In Jujutsu Kaisen 0, the death of Rika Orimoto is framed as the catalyst for all the events of the story, burdening young Yuta Okkotsu with a violent cursed spirit bearing her name. She is a victim whose death and subsequent haunting mutate an innocent crush into a twisted love story, but for those who have read her profile in the manga, her backstory kinda changes everything.

Originally published in 2018, Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is the prequel to Jujutsu Kaisen, following Yuta Okkotsu's journey to become a sorcerer, so he can exorcise the curse haunting him. After the success of the anime's first season, the volume was turned into a feature film that - like its manga counterpart - is an excellent introduction to the series, its characters, and its world.

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What The Film Tells Us

Apart from the adorable scenes of her meeting, playing with, and proposing to Yuta, there isn't a lot known about Rika before her death. What makes her a compelling entity is what she means to Yuta, both for good and bad. Additionally, the fact that her cursed form is so powerful (ranked as a special grade) is treated as a big mystery, considering neither she nor Yuta have any immediately obvious ties to jujutsu society.

By the end of the film, Yuta has become an incredibly powerful sorcerer within just one year at Jujutsu High, even capable of mimicking advanced techniques like Inumaki's cursed speech. It's presented as though Rika's unique power has influenced Yuta's own growing skill at sorcery, but it still doesn't explain where that power came from.

After the climax, the audience gets an answer that's infinitely more satisfying when one is familiar with the historical context. According to Satoru Gojo, he and Yuta are both descendants of Michizane Sugawara, a real-life scholar and poet of Japan's Heian Period. After his death, a wave of plague and drought came to be attributed to his vengeful spirit, deifying him in the Shinto faith. He is one of Japan's Big Three Vengeful Spirits.

So, as it happens, Yuta's bloodline did account for his large well of cursed energy, and furthermore, it's revealed that Rika didn't just become a curse because she died. Yuta unknowingly placed a curse on her that turned her into a special grade curse. All of this is a suitable explanation and there's really no need to refute it, but there's more to unfold.

There are details that the film (and the manga for that matter) don't provide within the central text that might change the story. It's a short profile on Rika provided at the end of Volume 0 as a small bonus, but these seemingly supplementary tidbits feel like crucial lore regarding a major character of the story.

What Rika's Profile Reveals

Turns out, Rika's story was dark way before she got hit by a car. Both of her parents died mysteriously. Her mother passed away when she was five and her dad's death reason why Rika and Yuta met. She and her father went mountain climbing and disappeared. A week later, Rika was rescued, alone. She recovered in the hospital, met Yuta, and then they both attended school together. Her father's body was never found.

Rika's grandmother took her in, but she was convinced that Rika had killed both of her parents. In just a few bullet points, Gege Akutami turns a character who has been - at most - a symbol of lost innocence into a possible serial killer in the making. As a little bit of salt in the wound, the ring that she gave Yuta turns out to be her mother's wedding ring, which she stole.

It was never quite clear where she got the ring in the first place, and were it just a ring she took from her parents under normal circumstances, that wouldn't have been that bad. But these aren't normal circumstances. There's one bullet point about how Rika is "aware of how her appearance is perceived" and "sometimes manipulates adults." When fans discover her backstory online, they tend to react to this particular detail with a bit of instinctive revulsion.

However, it might just mean that, because she's young, she takes advantage of the fact that adults probably underestimate her. Either way, there's no explicit confirmation that she did kill them. Maybe they truly died accidentally and this traumatized girl just gives off a weird vibe to those who consider the circumstances suspicious. Regardless, none of this helps her case.

Why This Changes Things

While it is practically written in stone that the power of Rika's cursed spirit was entirely contingent on Yuta's bloodline, these details leave just the slightest room for a different interpretation. Yes, Yuta's bloodline did a lot of the work, but it's not out of the realm of possibility to consider that Rika's history and mental state contributed to things. Maybe at the moment of her death, the negative emotions within her instantly triggered Yuta's innate abilities.

On a grander scale, the revelation of Rika's deeper nature changes the emotional interpretation of the film in two major ways. The first and most obvious one is that it forces the audience to rethink who Rika is, which might take sweet moments between her and Yuta and stamp a huge asterisk on them. Secondly, it makes clear just how little of a character she had to begin with.

These are the kinds of things that make people ask "Why wasn't this in the story to begin with?" and that's a completely reasonable reaction. To the story's credit, it is one primarily focused on Yuta and Yuta alone, and in that respect, Rika's backstory might have bogged down the pacing. While it adds an extra level of darkness to their romance, it was already a twisted love story, so one might argue it would only have added something that was already there.

Sure, there's context added about why Yuta had to distance himself from his family, but the rationale for his isolation was already self-evident. Rika was hurting people close to him, whether they were family or not. The audience doesn't even meet Yuta's family in the film, probably for the same reason that Rika's backstory wasn't explored in more detail.

Crafting stories takes time and the number of ideas that make it onto the page or onto the screen are likely a fraction of the ones that are shelved in the pursuit of something cohesive. Plenty of times in fiction, suggestions of arcs go nowhere and questions are left unanswered, but there can still be a strong plot at the center that is executed wonderfully. Sometimes, nailing that central narrative is far more important.

Gege Akutami left quite a minefield of implications within the bonus materials of their prequel story to the point that, quite possibly, most fans of the anime aren't even aware of them. For being one of the biggest films of 2021, that's pretty crazy to think about. In light of that, it might be time to rewatch Jujutsu Kaisen 0 with fresh eyes.

Jujutsu Kaisen is available to stream on Prime Video.

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