#but megumi and tsumiki have their own stories and they experience this relationship very differently

[prettyboykatsuki]

i think while loss is a very obvious theme in jjk i think a more accurate or completed representation of that theme is actually the burden of the living.

i just finished catching up on it (jjk 212 thanks for absolutely gutting me) and seeing megumi and tsumiki sort of clued me into what i think is really being expressed in many of the characters relationship.

from the beginning of the story, we see characters lose people that are important to them. yuuji and his grandfather, maki and mai, gojo and getou, yuuta and rika, nanami and haibara. but the story itself doesn’t actual center on their deaths. at least not in the sense we experience their deaths from their eyes.

i think jujutsu kaisen is ultimately a story about the burden of the living more than it is the grief of death. and its a burden that continues to pass itself down to the next generation. its parasitic and cyclical and ultimately an inescapable truth. everyone you love will die. it is also a a direct parallel of the structure of the jujutsu societies hierarchy.

clan politics, corruption, greed and power — all of these things are akin to the lifecycle we see so often represented are things that have the same black and white stagnancy. just like people will continue to die and their loved ones will live on without them - the society that is being upheld by the currency of that grief will not change. jujutsu society is a snake eating its own tail, and the only way to change that structure is to shake the atmosphere.

the trapping of gojo satoru, the slaughter of maki zenin, the culling games, the resurrection of both naoya and toji. all of these things stand to accomplish the same thing — with each side aiming to change the same structure stuck forcefully in its way.

in all of these stories, it is the sancity of the dead that is tarnished to foster power. it seems to be the only to make waves large enough for things to be different. the side of evil often disobeys the rules of dying, with kenjaku and sukuna both function as revivals of an existence long gone.

the question about jjks ending is never really about who will die. that is inevitable as has been proven over and over. it is about who will bear the burden of the living?

and were they able to do it with honor? were they able to honor life and death? ultimately, isn’t that what yuuji has always set out to do?