Jujutsu Kaisen’s Subversion of Trope Gender Roles

3 min readApr 7, 2021

Anime is to my understanding the most popular it’s ever been in America. The Japanese cartoons come in many shapes and forms, but we commonly identify a few pop cultural major players like Dragon Ball, Naruto, and My Hero Academia. Shonen anime particularly are action and adventure stories that cater to teenagers and young adults, they’re typically centered around male heroes that move the story forward. Jujutsu Kaisen is an anime that gained popularity recently, and although it’s still a male-driven story JuJutsu is flipping the script on what it means to be a female protagonist in a shonen story.

Without boring any non-anime fans with a full synopsis of the show, Jujutsu Kaisen follows three high school students Yuji Itadori, Megumi Fushiguro, and Nobara Kugisaki, who we’ll be talking about throughout this post. The trifecta of super-powered students go on missions taking out supernatural monsters known as Curses. In popular shonen, the main female characters in the show tend to play a psuedo-protagonist role. Although paired with men who’re powerful in status and ability, the female characters tend to be very weak and helpless through the series, and at some point, if gaining any type of supernatural ability at all, it’d likely be healing. These genre tropes although foreign to non-anime fans make up a very established set of gender identities and expectations for most any shonen anime.

Jujustsu completely casts these expectations to the side with the character design of Nobara Kugisaki. Kugisaki is confident, hot-tempered, hilarious, and just as strong or at least nearly as strong as her squadmates. In scenarios where similar characters in other shows would be useless or powerless, in example Sakura from Naruto who’s notoriously helpless throughout the show’s ten-year run, the writers of Jujutsu like Kugisaki steal the show slaying monsters with ease. An additional trope that comes with female anime characters is for them to be strong, they must be over-sexualized. Often having hilariously exaggerated features and endless innuendo-type references running in moments of high combat or action, Jujutsu opts out of this unrealistic Shonen classic creating female characters that are comfortable in their own skin and paint a realistic picture for young women. JuJutsu even goes as far as making the climax of their season 1 finale about Kugisaki and Itadori taking out an extremely powerful team of Curses, and they both do it with equal challenge and success.

Not creating radical leaps and bounds between male and female protagonists sets a realistic standard for young women watching the show. In an era where there is a hard emphasis on doing away with traditional gender roles and being more open-minded to what he put in front of impressionable youth socially and politically, Jujustsu Kaisen paves an admirable path that isn’t riddled in obvious virtue signaling and politically correct over-emphasis but simply making it plausible that anyone from any walk of life could profoundly impact their own story with no regard for what society traditionally expects.