When people reflect on the history of Weekly Shonen Jump in the coming decades, the fact that My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen both ended in the same year won’t go unnoticed. Just from a business standpoint, the magazine lost two of its biggest sellers and most successful multimedia properties in one fell swoop, but the loss runs deeper than that. In many ways, these two series represent the last in a generation of long-running battle manga that may no longer continue to dominate in a new era of digital publication, webtoon popularity, and viral marketing.
Moreover, the fact that My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen both ended mere months apart naturally invites several points of comparison. How did things come to a conclusion at the end of such a long run? What kind of messages, if any, did these stories leave behind? And will we ever see these two authors again? Answering these questions will form a valuable part in understanding their legacy, as well as how their absence will affect the industry as a whole.
This article contains full spoilers for the entirety of My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen.
Problems of Pacing
Ending a series is no easy task. While it’s true that a bad story can’t be saved by a good ending, a good story rarely has a bad ending. The pressure to deliver a satisfying conclusion is then compounded when it comes to serialized media: the need to put out regular slices of the narrative doesn’t allow an author as much time as other mediums to consider how best to bring plot elements together or in what way, sometimes leading to inconsistent pacing and poorly conceived ideas.
All of this is to say that the tasks facing Kohei Hirokoshi and Gege Akutami in ending My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen were enormous. No one should have the hubris to say that they could have done better considering the circumstances, but this doesn’t excuse the fact that both series suffered from serious problems of pacing, leaving fans frustrated as each story neared its conclusion. Whether or not these will affect the series’ legacies, however, comes down to a question of hindsight.
For My Hero Academia, the journey towards the ending was severely compounded by problems with Kohei Horikoshi’s health. Back in September 2021, Horikoshi took a one week break to recover from an unknown illness, but this was just the start of a series of short hiatuses that would serve to break up the schedule. What’s more, the number of pages that Horikoshi turned in each week dropped from around 20 to 15 or 16 as the manga entered its final arc, adding up to a frankly glacial pace as the story could only proceed at a fraction of the speed it could before.
Gege Akutami, on the other hand, was able to keep up a fairly consistent pace and page count towards the end despite some previous health hiccups. Where Jujutsu Kaisen fell short is the way that it decided to play out its conclusion: instead of a series of interlocked and escalating battles like My Hero Academia’s final arc, Akutami decided to center his conclusion around a singular final clash between the protagonists, pretty much all of the supporting cast, and Sukuna. This unchanging concept, repeated week after week, quickly led to frustration and a sense that the series was treading water at such a vital moment.
As a result, while My Hero Academia’s pacing problems were rooted in Horikoshi’s intermittent schedule during serialization, they may end up being moot when reading the series as a completed product in hindsight. Jujutsu Kaisen, however, suffered from the issue of bad pacing due to the core concept of its final arc, which is something that will endure no matter how future readers engage with the story. The problem of poorly conceived ideas also applies when looking at the series’ themes, or lack thereof.
What It Means to Be a Hero and “Proper Death”
Rather than the mechanics of the ending, it’s arguably more interesting to focus on what My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen wanted to achieve by drawing the narrative to a conclusion in that particular way. In many ways, an ending can determine the ultimate message of a story by bringing the various thematic threads together in a satisfying fashion, or completely ruin it by failing to do so. The tone of an ending can then also affect the overall tone of the story, for better or for worse.
Towards the end of the Shie Hassaikai arc, My Hero Academia began to slowly introduce the idea that maybe, just maybe, the villains needed saving by the heroes as much as their victims. No character best exemplifies this than Tomura Shigaraki, who committed atrocities against the rest of the world but was also a victim of his father’s abuse, who was also in turn traumatized by his mother giving him up to foster care. There’s also Himiko Toga, who was rejected because of her blood-based ability, as well as Spinner because of his appearance.
In addition, the idea of what it meant to be a hero was constantly questioned in the series’ latter half. With Endeavor’s abusive behavior brought to light, it was made clear that not all heroes have a heart of gold, while Deku attempting to take everything on by himself in the Dark Hero arc emphasized that heroism could also lead to self-destruction. There needed to be a redefinition of what it meant to be a “hero” and what it meant to be a “villain” - hence why the idea of “everyone becoming the greatest hero” ended up forming the core of the series’ conclusion, with everyday citizens inspired by Deku’s sacrifice to act more heroically in their own lives.
