I received a few asks about Sukuna's comments on Yuji and decided to make a post about it. To begin with one thing I have noticed about Sukuna is that despite being the embodiment of arrogance and selfishness he's sometimes gracious and even praises the opponents he's fighting.
The complexity of Sukuna is that he can rip the NanaMimiko twins into pieces for daring to ask too big a favor of him for only one finger, but he can also a few chapters later take time to praise Jogo before he dies. He can praise Gojo with touching words even when Gojo in his afterlife segment believes he failed tor each Sukuna. He can also slaughter thousand of people just to get Yuji's goat. He's capable of being somewhat honorable if you earn his respect, and yet there's nobody he respects less than Yuji.
In fact, the way he treats Jogo is a contrast to Gojo, Gojo just mocks him openly in his defeat. Sukuna gives Jogo advice that he should have fought for himself instead of teaming up with others, and then praises his efforts.
He slaughters both Hajime and Higuruma, but in their dying moments he also seems to grant them what they wanted. Hajime wanted an answer on whether or not it was possible for the strong to love other people, and Higuruma wanted to die fighting. Gojo was lonely at the top as the strongest and he lost all identity, Sukuna cuts him down and he dies as a human being and Sukuna praises him saying he'll remember his name forever.
Sukuna sees all humans as insects, but he seems to divide them into the ones that are tasty enough to eat, and the ones he wants to squash. If you're worthy in his eyes, he'll even entertain you and play with you for a little bit. That's not saying much, but Sukuna is known as the worst curse in existence. There are small moments though where he seems to have a sense of honor, at least to opponents who earn his respect or catch his interest.
All of this makes the way he treats Yuji stand out even more.
Sukuna says that basically all of humanity is his toy box and he can have endless fun playing with them until he dies, and yet Yuji is the one toy that Sukuna doesn't want to play with.
It's not because Yuji is weak, because Yuji has been shown to steadily grow in strength over the series. Yuji doesn't have the mental handicaps cutting off his true potential like Megumi does either, Gojo says right away that Yuji's crazy, that he swings for the fences, that he's obsessed with getting stronger. Yuji may not be on someone like Yuta's level, but he fights side by side with Maki perfectly in sync.
Yuji is even someone who will walk face first into Sukuna's cleave and then keep walking.
It's not because he's weak, it's not because he lacks potential or handicaps himself like Megumi, so why is Yuji the one opponent that Sukuna just cannot stand?
Much like Mahito who also sought to destroy Yuji, and felt like he couldn't be reborn or become himself until Yuji was out of the way it's most likely because they are ideological opposites. Down to the roles they play in their world, Yuji is someone who has completely repressed his own identity in order to become a true sorcerer, a cog in the machine, one among many fighting for a supposed greater good. Whereas, Sukuna alongside Mahito were what Yuji identified as "true curses". Mahito said as much in his monologue where he attempted to break Yuji, that he is a curse, and Yuji is a sorcerer. The point of curses is to kill humans, the point of sorcerers is to kill curses they don't need any deeper reason to fight and it's not a fight between heroes and villains it a cycle. Exorcise, consume. Exorcise consume. Curses are born, Sorcerers kill curses it goes on and on.
Looking at it that way, Mahito is Yuji and Yuji is Mahito. They're both cogs in the same endless cycle of curses vs humans. Yuji doesn't keep track of how many curses he's killed, and Mahito doesn't keep track of how many people he's killed.
Yuji is suppressing himself to become a sorcerer. Sorcerers are cogs and cogs have a function. He wants to carry the torch that Nanami gave him, because Nanami is basically the most ethical and model version of a sorcerer, and Yuji's only imagined role in things is to keep fighting until he dies and then ideally passes the torch to someone else. Sukuna was a strong sorcerer from 1,000 years ago who died and became a curse to linger on in this world. Yuji was a normal kid (or a science experiment from Kenjaku) who decided to eat Sukuna's finger and then become a sorcerer and die for a reason greater than himself.
Sukuna represents the ideology of curses, while Yuji represents the total collective ideology of sorcerers from the modern age.
Sukuna will ask his opponents their ideology, he'll even sometimes give advice and share his point of view. He questioned Jogo's beliefs on whether curses were the true humans. he shared with Hajime his thoughts on love to give him an answer to his question. However, he doesn't want even want to engage with Yuji, he just wants Yuji out of his sight.
He wants to invalidate and disprove Yuji's beliefs because they represent the opposite of him and everything he stands for, but he also knows he can't.
Sukuna does explain in this chapter that part of the reason he hates Yuji is that he's been forced to share a body with him for so long and was forced to endure his thoughts long enough to know that Yuji actually means what he says his selflessness is the real thing.
You could also argue that Yuji is a literal cage that Kenjaku constructed to contain Sukuna. Sukuna's entire character is built around the fact that he has so much strength he has the absolute freedom to do whatever he wants, and in a thousand years the only thing that's hindered his freedom is Yuji.
I think it goes a step beyond that though, one is selfishness incarnate, who is obsessed with freedom to Eren Jaeger extents and the other is selflessness incarnate, who deliberately chains himself to roles. Yuji is willing to give up his free will to be a cog in the machine, because cogs have a function, they have a role and meaning.
That's the extreme of selflessness though, you give up your very sense of self. Yuji builds his sense of self over the roles that others assign him, not anything he does himself. His function, his purpose, is given to him by others he doesn't define it for himself. Sukuna even mocks him for it in the latest chapter.
Yuji needs other people to give him meaning. Sukuna on the other hands rejects the notion of love because he's never needed and will never need anyone.
