Jujutsu Kaisen S01E06-08

This is the beginning of the inter-campus games, and... I know I keep saying it, but I will try to be a bit more succinct in running through these episodes. I was talking about the first five episodes so much and I wasn't the happiest when I read my own work. Anyway, this is going to cover the Jogo two-parter, then the opening of the Goodwill Event arc. 

 

Episode 6:

• The first part of this episode is Yuji and Sukuna within Sukuna's Innate Domain. Again, I absolutely love that this is portrayed as a very selfish deal with the demon. It's something that's pretty refreshing considering a lot of the other shonen manga often have the 'inner demon' be either secretly protective (Bleach) or be won over by nakama power (Naruto, Black Clover)... and it was already apparent in the manga, but I absolutely love just how slimy Sukuna sounds like with voice acting. 
• I also like how Yuji thinks he has equal mental strength in that realm or something and tries to punch Sukuna before he absolutely bullies the shit out of him. 
• Sukuna eventually smooth-talks Yuji into agreeing into several conditions -- he can use Yuji's body for a minute after a key phrase; he won't hurt or kill anyone while doing this; and that Yuji will forget this conversation. 
• And I love that this is very unambiguously shown to the audience as something that is 10000% unfair. The very moment Yuji says something that remotely counts for the geas, Sukuna whacks his head off. 
• And then we cut back to Gojo and the other adults, who get absolutely shocked to see Yuji come back to life, buck-ass-nude, in the morgue. It's... it's something that I honestly rather like -- the fact that the resurrection of the main character was basically done without any bullshit dragging out. 
• I also like that the death of Yuji is used to progress another plot point, instead of just being for drama -- Gojo, Ijichi and Shoko decide to keep this a secret, after Gojo's impassioned speech about how the higher-ups had planned to dispose of Yuji, and how they can only reform the Jujutsu society with great members of the second generation. 
• I also absolutely love the ease and the calmness of how Gojo states that he could just very casually 'murder every single member of the higher-ups'. 
• Okkotsu Yuta from the pilot miniseries (or JJK Zero) and -wikis- Hakari Kinji are mentioned as two high-potential students that could reach Gojo's power level. 
• 
  We then cut to the second part of the episode, where the cursed spirits are hanging out. It's easily one of my favourite scenes from this series when I was first reading it, with the spirits just casually hanging out there discussing about how to deal with the super-powerful Gojo. I also love that the POV is seen from the viewpoint of a particularly sensitive waiter, who decides to quit on the spot -- around a minute before Jogo starts to murder the shit out of everyone for a lark. 
• Good god who the fuck thinks it was a good idea to have a 'Gojo' and a 'Jogo' fight each other?
• Geto gives Jogo the special-grade cursed object Prison Realm, and I absolutely love the hamminess of Jogo as he gets excited about the powerful device, and then he just casually heats up the diner and causes every single person there to spontaneously combust. 
• There is a nice short scene of Megumi visiting the mother of the drunk driver that he had refused to save, giving her -- literally the only person that will mourn her son -- some closure. A nice little bit of showing that even with the short mission (admittedly Yuji died in that mission) Megumi's grown a little. 
• We also have some comedy of Panda training with Nobara in the background and literally flinging her around, while Megumi talks a bit more seriously with Maki. Tying into the Gojo/Yuji conversation later, I do like that this is a nice exposition nosedive into cursed tools. 
• We also have a bit of a explanation about 'cursed energy' and 'cursed technique', with the always-welcome shonen trope of displaying these powers on items like soda cans. It's going to be an explanation that I'll have to rewatch, but basically unless you're born with a surplus of talent, you do need technique to properly make efficient usage of skills, something that Yuji tapped into during his fight with the Cursed Womb. 
• I also love the very blatant and uncensored namedrops of Bankai, Rasengan, Kamehameha, Reigun and the Dodonpa. (While all the others are the marquee skills of their respective shows, the Dodonpa is a bit of an obscure skill from Dragon Ball, the skill used by Mercenary Tao!)
• I like the little training segment that Yuji's left with, where he has to watch movies and have to learn how to control a steady output of cursed energy even as his emotions flare up and down. 
• Gojo is the kind of jackass who, when talking about a movie, goes straight to spoiling the ending, huh? Be a nice guy! Don't do that!
• The episode ends with Gojo sending the long-suffering Ijichi off to drive away without explaining anything, before Jogo, the tiny little volcano dwarf man, slams in and gets ready to rumble!

