Jujutsu Kaisen Creator Originally Didn’t Want Nanami to Die

One of the biggest deaths in Jujutsu Kaisen thus far had been Kento Nanami in Season 2 of the anime, and it turns out that the original creator behind it all didn’t want Nanami to die during the Shibuya Incident arc at first. Jujutsu Kaisen is now working its way through yet another intense arc of the manga with the Shinjuku Showdown, and it continues in a long streak of fights where fans saw notable named characters die left and right as the fights get more intense. It’s highly likely that if a character is your favorite, they’ll be marked for death soon enough in the manga’s bleak world. 

While character deaths were definitely on the table before, fans of both the Jujutsu Kaisen manga and anime started to see a lot more death with a lot more frequency with the advent of the Shibuya Incident. This ended up flipping the table of the Jujutsu world in some massive ways with big consequences for many characters. For Yuji Itadori in particular, he started losing hope when he had to see Nanami die right in front of his eyes at the hands of Mahito. But the creator was trying to avoid this at first. 

Jujutsu Kaisen Creator’s Original Plans for Nanami’s Death

“Sometimes it feels like…the script progresses and evolves depending on the characters themselves,” Jujutsu Kaisen series creator Gege Akutami revealed as part of the special art exhibition for the manga now in Japan (as detailed by @soukatsu_ on X). Revealing that he at first didn’t want Nanami to die in the Shibuya Incident, the story kind of led to that point to give Yuji motivation, “I didn’t want Nanami to die at that point, but I was thinking that maybe there was no way around it, but Itadori burst in and well, you know how it went. I originally felt that Nanami had surpassed the script but when I put it into words like this, Nanami was the motivation and Itadori was the one who overcame the script.”

So while Nanami’s death was a shocking one, it was another nail into Yuji that further pressed him into the grand finale of the Shibuya Incident and the arcs to come. It was also the first of many notable deaths that we would see in the coming episodes and arcs, and will likely be far from the last before Jujutsu Kaisen comes to an end.