Jujutsu Kaisen – 33 – Thirteen Orphans

Not gonna lie, while it was fun to watch Gojou have a little squash match—literally squashing Hanami into a thin paste on the wall—it was also a little unnerving.

For much of the battle, Gojou is sporting a giddy smirk usually worn by villains when they’re doing villainous shit. He’s enjoying this a little too much. And he’s also operating under the assumption that his enemies are underestimating him.

But as was mentioned last week, the reason they’re even there fighting him is because Getou is properly estimating Gojou and his power. He discusses the length of time and the amount of space within which Jougo & Co. have to keep him confined. Jougo thinks it’s crazy to think they can do that.

But Getou has this all figured out. While Hanami is lost, Jougo and Choso are able to keep their distance until a train finally arrives, from which Mahito and roughly a thousand transfigured humans alight. The crowds of people are slaughtered wholesale; those who fought to get to the front of the door first are killed first.

Mahito then destroys Hanami’s confining roots to allow another mass of people to fall to the level below, and Mahito and Choso combine abilities to tear them to shreds. There’s a method to this massacre: to further back Gojou into a corner where he can no longer logically calculate “acceptable losses”.

Once Gojou reaches that state, he unleashes his Infinite Void, instinctively only using it for two tenths of a second. For those two tenths, each and every man and woman around him will be in the hospital for two months…but they won’t die. It only takes Gojou 299 seconds to eliminate all of the roughly 1,000 transfigured humans. It’s Gojou going full Neo.

When he’s done, he’s out of breath and looking pretty haggard, and that’s when Getou gets him, revealing the proverbial “Thirteen Orphans” (his hand in the Mahjong game): the Prison Doman. The conditions are met, and Getou is in deep doo-doo. There’s just one problem: while the man before Gojou certainly looks and sounds like Getou Suguru, Gojou can tell it’s not really him.

Sure enough, “Getou” removes the crown of his head to reveal a brain with teeth; Getou’s body is only a host for that brain, and the person it belongs to. So that’s something. Even so, the brain’s owner is able to use all of Getou’s abilities, which is why he was able to checkmate Gojou here.

While still with Mei Mei and Ui Ui, Yuuji hears from a little Mechamaru earpiece that Gojou has been sealed. And since Gojou is the strongest of the sorcerers, it likely falls to Yuuji and his impressive potential to defeat the strongest alliance of enemies he’s ever faced. We’ll see if he and all the others can really make up for the loss of Gojou.

Jujutsu Kaisen – 07 – Volcano Head

I’ll say this for Jougo, AKA “Volcano Head”: he’s a confident sonofabitch. Ambushing Gojou on a deserted roadin the night, he immediately engulfs him inflames, only for Gojou to emerge unscathed. Even when Jougo is sure he’s touching Gojou, he’s really only touching the “infinity” (mugen) between himself and Gojou. The closer Jougo’s hand goes into that infinity, the more that hand slows down. It’s like an invisible suit of impenetrable armor.

It’s extremely irritating to discover that not only is Gojou far stronger than Jougo imagined any human could possibly be, but Gojou has no problems whatsoever blatantly demonstrating the sheer chasm in power between them. Gojou is even able to stop by the school bunker and smuggle Yuuji out (while he’s in the middle of Lord of the Rings) so he can observe a high-level battle between a special-grade cursed spirit and the world’s strongest Jujustu sorcerer.

Jougo’s smoldering frustration is ably expressed by veteran seiyu Chiba Shigeru, as the spirit uses “Domain Expansion” to create an Innate Domain around himself, Gojou and Yuuji. Were Gojou not there, Yuuji would have probably died (again), but while the domain looks hella cool, it doesn’t do much against the sorcerer, who then easily nullifies it with his own domain, Infinite Void. He achieves this by removing his mask to reveal surpassingly piercing blue eyes.

While Jougo isn’t about to tell Gojou anything about who sent him, he’s in very real danger of being exorcised. Getou, who was watching from afar, leaves it up to the Groot-like Hanami to save Jougo, and he does so by conjuring a huge field of beautiful flowers, then grabbing Yuuji with a vine, forcing Gojou to rescue him while Jougo escapes.

Getou, Hanami, and Jougo all meet back up at what is apparently the cursed spirit boss’s beach hideout, and we meet their apparent boss, the stich-faced, odd-eyed Mahito. Jougo may be a hothead, but with cooler and more powerful heads among the baddies, Gojou and Yuuji shouldn’t rest easy. For his part, Gojou intends to personally spar with Yuuji in between movie viewings so he’s ready to dominate in the Kyoto Exchange Event.