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juhaku-nation · 1 year ago

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about judar from the hit manga magi

hiii everyone, zav speaking! or maybe more people know me as idola in the magi fandom, i dont know, probably. ive been here as idola for the past 9 years after all lol

okay so forgive me because it’s been a long time since i reread magi, but i am burdened by feelings and emotions and have GOT to talk about this even if there might be a few details that are a little questionable due to how long it’s been.

anywaaayy about judar (and juhaku by extension). i wanted to talk a little bit about judar’s identity, both in his mind and in the minds of others

so first of all, this was inspired by the self assessment extra in volume 35 of the manga. in it, there are 4 ticks for rankings with 1 being the lowest and 4 being the highest. the only relevant ones here are judar and hakuryuu so theirs are the only ones ill post:

judar future prospects: 4 mental strength: 2 kindness: 1 sense of humor: 2 face: 2 total points: 55/100

(on this judar and hakuryuu have a set of comments—

judar: i didn’t understand this question very well.

hakuryuu: it’s a question about your opinion of yourself. now that you mention it, i never heard that from you.)

hakuryuu future prospects: 3 mental strength: 4 kindness: 1 sense of humor: 1 face: 4 total points: 65/100

honestly i have absolutely no idea how they are getting 55 and 65 out of 100 with that, but oh well. doesn’t really matter. bottom line is that hakuryuu, who historically hasn’t had a good opinion of himself, thinks of himself more kindly than judar thinks of himself. the only character that has lower self-esteem than judar per this special paper is koumei. koumei!!

basically, what i got from it is that judar has incredibly low self-esteem, and probably not just in the areas they’re talking about here.

i’ve been in the magi fandom for… quite a while now lol and i very clearly remember everyone saying for a long time that judar knows he’s hot, and that doesn’t seem to be the case. moreover, judar makes a comment about how he wears the clothes he wears because sinbad told him that people would like him more if he wore them.

judar: the stupid king told me that i’d have more success in love wearing middle eastern clothes (ha ha… he’s so stupid…)

apparently he really believed that, because he then proceeded to wear them for literally the next 10 years lol. that might sound like a reach, but when you read the second half of the omake, i can’t imagine any other way to read it?

alibaba: but… you don’t have a girlfriend or a wife, do you?

judar: no, but… everyone at the palace let me do whatever i wanted with them, you know?

so what’s the truth, judar?

comment A: “i’ll wear these clothes because they’ll make me more successful with love!”

comment B: “everyone let me do whatever i wanted with them” (which he says right after calling women “boring” - yes this points to him thinking men are more interesting, but that’s not the point i’m trying to make today)

basically, my point is that judar wanted people to like him when he was younger so he changed the way he dressed completely and kept it that way consistently for the rest of his known life.

so why did he have to do that, then?

normally, if people don’t like you then you try to fix what they don’t like if you want to be their friend. but the reason that people didn’t like judar is, more than anything, because he’s “al-thamen’s pawn.”

was that or was that not something he had absolutely no control over lol. it’s no wonder that he fixated on and tried to fix other things about himself that he perceived as sub-par, like his appearance, since he obviously couldn’t change the root issue.

honestly, i don’t really think that he was super conscious of that fact or anything. but i do think that it’s what ohtaka intended to portray when writing these aspects of his character.

that being said, let’s back up a little bit.

we know that judar wasn’t originally born to al-thamen, but was taken soon after and then treated as if he was a priest/oracle, something holy and above others, to keep him from thinking too hard about anything else. and it worked! he thought of himself as a great magi, and thought reasonably well of the people who treated him like a great magi—see his childhood crush on gyokuen (revealed in a sticker). but on the other hand, he also wanted someone to treat him like a kid—see him telling hakuryuu to give him one of his brothers back when they were kids because he wanted to be a little brother ;-;

he couldn’t have that, though, because hakuryuu’s brothers burnt to a crisp, something that everyone saw him as complacent in… despite him being a young kid at the time. no, he didn’t do anything to stop it. but how could he? he was eight years old

hakuryuu, who had been his friend up until then, started to treat him differently afterwards, again for no fault of judar’s own. im sure that this hurt after everything that happened in snb, with seren dying and sinbad hating his guts (a dynamic that would continue for the foreseeable future).

so what was judar to do? treat them coldly in return? no! he treated hakuryuu like a friend just like how he used to. sure, he always asked him to go to dungeons with him, because he was a great magi and great magi can choose great kings and he knows that hakuryuu would be a great king… but he’s still eight years old. there’s really nothing he can do to win hakuryuu’s friendship back, even though he hadn’t really done anything wrong on a personal level.