Conducting a similar analysis for Jujutsu Kaisen is difficult as the series has never been up front about its themes, nor seemingly particularly concerned with exploring a central idea. There are hints here and there towards a grander thesis, but all of this is buried behind layers of plot set dressing and lore-heavy exposition. In essence, Jujutsu Kaisen has always been a manga to engage with in terms of story mechanics and action spectacle, but this does mean it falls down in comparison with My Hero Academia when looking at themes.
One of the concepts that Jujutsu Kaisen introduced at the very beginning of its run was the idea of a “proper death.” In particular, Itadori used to strongly believe that all life was precious and refused to kill anyone, but he explains to Sukuna in chapter 265 that “How someone dies doesn’t matter, but I can’t forgive someone who acts as if those lives are worthless.” This might feel an important inversion of this initial idea, but it ultimately only leads to Itadori being able to justify defeating Sukuna - something which he and the other characters had already been engaged in for dozens of chapters at that point.
Both My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen feature short epilogues after their main stories, but it’s almost laughable how little Jujutsu Kaisen’s epilogue serves to cap off the narrative or its themes. While Horikoshi took the time to explore how the final battle with All for One affected the main cast and the world around them, Akutami decided to send his characters on a meaningless grunt mission to take care of a mischievous sorcerer. There is the idea that Gojo wanted someone to “be strong in ways completely different from [him]” but this is first introduced in a flashback on page 15 of the very last chapter, so it doesn’t get explored much. Once again, it feels very underwhelming.
To a certain extent, it’s not very fair to compare two different series created by two separate authors with very different goals in mind, but the temporal distance between My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen will inevitably lead many readers to do so. Although this doesn’t mean that either series is superior, it’s hard to overlook the fact that while Kohei Horikoshi’s work on themes is at once both clear and conclusive, Gege Akutami ultimately leaves behind a series with muddled ideas that fail to match up to those same standards.
Whether or not this will affect how these manga are remembered, however, remains to be seen.
What’s Next for Kohei Horikoshi and Gege Akutami?
Weekly Shonen Jump has had a retention problem as of late. While new series are constantly debuting every year, not many of them have been able to stick, meaning that the magazine is losing big hitters like My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen at a faster rate than it can replace them. Moreover, successful authors are finding it increasingly harder to make a strong comeback, with some of them not even trying in the first place.
The fact that the author of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba has not launched any kind of follow-up series in the four years since its conclusion is downright worrying and frankly preposterous. From the magazine’s perspective, it would be best to capitalize on the series’ record-breaking success and strong name recognition as quickly as possible, but the pressure on Koyoharu Gotouge must be immense. What’s more, there’s no guarantee that this prior success would even result in any follow-up getting off the ground: look no further than the dull thud with which Masashi Kishimoto’s Samurai 8 landed after it got unceremoniously canceled in 2020.
In this landscape of uncertainty and instability, Weekly Shonen Jump desperately needs authors like Horikoshi and Akutami to stick around and continue to shore up the magazine despite the massive amount of pressure. Even if Kishimoto’s example proves that nothing is certain, no one blames him for giving it his best shot. Both Horikoshi and Akutami, however, have very different circumstances that may end up informing very different career paths post-My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen.
Horikoshi, on the one hand, is an industry veteran. He already made his major debut way back in 2010 with Oumagadoki Zoo before going on to serialize Barrage in 2012: both series were relatively short-lived, but this means that he has been active as a manga creator for close to 15 years at this point. When considering the fact that he suffered with constant health issues towards the end of My Hero Academia, it’s certainly likely that he may drop out of the industry altogether.
Akutami, on the other hand, is still young. Jujutsu Kaisen is his first major series, with even his first published work Tokyo Metropolitan Magic Technical School eventually finding its way into the series’ larger canon in the form of Jujusu Kaisen 0. Putting aside the few times he took a hiatus for health reasons, he still surely has plenty of time and energy to pick up his pen once again. Whether or not he can deal with the pressure of following up his prior success, however, comes down to an issue of personal conviction as well as the professional support that his editors can offer.
Regardless of if we ever see anything from Kohei Horikoshi and Gege Akutami again, the dual endings of My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen represent a landmark moment for Weekly Shonen Jump and manga as a whole. In a similar vein to when Naruto and Bleach concluded, the absence of these two series will be felt both in terms of sales figures and cultural influence for many years to come. Can anything emerge to take their place? Only time will tell.
