I Find Kenjaku Weirdly Relatable

I find Kenjaku weirdly relatable.

Not the murdering people part.

Not the stealing people's bodies part.

And definitely not the turning an entire country into a gigantic supernatural experiment part.

I'm talking about something much simpler.

The dude just wants to build something cool.

That's basically it.

There isn't some beautiful speech about saving humanity. He isn't trying to create world peace. He isn't particularly interested in ruling the world either.

Kenjaku has been alive for more than a thousand years and somehow his conclusion after all that time seems to be:

"I wonder what would happen if I tried this."

And I understand that more than I probably should.

But the more I thought about Kenjaku, the more I realised it isn't just his curiosity that I find relatable.

It's his entire relationship with knowledge, interesting people, power, identity and creation.

Obviously with one gigantic difference:

I'd like to keep the ethics.

I Don't Need a Grand Purpose

There's this weird expectation that everything ambitious needs some profound motivation behind it.

Why are you building a company?

"I want to democratize access to technology."

Why are you working on AI?

"I want to improve humanity."

Why are you building this random search engine at 2 AM?

...

Because it would be fucking cool if it worked?

Obviously I want the world to be better. I want world peace. I want people to have better lives. I don't want people starving or fighting wars.

But if you ask me what actually makes me want to wake up and build things, it's usually much less philosophical.

I want to see something that didn't exist yesterday exist today because I made it.

That's enough.

And that's fundamentally what I find interesting about Kenjaku.

He doesn't need to convince himself that his curiosity serves some higher purpose.

He wants to see something that has never existed before.

"I Wonder If This Is Possible"

This might be my favourite type of thought.

Not:

"Is there a market for this?"

Not:

"Can this make money?"

Not even:

"Will anybody use this?"

Just:

"Can I make this?"

That's how I've ended up wanting to build search engines, programming languages, AI systems and random internet experiments.

Half the time the project begins because I discover some technology and immediately start wondering how far I could push it.

Kafka exists.

Interesting.

What if I build something distributed with it?

Vector databases exist.

Interesting.

What if search worked differently?

LLMs exist.

Interesting.

What happens if I give one tools and memory and let it interact with other systems?

The project almost becomes secondary.

The interesting part is discovering what happens.

Kenjaku operates on basically the most psychotic possible version of this philosophy.

He sets things in motion because he wants to see the outcome.

Kenjaku Is Addicted to Possibility

I think this is a better description of Kenjaku than simply calling him curious.

He's addicted to possibility.

Think about what he accumulates over his lifetime.

Bodies.

Cursed techniques.

Knowledge.

Sorcerers.

Cursed objects.

Barriers.

Political influence.

Experiments.

Relationships.

Institutions.

But he doesn't seem particularly interested in possessing these things for their own sake.

Every new thing gives him another possibility.

Another combination.

Another experiment.

Another:

"What happens if...?"

That's a builder mentality taken to an insane extreme.

You learn one programming language and suddenly you can build certain things.

You learn distributed systems and another category of things becomes possible.

You understand AI and suddenly another thousand doors open.

Knowledge compounds into possibility.

That's what makes learning addictive to me.

Every time I understand something new, I immediately start thinking about what I can combine it with.

The Creation Should Surprise the Creator

This is probably the most interesting thing about Kenjaku.

He doesn't necessarily want complete control over what he creates.

He wants something beyond his own imagination.

Normally, a mastermind creates an elaborate plan because they want reality to perfectly match their vision.

Kenjaku is almost the opposite.

He plans meticulously so that eventually he can create something he couldn't have planned.

That's fascinating.

Normally when we build software, we know roughly what should happen.

Input goes here.

Function runs.

Output comes there.

But the coolest systems eventually become complicated enough that interesting behaviour emerges from the interaction between their parts.

You build the rules.

Then you watch what happens.

That's why simulations are cool.

That's why artificial life is cool.

That's why neural networks are cool.

That's why multiplayer games produce strategies their developers never anticipated.

That's why the internet itself is fascinating.

Nobody sat down and designed everything the internet eventually became.

People built protocols.

Other people built things on those protocols.

Then other people abused those things in ways nobody expected.

Eventually you get this enormous digital organism containing Wikipedia, cryptocurrency, cat videos, Linux, anime piracy websites and people arguing with strangers at 3 AM.

