CURSED CONDOM.

#FINGEREDFOOL    ❝ EVEN YOUR SMALLEST SCARS HURT MORE THAN THE GODS OF THIS EARTH. ❞  indie, private, & canon-divergent portrayal of yuji itadori — “THE BODY KEEPER”, “VESSEL OF THE CURSED KING” (est. 2022), a walking contradiction haunted by the devilment of a soul that is not his. this interpretation is grounded in spiritual horror, trauma-informed storytelling, and posthuman grief.▮ afro-indigenous [ gullah-geechee* black american w/ afro-carib roots — black on all sides.]

world-building will explore: ritual violence; shinto-buddhist death logics; exorcism, spiritual pollution (kegare), and sacrificial bodies; spiritual contamination, soul duality, and “vesselhood” as metaphysical violence and sacred burden; the psychology of guilt, martyrdom, and moral fatigue; the spiritual warfare of survival; execution as state-sanctioned erasure; post-shibuya nihilism; the slow death of compassion in a cursed world; karmic recursion, and moral absolutism vs. existential horror.

yuji had grown familiar with pain the way some people grew familiar with weather — something that passed over him in cycles, never asking permission, never sparing him simply because he was young. before he’d even understood what adulthood was supposed to feel like, death had already brushed past him dozens of times, cold fingers grazing his ribs, stealing breath, stealing names, stealing futures. it moved through his early years like a hand dragging through fog — again and again — leaving him with nothing but its residue and the knowledge that everything he loved could vanish without ceremony.

for a long while, he tried to think of death as something he could reason with.

it happens. there’s purpose. people live on through memory.

but adulthood — and experience — had corrected him with brutal elegance. there was no quiet meaning waiting beneath the surface. there was only the shattering, and the human ritual of pretending the pieces were art.

wakes. funerals. graveside offerings. tables of food set for ghosts. each one etched another crack into him.

and somewhere along the line, his courage collapsed — not in battle, never there — but in the simple act of showing up. he stopped attending. stopped standing beside the living. grief had become too vast, too loud, too capable of unmaking him. he feared that standing in its presence would erase the little humanity he had left.

and there was always another funeral. another name in his phone he could no longer text. another voice he would never hear again. another spirit leaving him with yet another person to mourn for eternity.

always… always… another funeral.

and today had been no different — another name, another service, another room he couldn’t bring himself to step into. he hated himself for that.

but this time, he returned anyway. not to the funeral… but to her.

on this december afternoon, beneath a sky swollen with rain, tokyo sounded distant — like a bad memory underwater. the downpour hammered the pavement, soaked through his sleeves, hissed against the gutters. but he heard none of it. numbness wrapped around him like a second coat.

he stood by the entrance of the building she lived in now — higher floors, better lights — almost foreign to him, almost unreal. he hadn’t seen her in months. she was living amazingly well. hadn’t spoken to her outside of clipped messages that said everything and nothing. his communication hasn't had the same sunny disposition it once did.

when the elevator finally opened, she stepped out with that unmistakable posture: unbroken, he assumed, but fraying at the edges. the same signature brand of kugisaki-isms that he remembered from when they were teenagers.

he caught himself wondering who she’d been terrorizing in his absence.

which poor, unfortunate knucklehead had the misfortune of provoking her infamous fury — if anyone had at all.

ever since he... became something of a fairweather friend.

without thinking, he angled his umbrella toward her. the rain softened around her immediately, like the world remembered itadori wouldn't allowed her to be touched without permission. or maybe the opposite — maybe he was shielding the world from her. with them, the coin never flipped the same way twice.

he wondered if she’d meet his eyes. and if she did, would she still see yuji beneath the soaked hood — or would she see someone else. something else.

something knotted in his chest. guilt, longing, and that admixture of soul-wearied emotions that only becomes unbearable when one has carried them for too long.

he cleared his throat, found his voice somewhere between hesitation and the breaking of a habit to actually use the muscles in his throat again.

    ❝ …hey. uh—how’re you holding up, kugisaki? you're looking good... ❞ it wasn’t the most elegant of greetings. it was far from brave.

this is from a man who didn't send cards. barely text messages. flowers, maybe — morning glories, and the ones she liked best — delivered on birthdays and on the anniversaries of the day they met. small tributes. little proofs that he still breathed somewhere in the world.

but it was the truth he could manage after so many empty graves and so many days he'd chosen not to stand beside her — chosen not to be what she needed him to be.

