Jogo, the special-grade curse from Jujutsu Kaisen, has an erupting volcano for a head and, for an origin, something more unsettling than evil: fear. He was born, like all curses, from the terror and hatred that humans pour onto the earth —disasters, lava, whatever razes villages without asking permission—. And yet Jogo does not think of himself as a demon. He thinks of himself as the legitimate one: he calls curses "the true humans" and considers people a cowardly anomaly that hides behind cursed energy without admitting that they themselves manufacture it. For Thorsten Sellin's culture conflict theory, that contempt is not a loose psychological trait: it is the voice of a complete code of conduct, foreign to ours, that claims for itself the right to exist. Jogo does not break our norms out of perversion. He breaks them because he lives faithfully by his own.
// The theoryTwo codes that cannot fit in the same land
The Swedish-American criminologist Thorsten Sellin, in Culture Conflict and Crime (1938), argued that much of crime does not spring from the evil individual, but from the clash between the conduct norms (conduct norms) of different groups. Every culture has its rules about what is right and what is wrong, and they do not always coincide with those of the dominant legal code, which is usually that of the majority culture. Sellin distinguished two forms of the conflict: the primary, which pits two different and complete cultures against each other —the immigrant against the host country, the colonized against the colonizer—; and the secondary, which fractures a single society into subcultures with their own rules. Jogo is the extreme, almost laboratory case of the primary conflict: he does not represent a deviant subculture within humanity, but an entire normative otherness, a form of life with its own idea of who deserves to be called real. Between his code and ours there are no nuances to negotiate: there are two truths about the world that cannot occupy the same ground. And when that happens —Sellin reminded us— whoever abides by the norms of their group is, inevitably, violating those of the other.
Loyalty to the norms of the losing code
Sellin's most uncomfortable thesis is that much of what we call crime is not an absence of norms, but loyalty to the wrong norms —wrong only from the perspective of the code that won the power to write the law—. Jogo illustrates this with a clarity that frightens. He does not act without rules: he has a crystal-clear hierarchy of values —strength, pride, loyalty to his own kind, the dream of a world where curses do not have to hide—. From within that code, exterminating humans is not murder: it is reclaiming a territory he considers usurped by beings who will not even admit to having birthed their enemies. The cursed energy that feeds him is generated by humanity; Jogo therefore sees himself as the logical consequence of a world that produces hatred and then pretends not to recognize it. The theory does not ask us to agree with him. It asks us to see that his "crime" is, to him, the fulfillment of a duty. And that we call "monster" whoever obeys a code different from the one that had the strength to become law.
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// The subjectThe volcano that believed it was the future
What is revealing about Jogo is that his conflict is not only with humans: it is also with his own powerlessness within a code that idolizes strength. He dreams of a world of free curses, but again and again he runs into beings —Gojo, Sukuna— who surpass and humiliate him, and that clash devours him as much as the contempt he feels for humanity. His pride is his supreme norm and also his wound: he belongs to a group whose highest value is power, and he is never powerful enough. When Sukuna, another curse, treats him like an insect, Jogo does not experience a tactical defeat: he experiences a crisis of belonging, the realization that not even in his world does he occupy the place his code promises to the strong. His end —weeping with rage and emotion at being recognized, for once, as someone who truly fought— says it all: Jogo did not want to destroy for the sake of destroying, he wanted a place where his way of existing was legitimate. The series does not redeem him, but it lets us see that beneath the volcano there was an almost tragic loyalty to a code that the whole world had decided to criminalize before he was even born. You can connect him with Sukuna and with Mahito: three curses, three ways of inhabiting the same normative otherness.
Jogo
// The crackWhen the "clash of cultures" becomes an alibi
The crack with Jogo is sharp, because it tempts us with two opposite abuses. The first is relativism: if everything is a "clash of codes", shouldn't his be respected as just another culture? Sellin never said that, and here it is best not to say it either. Understanding that Jogo obeys a code does not render that code harmless: his norm includes the extermination of humanity, and explaining its origin does not absolve the harm. The culture conflict theory serves to understand the conflict, not to tolerate its victims —just as the "cultural defense" before a court explains a conduct without granting it a license to kill—. Explaining the code does not exculpate the crime.
The second abuse is more subtle, and specific to this character. Jogo is not an immigrant bringing "other norms" from a real human culture: he is a being born from collective hatred, an abstraction of fear. Reading him as a simple cultural product brushes against the limit of the theory, because Sellin was thinking of human groups with history, language and territory, not of incarnations of rancor. There fiction stretches the model almost to breaking: Jogo lacks the humanity that would make his code a negotiable "culture". And yet the metaphor holds —and that is why it disturbs—: it forces us to ask how many times we have called an entire group "monster", how many times we have turned our code into the only truth and their difference into crime. Jogo does not deserve our villain's pity; he deserves that we not forget that the labels "human" and "monster" are always written by whoever has the power to impose them.
The law is written by whoever wins the narrative
Jogo matters because he takes Sellin's theory to its purest formulation: the question of the power to define. In his world, humans and curses accuse each other of being the aberration —and whoever decides which of the two is "the real one" is not reason, but the force that controls the narrative—. That is the seed Sellin planted and that critical criminology would later pick up: the dominant culture turns its own norms into penal code and automatically defines the conducts of others as criminal. Not to prove the Jogos of the world right, but so as not to be naive about how an enemy is manufactured. The lesson is not to pity the volcano, but to distrust the ease with which we call what is different a monster —and to remember that, among fictional villains, it is healthy; among real human groups, it has always been the first step toward the worst things—.
Three key takeaways
- Jogo embodies Sellin's culture conflict theory in its primary form: he is not a "bad guy" without norms, but absolute loyalty to a code —that of the curses, "the true humans"— that collides head-on with that of the dominant society.
- His contempt for humans and his wounded pride are the voice of that normative otherness: he obeys the rules of his group while breaking ours, and his tragedy is not being strong enough even within his own code.
- To explain is not to exculpate. Understanding the clash of codes illuminates how a "monster" is manufactured and who holds the power to write the law, but it does not render harmless a code whose norm is extermination. Memory is for the victims.
Sources · further reading
- Sellin, T. (1938). Culture Conflict and Crime. Social Science Research Council.
- Vold, G. B., Bernard, T. J. & Snipes, J. B. (2002). Theoretical Criminology. Oxford University Press.
- Sutherland, E. H. & Cressey, D. R. (1978). Criminology. Lippincott.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Jogo?
Jogo es un villano de Jujutsu Kaisen, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. Born from the fear humans feel toward volcanoes, Jogo does not believe he is a demon: he believes he is the legitimate life that humanity insists on denying.
¿Por qué Jogo se convierte en villano?
Jogo, from Jujutsu Kaisen, and Sellin's culture conflict theory: when two irreconcilable codes of conduct share the same world, someone ends up being the other's "monster".
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Jogo?
El caso de Jogo se analiza desde la Teoría del conflicto cultural. Thorsten Sellin's culture conflict theory explains part of crime as the clash between the conduct norms of different groups: whoever obeys their group's code may be violating that of the dominant culture, which is the one that writes the law. Jogo, the special-grade curse with a volcano head from Jujutsu Kaisen, embodies that conflict taken to the ontological level: born from the collective hatred and fear of humans, he acts in accordance with the norms of the curses —whom he calls "the true humans"— and dreams of a world where they can live without hiding. He is not an "evil" individual: he is absolute loyalty to a code that collides head-on with ours.
