A Tirade Against the Cliched Use of Flashbacks in Anime

    Jujutsu Kaisen was last season’s (Fall 2020) shonen to watch. Published by Jump and animated by MAPPA, everything was set for it to become the next hot thing after My Hero Academia. With that said, I should tell all of you that I usually avoid these types of shows like the plague. I watched only the first season of HeroAca and gave Black Clover, Fire Force, Blue Exorcist, and the rest a wide berth. It only took me a few shows in the beginning of my journey with anime for me to tire of the repeated tropes - main characters whose main personality traits were limited to being a super nice guy (it’s always a guy), a massive rotating cast of characters, an ostracized MC marked by a distinct disadvantage that turns out to be a surprising advantage (Midoriya’s lack of a quirk, Black Clover’s MC not having magic or whatever). I initially treated Jujutsu Kaisen the same way I did the others - I ignored it in favor of the slice of life of the season. But then, I read an article (which has since disappeared into the never-ending void of the internet) that talked about how it overturned all the genre conventions - the main character dies (technically)! The villain doesn’t pull any punches and is a cruel masterpiece of a character! Episode 4!!! That made me turn my head, but I didn’t really have the motivation to pick it up until my friend recommended it to me. He’s a shonen-addict, so I take what he says with a grain of salt, but it was enough for me to at least take a look at the series. And then it was the animation that grabbed me and hooked me. 

     Long story short, it’s done enough right to make me catch up to the most recent episode. It was seriously very generic (episode 4 wasn’t revolutionary), but I’ve been starving myself of some good action fare, so I told myself to suck it up and just enjoy the fights. That was enough, until they started interrupting the fights with flashbacks. There were already a couple of red flags in the Junpei arc, where it was basically just one massive sob-story - express character development in two episodes - that made me cringe more than cry. But with the beginning of the inter-school competition, each fight was hobbled with the all-important character backstories, thereby making each episode literally just one fight with one flashback per character, for character development. This has been my pet peeve for a long, long time, especially since this problem extends beyond shonen (even if it is much more prominent in them). With Jujutsu Kaisen currently airing and the current arc suffering from this exact problem, I’ll take this opportunity to soapbox about my issues with flashbacks and how other good manga and anime deal with character development without the need for flashbacks.

To avoid spoilers, I will try my best to discuss the plot developments in vague terms, but I might use a few insignificant examples in order to illustrate my points (they aren’t main plot points, so please don’t stop reading).

    So, let’s begin with how flashbacks are currently being used in anime. They are, for the most part, used to deliver what I call an “emergency dose” of character development. It’s an adrenaline shot of feels, meant to connect the audience to a character has not had much screen time, like side characters or villains that have sudden come to the fore. In the case of Jujutsu Kaisen, the flashbacks are there to supplement the fights between side characters that we haven’t seen much of yet, padding out the episodes so that one fight plus the flashbacks round out the 20 minutes. And holy shit, I am so tired of this. Continuing the medical metaphor, it is as if the authors have forgotten to tend to a patient, and wait until they are on their deathbed before pumping as much adrenaline into their bloodstream as possible, pretending that it’s a healthy method of care. The patient flops around a bit, their hearts restarted by the drug cocktail, creating an illusion of life. Even worse, after the emergency dose of flashbacks, the patient is usually left to die a slow painful death - represented as a slow disappearance into irrelevance on the show - as the new rotating cast of characters are carted in on their beds, ready for their injections.

    This is a symptom of lazy writing - or bad planning. This is also an endemic problem with long-running shonen series, since the authors must keep bringing in new characters to keep things fresh, and the story is usually not planned out from start to finish. This can be seen in series such as Bleach, which suffers heavily from the revolving cast. But today, it seems like authors that aren’t facing the same problems are resorting to using flashbacks just because it has become a cliche of the industry. It is felt that each character needs a backstory - they need more development! Demon Slayer’s big spider villain gets his own flashback just as Tanjiro was about to kill him, to give him DevLopMEnt. To this, I say: fuck off! Character development does not take place over two episodes - characters are supposed to be nurtured and grown over the course of a series. Flashbacks give whiplash - this is how the character once was, this is how they are now, bam. Of course, the flashbacks have to be melodramatic, filled with suffering and trauma, in order to squeeze as much emotion out of the audience as possible. But this surge of emotion, since it is forcibly evoked rather than naturally arising, dissipates quickly and makes much less of an impact in the long-term on the audience. The ending of Code Geass is held up as one of the best of all time, because we watched Lelouch and his plans grow over the course of more than 40 episodes, not because we got a 10 minute flashback. 

    This brings me to my second point: not every character needs development. Each good anime has a theme, a message, a narrative they want to deliver. A good anime doesn't just "go with the flow" and toss in flashbacks when they're needed - it is constructed from carefully prepared themes and characters. Good animes focus on the development of characters that contribute an overall theme and narrative, not just going with the flow and acting as if each character was as important as the main ones. I haven’t seen the MC of Jujutsu Kaisen in two or three episodes! What happened to the theme of having a “good death”? How does the struggles of Mai and Maki and their differing views on life contribute to that? It doesn’t. The spotlight swings around wildly, making the narrative much less coherent and making the plot lose its drive.

    Speaking of drive - an anime that did character development well was Akudama Drive, a recent anime that I feel was very underrated. Akudama Drive is ostensibly about a group of criminals carrying out a massive plot in a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk Osaka. But the narrative was about learning to break the shackles of society, about following your heart and your beliefs, at any cost. There was a cast of about 10 characters; only about 3 of them got any development. The other characters were flat to the point of becoming caricatures. For instance, the Brawler pretty much only speaks variations of one line - something about not giving up, fighting, and winning. The Doctor is obsessed with control. The Killer is crazy. There’s not much to them, but the important part of the plot is how the main character’s interactions with them helps her develop and change. The spotlight never leaves the story of the MC, which makes the ending so much more powerful, as it ties the bow on her transformation and tells us: yes, you can change like her - fight for what you believe. They don’t obsess over grey areas, they don’t make the villains more sympathetic, they were just interested in telling us their story. And they used only a single short flashback in the entire twelve episodes.

    Compared to Akudama Drive, Jujutsu Kaisen is falling apart in the most recent competition arc because it has forgotten the core idea of the series. In every arc before this, each character was at least facing death in some way (their own, their friend’s, etc.) and their struggles related to trying to become stronger to prevent such improper, unfair deaths from occurring again. The competition has nothing to do with that; the flashbacks and backstories are self-contained within the episodes. For instance, the battle between Mechamaru and Panda concerns friendship and humanity; Mai and Maki’s is about their family issues, independence and ambition. This dilutes the themes of the story and suddenly takes the spotlight away from Itadori, in the interest of developing the side characters. I know this makes the show money (more figures! more waifus!), but it is to the detriment of the overall quality of the anime. I really hope that moving forward, anime creators look outside the tropes of their genre and medium to build original, beautiful, emotionally-moving stories like they did in the golden age of anime.