@waraningyo

something about what she said didn’t add up.

yuji twisted at the waist, neck craning toward her like a confused puppy hearing a far-off whistle. his eyebrow lifted with a slow, deliberate skepticism that crawled across his face. for a moment, he just stared — baffled, borderline offended — with what the hell smeared plainly across his expression, because none of this lined up with the facts as he understood them.

first of all: gojō-sensei had explicitly told him to spend the day on this. another whacky stratagem that constituted as a “training exercise” disguised as leisure — which, fine, he’d take it. who is he to complain? what young adult would? second: kugisaki had sworn today was her self-care day. he’d assumed she was terrorizing a mall somewhere, annihilating racks of clothes he’d never actually see her wear. there was no universe where she’d willingly be anywhere near him during her sacred off-hours.

so the only logical conclusion?

this was cap.

the light bulb flickered on in his head, and he remembered: she was an absolute menace at the arcade. the competitive streak of a demon. and worse than that — a damn hog. if he surrendered the controller to her, he'd might as well sit back and watch paint dry. she’d clear the stages, beat the bosses, humiliate his high score, grind all day to 100% it by collecting all trophies, and then make sure the entire neighborhood knew exactly how much fun she was having.

    ❝ whaaat? pfft! first off, it’s a ps5, not a ps4 — let’s get that straight before you start talkin’ bull. secondly, yeah right! stop trying to blow smoke up my ass, kugisaki! ❞

his voice detonated off the cramped, dimly lit walls — a sudden boom so loud it felt like the whole room might fold in on itself. and if it did? clearly her fault. she had a volume setting reserved only for interrogation rooms and divine punishment, and a mouth bigger than a sumo.

yuji shot her a glare over his shoulder — half annoyed, half bracing for whatever death-beam expression she’d fire back — then shuffled several cushions away from her on the couch. shoulders hunched. posture defensive like a human armadillo. as if he could shield both the console and himself using nothing but surface area and stubbornness.

    ❝ and quiet down, wouldja, please? geez— you’re louder than bulma! i can’t hear the cutscenes! ❞

@waraningyo + meta questions , always accepting.

well, it's a virtue that's difficult for him to access. no, that's wrong. it's not difficult. he simply can't.

he forgives everyone except himself. it’s tempting to call this a “martyr complex,” but that’s surface-level. once you apply bodhisattva logic to his worldview, things become clearer. yuji lives by a simple, instinctive code:

if someone is hurting, help them.

if someone is suffering, share the burden—if not lift it entirely.

if someone dies, carry the grief for them.

if someone is to blame, it should be him.

these beliefs form the foundation of why self-forgiveness is spiritually incompatible with the role yuji assumes.

to forgive himself, he would need to accept that he, too, deserves liberation. but yuji refuses to move on while others still suffer. he doesn’t believe he has the right to soothe his wounds while the world remains broken. to him, self-forgiveness would feel like abandoning the dead.

and as he grows older—more world-weary, more spiritually scarred—he doesn’t even consider the topic. not with others, and certainly not with himself.

before immortality, self-forgiveness was already fragile. after his biology changes—after death stops applying to him—it dies completely. realizing he will outlive everyone he loves fractures something fundamental in him. he understands that:

everyone he cherishes will die. he will not. he'll carry every grief forever.

he even avoids funerals now—not from apathy, but because he’s reached the point where grief has become untenable. every loss compounds. every death follows in his shadow. guilt builds upon guilt, making self-forgiveness not just difficult, but impossible.

how do you forgive a self that never ends? how do you absolve a life with no closure?

and once you place him at forefront of the kṣitigarbha vow—the vow to postpone personal transcendence until all hells are emptied—yuji’s mission becomes literal. he cannot forgive himself while people are still hurting.

so, for yuji, self-forgiveness becomes irrelevant. he doesn’t reject it—he simply stops recognizing it as something meant for him. his spirit abandons the idea. throughout the series, yuji repeatedly resists “roles” others impose on him, yet he always returns to one path: the path of liberating others from suffering. service becomes the center of his identity. it’s the only place he allows himself to stand still.

this is why his bond with nobara matters. others may tell him to forgive himself, to rest, to stop carrying everything—but nobara treats him like a person, not a symbol. she interrupts his fatalism by just existing. with her, he remembers community. humor. warmth. humanity. but even then, his mind stays hooked on responsibility. his compass is fixed forward, never inward.

at the end of it all, with yuji, self-forgiveness doesn't disappear, nah. it transforms and it becomes:

responsibility to guide others toward liberation

service to humanity

compassion that extends even to the monstrous

guardianship over the vulnerable

because yuji was a once a boy who:

housed a king of massacres inside himself

survived death after death

endured persecution and terror

been immortalized by accident and couldn't abandon the world, even if he wanted to try.

outlived his own childhood

lost nearly everyone who mattered to him

and still chose compassion at every crossroads—even when performing shadow work threatens to unravel his own sanity.

and in doing so, he became someone who will save countless lives, but through the stubborn, relentless humanity that defined the yuji itadori we met from the start.

just as his grandfather wanted from the start.