now i hear what you might be thinking—al-thamen’s goons, sinbad, and hakuryuu arent the only people in judar’s life… and yes, that’s true. but the way he treats them is so obviously different from the way he treats his other king vessels. the only one that even comes close is kougyoku, who he teases and seems to be friends with, in a way. they definitely don’t have a truly antagonistic relationship despite his relentless teasing… but he doesn’t take her seriously, really. i guess she doesn’t have the same potential in his eyes as sinbad and hakuryuu do. so he keeps bugging those guys instead of being satisfied with what he has.

i do think that sinbad and hakuryuu having extremely negative feelings towards al-thamen contributes to judar’s impressions on them… but i don’t think that he has any solid perception of his intuition at this point.

so basically, timeline wise, we have:

judar being born into a small village in the far east. it’s unclear on if he was born into kou, gai, or go, but his village was soon slaughtered so what does it matter (for the purpose of this essay)

he was raised into al-thamen, presumably by gyokuen primarily since she’s the reason he was in kou to begin with… but he was really, really young when they captured him judging by the pictures we were shown. so he probably had a random woman nurse him. he is shown wearing kou’s clothes in the reim arc in snb so when he’s 4 years old. at that time, his rukh was white

judar’s powers as a magi are used to help get metal vessels and djinns for a huge number of people. it’s unclear to me which dungeon he summoned first, but either way by the time he was taken to parthevia, he wasn’t a stranger to summoning them or having kings.

his rukh is forced to turn black, likely via arba’s “mental magic”

flashforward to three years later and he grows somewhat close to serendine, who treats him like a little brother at times. he’s ultimately part of the reason why she dies so i’m sure that hurts, but he doesn’t really talk about it. i can’t even begin to imagine how much it’d hurt for this to happen, then to go to kou and have the fire happen, and have his comforting friendship with hakuryuu - the first and last person he could consider a friend, in all likelihood - go up in flames soon after.

as he gets older, he continues to collect king vessels. even so, he makes it a point to always ask hakuryuu to become his king. why? hakuryuu doesn’t like him anymore… at least, that’s what he says. maybe judar believes him, maybe he doesn’t. we really don’t know.

in a meeting with sinbad, he’s told that he’ll have more luck in love if he dresses different, so he does just that.

people at home let him do whatever he wants, but it doesn’t fill the void so to speak - he calls it boring instead of fulfilling. it seems that he’s grown tired of being the great magi, the ‘other’ who others can’t understand because they don’t know anything about him. they take advantage of his powers without understanding or caring on a deeper level (unlike sinbad and hakuryuu who don’t take advantage of him at all, whose opinions he seems to value a lot more)

so that’s all for pre-magi canon.

as for magi canon itself, the first time we see judar is him outside of the dungeon that alibaba conquers if i’m not mistaken. he has no personal interest in alibaba, but the others in al-thamen have an interest in aladdin. when judar learns about aladdin, it probably doesn’t feel too great… after all, judar has always been special, and that’s why everyone treats him differently, right?

because he’s special, he’s powerful, he’s everything that nobody else will ever be.

…but he’s also nothing that anyone else wants to be, because he’s al-thamen’s pawn… something that he’s probably becoming conscious of for the first time after he learns about aladdin in the early parts of the story.

he gets to see aladdin with alibaba, a king who he chose without anyone else’s input. he gets to see how free aladdin is.

and he gets to see how unfortunate he himself is after aladdin activates solomon’s wisdom and shows him that he’s not special after all. not against aladdin, and not to al-thamen either—yes, he’s their magi. yes, he was their perfect pawn who they went to great efforts to obtain.

but he doesn’t have solomon’s wisdom. he isn’t aladdin.

he’s not their ideal anymore.

so what is he if he’s not special?

he’s ‘judar,’ but that’s not the name that his parents gave him or anything. it’s a name that al-thamen gave him when they essentially took him captive.

he’s been going by a name that wasn’t his and fighting battles that aren’t really his. not only that, but he’s wearing clothes that were someone else’s idea and attracting people who only want him for his power. who would he be if he wasn’t a magi, anyway?

nothing, really

he’d be nothing, and he’d have no one

nobody wants to be around him because they think he’s a pawn, and for the first time, he readily agrees with them, and that makes him angry.

