In real time, it’s very rare for anime fans to witness so-called generational moments that’ll stand the test of time. In the past, one of those great moments was and forever will be Naruto‘s Rock Lee Chunin Exam fight, where even though fans didn’t have the internet, you could hear the world all but collectively gasp when the shonen character without powers in his ensemble dropped his leg weights and proceeded to put belt to ass on an adversary billed as hot shit. There’s just something about witnessing a character without powers in a world filled with the “gifted” running rings around the whole lot. It’s an underdog story. It’s wrestling. It’s concentratedly euphoric.
Jujutsu Kaisen is no stranger to its fair share of euphoric beatdowns. Mappa operates as if they’re mandated to deliver at least one meme-worthy ass-whooping per season. And for the most part, they’ve delivered on that front with Yuji Itadori and Kento Nanami’s double-team beatdown of Mahito in season one and Nanami’s hot-and-heavy hair-pulling brutalization in season two. Season three kicked off seemingly having already found its moment with the Culling Games’ shithead character Naoya Zenin taking a moment to fix his hair toward the camera while punching the hell out of Choso.
Despite the moment being tantamount to an RPG character spamming punches that deal -1 HP, Mappa’s Naoya sequence quickly became a viral meme on social media, with artists recreating the sequence with characters from other series like Steven Universe, Dragon Ball Z, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. The JJK trend became so famous that even artists from other anime, like Fate/Strange Fake, recreated it while promoting the fact that they were animators on a different show.
While the trend definitely delivers on the aura farming World Star moments anime fans clamor for, it’s not of the same ilk as Naruto‘s Rock Lee fight. That distinction goes to JJK‘s fourth Maki Zenin-centric episode, which not only put the trend to rest (literally), but also delivered arguably one of, if not JJK‘s, most emotionally cathartic fights ever. A fight deserving of being hung in the rafters alongside Rock Lee’s Chunin exam fight as one of the most satisfying episodic anime battles of all time.
Episode four, “Perfect Preparation”, primarily follows Maki, a jutsu sorcerer who, like Rock Lee, wasn’t blessed with magical powers. To make up for that in Jujutsu Kaisen‘s world, she utilizes cursed weapons to bridge that gap. And what with the Culling Games sorcery fight tournament looming over the cast of heroes’ horizon, Maki’s tasked with going to her clan’s compound to collect as many weapons as she can. Her family, however, are the worst kind of assholes who, while dealing with their own hierarchical politicking, have decided that Maki is better off dead to them.
Aside from Naoya (who is Maki’s cousin) having already talked hot shit about Maki—being both weirdly incestuous as well as blatantly sexist—the whole of her family up until this point in the show has treated her as a mark of shame for not having any powers. To further hammer this point home, Maki’s own father appears, towers over her bloodied twin sister, Mai, and has no qualms with leaving both siblings near death for cursed spirits to finish them off. Gone are the days of early JJK merriment. This cast was born to shojo and forced to shonen.
After an emotional moment between the sisters, Maki proceeds with the single-handed slaughtering of her clan. Not a new concept in shonen anime, granted, but Maki’s vengeance is one that she’s all but earned against a family that has made her and her sister’s lives a living hell. And what a helluva fight that was. The rest of the episode, which hews so emotionally close to the agony and imagery of Mappa’s work in the Chainsaw Man film, is a nonstop battle royale between Maki and her entire clan that stylishly references Kill Bill with its staging and in its black and white colors that erupt in a Kurosawa-esque blood splatter as Maki achieves divine retribution.
The episode contrasts everything we’ve ever been told about the Zenin family in JJK, with Maki almost immediately tearing them apart with ease. She even puts a satisfying end to her misogynistic cousin—now, whenever you search Naoya’s name, it’ll be him getting posterized by Maki instead of his memetically smarmy grin.
What makes the fight so satisfying to watch is that Maki’s whole journey has been toward becoming stronger by her own means. It’s led her to not want to be referred to by her last name, because she’s never felt that love and affection from her conservative-ass family, and that throughline has been maintained across both the anime proper as well as its prequel film, Jujutsu Kaisen 0. That hasn’t stopped the rest of the cast from putting respect on her name as the hardest worker and best fighter when it comes down to fisticuff fundamentals, but it becomes something else when we see Maki bask in the limelight of bringing down her family.
While the manga version of this scrape came with its share of issues on account of creator Gege Akutami being sick at the time, leading to this moment’s release having harsher early draft lines compared to the illustrative clarity the series is used to, it hasn’t stopped the fight from being the most cherished of the manga’s litany of battles. That isn’t to say that the season ahead of us won’t have any more hype-worthy fights—but in terms of battles with a killer story hook behind their punches, as far as we’re concerned, JJK peaked here with Maki, and we look forward to following her career as the character who puts fight into sorcery fights as the show progresses.
New episodes of Jujutsu Kaisen Culling Game Part 1 air every Thursday on Crunchyroll.
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