The system escaped the imagination of any individual creator.

That's beautiful.

Kenjaku basically wants to do that with cursed energy.

Set the parameters.

Create the conditions.

Introduce enough complexity.

Hit RUN.

Watch what emerges.

I Like Interesting People Too

This is another part of Kenjaku that I understand.

I really like interesting people.

Especially intelligent people.

Actually, even better:

people who are better than me at something.

If someone knows significantly more than me about something, I don't find that threatening.

I want to talk to them.

I want to figure out how they think.

Tell me about the thing you've spent ten years obsessing over.

Tell me something I don't know.

Change my mind about something.

Show me a way of looking at a problem that I've never considered.

That's infinitely more interesting than always being the smartest person in the room.

And Kenjaku seems attracted to people like that too.

He doesn't necessarily like people because they're nice to him.

He likes people who are interesting.

People who can surprise him.

People with unusual abilities.

People with unusual ideas.

People capable of pushing something further than he expected.

That explains a surprising amount of his behaviour.

His Conversation With Yuki Doesn't Feel Like a Normal Villain Fight

Yuki Tsukumo is trying to stop him.

She's an enemy.

She's also one of the few people who has seriously thought about the same fundamental problem Kenjaku has spent centuries thinking about:

cursed energy.

And their interaction reflects that.

It almost feels like two researchers arguing competing theories while simultaneously trying to kill each other.

Yuki has an actual hypothesis about humanity.

Remove cursed energy.

Break away from it.

Kenjaku wants essentially the opposite.

Explore cursed energy further.

Push it.

Create conditions where something unprecedented can emerge from it.

But what's interesting is that he actually engages with her ideas.

He doesn't just go:

"You're my enemy, therefore you're stupid."

He listens.

He responds.

He argues.

Because Yuki is interesting.

She's intelligent.

She's independently reached conclusions about something he's obsessed with.

That's valuable to someone like Kenjaku even when she's trying to kill him.

And there's a subtle philosophical difference between them that I love.

Yuki wants humanity to become something specific.

Kenjaku wants to discover what humanity could become.

One has an ideal.

The other has a question.

His Relationship With Tengen Is Even More Interesting

Tengen and Kenjaku are both ancient.

That immediately makes their relationship different.

Kenjaku doesn't treat Tengen like some mystical god.

There's almost familiarity there.

And I think they're two completely different answers to the same question:

What happens to a human after living for a thousand years?

Tengen chooses stability.

Preservation.

Maintaining barriers.

Maintaining the existing system.

Kenjaku chooses change.

Experimentation.

Breaking systems.

Creating new conditions.

Tengen spends immortality trying to keep things functioning.

Kenjaku spends immortality poking reality with a stick.

And I know which one sounds more fun.

Gojo Shows How Pragmatic Kenjaku Actually Is

Kenjaku knows Gojo would destroy him.

And I love what he does about it.

He doesn't fight him.

There's no:

"I must prove that I'm stronger than Satoru Gojo."

He doesn't need the ego victory.

He needs Gojo removed from the system.

So he builds a solution around the constraint.

Prison Realm.

Geto's body.

Gojo's memories.

The psychological shock of seeing his dead best friend standing in front of him.

Everything is engineered around achieving the actual objective.

And it works.

This tells you something important about Kenjaku.

He obviously has an ego.

But his ego isn't:

"I need everyone to know I'm the strongest."

It's closer to:

"Look what I managed to make happen."

That's a builder's ego.

And I understand that too.

I don't necessarily care about being the best programmer alive.

But if I build something and someone goes:

"Wait, YOU built this?"

That feels fucking amazing.

The Kamo Clan Shows He Doesn't Actually Care About Power

Kenjaku taking over the Kamo clan is another really revealing moment.

One of the Three Great Families.

Centuries of prestige.

Political influence.

Status.

Authority.

For another character, becoming its head could be an entire life's ambition.

For Kenjaku?

It's infrastructure.

He doesn't want the Kamo clan because being clan head makes him feel important.

He wants what controlling the clan allows him to do.

Access.

Authority.

Information.

Influence over jujutsu society.

And when those things stop being useful, the title itself means almost nothing.

That's a distinction I really like.

