Jujutsu Kaisen Episode 17 features a time-honored staple of shonen anime: the mid-fight debate. Set during the Kyoto School Friendship Arc, the characters are Momo Nishimiya and Nobara Kugisaki; while the initial subject of their debate was Mei Zenin, the argument quickly derailed into a larger debate about gender. Momo argued that the demands on female jujutsu sorcerers contradict themselves, and Mei's resultant mistrustful and combative worldview reflected the toll of living this contradiction. This was not an original argument, yet its delivery suggests it's meant to resonate beyond well beyond the anime's dimensions.
Jujutsu Kaisen is nowhere near the first shonen to address these real-world issues, but the series confronts this paradox of gendered protagonism in an interesting way. Nobara doesn't try to refute Momo's arguments but instead rejected the premise altogether. She declared instead that the breadth of her own self-love, in whatever guises or postures, makes others' expectations of her simply irrelevant. It's a powerful moment in the series, but one which followed directly from the self-awareness that undergirds its tone and themes.
"I'm the Girl"
The genesis of this moment tracks back to Episode 3, wherein Yuji and Megumi Nobara declared, “You should be honored, boys. I’m your group’s girl.” This is a funny moment, but like other moments of seeming lightness in Jujutsu Kaisen, hints at a great deal. Specifically, while on one hand, this is a statement of Nobara's lovable narcissism, her self-awareness of the shonen trope means she's already identifying and anticipating the scripts in which she might be seen.
This isn't the first time Jujutsu Kaisen has referenced anime or manga. Earlier in the series, Yuji cited manga in his motivation to be jujutsu sorcerer and later bemoaned being unable to "pull off a Kamehameha or a Rasengan" to Gojo. This kind of self-awareness has ample significance for Yuji's own character development, but the distinction between his and Nobara's moment of self-awareness is critical. Yuji's regarded what he can and can't do, while Nobara's concerns are about the generic functions her gender prescribes while ironically hinting at how she will ultimately flout these expectations. As her battle with Momo in Episode 17 illustrated, Jujutsu Kaisen uses its self-aware mood to illuminate, and break this paradox of female protagonism.
The Curse of Gendered Protagonism
Momo and Nobara then are less at different sides of an argument, but stages of a process. Momo was immediately frustrated by the unfairness of the propositions, having seen the lengths Mei was driven trying to fulfill them. Conversely, Nobara was no longer trying to reconcile these conflicting external demands. Instead, by declaring that she loved herself in whatever mode, she's placing herself outside of the trap of toxic self-objectification which limits other female characters. Nobara's frustration with Momo is that given the opportunity, Momo has obligingly accepted to play this losing game of self-objectification instead of refusing out of self-love.
Again, while questions of representation are not far from anime, the way Jujutsu Kaisen grounds these issues in self-aware makes these questions more poignant, and its own characters more relatable. As Nobara and Momo show, its characters not only do their own thinking in ways relevant to their own histories and worldviews but go as far in their self-awareness to reject debate. This emphasis on self-awareness, although humorous, nevertheless has important implications for the unique setting and premises of Jujutsu Kaisen. Specifically, the concept of Cursed Energy in Jujutsu Kaisen, takes its form and potency in part from how its users "see" themselves in the world, adding and subtracting powers accordingly. This means that, even beyond the bouts of the Kyoto Goodwill Event Arc and into the anime's second season, the self-aware, neurotic mood will have important consequences going forward. In the meantime, however, as Nobara Kugisaki demonstrates, the self-aware tone of Jujutsu Kaisen enables a special mode in which Discourse can bubble up organically, and be handled authentically - - i.e. with self-love and a squeaky hammer.