@waraningyo + meta questions , always accepting.

originally, he saw it as the raw end of a bad deal. once he realized his autonomy was gone, it felt like finding a little sugar in shit — technically sweet, still unlivable. yes, he’d been handed immense power, drawn up from that endless pool of compassion in him, but his body had become a walking horror story.

it’s not like he was the “chosen one.” whatever lived in his body was miles away from anything holy. life had him fucked up.

and it’s a consequence he begrudgingly accepts, because he can’t imagine reneging on that instinct to help. he can’t darken his heart while people are obviously in need of help. that reflex was born from compassion in a split-second, desperate choice made in the claustrophobic grip of panic — and it’s not a trait he can easily undo.

he swallowed that finger to save someone else. in doing so, sukuna entered him and shattered his way of life; the world started reading yuji through an archetype older than his great-grandparents — a primordial evil — and, without knowing it, he was steeped into the vajrapāṇi path.

vajrapani: the divine contradiction yuji embodied.

in buddhist lore, vajrapani is the wrathful bodhisattva who:

holder of the invincible thunderbolt

destroys all obstacles to enlightenment

casts divine violence in defense of the innocent

stands at the threshold between human frailty & cosmic doom

channels power that is not inherently his own.

the terror surrounding vajrapāṇi isn’t about malevolence — it’s about responsibility. he carries borrowed divine power, entrusted to a being who must remain humble enough not to break under the weight of it.

yuji identifies with that contradiction instinctively: the power was never his, but the consequences were. the responsibility was wildly disproportionate to his age — he was just a teenager. the idea of misusing that power haunted him more than the people calling for his execution. yuji, like vajrapāṇi, doesn’t shake from cowardice, but from awareness of the magnitude in his own being. every time sukuna stirs, yuji feels a tremor in his bones.

vesselhood becomes both his bodily contamination and his threshold into spiritual enlightenment. most people call him sukuna’s "vessel", or “host,” and on the surface, he internalizes that label too. but as yuji matures, that viewpoint shifts. he starts to see himself as the impact site — the place where everything hit. what once felt like dark holes in his soul reveal themselves as tender soil where his humanity and divinity quietly start to bloom.

yes, vesselhood was once nothing but contamination — a great evil parasitically gripping him. he was thrust into responsibility without consent, handed an existential burden he had to manage just to keep others safe. the constant fear of slipping under sukuna’s influence felt like holding a thunderbolt with wet palms. and on top of that was the knowledge that people saw the weapon first — the thing that ought to be killed — long before they saw yuji itadori.

but in vajrapāṇi’s folklore, he’s a selflessly committed figure whose task is to shatter the chains of suffering and ignorance, even if that means staying in the ugliest realms. the vajra he holds is the clarity that cuts through ego; the wrath he shows is a form of mercy. he wields burning power and keeps wielding it if it means ultimate liberation for others.

vajrapāṇi wields burning power and keeps wielding it if it means absolute spiritual liberation.

that’s how yuji comes to see himself. vajrapāṇi may look monstrous, but none of his features symbolize evil — only the necessary ferocity required to confront the greatest terrors during his guardianship of humanity.

yuji is still human, though. his trials enlighten him, but they’re also full of warnings about what he must never become (something I believe I stated before). drawing on sukuna’s power sparks the fear of losing himself, enjoying the bloodshed, becoming desensitized, or justifying being feared.

that’s why he has an unhealthy relationship with the very human emotion of his anger. he equates anger with harm, hatred, and cruelty — even when it’s in the defense of others.

he rarely admits it aloud, but vesselhood forced him to confront that he is capable of a divine-level fury — and somewhere deep down, it frightens him.

this plays a part in why, in his early years as sukuna’s vessel, he saw himself as disposable. better him than anyone else. better he bear the pain than allow the world to break. that self-image is perhaps the most tragic part of yuji’s psychology.

his body and mind suffer continuously. vesselhood spiritually erodes him. every death gnaws at him. every failure feels cosmically amplified. he internalizes the suffering of others as his own.

yuji becomes a living lightning rod for pain.

and he feels he must bear vesselhood as punishment. the world sees his vesselhood as danger, so he believes it’s on him to keep himself on a spiritual leash and become the wrathful protector. he was never meant to channel something like sukuna — but he was always capable of carrying unbearable weight for others’ sake.

that’s the essence of vajrapāṇi: a figure who terrifies evil, comforts the vulnerable, fights suffering, and stays compassionate beneath monstrous power.

yuji is someone who once held an ancient evil inside him yet chose mercy. he is the threshold where violence becomes compassion. we saw it from the beginning all the way to the moment he invited sukuna into a domain shaped entirely by his own spiritual clarity—showing sukuna neither bitterness nor fear, only an unwavering commitment to empathy.

and that supreme compassion aligns him with another bodhisattva: avalokiteśvara, “the lord who looks down with compassion.” the embodiment of great compassion in mahāyāna buddhism.

