Hollow Hush

1. A Normal Girl, A Crazy Girl

So, Nobara’s introduction shows us these two contradictory ideas of her. Nobara is just a normal girl from the country side, in fact how she tells it she’s the only sane one from her home village. 

Nobara has this everybody else is crazy but me, mentality. Which makes sense as she saw everybody else turn against her friend that had done nothing wrong. They all persecuted Saori because they weren’t thinking for thmeselves. Therefore, in Nobara’s mind, her individualism trumps everything else. She doesn’t want to follow what the crowd says because the crowd will hurt people unfairly. Nobara’s not really motivated to save people at the same desparate way Yuji is, but she has a strong sense of justice. 

She doesn’t like when Mai punishes Maki for what the Zen’in family did to Mai. She doesn’t like when people are treated unfairly, or people lash out blindly due to circumstances. So to her the worst result would be to become someone who hurts other blindly like the people in her village did. 

However, Nobara’s response is to just shut out everybody else’s opinions all the time. Which is why Nobara is lacking in self awareness. She sees herself as the only normal person in the world, but literally right in her introduction chapter Gojo announces that she needs to be headstrong and crazy to survive in the world of curses. 

So, Nobara’s bull-headedness means she tends to treat everyone like they’re enemy. Not that she’s incapable of being friendly with others, or cooperating with others. It’s just she tends to be defensive, which is why we see this Nobara flip. 

Nobara acts bossy and short tempered with Yuji when he’s at a distance. When Yuji closes that distance a little bit, she starts to act sweet, and then immediately she snaps back to her usual bossy and difficult to please personality. 

The entire point of Nobara is this behavior is inconsistent. Nobara sees herself as a normal girl, but she’s a loud and obnoctious crazy person at the same time and because of lack of self awareness she tends to just flip between the two unevenly. As I said above, it’s mainly a mechanism for keeping others at a distance. Nobara really only lets people with like-minded views or those she respects up close. 

Are Yuji, Megumi and Nobara friends? Are they just teammates? Are they accomplices? One point of the Origin of Obedience Arc is to show that while Megumi, Yuji and Nobara are close they’re not /that/ close. Nobara and Yuji know almost nothing about Megumi’s past. Megumi and Yuji deliberately decide to keep secrets from each other. It’s a fact that people in the Jujutsu World avoid closeness because they can die at any moment, and Nobara and Megumi have even experienced the loss of Yuji once already. 

So, part of Nobara avoids the vulernability of letting people get too close. The point of showing the flashback from Fumi’s perspective is to remind us once again that like. If instead of a reader, you were just a person in Nobara’s life, she’d be really difficult to understand because Nobara just flips like this all the time. 

It’s hard for Fumi to understand and keep up with Nobara, because Nobara never really lets Fumi in to the same extent she did with Saori, and so Fumi really only has what she can observe from the outside to go off of with Nobara’s behavior. 

So we don’t know why yet exactly, but we know even before Saori, Nobara shut people out. I mean probably part of the reason Fumi and Nobara got along as friends besides growing up together is that Fumi is someone who will quietly watch from a distance because she’s too shy to speak up, and that’s more comfortable to Nobara. 

What happens in the flashback is also, kind of normal. It’s not some big secret or tragic backstory, but it did shape Nobara’s views of the world. As I said, part of Nobara’s character is that she acts crazy, but she is also kind of just a normal girl from the country side. That’s part of the fun of it, she has the ego of Gojo, without being the magical chosen one bodhivista.

Nobara found someone she really opened up to in that village, after believing she couldn’t open up to anybody else in the village, and when she lost that person Nobara cried for the only time that Fumi can remember in their entire childhood. Nobara doesn’t let people in easy, and when she loses them after letting them in, it hurts a lot, hence why she avoids that vulnerability. 

So the twist is Saori wasn’t anyone special. She was just a normal girl that Nobara liked. But also, she didn’t need to be anyone special. Nobara just kind of put Saori up on a pedestal because she was the first person she let in that close.

Fumi wanted Nobara to cry when Nobara left the village because they’ve been friends for all that time, and friends are vulnerable in front of each other, but Nobara is really kind of bad at showing that vulnerability. It’s obviously there, she’s just hiding it. 

So Nobara’s tendency was to treat everybody else in the world like they were crazy and she was the only sane one, as a means to avoid getting close, and she also put Saori up on a pedestal as some super special friend. Except, this is just Nobara’s weird contraidction. Nobara actually fits in with other people, especially other crazy people quite well. Saori was just a normal person that Nobara happened to get close to, and Nobara in her time in the Jujutsu Academy has gotten close to other people as well. 

What Nobara needs to learn is to let her barriers down and just be more open around other people, listen to other people besides herself, because they’re not going to stomp all over her. She can remain a strong willed individual and also accept other people at the same time, people are complex like that yo. What she regrets as she thinks she’s about to die is that she didn’t get as close as she could have been, because she really liked all of those people, she was just putting up a front .

Those people in her life made her happy. She had been avoiding the pain of being close all that time and in her last few moments Nobara thinks that getting close to those people, getting to know them, didn’t hurt after all.