Did Gege Akutami Undercut Jujutsu Kaisen? The Toji Plot Hole That Could Rewrite Everything

Toji Fushiguro is one of those characters who walks on screen and the temperature drops 10 degrees. But every time I revisit Jujutsu Kaisen, I keep circling the same thought: did Gege Akutami send this guy down the wrong career path? Toji, the Sorcerer Killer, the human cheat code who only Gojo could ultimately put down... should probably have been running laps around stadiums, not running jobs for hire.

The athlete version writes itself

Strip away cursed energy for a second and look at the raw measurables. Toji is a tank with cat reflexes, stupidly efficient in basically every form of physical combat, and built like someone a sports science lab would keep for research. If his main motivator is cash (and Toji often treats life like a stack of betting slips), then being a pro athlete checks every box: cleaner money, longer career, fewer stab wounds.

And yeah, he picked the opposite. He chose the thrill, the gamble, the chaos. He even leveraged his own kid at one point, selling Megumi's future to the Zenin clan to cover his mess. That is not exactly a man chasing stability. But from a purely practical angle, the 'unlimited money glitch' for someone like Toji is a world where he is breaking records, not bones.

He already had one foot in sports, sort of

Toji actually knew his way around boat racing. Not because he wanted a podium; because he liked betting on it. Still, that gives you an angle on how this could have gone. In another timeline, he is not taking contracts — he is casually blasting home runs for fun alongside Yuji and Aoi during that baseball detour. Tell me Toji clearing the fences like it is nothing would not feel more on brand than half the disasters he walked into.

Would the Zenin clan have interfered? Not likely

The Zenin family wrote Toji off the second it became clear he had zero cursed energy. In their eyes, he was irrelevant to their status games. Whether he grew up to be a gold medalist or the Sorcerer Killer did not move the needle for them politically, so they were not going to burn calories steering his life. They tossed him aside. That is exactly why the athlete route actually feels plausible — no family interference, just Toji doing whatever maximized his income and his ego.

So why mercenary work?

In-story, it tracks that Toji picked the immediate payout and the adrenaline, even if the ceiling was lower than a sports career. Out of story, Akutami clearly built Toji as a chaos agent who exists to test sorcerers, not sprinters. Still, the idea that he could have been an Olympian-level problem — and a millionaire for once — is hard to shake.

Quick Jujutsu Kaisen primer

• Title: Jujutsu Kaisen
• Creator: Gege Akutami
• First air date: October 3, 2020 (Season 1)
• Studio: MAPPA
• Genre: Gore, action, supernatural
• Where to watch: Crunchyroll (all currently released episodes are up), and you can read the manga digitally via Viz Media

So what do you think? Did Toji pass on the better path, or was he always going to choose the kind of beautiful mess his life became?