Chapter 214: Cursed Womb Under Heaven, part 6—Sukuna Sukuna Sukuna Sukuna Sukuna Sukuna Sukuna Sukuna Sukuna Sukuna Daddy Sukuna Sukuna Sukuna
Blessed / Cursed JJK-Sunday! Pick your poison...
I hate (affectionate) Sukuna because... well... this whole Megumi thing is so weird. Like... what is going on with the hair?
And yet I am a massive Sukuna simp (questionable) because... well.. this whole conversation with Yuji...
Like Sir. Yes, I will dedicate my life’s work to spreading the gospel of Sukuna to all who will listen. Ura Ume can cook, I can be your Marketing person and do your social media if that’s what you’re into.
I LOVE a character twisted by his own humanity. Yeeeessss...
More, please!
There’s more of me “yeeeeeeeeeesssss”+ing and promoting Sukunaism under the cut.
yeeeeeeeeeeeesssssss.....
The King of Curses
I am perhaps projecting, but there’s something definitively very regal about Sukuna and the way he carries himself in an embodied state.
I also loved that there is also something very benevolent about the look in Sukuna’s face as he speaks with Yuji about the nature of suffering for weaker beings.
Almost like “oh you poor thing, you really thought you were just going to be handed your cake and get to eat it too, didn’t you?”
And I am VERY consciously choosing to use the word benevolent to describe Sukuna because... there is something inherently twisted and yet, extremely real, in the message that Sukuna embodies.
Almost like he’s doing Yuji a favor by enlightening him on the root cause of his suffering.
YES! yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes YES!
Am I like a crazy person for loving Sukuna so much?
And there’s something so fascinating here about how, despite dropping deep truths about the human condition, Sukuna is literally the epitome of all that is cursed, a sort of container for all that is inherently wrong about humanity--to the point that you can’t even think of him as human, but rather, as inhuman.
But... really... what does it mean to be a human, what does it mean to be a curse, and where do we draw the line?
Are curses truly the sole source of suffering as Spooks asks?
After all... are curses not the result of negative human emotion?
Are we, as humans, not responsible for their existence?
You see, I became a cursed spirit apologist the moment Yuta kissed a cockroach. This forced me to start questioning what is good and what is evil.
The marriage of Heaven and Hell
Now... I am not asking for Sukuna to not be thought of as evil.
I am asking for a wider, more profound interpretation of evil. One that is not colored by the Western, white-washed, Judeo-Christian idea of the figure of Satan as a red horned creature that is evil for the sake of evil and makes people do evil #things.
I am asking for you to leave your pre-conceptions of evil at the door...
What if perhaps we saw Satan as Lucifer, the harbinger of light who was thrown out of Heaven for challenging the status quo and daring to seek enlightenment through embodiment?
What if we saw evil as as a corruption and degeneration of all that is good and humane--a sort of rejection of one expression of the self in favor of the trappings of self-gratification and self-identification?
What if we asked how Sukuna’s degenerated and corrupted humanity is an embracing and transcendence of suffering as not just inherent to the human condition, but a precursor of psychological and psychospiritual growth and development?
What if evil was a choice made in favor of the self and that is why Satan was cast out of Heaven?
What if evil was just trying to re-affirm the sense of self, and that is why Sukuna has chosen ego as his path of enlightenment?
After all...
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
When Gege introduced Jacob’s Ladder in chapter 213...
... he introduced one hell pun intended of a rabbit hole. One that I am not quite ready to talk about in great detail because I am unsure on how the symbols will be explored, or let’s be real here, whether they will get explored at all.
But with this tiny panel, Gege basically introduced the “upper” extreme of a metaphorical experience of psychospiritual growth depicted in the shape of a ladder. At the lower end of said ladder is the experience of descent into hell that is depicted in stories like Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Now. The interesting bit about Jacob’s Ladder getting mentioned, is that Gege added a neat little detail that is easy to miss unless you know what you’re looking for:
That is: Urizen’s Architect’s compass.
Now, for context, the painting above is a painting by William Blake, who perhaps not so coincidentally, also has a painting titled Jacob’s Ladder.
The painting is, indeed, inspired by the Biblical depiction of Jacob’s dream found in Genesis 28:10-17.
Again, the rabbit hole runs deep.
What I’ll say about this for now is that Gege might be using these symbols to present Sukuna as a character that personifies a sense of self that is beyond logic and reason where...
Good = logic bound by reason, and
Evil = imagination free from reason.
I still haven’t made up my mind about it because Gege is being a bit inconsistent with symbols, so we’ll have to wait to confirm.
But in a nutshell, this feels like a murky exploration of the sense of self and where it stands in relation to the question of “good and evil” or as Blake calls it “the marriage of Heaven and Hell”.
So if Gege is using William Blake’s philosophy then... I can’t help but see Sukuna as a character who has become enlightened through becoming entangled in the trappings of ego. Which is a nice dichotomy to how enlightenment is thought to be about transcending and leaving behind ego attachments.
