Movies & TV

It's overcomplicated and doesn't make sense with how the power is depicted. It's better to just think of Limitless as a forcefield, red and blue as repulsive and attractive force powers, and purple as basically just being a "fuck you" button.

Someone wrote up a very nice explanation of how JJK works, and I have it saved in a note somewhere, and I've read it a couple times. I kinda understand it, but I still feel like it's overly confusing.

RCT is sort of a dumb name, though I think the reason it's called that is because the healing is just an application of it and there are other applications (most important for Gojo's case). However, that part is so under-developed that it really fails to justify the term.

It's totally masturbatory, but I think the way to look at it if you want to enjoy it is that the complex powers present a game, and the way that the characters play that game is fundamentally an expression of their character. Not in terms of what powers they have (sometimes the case, sometimes not) but how they approach situations.

It probably seems stupid, but one of my favorite moments in JJK fights is in the manga, where there's a character whose power makes him functionally invincible for a period of time (you'll hate that character, btw), so his opponent, a wildly ambitious freak who single-mindedly wants to defeat Sukuna [not present] for the sake of proving that he's the best and not any of the valid moral reasons for fighting Sukuna, correctly reasons that the best thing to do against the temporarily-immortal opponent is defend until the window of time when the effect ends and then go on the offensive. He completes the thought with "but that's how small fry think" and immediately goes in to kill someone that both he and the narrator said was effectively immortal before the window expires instead of waiting.

Probably a better example though is Hidden Inventory, where Toji sub-contracts a bounty on a timed basis to force Gojo to constantly keep his guard up using Limitless until he exhausts himself so that Toji himself can ambush Gojo the moment he lets his guard down after the timer expires. It expresses Toji's ruthless pragmatism and inclination to reach for any available resource to compensate for his Restriction, as well as the seriousness with which he takes Gojo due to their past encounter, and exploits Gojo's arrogant sledgehammer-like thought process that they way to solve any given problem is in the most head-on manner of exercising his ridiculous personal power like it's a cheat code that others are helpless to.

Right, I think the point of JJK is more "wouldn't it be cool if" and then some weird power system with the people shoehorned in to fit, as opposed to My Hero Academia which, despite having like 600 characters (okay maybe not that many but there are like 30 students in each of the two classes, a bunch of teachers, a ton of villains, the kids (I mean the little kids like Eri, Kota, Mahoro and such), the parents, the government officials... and most of these have Quirks (super powers), but you can remember what most of them are because they fit the personalities and they all just mesh together so much better. Whereas JJK has like a dozen characters tops and only a handful actually matter at any time (Gojo, Itadori and his demon/curse lord Sakuna, the girl with the glasses and the green hair, the guy with the glasses and the black hair, that one bad guy) and I'm still overwhelmed.

It's not that I like MHA better. I do — but because I understand it better. I watch MHA in Japanese and I have no issues. I have to watch JJK in English because following along with what does what is so much work. (My favorite battle anime isn't really one, and it's more seinen than shonen, and that would be Bungo Stray Dogs. My favorite shonen anime might be Sword Art Online, so I know that's gonna get my opinions tossed by a lot of anime fans. Note that I'm not defending the trash, just admitting to liking the trash. (And yes, I've also seen .hack//SIGN so maybe that makes it worse and I should stop digging?))

I think Infinity Castle as a pastiche of that one part of the Chimera Ant arc is okay at first but it seriously loses steam and by the time they get to the second-to-last final boss it just fucking sucks in terms of the fights even if the story still has good elements (and then Muzan is just flat bad by the end). I haven't seen the movie yet but I think it only covers like half of Infinity Castle or less, and it's probably better animated because the anime is honestly way better-looking than the manga relative to their respective mediums. Regardless, a problem I have with the whole series is that it's the epitome of the Stan Lee quote that the character who wins the fight is simply the one the author wants to win, rather than there being much of a "reason" within the world itself, while I'm one of those sorry battle manga snobs who is mainly interested in the reasoning and how it relates to the characters.

I don't like TG but it's definitely more horror than most shounen, at least pretty far into it. It's really probably the most horror among battle shounen that have ever gotten any prominence (besides Chainsaw Man, anyway), so you might want to check it out again, though the sequel/spinoff stuff is much worse imo. That mangaka went on to make Choujin X, which I personally think is a lot more interesting but is much less horror (though not none, there have been panels where I felt like I was looking at Chainsaw Man, funnily enough).