentionally distance herself from the ideology of Jujutsu High, taking the more idealistic position of addressing the root causes underlying cursed spirits rather than treating symptoms.

The thing is that her position wasn’t really all that idealistic, it only looks that way against the backdrop of Jujutsu Kaisen. The franchise allows several different ways of thinking about cursed spirits to flourish, and Yuki stands in opposition to essentially every other way of thinking. Yuki’s solutions were simple and even pragmatic: eradicating their ability to leak cursed energy to begin with, or otherwise teaching people how to control cursed energy at the level of a sorcerer.

This simple change put her in opposition to the institutional hierarchy of jujutsu sorcery, to its major figures like Tengen, and to the intriguingly divergent desires of different cursed spirits like Kenjaku and Mahito. Yuki stood outside the prevailing ideologies of the series just by wanting one thing: ending the cycle that brings cursed spirits about, a bizarrely under-explored perspective for a series that ventures so far with different modes of thought.

How Jujutsu Kaisen Killed Off Its Greatest Potential

When Yuki and Choso’s fight with Kenjaku came around, readers were largely unaware of what Yuki could actually do. It was known she was a special grade sorcerer, but her cursed technique was purposely kept secret until she was forced to reveal it in combat against Kenjaku.

Yuki’s convoluted cursed technique, Star Rage, allows her to manipulate mass (hers or her shikigami’s) without losing speed. Basically, she’s able to add virtual mass, which is distinct from her actual mass. This added mass has no effective ceiling and can offer immunity in certain scenarios where she is specifically targeted.

She essentially gets only one fight in the whole series, and it’s disappointing in a strange way. The nature of her death has been hotly debated. In a final gambit to take down Kenjaku, Yuki uses her control of virtual mass to generate a black hole, which he narrowly escapes through an antigravity technique he had acquired years earlier from Kaori Itadori, Yuji’s mother.

What this means, in effect, is that one of the series’ most ideologically interesting characters was lost in her first big fight, precisely at the point where she faces off against what is essentially her philosophical opposite. Kenjaku doesn’t just inhabit the body of Suguru Geto—he’s cynically inverting the question Suguru came to Yuki with years before. Rather than Geto’s disillusioned desire to cull all non-sorcerers so cursed spirits no longer exist, Kenjaku wants to merge humanity with Tengen purely out of his own curiosity.

At that point, the fact that Kenjaku’s victory and seizure of Tengen comes in a way that so easily reads as coincidence—whether accurate or not—just serves as salt in the wound.

Season 4 Will Reignite The Debate Over Yuki’s Death

Where Jujutsu Kaisen‘s fourth season comes in is the fact that this contested death will no longer be restricted to manga-only fans; it’ll be put in front of the millions of hardcore fans worldwide who have faithfully followed the anime from day one. Much like manga-only fans once upon a time, there’s still a very sizable contingent of people who are currently waiting with bated breath to see what comes of Yuki and Choso’s efforts to fend off Kenjaku.

When those fans see what comes, the debate will likely go the same way. One side is going to see the outcome more metaphorically—one of the most interesting readings of Yuki’s death has positioned her plot impact as thematically mirroring her cursed technique: a lot of mass behind a few well-timed, if sparse, punches.

Meanwhile, the other side will align with the more popular view that Yuki had much more to provide Jujutsu Kaisen‘s plot. As one of the only characters who inserts herself into every conversation on the nature of humanity’s relationship with cursed spirits, she more-or-less presents as the series’ arch-philosopher in a world of warriors.

In the end, one thing is absolutely certain: Jujutsu Kaisen lost quite a lot by allowing Yuki to die in the way that she did. Ignoring her combat potential for a moment, her unique strain of thought could have carried more narrative weight were it ever pitted against other ideologies in a substantial way.

At the very least, it exposes a problem akin to the essential flaw with Naruto‘s world building where, intentionally or unintentionally, the predominant strains of thought in the series suppose a lot of givens about the world which don’t actually have to be the case. Yuki is one of the most provocative characters Jujutsu Kaisen has ever introduced for precisely that reason: she simply asks why things have to be the way they are, and why every seeming solution just perpetuates the same cycle.

Jujutsu Kaisen‘s fourth season is bound to reopen that can of worms, but considering the series’ colossal misstep in silencing one of its most provocative characters, the questions her death raises will remain worth asking.

Release Date

October 3, 2020

Network

TBS, MBS, CBC, Tulip Television, BSN, tys, NBC, HBC, RKK, i-Television, SBS, IBC, BSS, MRO, OBS, TUF, RSK, TUY, tbc, RKB, SBC, KUTV, RBC, UTY, RCC, MRT, atv, MBC

Directors

Ryohei Takeshita, Masataka Akai, Chie Nishizawa, Daisuke Tsukushi, Tomomi Kamiya, Kakushi Ifuku, Ken Takahashi

Writers

Hiroshi Seko

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  Yuichi Nakamura

  Satoru Gojo