Episode 7:

• 
  Almost all of this is a battle episode, but man, what an episode! I don't really have much to say in terms of plot progression, and I want to limit my anime animation wank-gushing to a limit, but this episode basically has "Gojo fights Jogo, we see Domain Expansions used against each other, Gojo absolutely overpowers Jogo, then Jogo gets rescued and escapes". But boy, I did remember reading this fight in the manga and loving it a lot. It's not often we get to see the sheer and absolutely overpowering strength of one of our strongest heroes in such an impressive fashion, right after the villain shows himself off to be impressive. The usual formula is 'protagonist gets bullied by villain, then villain gets bullied by mentor', and I do find it very interesting that this fight focuses more on Gojo and Jogo, while Yuji doesn't even show up until Gojo literally teleports and brings him in as to study about Domain Expansion. 
• Pretty cool usage of ash and lava effects, and I do really like that we get to see Jogo do a lot of wacky stuff like summoning volcanoes from the side of the sidewalk, or the exploding screaming fire bugs... they all don't amount to much in the end, but it's neat that Jogo doesn't feel basic in terms of an anime protagonist. 
• Always love the action trope of an attack coming in, a character blocking it, but the shockwaves being so explosive that it destroys the ground behind the blocker. 
• 
  I also do like that Jogo is established to really not be a pushover, being noted to be such a rarity since he's an intelligent curse, and Gojo compares him to be as powerful as Sukuna as he is currently. 
• Jutsushiki Hanten: Akan (Cursed Technique Reversal: Red) is such a nicely animated sequence, with great usage of colour and random ink splotches before the gigantic explosion that dwarves the lava bombs that Jogo did earlier.
• I also love the sheer hilarity of Jogo getting tossed through a forest for quite some time, enough for Gojo to teleport back to his base and talk to Yuji, commenting on his improvement in emotion control, before teleporting him back to the lake. 
• And then we get the pinnacle of jujutsu battles -- Domain Expansion. RYOIKI TENKAI! It's the new Bankai. Such a fun thing to yell out, as all these voice actors have fun with. 
• And Gojo just casually handwave Jogo as a weak curse, and I absolutely love the split-second "WTF did you just say" as all three of Jogo's head-volcano-caps erupt as he gets absolutely pissed. 
• Great voice-acting, too. I haven't been saying too much about it, but Jogo's voice actor does a great balance of being someone who is normally in control of a situation, goes in expecting a fight, and then gets shocked at the sheer degree of a fight that he gets. 
• I also love that in the initial parts of the fight, Jogo uses those ports like little dials to adjust his volcanic explosions.
• And then we get Jogo's Domain Expansion. Gaikan Tecchisen! Or Coffin of the Iron Mountain. 
• It's a neat little explanation to what a Domain Expansion looks like and the properties thereof. Gojo also makes it clear that attacks in a Domain Expansion always hits, since the opponents are stuck inside the Domain. 
• "Zettai?" "Zeeeeeee-ttai!"
• 
  Gojo then flexes and unleashes his sheer power, showing that you can overpower a Domain Expansion with escaping (which is difficult), or by using an even stronger Domain Expansion, unleashing his own Domain Expansion. And then he unleashes his own Domain Expansion and removes his blindfold.
• Ryoiki Tenkai: Muryokusho!
• I was actually surprised but I shouldn't be, because I remembered being surprised that human jujutsu sorcerers were able to use Domain Expansions, but I guess it's my old Bleach instincts kicking in. 
• The visuals of Muryokusho is pretty cool! I still feel like the powerful ink splotches in the manga is a lot more striking, but the colours in the anime, the confused voice acting and the movement of the stars are very cool. But my favourite part has to be the rapid, jarring change from the psychedelic but calming Unlimited Void to Gojo very brutally ripping off Jogo's head like a ink painting in black and white. 
• I do like that Gojo doesn't look stupid by sparing Jogo, even though the narrative needs him to be spared -- but it's a combination of Gojo wanting to interrogate Jogo, as well as Hanami jumping in and using that brief 'oh flowers are nice' bit, and then Yuji being attacked by a plant monster. 
• Love the initially cocksure "I can handle this master! Go after him OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD HELP". 
• Geto is also keeping himself hidden from the humans, while Hanami, in his reverse-speech, is very pissed off that Geto isn't considering curses as living things. 
• Also absolutely love Dagon's little adorable happy fun beach domain. I love Dagon. 
• We also get the seeming leader of the group, Mahito, who is a patchworked-up human. There's a neat little undercrurrent between Mahito and Hanami's dialogue about how these sentient Curses hate being considered as sub-human lesser beings.

