Crunchyroll’s Hottest New Anime Just Hosted Its Own Small Jujutsu Kaisen’s Most Famous Arc
Crunchyroll is featuring a perfect shonen anime this Summer season, and as new episodes are released, Black Torch is proving to incorporate all the best elements of a great shonen anime. While the anime initially emerges as something similar to Naruto, thanks to the same core elements, from its main character to the dynamic of its main trio, Black Torch is surprisingly also emerging as an anime similar to Jujutsu Kaisen. It starts with the protagonist. Jiro Azuma has the same foundation as Yuji Itadori, being physically gifted and sharing a close relationship with his grandfather.
Meanwhile, the premiere episode also features another similarity with Rago, a Mononoke, essentially a spirit who is known as a legendary spirit among other spirits, entering Jiro and granting him his powers. This essentially poses the question of whether Jujutsu Kaisen has finally found a good Sukuna. However, the series doesn’t stop its similarities there, and as its battles unfold, it delivers the same early-action elements as Jujutsu Kaisen, with the Bureau, a secret task force responsible for dealing with Mononoke, providing the same sense of gravity as encounters with cursed spirits. Now, in the latest episode, Black Torch has started a new arc that can’t help but be compared to Jujutsu Kaisen‘s Shibuya arc.
Black Torch‘s Latest Arc Is Impossible Not to Compare to Jujutsu Kaisen‘s Shibuya Arc
With so many similarities to Jujutsu Kaisen already, Black Torch‘s latest arc, which features the main trio entering an area covered by a veil cast by the Mononoke, makes it feel like a small Shibuya Incident arc of its own. It features humans being trapped and used to lure out Rago, much like the cursed spirits’ plan to lure Gojo and bring out Sukuna to join their forces. The latest episode also features Rago stating that he doesn’t wish to join the Mononoke, just as Sukuna did, albeit in a much more action-oriented way.
However, Black Torch‘s latest arc isn’t on the same caliber as Jujutsu Kaisen’s Shibuya arc, as the latter was on a much larger scale, with deaths surrounding almost every major event. Still, Black Torch‘s mini-Shibuya-type incident is a classic shonen action arc that makes it feel incredibly intense. This is a major event that also features Jiro’s first transformation, perfectly complemented by Rago’s power and emerging as a new addition to the classic shonen hero transformations. But Black Torch also adds its own twist to this dynamic, allowing it to stand out among modern shonen anime.
That said, ever since Black Torch began airing this summer, it has indeed felt like a classic shonen anime with elements drawn especially from Naruto and Jujutsu Kaisen. However, the interesting thing is that Black Torch was the first manga to appear before Jujutsu Kaisen. Therefore, it is truly possible that some of Black Torch‘s events might have influenced Jujutsu Kaisen, which picked up on its classic elements and made them even better, emerging as one of the best modern shonen series of all time.
