the illiad and jujutsu kaisen

the illiad and jujutsu kaisen

prince edward county on lomochrome purple, july 2024

the ending of every great story is the same: we die. and yet despite the ending being written into the beginning, some stories we can’t seem to peel our eyes away from for thousands of generations.

the illiad is an example. the hidden inventory arc of jujutsu kaisen is another, and yes, i’m being so serious right now. both of these stories are about mortality, about war, about the hubris of young men, and about the human desire that lies before it. they are about loss and how no amount of retribution is ever enough to compensate for the magnitude of loss. you can curse the world and kill a thousand more men but it will not prevent death. it is the ultimate great irreversible, illogical nothingness.

“loss” of innocence

i, like many others my age, had my first exposure to the storyline of the illiad through madeline miller’s the song of achilles. a beautiful, melodical, easy-to-love novel that revolves around achilles and patroclus’ relationship (you see how i first started marinating this tie-back into gojo and geto…). then, i read stephen fry’s excellently written retelling of the odyssey; afterwards, taking a much-needed detour through margaret atwood’s scathing penelopiad. of course, circe, again by madeline miller, and finally the original illiad, translated by emily wilson. i will probably continue to read a lot more - lavinia is next on my list.

i say this to emphasize that my understanding of this myth is very much coloured by the emotions that modern writers and classics researchers have on the story. i think what makes us modern readers’ feelings on the war of troy different from the ancient captivated listeners of the oral tradition, is that for us, death has become an anomaly. many experience their first close death well into their 20s or 30s, especially in a lot of first world countries where we have grown fat on peace stolen from proxy wars and exploitation waged far, far away.

to us, youth is a fluffy, warm stretch of two decades where we are buffeted from the winds of the world, where we hold hands tightly with one another not thinking about the close future where separation is imminent, and where we have no responsibility but the burden of becoming. it is now a sort of expectation and cultural promise, this innocence. so to a girl like me, reading about the war of troy (or any war, really) feels fantastical, unrelatable, and utterly foreign - because i have internalized that cultural promise and made it a non-negotiable. i have goals: i want to start a games studio, make an album with my friends, buy expensive things for my family, travel the world, marry my boyfriend. dying in some nonsensical manner or freak accident is a possibility that is so completely outside of my imagination (and frankly, it’s true that the probability is relatively low).

this is not the case for the youth of jujutsu kaisen (where early, undue loss of innocence is a core theme) and the illiad. in both these stories, the wars are waged mostly by young men, barely finished with their growth spurts, the majority destined to short lives but delusionally (as all humans do) gripping onto each second they do have, hoping for the next if they play their cards just a little bit differently this time, if they hit a little bit harder, move a littl e bit faster, get a little bit stronger. you could argue this delusion is even stronger for characters like hector, achilles, odysseus, gojo, geto, and yuuji, who are literally touched by the gods. they are the strongest and wiliest of their respective generations, and their comrades may fall but they seem untouchable, until irrevocable loss does touch them and they realize they are not immune to the amoral destruction of death that crushes every framework they ever navigated the world with. even the strongest have no power against senseless fate. this is riko and haibara for geto, patroclus for achilles, hector for himself, geto for gojo, and nanami and junpei for yuuji.

and yet that’s the thing - even though they live in a world where people die every day meters away from them and i don’t, they share the same delusion as me. the whole schtick about being human is that even when death is opening its gaping jaws right in front of your nose, it hasn’t eaten you yet, and so you keep hoping despite. this is what makes the illiad gripping. you could say this is actually the true core tenet of youth that we share with the mythical figures of gojo, geto, achilles, patroclus, hector, and their ilk - we feel like gods until we are shown we are mortal, and we continue to be terrible at probabilistic calculations.

youth is not about innocence. we don’t have that luxury - it’s completely imaginary. these stories aren’t actually about the loss of it, they’re showing that innocence in youth was all a ruse in the first place. gojo was predicted to be the strongest curse sorcerer of all time when he was an infant. achilles was foretold to become the best warrior of the greeks long before he was even born. they were never sheltered from violence, they were just sheltered from the meaning of that violence, from understanding their own vulnerability to it, until someone they loved died and the reality became unavoidable.

it’s also why the most fundamental and most difficult work of being a parent is to uphold the mirage of innocence at all costs for your children until they are big enough to shoulder the destruction of it themselves. if you got out of your adolescent years while managing to hold on to it, you are one of the true lucky bastards!

breakdown of meaning

the greek warriors’ pursuit of kleos, glory, and the jujutsu sorcerers’ promise of using their so-called “gift” for the salvation of humanity - these are all notions of meaning and self-realization and legacy-making that ultimately crumble when you’re faced with a sharp thing pointed at your softest part.

i mean, i don’t know, maybe you could ask achilles’ fictional ghost if it was all worth it, but i think odysseus’ later pursuit of more story-making by leaving the ithaca and the penelope that he spent thirty years running towards says it all. he couldn’t square the domestic peace he ostensibly “earned” with the intense loss of his entire crew, the deaths he saw while trying to outwit his fate, and the violence he both engendered and escaped due to his single-minded desire to survive it all. the reward of home and hearth could not compensate for the great void of the loss of war. geto’s genocidal nihilistic descent is the same thing - he was arguably the most sane out of the whole cast of jujutsu kaisen, and that’s why he ended up wanting to destroy everything, because he desperately wanted to retain meaning in fighting curses but could not hold himself together against the cognitive dissonance of dying for people who don’t “deserve” it, the cognitive dissonance of not being able to live after you just decided to choose life and not being able to die when you have no attachment to life.

gojo is undeniably the strongest, but he still had to kill geto. achilles was the best of the greeks, but killing hector and desecrating his body would never bring back patroclus.

many of our ideals crumble when death grazes our side.

AND YET! the story spun by the homeric poets about one man full of twists and turns and his intelligent grit continues to resonate for millennia and reached me, just another 20-something girl an unthinkable number of generations later, even though they were never able to bring back all the dead warriors who perished unjustly in battle. and yet! gojo carried the memory of geto within him for more than a decade, and the once apathetic god-child learned the importance of teaching and mentoring the next generation so they turn out to survive just a little bit better than the previous generation of sorcerers, even though it would never bring back geto.

the men of the trojan war and the sleepless sacrifice of the jujutsu sorcerers in the narratives of the illiad and jjk represent our duty to the collective human endeavour of reaching for the gods. what you pluck up your courage to do in this life will invariably enable another to do the same in the next generation.

#neverkillyourself

even though legacy and meaning-making don’t compensate for loss at the personal level, they still matter at the collective level.

our individual efforts will never be enough fill the gaping void of grief, and that is the great tragedy. but those efforts do contribute to the ever-growing tower of human contribution that we stand on today, built by the rise and fall of countless civilizations made up of people just like us. being human is like this - we die, and that is inevitable and irreversible and unthinkable, but we also build castles and cities and languages and paintings and machines that can do anything and epic poetry and great civilizations and we simply do it because we’re alive and we want. it’s for the love of the game! we vie to be the first to touch the firmament (footnote: the existence of elon musk). this is the human condition.

the work will always have value. it just can’t bring back the ones you love.