(side note: at some point during the balbadd arc, i think before solomon’s wisdom is activated but i don’t remember clearly, judar’s rukh tries to leave his body but is forced back inside by al-thamen. the man can’t even die without them dictating if it’s okay or not. like come on.)

so after the balbadd arc, judar’s kind of a whirlwind of emotions. he “fake cries” at sinbad in sindria, which i always thought was funny because there’s no way in hell that he wasn’t even a little bit sincere in that. “i’m also one of al-thamen’s victims!” we know you are. you just don’t want to be pitied so you backtrack and laugh about it instead

there’s a cute moment around there where ithnan says to be careful about hurting hakuryuu because he’s judar’s favorite, bit AWWW because it’s been 11 years since judar and hakuryuu were truly friends and he’s still judar’s favorite, judar’s still talking about him and hyping him up, even though he most certainly was not hyping him up to the right person lol

from here we have a bit of a stalemate for judar, who wants to have the power to escape al-thamen but just. doesn’t. there’s nothing he can do alone, but nobody wants to take his hand because he’s with al-thamen, and the proof is in his black rukh.

he clearly has someone in mind, though. he wants hakuryuu and urges him to take his hand now more than ever, knowing that they are the same in this sense, and that together they can cover each other’s weaknesses and break themselves free of their fates.

hakuryuu goes with judar when the medium implodes in magnostadt and judar takes the depraved rukh from it. from there, they set more plans into motion

i won’t bore you with a recap of the Best Arc in All of Manga History (the juhaku… i mean kou arc) because tbh you should go read it (again) yourself, it’s literally a masterpiece, BUT the key points of it as far as judar’s concerned are:

he did want to take aladdin’s hand and be friends “at one point,” but quickly decided against it because of the anger in his heart

he understands that it’s the right thing to do, but just can’t forgive the world enough to do it. he knows that he could fight al-thamen with everyone else but he just can’t do it, because he knows that nobody shares this anger with him, and nobody would let him do the things he wants with it. but after everything, that’s all that he really wants:

to do something that he himself decided on doing, not what others wanted him to do. he wants to be himself, not what other people want him to be.

“we will destroy this world and create it anew” - the iconic line

“this feels just like… il ilah itself…” - belial when judar attacks

not too long later, at the battle camp, judar is shown to be struggling to subordinate the huge quantity of black rukh he obtained from magnostadt, but he doesn’t regret it or anything. he’s getting all sorts of useful information from it. just like how hakuryuu is learning how to use his new powers from belial, judar is understanding how to parse the information from mogamett’s rukh.

side note #143: hakuryuu knowing how judar’s mind works is so cute. him telling judar to learn this magic “or is it too difficult?” ALWAYS works on him lol. how did they grow so close if they only knew each other for a year, between ages 7-8 for judar and 5-6 for hakuryuu, before the fire? like that’s crazy to me. they act like they have TONS of history outside of that. i feel like they do, too, it’s all just very controlled interaction on hakuryuu’s side. he holds back so much, it must feel so good to just… be on each other’s sides again, especially knowing that they understand each other and want to be together DESPITE everything else being so fucked up ;-;

anyway onto the next point: the isolation barrier

so this is basically also a side note, but the isolation barrier was only mentioned/used twice: once in the alma torran arc, where they say it was invented by magicians who want to commit suicide so that their borg doesn’t stop them, and then when judar activates it to let hakuryuu kill gyokuen. it’s impossible for judar to do any damage to her after that but if it works it works!

then there’s the ultra iconic “if you hadn’t raised me, i would be more… more… more…! huh? what was it, again? it slipped my mind.”

rahhh i love judar. i don’t think i need to explain that really, i think it’s pretty self-explanatory. classic judar knowing the feelings in his mind but not knowing how to put it into words

as for the battle with aladdin, judar plays with the idea of summoning the medium because it’d be his idea and no one else’s. except that it’s literally not, because he was essentially being raised since childhood to become the medium. oops

anyway, i already talked about the stuff that was revealed in the dark continent and with the mother dragon. the rest of judar is also pretty self-explanatory once you think back on all the other things that have been revealed until then and in extra papers and omakes after it too

the things that stand out most to me in the final arc are when judar comes back, how he goes straight to his village instead of attempting to find hakuryuu (despite what yunan likely told them) to pick up where they left off, and then telling hakuryuu about everything even though he’s been shown to be a pretty private person who doesn’t talk about himself much

and then… at the very end of all of this, when he fights sinbad, he finally gets to say that he’s satisfied for the first time in his life, because he has hakuryuu who understands him and wants to be with him just because he’s himself, not because he’s a powerful magi ;-; i have so many feelings and emotions it’s actually insane

and yes i DID just write a 3k essay on a magi character in god's year of 2024. sue me

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