He doesn't collect titles. He collects capabilities.

Power isn't the destination.

Power is a tool.

Money is similar for me.

Obviously I want money.

A lot of it.

But the interesting part isn't watching some number increase forever.

Money means freedom.

Servers.

GPUs.

Travel.

A lab.

People I can hire.

Experiments I can fund.

Things I can build.

The capability is more interesting than the status.

And Then He Just Lets Noritoshi Go

This tiny interaction says a surprising amount about Kenjaku.

Noritoshi Kamo confronts him.

Kenjaku has taken over his clan.

Kenjaku could kill him.

But...

why?

Noritoshi isn't particularly relevant to what Kenjaku is doing anymore.

Killing him wouldn't meaningfully advance anything.

So Kenjaku essentially leaves him alone.

That's an interesting contrast with villains who kill people simply to demonstrate how evil they are.

Kenjaku absolutely will kill people.

He has done things infinitely worse.

But violence isn't necessarily the thing motivating him.

If killing someone provides no interesting or useful outcome, sometimes he simply doesn't bother.

It's almost an optimisation problem.

Does this person matter to the experiment?

No?

Okay.

Moving on.

That somehow makes him both less cartoonishly evil and much more disturbing.

Choso Shows the Horrifying Side of the Same Personality

Then you look at Choso.

For Choso, everything Kenjaku did is intensely personal.

His brothers.

His existence.

His family.

His suffering.

Kenjaku's experiments shaped basically his entire life.

And from Kenjaku's perspective?

It was an experiment.

That's horrifying.

The most important event in somebody else's existence can be an abandoned prototype to Kenjaku.

The Death Paintings reached their limits.

Okay.

Learn something.

Move forward.

That's the dark version of a trait I otherwise admire:

not becoming emotionally attached to failed experiments.

When I'm building software, that's useful.

Spend three days trying something.

Doesn't work.

Fine.

Delete it.

Learn from it.

Build version two.

When the "experiment" is a human being?

Slight problem.

Again:

I'll keep the builder mentality.

Kenjaku can keep the crimes against humanity.

His Relationship With Sukuna Is Also Different

Sukuna is one of the strongest beings in existence.

Almost everybody's relationship with Sukuna therefore revolves around fear, worship, hatred or trying to control him.

Kenjaku's relationship feels much more transactional.

He understands what Sukuna is.

He respects the variable.

He makes arrangements.

He works around him.

But he doesn't seem interested in worshipping Sukuna or proving himself against Sukuna.

That's another thing I like about Kenjaku.

He can acknowledge:

this person is better than me at this.

And then continue thinking.

Someone else's superiority doesn't automatically destroy his identity.

That's incredibly useful in real life.

There will always be someone smarter.

Someone richer.

Someone stronger.

Someone who has been programming longer.

Someone who understands mathematics at a level I don't.

Good.

I want those people around me.

Because they expand what I think is possible.

Kenjaku Doesn't Seem to Hate Anybody

This might be one of his strangest traits.

Think about how many villains are powered by resentment.

Geto hates non-sorcerers.

Mahito enjoys human suffering.

Sukuna operates according to his own desires and looks down on almost everyone.

Kenjaku manipulates people, kills people and destroys lives.

But remarkably little of it feels like:

"I fucking hate you."

He doesn't need hatred.

Yuki can be interesting.

Gojo can be an engineering constraint.

Sukuna can be a useful variable.

Tengen can be an ideological opposite.

Choso can be an experiment.

Noritoshi can simply be irrelevant.

Everything gets classified according to what it means to the larger system.

That's why Kenjaku feels unusually calm.

He Isn't Emotionless Though

This is important.

Kenjaku isn't some boring hyper-rational robot.

He's playful.

He jokes.

He laughs.

He gets excited.

He gets surprised.

He enjoys conversations.

Sometimes he seems to genuinely enjoy himself.

And that's why Takaba might actually reveal more about Kenjaku than almost anybody else.

Takaba gives Kenjaku something incredibly valuable:

novelty.

Something unexpected.

Something weird.

Something he hasn't experienced a thousand times already.

And Kenjaku actually participates.

He plays along.

He has fun.

Underneath the thousand-year conspiracy, there's still somebody capable of thinking:

This is fucking hilarious.

