On Sunday, September 29, the mega-popular supernatural Shonen Jump manga series Jujutsu Kaisen will end. While the end of a popular manga series that spun off into a viral anime adaptation will surely come with its fair share of thank-yous to creator Gege Akutami and well-meaning online eulogies online from fans of the series’ famous (and hot) characters, it would do well to take its infuriating leak culture to the grave with it.
In August, Shonen Jump announced that Jujutsu Kaisen would finally end in September. For many, JJK‘s imminent end came as a bit of a surprise given how the series felt like it was sprinting toward a finale during its abruptly upended Culling Game arc—which Mappa will adapt in the anime’s upcoming third season. While I can (and have) waxed poetic about the series’ uneven storytelling inevitably failing to deliver a satisfying ending for longtime readers, I will instead shift my ire to the most frustrating aspect of reading Jujutsu Kaisen: its readership. More specifically, JJK fans who’ve been hellbent on spoiling every iota of story progression by spreading manga leaks across every corner of the internet for the past five years.
Typically, in the U.S., new chapters of Jujutsu Kaisen would release on the Weekly Shonen Jump website alongside other ongoing series One Piece and My Hero Academia every Sunday. To promote said chapters, the official Shonen Jump social media account would post an innocuous panel from a newly released chapter with vague flavor text to not spoil those who choose to keep up with the series via its anime counterpart. While well-meaning, this routine is always in vain because JJK fans—without fail—would have already obtained scanlations of said chapters from Japan the previous Thursday.
The phenomenon, which became colloquially known as “Spoiler Thursdays,” led to a rough translation of what happens in JJK chapters, which would then be paraded across the internet so everyone, their mother, and their dog would know what happens in any given chapter well in advance of its official release. While Japan takes manga spoilers seriously enough to have arrested foreigners for doing so, it’s nigh-on impossible to prevent the entire internet from performing a domain expansion of sorts with a guaranteed hit to spoil some unsuspecting fan on JJK.
JJK fans spoil shit like it’s their last day on earth. I ain’t ever seen a fanbase so uncaring about spoilers it’s crazy
— Cosmonaut Marcus is Back (@CosmonautMarcus) August 22, 2024
This infuriating tradition, coupled with the fact that JJK fans can’t contain spoilers to save their lives, has led to anime-only JJK viewers getting spoiled years in advance to plot developments in the show with raw, untagged panels circulating online. This, in turn, made it so that existing as an anime-only JJK fan meant you either avoided being online only to await news of a new season via carrier pigeon, or got coerced to just read the manga. The last of which came with that same energy that Marvel fans have with sharing spoilers the next day for a new show, as if it’s on the reader to drop everything they were doing to watch whatever show/movie is in vogue the moment it drops, or else. Spoiler culture has no place in the manga community, whose greatest quality is that it’s predicated on experiencing a story at the reader’s own speed.
Got the lead VA of Jujutsu Kaisen throwing shade at the manga’s official translator, a guy who is regularly hounded already. https://t.co/1iXC0gQWc7
— Lynzee Loveridge 🏳️🌈 (@ANN_Lynzee) August 27, 2024
And another thing: JJK‘s weird spoiler hang-up also spun off into gross harassment by both fans and voice actors of the show who wore their reading for the series as a badge of honor, to the series’ official translators. Many of these gripes spawned by irked readers at translator John Wery are based in colloquialisms that wouldn’t translate well or at all to English-speaking audiences, or minutia in the leaked fan-translated texts being dissimilar to the official translation. This hellspawn of JJK‘s manga leak culture that its fandom allowed to fester is plain unhealthy, especially because it has been propagated as running defense for a series that honestly hasn’t been that good for a while to warrant such petulant behavior.
Needless to say, manga reading communities with anime projects on the horizon like Sakamoto Days and Dan Da Dan have already started gatekeeping the the soon-to-be-wayward JJK fandom, saying they aren’t welcome in their own community. Even the official Viz Media account took it upon itself to give fair warning to prospective Dan Da Dan fans to spare themselves the trouble of getting spoiled by reading ahead before someone else cuts them at the chase. All this to say, I wish the Sakamoto Days and Da Da Dan fandoms go luck in their attempts to prevent JJK spoilerkind from infiltrating should they survive the manga’s end.
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