Jujutsu Kaisen Creator Originally Drafted the Manga With Megumi As Its Hero

It turns out that Jujutsu Kaisen 's creator originally planned to lead the series with Megumi Fushiguro as its hero! Jujutsu Kaisen is now in the midst of a new art exhibition in Japan as fans are celebrating how far the manga has come, and with it the original creator behind it all has been sharing new tidbits about the origins of the series. Along with outling Yuji Itadori's role in the series and how it's changed since the franchise was first conceived, Jujutsu Kaisen original creator Gege Akutami revealed that in the original drafts for the story, Megumi was actually the first character he designed with the intention of making him the main character.

When drafting up the original concept for the series , which was ultimately dropped in favor of what we would see later with Jujutsu Kaisen's run in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, Akutami explained that he had created Megumi first, then Yuji and Nobara Kugisaki after. The original series was actually more akin to the Culling Game arc's events at first, but was ultimately scrapped in these planning stages before moving onto a new idea that would eventually become Jujutsu Kaisen as we know it.

Megumi Was Originally Jujutsu Kaisen's Lead

"It was Fushiguro [then] Itadori [then] Kugisaki," Akutami answered when asked in which order did he create the series in ( as translated by @soukatsu_ on X ). "Originally, Jujutsu Sousen [the initial idea for the series] had a character that became the prototype for Fushiguro. In Sousen, that young boy ended up housing Sukuna, and the setting was similar to the Culling Game, with Itadori in a supporting role. Kugisaki was a character conceptualized for the manga serialization. I didn't think to do anything unique with the initial character configurations so I made them into a three-man-cell like in Naruto ."

Elaborating on this further, Akutami revealed that he then drafted a new idea more fitting for a shonen series with Fushiguro already a set character he wanted to use in the new series before eventually shifting the lead to Yuji, "When Sousen was dropped during our serialization meetings, I decided to try one more time and draw a story that was more suitable for a shonen magazine. Fushiguro's character was already quite set in stone in my mind , and I thought Itadori would be more adaptable so I changed the character configuration."