That's such an important part of his character.

His experiments themselves almost feel like play conducted at a monstrous scale.

I Understand the Boredom Too

Imagine living for a thousand years.

Money probably stops being interesting.

Status definitely stops being interesting.

Politics repeats itself.

Empires appear.

Empires disappear.

Currencies disappear.

People fight over slightly different versions of the same things.

At some point your biggest enemy might simply become boredom.

So you start experimenting.

Obviously I'm 23, not an immortal brain hopping between corpses, but I understand the tiny human version of that feeling.

Doing the same thing repeatedly gets boring incredibly quickly.

Build another CRUD dashboard.

Okay.

Build another landing page.

Okay.

Connect another REST API.

Fine.

But tell me:

"Let's build a search engine."

Now I'm awake.

Tell me:

"Let's make our own programming language."

Fuck yes.

Tell me:

"What if we tried building a tiny GPT from scratch?"

Now we're doing something interesting.

Sometimes the difficulty isn't a downside.

Sometimes the difficulty is the reason to do it.

I Used to Think About Body Hopping Too

This is another reason Kenjaku immediately fascinated me.

I've had variations of the same fantasy since long before watching Jujutsu Kaisen.

Not literally cutting open someone's skull and moving my brain into them.

Please don't arrest me.

I mean the technological version.

Brain uploading.

Consciousness transfer.

Artificial bodies.

Replacing biological parts one by one.

If you copied every connection in my brain perfectly into a computer, would that computer be me?

If I gradually replaced neurons with artificial neurons while remaining conscious the entire time, at what point would I stop being biological?

Would I ever stop being "me"?

Could consciousness eventually become independent of the body it was born in?

And Kenjaku takes this question even further because after switching bodies for centuries, what does identity even mean?

Your face isn't you.

Your surname isn't you.

Your family isn't you.

Your body isn't you.

Your sex isn't even necessarily a permanent characteristic of you.

They're interfaces.

The persistent thing is the mind.

That's basically supernatural transhumanism.

Just considerably more disgusting.

One Lifetime Feels Too Short

There are too many things I want to understand.

Programming.

AI.

Distributed systems.

Physics.

Mathematics.

Biology.

Languages.

Space.

Economics.

Hardware.

Robotics.

And every subject branches into another hundred subjects.

You learn programming and discover compilers.

You learn compilers and discover language design.

You learn AI and discover linear algebra.

You learn linear algebra and suddenly mathematics opens into an enormous universe.

You learn networking and eventually you're wondering how undersea cables work.

You read about computers and somehow three hours later you're reading about semiconductor lithography.

How the hell are you supposed to finish all of this in eighty years?

Imagine having 500.

Imagine having 1,000.

I'd probably still procrastinate for the first 200, but eventually we'd get somewhere.

And after a thousand years, something else probably happens.

Knowledge stops being the scarce resource.

Novelty becomes the scarce resource.

You've seen governments rise and collapse.

You've met geniuses.

You've watched generations die.

You've learned things and watched humanity rediscover them.

Eventually:

"I've never seen this before."

might become the most exciting sentence imaginable.

And I think that's basically Kenjaku.

I Don't Want to Rule the World

This is another thing I like about characters motivated primarily by curiosity.

Power itself seems boring.

Suppose someone gave me unlimited money tomorrow.

Obviously I'd buy a nice house.

Nice computer.

Travel.

Help my family.

Do all the normal things.

But after that?

I'd probably build a lab.

Servers everywhere.

GPUs.

Robotics equipment.

3D printers.

Electronics.

Maybe a telescope.

Then I'd gather a bunch of extremely smart weirdos, preferably people significantly smarter than me in different fields, and say:

"Okay, what cool shit can we make?"

That's infinitely more appealing to me than sitting in some giant office being important.

Money is interesting primarily because of what it allows you to do.

Building is the fun part.

Not Everything Needs to Become a Startup

This is something the internet has ruined slightly.

You build something cool and immediately someone asks:

"How are you going to monetize this?"

Maybe I won't.

Maybe seven people will use it.

Maybe nobody will.

Maybe I'll abandon it in three weeks.

Maybe the entire purpose was learning how the thing worked.

That's okay.

Some things should exist simply because someone thought they would be cool.

