JJK Villains

Jujutsu Kaisen's villains come in three broad types. There are cursed spirits, which are born from negative human emotion and mostly want humans gone. There are curse users, sorcerers who use their power for themselves or against the jujutsu establishment. And there are the ancient ones, Sukuna and Kenjaku, who have been around for a thousand years and treat everyone else as pieces on a board.

What makes the JJK characters villains list interesting is that the lines blur. Choso starts as an antagonist and ends up protecting Yuji. Toji is hired muscle, not an ideologue. And several of the Culling Game players are only villains in the sense that they are trying to kill the people we're rooting for.

Ryomen Sukuna

The King of Curses is the series' biggest threat and the one with the simplest motive: he does what he wants. He isn't trying to remake the world or prove a point. In Season 2 he wakes up in Shibuya, kills Jogo, burns a huge section of the city and treats the whole thing like a stroll. That's the scariest part of him. He has no plan to stop.

Kenjaku

Kenjaku is the planner. A sorcerer who survives by swapping into other people's bodies, he spends most of the story wearing Suguru Geto's corpse, stitches across the forehead and all. The Shibuya Incident is his operation, the Culling Game is his design, and a surprising amount of the series' backstory turns out to have his fingerprints on it. He is finally killed by Yuta in Chapter 243.

Mahito

Mahito is the villain Yuji takes personally. A cursed spirit born from humans' hatred of each other, he can reshape souls with a touch, and he enjoys it. His arc with Junpei Yoshino in Season 1 is where a lot of viewers first realised JJK wasn't going to play nice. Read the full Mahito profile.

Suguru Geto

The real Geto is the villain of Jujutsu Kaisen 0, a former special grade student who decides non-sorcerers are monkeys and tries to wipe them out. Season 2's Hidden Inventory arc shows how he got there, and it's one of the few villain origins in the series that actually makes you sad.

Mahito's group of special grade cursed spirits is often called the disaster curses, because each one is born from humanity's fear of something natural:

• Jogo, the volcano-headed one, is born from fear of the earth and volcanoes. He's the one who attacks Gojo in Season 1 episode 7 and learns very quickly how bad an idea that was.
• Hanami comes from fear of forests and nature. It's calm and almost gentle in its speech, and its fight with Yuji and Todo during the Goodwill Event is one of the first season's best set pieces.
• Dagon is a sea curse. It spends most of its time in the background until Shibuya, where it gets a domain, a strong showing and then an extremely bad day once Toji arrives.
• Mahito is the odd one out, born from people rather than nature, and the most dangerous of them.

Toji Fushiguro is a sorcerer killer with no cursed energy at all. In Season 2 he takes a contract to kill Riko Amanai and beats teenage Gojo along the way. He isn't evil in the grand sense. He's a man who walked away from his clan and doesn't much care about anyone, including, for a long time, his own son.

Uraume is Sukuna's loyal servant, an ice user who has been waiting a millennium for their master to come back. The Death Painting brothers, Choso, Eso and Kechizu, are half-curse, half-human beings created by the sorcerer Noritoshi Kamo (the ancient one, which is a whole separate rabbit hole). Naoya Zenin is the Zenin clan's heir and possibly the most unpleasant human in the series, a smug misogynist who makes the clan's rot impossible to ignore.

The Hasaba twins, Mimiko and Nanako, and Miguel and Larue are part of Geto's family in JJK 0. Geto rescued the twins from a village that was abusing them, which is the moment in Hidden Inventory that pushes him over the edge.

Not by power. By how much they make the story better.

1. Mahito. He's cruel in ways that matter to the main character, and he forces Yuji to confront what he is. Every scene with him has consequences.
2. Suguru Geto. The best-built villain origin in the series. You understand every step, and you still disagree.
3. Sukuna. As a presence he's unmatched. As a character he's thinner, which is partly the point.
4. Kenjaku. A great mystery for a long time, slightly less interesting once explained.
5. Toji. Barely a villain, but his short arc is so good that he belongs here.

Season 1 is Mahito's show, with Jogo, Hanami and a disguised Kenjaku moving in the background, and the Death Paintings Eso and Kechizu in the last arc. Jujutsu Kaisen 0 belongs to Geto and his followers. Season 2 gives us Toji in 2006 and then throws almost every villain into Shibuya at once. Season 3 shifts to the Culling Game, where the antagonists are mostly players: Reggie Star in Tokyo Colony No. 1, Naoya Zenin back home, and the Sendai Colony's ancient sorcerers. If you're anime-only, Sukuna and Kenjaku's biggest moments are still ahead of you.

Is Sukuna stronger than Kenjaku? Yes, by a distance. Kenjaku's danger is planning, not raw power, and he knows it. That's why he needs Sukuna back in the first place.

Are cursed spirits always villains? Mostly, but not always. Rika in JJK 0 is a cursed spirit who protects Yuta. Panda isn't a curse at all, despite what people assume.

Who is the villain with stitches on his head? Kenjaku, wearing Geto's body. The stitches are where he swaps brains.

Kenjaku is the hardest JJK villain to explain because so much of him is hidden for so long. On the anime, he appears first as the stitched-forehead "Geto" helping the cursed spirits, and you're meant to be confused. Shibuya confirms that the real Geto died at the end of JJK 0 and that someone else is using his body.

The three main villains work on different levels, which is why the series never feels repetitive. Sukuna is a physical threat: if he's free, people in the area die. Mahito is a personal threat: he targets the people Yuji cares about and wants Yuji to understand that it's his fault. Kenjaku is a structural threat: he changes the rules of the world itself, from sealing Gojo to rewriting society through the Culling Game.

That's also roughly the order you meet them in terms of importance. Mahito dominates Season 1, Kenjaku takes over in Shibuya, and Sukuna's real menace builds slowly until the end.