#Maki fans who don't like her after Perfect Preparation--this one's partially for you. I guess.

[frost-felon]

221 was mostly fine, and 222 was a valley of highs and lows for me. 222 is perhaps one of the chapters that suffers the most from Gege's hardcuts. I would go from, "Are we actually gonna get a better understanding of Kenny's relationship to Tengen?" to 'I love Ino, I hope he has at least a single line of dialogue.' to "'Regulations'. Are these 'higher-ups' or this 'Jujutsu Headquarters' in the room with us right now?" to bemoaning the timeskip, etc, etc.

I'm glad we got some character moments, but knowing that moments like these can't properly stand on their own weight stings. That is, the depth of each character is often held back. I noticed it particularly hard with Maki, whose actions are hard to discern (in comparison to, say, how she acted at her introduction, months prior in the story's timeframe) based on what we're given. The panel I'm discussing, for reference:

As told to some of my friends: "Is she making a light-hearted comment because she's grown fonder of Gojo? Because she's uneasy? Because she wants to lighten the mood? Is she conscious that she's still giving Gojo more credit than she did months ago?

"It's a change from how Maki acted earlier in the story, sure, but not one I can point to with analysis to her character or how her relationship to Gojo has (or hasn't) changed. It's just there."

I am factoring in how Perfect Preparation changed her, her discussions with Noritoshi, and the sumo self-discovery (which was less about Maki, in my opinion, and more about Toji haunting the narrative), but I can't really land on an interpretation for this moment, with evidence provided by earlier chapters. With the ~month-long timeskip, it is impossible for me to know if any of the character interactions I can presume happened with Maki and Gojo led to this. Simply because I can't know what those interactions were, or even how many they had.

So this ends up just being nothing. The bare minimum, and maximum, it does is tell me that Maki has returned to a state of mind where she can 'threaten' some good old-fashioned roughhousing, maybe. There are some bits just a little later that could potentially give me more to go on, but she's largely played as having the same role as at least two other people in the following scenes. There are differences in expression for the "Go get 'em, tiger." scene with Gojo, but Maki doesn't affect anything through her action or inaction, and ends up replaceable, as a result. Though not nearly to the extent of Miwa, who might as well be named "Missing", for all her lack of relevance to...anything.

This is fairly light analysis, damn near a vent post with extra steps, but I do think the short supply of character-building moments throughout the manga cheapens both its characters and its pacing. Culling Games, while having FAR more pressing issues than needing more time to flesh out characters, did suffer from the time-jumps that the first half of the manga was prone to, and I hate to see this story convention return so abruptly and damningly.