Linux started as a hobby.

The early web was full of people building strange little websites because they could.

Open-source projects are often maintained by people spending hundreds of hours solving problems for strangers without some enormous financial reward.

Human beings like making things.

We've probably always been like this.

Someone thousands of years ago looked at a rock and thought:

I bet I could make this pointier.

And now we have GPUs.

Building Is a Form of Thinking

There's also something you can only understand after actually building something.

Reading about distributed systems isn't the same as watching your own distributed system fail.

Reading about databases isn't the same as discovering that the schema you thought was brilliant three months ago is now ruining your life.

Reading about programming languages isn't the same as writing a parser and suddenly understanding why languages make certain design decisions.

Building forces reality to argue with you.

You have an idea.

Reality says no.

You modify the idea.

Reality says slightly less no.

You keep going.

Eventually something works.

And now you understand the subject differently.

That's probably why I keep wanting to build things even when perfectly good versions already exist.

I don't need to build a search engine.

Google exists.

That's not the point.

I want to know what it feels like to build one.

He Treats Failure as Information

This might be the most builder-like thing about Kenjaku.

A thousand-year plan can't possibly work perfectly.

Things fail.

People behave unexpectedly.

Experiments reach dead ends.

Circumstances change.

Kenjaku adapts.

That's what building actually feels like.

You rarely have:

idea → implementation → success.

It's usually:

idea → implementation → disaster → debugging → slightly different disaster → rethink everything → somehow it works.

Failure isn't necessarily evidence that the entire idea was stupid.

Sometimes failure is just information.

Okay. That didn't work. Why?

Then you try again.

Over centuries, Kenjaku has basically turned iteration into a philosophy.

Again, unfortunately, his unit tests are human beings.

Curiosity Can Be the Purpose

Maybe this is the main thing I find relatable about Kenjaku.

Curiosity doesn't need to justify itself with some greater mission.

Sometimes:

"I want to know what happens."

is enough.

Scientists have done experiments because they wanted to know what happens.

Programmers build useless programs because they want to know whether they can.

Kids dismantle toys because they want to know what's inside.

Humans crossed oceans without knowing what was on the other side.

Curiosity is one of the strangest things evolution gave us.

We don't just want to survive.

We want to know.

And then, once we know something, we immediately want to fuck around with it.

There Is One Pretty Important Difference

Of course, Kenjaku represents what happens when curiosity has absolutely no ethical boundary.

That's where I stop relating to him.

There's a massive difference between:

"I wonder what would happen if I built this."

and:

"I wonder what would happen if I used millions of people as unwilling test subjects."

Curiosity isn't automatically good.

Neither is technology.

Building something because it's interesting doesn't remove your responsibility for what the thing does.

Maybe that's actually what makes Kenjaku such an interesting character.

He's curiosity completely detached from empathy.

The builder instinct with every safety mechanism removed.

The scientist without an ethics committee.

The engineer who never asks whether something should be built after discovering that it can be built.

And unsurprisingly, that becomes horrifying.

I want the curiosity.

I'll keep the ethics.

I Just Want to See Cool Things Exist

I don't know what I'll ultimately build.

Maybe I'll build a successful company.

Maybe I'll contribute to something important.

Maybe I'll build hundreds of stupid projects and three of them will be interesting.

Maybe one day I'll work on something genuinely new.

I hope so.

But I don't need to convince myself that everything I make is part of some enormous mission.

I want to meet people who know things I don't.

I want people around me who are better than me.

I want to learn strange things.

I want to combine unrelated ideas.

I want to ask stupid questions.

I want to build things that might fail.

And every once in a while, I want something to work significantly better—or significantly weirder—than I expected.

Sometimes I just want to sit in front of a computer, have a stupid idea and spend the next six hours finding out whether I can make it real.

Then finally run it.

Watch it work.

Lean back.

And think:

Holy shit. I made that.

Maybe that's why Kenjaku fascinates me.

After a thousand years, money, status, identity and power aren't really the point anymore.

The scarce thing is surprise.

Something genuinely new.

Something even he couldn't have predicted.

Kenjaku doesn't just want to build something cool.

He wants reality to show him something he hasn't seen before.

And I think I understand that.

Kenjaku just took it way, way, way too far.