Episode 8:

• This episode is a bit lighter in action compared to the previous two, mostly because it's a bit of an introduction. 
• Basically, the focus of the episode is the meeting between Megumi and the (very clueless) Nobara with two students from Kyoto, namely Zen'in Mai and Todo Aoi. It's always nice procedure in these tournament arcs to have some of our protagonist meet against some of their opponents.
• Zen'in Mai being the twin sister of Maki, who we're already familiar with, is a great way to introduce an enmity between a member of 'our guys' and the antagonists (see also: the Hyugas from Naruto). 
• Todo Aoi is very... uh... he does strike a great impression, yeah? Immediately asking Megumi about his fetish and preference in women. The 'huh?' given by Megumi and Nobara is hilarious, the ranting about how fetishes show how boring or interesting a man is, and Todo treats it as something as honourable as giving out your name. Mai, meanwhile, is just... she is trying so hard to be an intimidating alpha-bitch bully, but she's stuck with this moron as a partner.
• Mai also instantly stands out as being completely unlikable by speaking ill of the dead. 
• I also do really like that while Megumi's trying his best to answer Todo's question politely, Nobara just snipes in that it's a difficult thing for an antisocial twerp like Megumi.
• Todo and Megumi's fights are... it's pretty cool. We have a typical punching around and tossing people through buildings. I don't think it's quite as epic as Megumi vs. Sukuna a couple episodes back, but it's still very prettily animated. That lariat is particularly fun. 
• Megumi also gives us a brief little name-drop about the events of Jujutsu Kaisen Zero, which is released as a 'canon' movie in-between season 1 and season 2 of the anime. In terms of the manga, Zero is a pilot miniseries that ended up being retooled where the author kept the setting but switched the protagonists around. It's a great way to salvage something that perhaps isn't the most marketable, and also keeping your previous work as basically backstory. 
• I don't actually remember if Todo shows up in Zero, but apparently he single-handedly wiped out all the cursed spirits during the Hyakki Yakou. 
• We get to see that Megumi can combine Toad with Nue, creating a bunch of winged frogs to grapple around Todo. 
• 
  Not the biggest fan of Nobara and Mai's confrontation. It's the second 'arc' in a row that Nobara's fight ends up basically being off-screened. Mai threatens Nobara with a gun, and kind of beats her up off-screen, but ultimately it's Maki's arrival and Maki's interactions with her twin sister that's the primary focus. 
• Ultimately, Toge and Panda show up to stop the fight. 
• "Me panda, me no understand human language."
• It's also a neat little info-dump that both twins have rather poor talent with Jujutsu and had to compensate with other means. It does immediately give us the origin of Mai's bitchiness, at least. 
• And then Todo calls the fight off because he has to go off and shake hands with an idol, which... it's fun that Mai, despite all of her cattiness towards the Tokyo kids, actually does go and humour her friend.
  
• And then we get the final scene of this sequence, where Gojo Satoru meets up with the principal of Kyoto, old man Gakuganji, who Gojo all but directly accuses is the one that pulled the strings to cause Yuji's death. It's a very fun sequence where Gojo absolutely and entirely overpowers Gakuganji, but they're both technically supposed to be on the same side, and Gakuganji is just a bit too extreme in his desire to eliminate curses. 
• Also love that Gojo notes that this all stemmed from the Jujutsu Highs' desire to suppress everything with information control, which we saw during the Sukuna-vs-Special-Grade fight that... the 'Special-Grades' are extremely different in power level. 
• We also get the debut of my favourite secondary character, the blue-haired Miwa Kasumi, whose whole point is that she tries to act professional but is a gigantic fangirl of Gojo. This was funny in the manga, and even moreso in the anime. A lot of fun hilarity from Kasumi's inclusion as compared to the rather somber tone of the meeting between Gakuganji and Gojo. 
  
• And after the comedy with Kasumi asking for Gojo's authograph, as well as Mai being forced to accompany Todo to the autograph/handshake event... we get another case, as three heavily mutilated corpses are found in a movie theater, Mahito's handiwork. Mahito is approached by a young man, who approaches him.