Jujutsu Kaisen Modulo and Eighty Years
For about a month now, pretty much since Jujutsu Kaisen Modulo started, I’ve taken some time to mull over the choice of timeframe. Eighty years is a pretty specific period of time to space out the end of the main series from the start of this one. Having given it some thought, I think I can take a stab at what it means for Modulo’s story.
Namely, eighty years amounts to a pretty good average for a human lifespan. Most people hope to see a hundred years but expect to see eighty. Eighty years is about the time it takes for one generation to come of age, raise a second generation to come of age after them, then for their children to sire a third generation that's then going to be coming of age as that first of two generations before them is on the way out. It’s how long you can expect certain trees to take to reach maturity. A tree you plant in your lifetime may not reach its full height until after you die. When you plant a tree, you plant it knowing it may only provide fruit and shade to people who will come after you.
It’s just enough time for most of Jujutsu Kaisen’s cast to be dead. That’s a pretty harsh way to put it, isn’t it? But I think it was a conscious decision on GeGe’s part.
There have been lots of comparisons between Modulo and Boruto, and most of those comparisons are poorly informed or made in haste. But I think that something here warrants comparison.
Because when you look at Boruto, you notice this issue where the grown-up cast from Naruto feel disrespected on various different levels. If you look at it from a power scaler-adjacent perspective, the sense of stakes is off and there’s discrepancies between what they were capable of then and what they’re capable of now. When you look at character design, the new interpretations of how they look are either wholly derivative of Kishimoto’s designs or, when they do deviate from his artistic language, fall short of capturing what made his designs fresh and captivating. Looking at it from a more thematic perspective, they don’t really justify still being around for the roles they play in this story. They also have a tendency to overshadow the new generation rather than letting the new generation have the kind of prominence in what should be their story, the kind that their predecessors had in their own story.
GeGe Akutami is an author who’s very conscious of their place in Shonen Jump’s history. They were an avid reader of Jump titles like Bleach and Naruto in their youth. I can’t imagine that the thought of how to approach a “next generations” sequel, but better, never once crossed their mind.
So while I think Boruto’s mishandling of the new and old generations in its cast comes out to self-indulgent, half-baked writing on the part of Kishimoto and Co., I also think it says something interesting that’s relevant to Modulo. The old generation clinging to roles in a story that’s moving past them, casting a shadow on the new generation. Casting a curse on them, so to speak.
Yuka and Tsurugi are both motivated by and obsessed with the vision they have of their respective grandparents in their heads. Grandparents are easy to idealize. They’re the parents of your parents, and if your parents seem bigger than life to you as a kid, your grandparents might as well be gods. It’s easier to maintain an idealized vision of them if you don’t see them as often as your parents, which most of us don’t unless something’s gone wrong at home.
You live in your parents’ house, you experience them and what they do and say every day, and as time goes on, you start to see their flaws, too. The ways they see the world that just aren’t true, their moral failings, their weaknesses, the hopes and dreams they might have let die. Sometimes for your sake, but other times that’s just an excuse. Parents leave us a lot of clutter to sort through – physical clutter, emotional clutter, and philosophical clutter. We all have to sort through what they taught us to see what's useful and unlearn the things that hold us back. And resentment starts to form from that.
But when you only spend a weekend at most with your grandparents, you have less chances to see that ugly, imperfect humanity. You can just see grandpa for his fishing and his war stories, just eat grandma’s cooking – cooking she probably has more time to do than your mom does, since she’s retired and mom isn’t – and listen to her tell the story of how she met grandpa, of the way she stood up to her bullies at school, of how he once rescued a dog from a river. They’re all probably a little embellished, but a kid doesn’t need to know that.
Yet your grandparents raised your parents. They had a hand in how they turned out. It may have been with best intentions or due to carelessness, but everything you might hate about your parents was partly because of your grandparents. It’s why you should try to give your parents a little bit of grace; you didn’t choose how they raised you, and they didn’t choose how their parents raised them. Give grandma and grandpa some grace, too. Somebody raised them too, and probably could have done a better job for them.
I think that the core themes of Modulo are going to be perception, communication, and the limitations of both. I think they already are, I just think it’s going to take time to germinate. But the fact is that Yuka and Tsurugi have very idealized visions of Yuta and Maki. Yuka in particular seems to have a very skewed perception of Yuta, and it’s hard to tell how much of that is due to him trying to put his own mistakes behind him while leaving her misconceptions alone, the Gojo Clan doing some myth-building, or her just wanting him to be the perfect grandpa who dotes on her and can do no wrong. Enshrined in her memories, forever unblemished.
I’m certain it was despite his best intentions, but Yuta is casting a shadow over Yuka. A curse that’s led her to push herself too hard and put her into conflict with the person she should be closest to. That’s the thing about trying to raise a new generation: they’re their own people, and you don’t get to control what they do with what you teach them or how they perceive you. That’s how other people are in general. You can only control how you communicate, not how they understand what you say.
That’s part of why change is so hard to bring about. Consider how many difficulties arise when you try to talk about complicated, challenging things with the people around you. Now scale those difficulties up to a whole country of at least two or three generations – the grandparents, the parents, and the children coming of age in their adolescence – all trying to figure out what life should look like and what form the future needs to take. Usually you have five generations all inflecting off of each other, but usually one or two of them are too old or too young to participate in society. Then you begin considering how a whole country, a whole culture, fits into the context of all the different countries and cultures that now interact on a global scale.
But just three is enough of a challenge if you’re talking about getting people on the same page. They’ve all got different experiences, different values. Those values mean something very real, and can’t just be overwritten at the drop of a hat.
When you talk about society changing, you’re not talking about one big, noisy spectacle that’ll just make it all happen. It’s generational. The change you set into motion now will probably not get results until your grandchildren come of age. With the evolution of medicine and information technology, things may get better or worse. But that’s been the story of the human race so far up into the modern era: if you want to see change, you need to work your ass off knowing you might not live to see it come to completion.
It’s as old as Greek mythology. Ouranos, the Sky personified, was an abusive husband and father who held his children captive so they couldn’t overthrow him. Kronos violently emasculated his father and set himself and his siblings free, yet he went on to consume and imprison his own children when he learned he, too, would be overthrown. He rebelled against abuse, grew into the abuser, and his progeny rebelled in turn. You can argue Zeus made for an improvement, though if so, then he’s only a marginal improvement. He still rules with punishment and exploits where he so desires. The work remains unfinished.
We think about rebellion as shining fire and as swift gusts blown by the winds of history. Certainly, those play their part. But we need to think about rebellion like changes in the soil, too, as slow-moving water, and especially as a tree taking time to grow. There’s a lot that can happen in eighty years, but only for those patient enough to tend the seeds.
