#I finally accept Nanami's death and you take Higuruma from me

[1singulargrape]

I'm going to throw up. My favorite jjk characters, and it's list I decided on and locked months ago, were, in no particular order,

Nanami

Choso

Higuruma

AND NOW YOU'RE TELLING ME. YOU'RE TELLING ME. YOU ARE- *heavy sobs interjected with maniacal laughter*

[kingofanemptyworld]

I saw a post like a week back comparing Nanami’s final words to Itadori with Nobara’s — as in, Nanami cursing Itadori (in the same way he considers his grandpa’s last request a curse) vs. Nobara trying to ease some of Itadori’s burden.

Nanami: “You’ve got it from here.”

A more gentle curse than his grandpa’s, maybe, which is more like a demand that Itadori help who can and save who he can by virtue of being “strong enough” to do it. But a curse all the same. Placing yet more unreasonable expectations on a child who already bears too much on his own shoulders.

Nobara: “It wasn’t so bad!”

Plainly telling Itadori that she doesn’t regret becoming a sorcerer and that her death shouldn’t weigh on him. Her life wasn’t bad, so there’s no reason to lay another curse on him. Whether or not she really means it is sort of irrelevant — on some level she’s saying this for Itadori, because she knows him and she knows exactly how much of the blame he’ll take on himself. It’s also for herself, I think, in that she doesn’t want to have regrets. She didn’t reunite with her friend but she came to Tokyo, she got stronger, she proved over and over again that a little bit of vanity and power can go hand in hand and there’s nothing wrong it. She made friends she loves dearly, people she gladly put aside chairs for. Nobara knew the risks and she’s accepting the consequences.

Which isn’t to say that Nanami isn’t doing those things, that he didn’t know the risk. He clearly hates that he’s passing the burden onto Itadori. But he still says it. He still puts in his faith in Itadori to finish the fight and continue on.

There’s a similar trend of the adults doing this, too, especially with Higuruma in one of the latest chapters.

He may not be verbally telling Itadori that it’s his job now to take down Sukuna. But the “I’ve done what I can” combined with that open-palm gesture towards Itadori and the flashback we get of him saying he’ll play his role and die in the fight… it’s another curse, however you look at it. Passing the baton to Itadori because he can’t do it himself, as much as he would like to.

I would argue the kids are more liable to try and lighten the load for Itadori, but then, Fushiguro gets Itadori to go along with the culling games plan by asking him to “start by saving me [Fushiguro]”. Because he knows that’s what will motivate Itadori and likely prevent him from going off on his own. It’s fair, and I don’t even think he’s wrong to say it like that, but it’s still sort of digging hooks into Itadori that absolutely dictate his actions going forward.

So Nobara is actually an outlier in this respect, which is fascinating. Especially because her moral views are so different from Itadori’s and even Fushiguro’s. But that’s probably precisely why she says what she does to him. Nobara values the lives of her loved ones more than anything else. She’s willing to play hero when she has to but it’s not her natural instinct and she immediately sees the negatives to a situation like that (ex. When she tries playing along with the cursed spirit in her intro to save the child and realizes they’re both probably going to die there). You might say it’s selfishness, and yeah, to a degree it definitely is, but then Nobara — maybe selfishly, maybe not — wants to prevent Itadori from being hurt from her death more than he has to be. She doesn’t want to be a burden, her final words to be a curse.

It makes me wonder if he talked about his grandpa and what it meant for him to be told, in his last moments, that he’s responsible for saving and helping as many people as he can. That’s who he has to be, for his grandpa’s sake. Did that influence Nobara’s choice here? Or was this just based on what she’s seen of him combined with who she is as a person?