The JJK Ending, One Year Later: Was It Really That Bad?

I remember exactly where I was when I read the final chapter of Jujutsu Kaisen. It was a Sunday in September 2024, mid-afternoon, and I’d been reading the series weekly since 2019. I closed the tab and just sort of sat there for a minute. Then I went on Twitter (which was X by then, technically, but no one was calling it that) and saw the bloodbath unfolding in real time. People I’d followed for years calling Akutami a fraud. Other people defending the ending as misunderstood genius. Within forty-eight hours the discourse had calcified into trenches.

I was, for the record, Team Disappointed. Not livid. Disappointed. There’s a difference, and over the last year and a half I’ve thought about that difference a lot.

What I went back and reread

A couple of weeks ago I did the thing I had been avoiding. I reread the Sukuna fight from chapter 220-ish through the end. Not skimming — actually reading. I wanted to know if my September 2024 reaction would hold up, or if I’d been swept up in the discourse without sitting with the actual pages.

Here’s what I found, and it surprised me.

The Sukuna fight, as drawn, is still messy. That part of my reaction held. Akutami’s tendency in the back half of the series to skip the visual setup of a technique and then explain it in a panel of text is more pronounced here than anywhere else in the manga. There are sequences where you genuinely cannot tell who is doing what to whom without the dialogue scaffolding. That’s a real problem. It’s not me imagining a problem because I wanted to be mad.

But — and this is the part that surprised me — the pacing, which a lot of people called rushed, actually reads better in one sitting than it did week to week. The time skip. The bittersweet character resolutions. Yuji ending up where he ends up. Read in 90 minutes, those choices have a shape. Read week by week in 2024 with no context for where it was going, they felt arbitrary. I think a lot of the September 2024 anger was a function of how we read Shonen Jump now — chapter by chapter, in real time, with the entire internet screaming next to you.

What I still hold against the ending

Let me say what I still think doesn’t work, because I don’t want this to be a “actually it’s great” piece. It’s not great. It’s complicated.

Megumi’s arc gets the worst of it. There’s a version of the ending where his possession is resolved in a way that gives him agency for his own story, and we just don’t get that version. He spends the climactic arc as a vessel and then comes back as a person who has lost. That’s a valid choice. But the page count given to his interiority during that period is, in my read, just too thin. He deserved more space than he got.

The Culling Game sorcerers — Hakari, Kashimo, Higuruma — were introduced with enough setup that they should have mattered more in the final fight. They got cameos. Hakari got the most useful thing to do and even his contribution feels like it ends before it should.

And Akutami’s well-documented exhaustion, which they have spoken about in interviews, shows in the linework of the last twenty chapters. The art quality drops in a way I don’t think you can fully separate from the structural decisions. If you’re drawing on fumes you make different choices than if you’re drawing fresh, and we got the fumes version of the ending.

The reassessment I’ve watched happen

What’s been interesting in 2025-2026 is that the discourse has actually… softened? Slightly. The most online reactions of September 2024 have aged the worst. The “Akutami doesn’t care about his own series” takes look silly in retrospect — he clearly cared, he was just running on empty. The “the entire series is retroactively bad” takes look even sillier. The Shibuya Incident arc, animated in late 2023, is still one of the best things shonen has produced in a decade and the ending does not retroactively remove that.

A year later, the takes I respect most are the ones that say: this is a flawed ending to a great series, the flaws are real, and it’s OK to hold both of those things at once. That’s where I’ve landed. I think the Sukuna fight is genuinely the weakest writing in the manga. I think the time skip resolution is more graceful than the discourse gave it credit for. I think Akutami needed to finish more than they needed to land it, and I respect that decision even when I wish it had gone differently.

The anime adaptation is going to retell this. Season 3 is in production at MAPPA as of 2026, and director Park Seong-hoo’s team will have the benefit of hindsight. They can clarify the visual storytelling of the Sukuna fight. They can give Megumi the silent panels he needed. The ending we got might not be the ending we end up remembering.

That’s a strange feeling — knowing the canonical text is what it is, but that the cultural memory of it hasn’t been written yet. A year removed, what I feel is not anger. It’s something closer to patience.