But not Sukuna.
Sukuna is about experiencing the highest of highs and the lowest of lows of the human experience.
Logic be damned.
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”.
In other words, Sukuna strikes me as being about willingly and consciously embracing the suffering that is inherent to the human condition, and growing in strength because of it.
After all, you cannot know pleasure without first having known pain, and you cannot know pain if you have not known pleasure. In Blake’s words, "without contraries is no progression.”
Quick detour here to expand on these panels above... Explaining the sense of self is not easy.
What I can say right now is that the sense of self is the result of the ego-self negotiating with reality as it presents to you compared to your expectations and hopes for your reality.
In the words of Westworld’s Robert Ford:
"...the thing that led... to... awakening [is] suffering. The pain that the world is not as you want it to be.”
Similarly, Westworld’s Man in Black tells us that
“When you are suffering, that’s when you are most real.”
Which is another way of saying that there is strength and transformation to be found in suffering and that turning away from suffering is what weak minded people would do according to the gospel of Sukuna.
Or basically, when life hands you the lemons, you make margaritas with them although I highly recommend you use limes instead of lemons and might I also recommend Mezcal instead of Tequila for a nice smokey twist on everybody’s favorite Mexican cocktail.
Suffering is an inherent aspect of the human condition after all. You either develop the mental fortitude to keep moving forward, or, in Sukuna’s view, you remain weak, defeated by your fate.
And what’s interesting here is that Yuji has a very infantile unwillingness to see suffering as an inherent aspect of human existence.
Or as Spooks reminds us all, it’s not just curses that cause suffering.
So to me, Sukuna’s philosophy is about overwhelming strength as a result of self-gratification. He is the kind of character who will put himself through hell for the sake of acquiring strength.
This is where Jacob’s Ladder becomes relevant, because in Blake’s philosophy, the Angels who are “good”, could only see ego attachment (which is a metaphor for hell) as suffering. As such, they could not comprehend why anyone would put themselves through hell for the sake of self development.
In other words, Sukuna is an exploration on hedonism and all that can be considered sinful if only because the ego’s attachment to pleasure is at the root of suffering.
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”.
A different execution of this trope is another one of my blorbos, Twelve, from Watanabe’s Terror in Resonance (Zankyou no Terror).
Twelve is the kind of character who wants to have certain experiences and will, at the expense of his better judgment and other people, force certain experiences to happen just because he wants to have them. In fact, he doesn’t stop to think about consequences, he just acts for the sake of experiencing.
Whether these experiences cause pain and suffering or joy and happiness, does not matter. The point is to have the experience because the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
For those of us who are crazy enough to be romantically inclined, it’s like the experience of falling in love while fearing rejection, but still choosing love.
Logic be damned.
But that’s just the thing, isn’t it? If you held back from the moments when you are invited to come alive every single time that you saw suffering in the horizon, would you cower from those experiences?
Or would you embrace them for the sake of self development?
Similarly, Sukuna who exists only for his own pleasure, is an example of how the ego is shaped and transformed through experience.
In Sukuna’s case, experience can come in the shape of fights and women and whatever will satiate the appetite of an ego hungry for embodied experience...
Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure and sensual self-indulgence.
But I want to think that Sukuna also understands that you cannot forsake suffering, especially if you are in the pursuit of the better things that life has to offer.
There isn’t one without the other after all.
If you want to be happy, you have to be willing to suffer for that happiness.
You can’t know what wealth is unless you have known poverty.
You can’t know great love unless you have known heartbreak.
"Without Contraries is no progression.”
To reject this principle of human existence is, in Sukuna’s gospel, to be weak, to be prey to those who will consume anything and everything that is standing in the way of their hungry, insatiable ego.
God I love Jujutsu Kaisen...
Splat
Well, that was two *splat* moments in one month and I have to admit they are both just as brutal.
Anyways. This was an interesting chapter from a translator’s pov because there were subtle messages that may or may not have gotten lost in translation.
So just a heads up I kind of stuck to the fan translation for the most part for that very same reason.
Yuji and Megumi vs. Sukuna
Ok but to wrap things up...
I love that Sukuna is always impressed by Megumi...
THAT’S MY BOY!!!!!!!! YEEEEEEEEEEEES!!!!
And I also love that Sukuna underestimates Yuji...
Yuji is by far one of my absolute favorite mcs in Shonen. He embodies the characteristics of your typical Shonen mc and then re-defines them in a way that is very uniquely Yuji.
Anyways, sigh of relief about Megumi. I can stop holding my breath FOR THE TIME BEING!!!!
It’s not that I don’t trust that Megumi has what it takes, the one I don’t trust is the cursed cat.
Can’t wait to see these two beautiful boys fight together.
Happy Jujutsu Kaisen Sunday and thank you for joining me again this week in this hell pun intended of a roller coaster.
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