Warning: The following contains spoilers for Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2, now streaming on Crunchyroll.

Shōnen side characters can often be way cooler than the main characters and Jujutsu Kaisen has one of the coolest supporting casts around, even with an ever-increasing body count. Mei Mei is one such mesmeric figure, but as the Shibuya Incident arc has come to a close, the fandom has become much more divided about her as a character after a recently adapted, controversial scene.

In Episode 46, Mei Mei is revealed to have teleported out of Japan to save herself, lying in bed at a fancy hotel, offering to let her younger brother, Ui Ui, share her bed, before getting interrupted. The fans had a lot to say about the scene's dubious implications, but fixating on those can distract from the scene's larger significance, and how Mei Mei has always been a terrible person. Of course, to say that she is a terrible person is not the same as saying she is a terrible character, because she has been one of the most consistently entertaining of the bunch. Were that not the case, the disdain among some fans wouldn't be so prevalent, so it's worth dissecting why she was so captivating and how this backlash was probably intentional.

Related

Jujutsu Kaisen: Gojo’s Best Friends, Ranked

Jujutsu Kaisen's Satoru Gojo is one of the strongest sorcerers in the series, and as such, he only has a small group of friends whom he trusts.

The Ever-Greedy Girlboss

Make no mistake, Mei Mei is the same person at the end of Season 2 as she was when she was first introduced. She debuted in Episode 17, an episode already notable for exploring the depths of its female cast to great effect. Throughout this arc, her ability to control and look through the eyes of crows is used to observe the students during the Kyoto Sister School Exchange Event.

Gojo deduces that she's intentionally not displaying Yuji's camera feed and that she's been paid by Yoshinobu Gakuganji to do so while his students attempt to kill Yuji. Without outright confessing this, she describes her love of money and its influence on her value judgments, apropos of nothing. It's shameless, but with the way Gojo banters with her, it doesn't come off like he's accusing her threateningly. If anything, it comes off like two colleagues poking fun at one another.

This makes it hard to find her behavior appalling in the same way as the teachers and students of Kyoto Jujutsu High, the ones to whom Yuji's death comes across as more prejudiced. Contrary to this, Mei Mei takes a "neutral evil" stance on the debacle. And for most of Season 1, that's about all the audience knows or needs to know about her.

Her biggest contribution comes after Gojo turns the tables and bribes her to sponsor the main characters for promotion to first-grade sorcerers, a worthy investment to get back at Gakuganji. So the fans are left with a rather positive impression of her as this true neutral diva who helped the protagonists. And then, Jujutsu Kaisen 0 happened, where Mei Mei made quite an impression once again, this time on the big screen.

Speak Softly and Carry A Great Axe

The feature film prequel to the series gave anime viewers a taste of the first-grade sorcerer in action and, despite how brief her fight scene is, it is glorious. Mei Mei wields a giant axe that cuts through curses like paper, but even with how much weight is conveyed in each swing, she moves as if it weighs nothing. All the while, she smiles in glee, so confident in her skills and seemingly at the prime of her life.

There is hardly a single scene with Mei Mei in Season 2 that isn't great. The opening of the Hidden Inventory arc showcases her intuition while maintaining her cool demeanor in contrast with Utahime's nervousness. Then, Episode 36 treated fans to her iconic runway walk, but also provided some context about how she became so strong and what motivated her.

She comes off as an enterprising young woman who has made something of herself despite an ability that she admits is pretty unassuming and which could have held her back. It paints this aspirational portrait of an underdog, similar to how characters like Maki have overcome their shortcomings (which isn't to say that their struggles are comparable).

Finally, the pièce de résistance: Mei Mei's fight against the Smallpox Deity. Once again, her flaws are inherent and on full display, namely the way she manipulates Ui Ui and his admiration for her to use him as bait, or how she similarly sacrifices her crows in combat. It's blatant, but the audience doesn't necessarily care because, well, look at it - this is one of the prettiest fights in the season, and it's just the cold open to Episode 38.

By this point, Mei Mei's greed is so central to her character that it defines every allegiance of hers. When she kills Niji Ebina, she purports that he lost because he can't conjure a metric by which to measure the lives he has taken. One might charitably interpret this as Mei Mei looking down on him for not considering the worth of lives, but it just as well exemplifies the flaw in her philosophy: that everything should be judged according to an extrinsic value.

But once again, this might not be a dealbreaker for the viewer, because Mei Mei is on the side of the "good guys" and she hasn't lost a fight yet. When she confronts Pseudo-Geto, one naturally assumes that she will either win (unlikely) or she will be defeated and possibly die. So when neither occurs and eight episodes later, she has abandoned the fight to cock-tease her younger brother in Malaysia, it's not a veil being lifted before the viewer so much as the text pointing out the obvious.

Mei Mei is The Problem With Jujutsu Kaisen's World

There's something so sinister yet unfortunately ingenious about how Mei Mei's survival comes after the two saddest casualties of the story yet: Kento Nanami and Nobara Kugisaki. Specifically in the former case, the anime has taken careful strides to put Nanami and Mei Mei side-by-side. After Mei Mei stole the spotlight in JJK 0, Nanami did it again, but better. Even their scenes in the Shibuya Incident arc tend to follow one another because they contrast wonderfully.

Nanami is everything that the viewer would assume jujutsu sorcerers are supposed to strive to become; a selfless hero who prioritizes protecting the youth. Meanwhile, Mei Mei's retreat sinks the dagger that has loomed over the viewer since the start: the reality that sorcerer society is selfish and greedy and thinks nothing of sacrificing children. The fact that she escapes to Malaysia while Nanami dies dreaming of it is just salt in the wound.

Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2's repeated exploration of exploitation has made it clear that this is not a story about fighting curses anymore, and that it never was. It is a battle between a deeply flawed society and a genocidal force that wishes to upend it, in which the protagonists have no choice but to participate. Mei Mei represents the allure of that society and the power fantasy it presents to the viewer. By all accounts, it is glorious to watch, but once the sheen wears off, it is rotten to the core.

MORE: Jujutsu Kaisen: Does Gege Fall Short in Writing Female Characters?