Why Is Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 A Prequel & Is It Really Necessary?
As far as its chronology goes, "Jujutsu Kaisen" has been a little bit tough to parse out thus far. While the series began by following Yuji Itadori (Junya Enoki/Adam McArthur) as he enrolled in Jujutsu High, a school for sorcerers, subsequent arcs have drawn the series further into the past and away from the main story that fans followed for all of Season 1.
The prequel film, "Jujutsu Kaisen 0," took the timeline back to follow the origin story of Yuta Okkotsu (Megumi Ogata/Kayleigh McKee), while the Hidden Inventory/Premature Death arc has taken things back even further to when Suguro Geto (Takahiro Sakurai/Lex Lang) and Satoru Gojo (Yuichi Nakamura/Kaiji Tang) were only students themselves. However, what many fans might be asking is ... why?
Well, the central reason for the flashbacks and prequels that have followed Season 1 of "Jujutsu Kaisen" seem to be focused on charting how Geto eventually becomes the main villain in the series and how he and Gojo go from close friends to the most bitter of enemies prior to the mainline story of Yuji and friends. Though the deviation might appear to be merely an excuse to focus more on fan-favorite Gojo, the truth is that in terms of how the story unfolds in the manga, these plot details are actually key to the upcoming arc.
Geto and Gojo are the focus of the first arc in Season 2
As eagle-eyed fans may have already noticed, Suguro Geto is actually among the cabal of curses and cursed spirits that have been the main antagonists of "Jujutsu Kaisen" thus far. What makes this especially puzzling is that in "Jujutsu Kaisen 0," the character was killed off by his former friend, Satoru Gojo. While characters have come back from their suspected deaths before in "Jujutsu Kaisen," the return of Geto and the subsequent prequel arc that focuses on how he eventually goes bad appears to put an extra emphasis on his and Gojo's origins, suggesting that there is a pretty key reason for the exploration.
This is likely because, as Season 1 of "Jujutsu Kaisen" suggests, he is the leader of the cursed spirits seeking to upend society and kill off the remaining Jujutsu sorcerers. Still, this again begs the question of how he survived, being that he now bears a series of scars similar to his cohort, the cursed spirit, Mahito (Nobunaga Shimazaki/Lucien Dodge).
These are questions that will likely be explored in the next section of "Jujutsu Kaisen" Season 2, the Shibuya Incident arc, which will bring the story back to the present and help to explore why these flashbacks are so relevant to the central plot of the popular anime series. Unfortunately, fans will have to settle in for a brief midseason break before they can see how the rest of Season 2 shakes out.