meanwhile, the silhouette in yuji’s domain evokes kṣitigarbha (jizō): the earth-store bodhisattva who vows not to attain buddhahood until every hell is emptied, lantern in hand, protecting the lost and guiding the damned.

but yuji’s manner—the way he listens to the world’s suffering and consistently chooses empathy over vengeance—resembles avalokiteśvara just as strongly.

honestly, yuji’s personhood, journey, and role begin to resemble a three-fold bodhisattva fusion:

vajrapani's wrathful protection

avalokiteśvara’s infinite compassion

kṣitigarbha’s refusal to transcend while others still suffer in hell

yuji doesn’t forsake sukuna or himself for what vesselhood made him. he endures the spiritual wound it carved into his soul, even as immortality slowly settles in. and although his self-alienation isn’t a healthy response to his condition, he keeps his focus where it has always lived:

@waraningyo + meta questions , always accepting.

there’s a warm-and-cold complexity to yujibara’s spiritual-psychological relationship. there’s more colors to their dynamic than a basquiat painting.

yes, they became fast friends. but not in a shallow or typical sense.

( what they developed is a rare find in this world and theirs. )

yuji’s undeniably sociable and approachable, and yet, not many people can actually tolerate him long-term, nor can many connect with him in ways that matter.

nobara is the exception.

while yuji is vocal, expressive, and filled with idiosyncratic quirks, there are areas of emotional communication he simply collapses in, especially when the topic is guilt, grief, or existential stakes. he retracts. he deflects. he goes quiet and keeps it pushing.

nobara, however, is someone who can operate with him on an unspoken, intuitive “if you know, you know” wavelength and you can tell the love is there, without them even having to say it.

her presence doesn’t pressure him in any way. her personality doesn’t turn him off. her conviction doesn’t suffocate him.

nobara simply gets him.

despite all the trials they endured as teenagers — curses, death, trauma, near-annihilation — nobara helps yuji take care of his inner child in a way no one else can.

the teasing, the banter, her irreverent humor, the way she can pull laughter out of him without trying — she reconnects him to the parts of himself untouched by the ultraviolence and tragedy.

she keeps him boyish. she keeps him tethered to his humanity. she keeps him alive.

yuji unquestionably loves her in a way that’s not infatuation — but unconditional. she’s one of the only people who can touch the innocence he keeps buried under survivor’s guilt and burden. his nihilistic martyrdom — that infamous self-destructive ideology — is a difficult perspective to crack.

nobara’s personal attitude toward existence, her sharp philosophy on living life on her own terms, is the one force strong enough to challenge his fatalism.

her honesty gives his hard-headedness something to soften against, creating room for thought — room for change.

yuji respects her worldview: her refusal to be pitied, her insistence on dignity, and her unwillingness to compromise her agency. their convictions about life — about meaning, death, autonomy, and human dignity — converge more often than they diverge. this mutual alignment makes empathy between them effortless.

and because nobara refuses to indulge self-pity or self-annihilation, she is the balancing force yuji desperately needs.

if he punishes himself, she pulls him back. if he leans toward self-erasure disguised as atonement, she cuts through the delusion. if he spirals, she grounds him.

she is the constant in his life who refuses to let him disappear into guilt.

but the tragedy begins after the battles end.

once yuji’s biology is transmuted — no longer human-clocked, no longer aging, no longer killable by conventional means — everything changes. joy? connection? vulnerability? these are human baggages yuji can no longer afford.

because everyone he loves will die, while he remains. and the thought of seeing nobara or megumi or anyone he cherishes disappear — violently or naturally — is unbearable. immortality sets off a powder keg inside him.

it detonates every human instinct for intimacy. and that explosion makes him pull away from the people he loves the most. not out of apathy. but out of uncontrollable fear.

when he was sukuna’s vessel, yuji was in his vajrapāṇi phase — the wrathful protector, the thunderbolt-bearing guardian who destroys evil with righteous fury.

but after sukuna is gone — after the curse of immortality settles into his being — after he realizes he cannot die — yuji enters his kṣitigarbha phase (im gonna touch on this on later portrayal notes). he becomes the eternal bodhisattva sworn to purifying all the hells until his work is done.

yuji transcended into being the one who refuses to abandon the world no matter how painful it becomes. the one who shoulders suffering without end, because he believes it’s the only thing he’s good for. he fells curses until none are left — or until nothing is left of him.

(if such a fate were even possible anymore).

nobara has what yuji can never have again: death. she can live a full life, surrounded by loved ones, and be mourned when her time comes.

yuji cannot. he no longer has the luxury of looking forward to growing old with those dearest to his heart.

so he steps away from her. because the idea of watching her die would break something inside him he cannot afford to lose. that happened already when mahito presumably killed her. he leaves because he loves her too much to stay. he’s done with funerals.