Sukuna is all about his overwhelming sense of self, whereas Yuji lacks a sense of self entirely. By Sukuna's logic where strength comes from asserting yourself and burning everything around you, Yuji is weak, Yuji should have been crushed like a bug by now, but Sukuna hasn't crushed him yet.
Sukuna is the ultimate ideal of strength in the story. The only way to be strong is to get rid of your attachments and become a human calamity like him. Yuji's selflessness on the other hand is something that he's continually punished for. Yuji even thinks of himself as weak he says as much to Higuruma, people died, Yuji was unable to stop Sukuna because he was weak.
Yet Sukuna cannot get rid of Yuji, which challenges Sukuna's black and white ideals that all that matters is strength and weakness and the strong always triumph over the weak and devour them.
To change the subject for a moment let's talk about Gege's inspirations. Can you guess who Gege's favorite Fate Character is? I bet you can't guess.
While Gilgamesh is the unequivocally strongest hero in the Fate franchise, there is one character who is the natural enemy and the perfect counter to Gilgamesh. That is Shirou Emiya, who actually defeats Gilgamesh in combat in one of the three routes, something both gilgamesh stans and Gilgamesh himself hates Shirou for.
Gee, I wonder what the inspiration is.
However, there's a particular reason why Shirou and Gilgamesh are opposites besides the fact that they have relatively the same ability, Shirou can copy swords and Gilgamesh has every weapon in existence in his armory.
Gilgamesh is the first and greatest of heroes who defined what it is to be a hero and the heroic legend. Shirou Emiya is a fake hero. That's even how Gilgamesh refers to him, "Faker." Shirou has completely destroyed his own sense of self in order to be of use to others, because he thinks he is not allowed to exist unless he is saving others in some way. This is a pretty brief summary of Shirou's character, but because of survivor's guilt Shirou forgot his past, and identity and thinks it's unfair he got saved while others didn't. At the same time, Shirou saw the happiness on the face of the man who admired him and then became obsessed with the idea of saving others. Shirou can only experience happiness when he saves someone, and feels pretty much nothing otherwise. Not only does he save people for entirely selfish reasons, because of his survivor's guilt and to give him a reason to exist, but it's also not his own dream of being a hero. He stole someone else's dream, that of his father Kiritsugu who wanted to be a hero and who saved him and looked happy saving him.
I read in an analysis a long time ago, too long for me to remember who's it was that Gilgamesh will respect those that have a dream. When he fights Iskander in Fate Zero, while he completely slaughters him he also gives him his props in his last moments and honors him by killing Iskander with his full strength, because he respected Alexander the Great's dream of conquering Europe from ocean to ocean.
Which is why he cannot tolerate someone like Shirou, who has no dream of his own, no reason for fighting, only saving others for the sake of saving them and asking nothing in return.
Shirou wants to repress himself entirely and become an ideal, the same way Yuji does, it's just Shirou wants to become the ideal superhero and Yuji wants to become the ideal sorcerer.
There's another video I want to reference to illustrate how little sense of self Yuji has, and how conversely reliant on others he is for that sense of self. The video is [here] I reccomend the whole thing but this quote summarizes it pretty perfectly.
Yuji is the main character of the story, but the series own villain, and even a vast majority of the fandom constantly insists that he is not the main character, because he is so lacking in a sense of self. That's not a knock against Yuji, that's the point of his character. Shirou Emiya is one of my favorite characters of all time, they're similiar it's just Shirou goes to greater lengths to show how hollowed out he is as a person, how deeply unhappy and even mentally ill he is to live for the sake of others the way that he does.
Yuji wants to crush his own sense of identiy and become an ideal like Shirou, that ideal being the ideal sorcerer. Whereas Sukuna is defined by his overwhelming sense of self and his lack of ideals.
It only makes sense that they'd be at odds with one another, but Sukuna takes things a step farther he cannot abide by Yuji's existence because he's against the idea of ideals themselves.
Sukuna wants to believe that he is right to reject idealism and love, that he is not missing out on anything as long as he has himself and is strong. So far in life he's been able to poke holes in the ideals of anyone who challenges him, but he's spent so long in Yuji's brain he knows that Yuji's ideals are not false.
Sukuna doesn't just want to crush Yuji's hopes he wants to prove himself right. This is probably the first time in a thousand years he's even paused to question himself or think over his own beliefs because he's been so unchallenged and right.
Yet, Sukuna can't be right, by the very nature of the manga.
Jujutsu Kaisen isn't about one person being right, it's about balance. The worst person you know in Jujutsu Kaisen can have a point. Kenjaku does everything for his own amusement, but both he and Tsukumo Yuki agree that things in the modern Jujutsu World can't stay the way they are. Geto is a genocidal maniac but he's right that it's unfair for Sorcerers, especially children to sacrifice themselves pointlessly over and over again and if Geto hadn't been a close friend of Gojo's and went off the deep end Gojo likely would have never seen the flaws present in his own society.
Jujutsu Kaisen isn't a story about binary opposites, but one of yin and yang, of complementary ideals. Even a character like Sukuna can't last forever with his binary thinking, and Yuji existing and disagreeing with him is clearly having an effect on him. Sukuna's been so thoroughly challenged by his inability to crush Yuji outright that he's changed his goals. A thousand years ago Sukuna laid waste to sorcerers yes, but he was fine just being worshipped and bribed and getting into fights in the country side. He didn't destroy the world or anything.
His frustration with Yuji has gotten him to the point that he's willing to go full omnicidal maniac in order to challenge Yuji's ideals. That is how out of balance Sukuna is currently.
The manga won't land on the side of Sukuna being right, it will land on the side of balance, which is exactly why Yuji needs to challenge Sukuna as his antithesis.
The true answer however, will probably not lie in Sukuna's utter selfishness, or Yuji's selflessness, but rather somewhere in between.
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