As you read or watch through the Jujutsu Kaisen series, you’ll hear all the different sorcerers refer to domains and domain expansion quite frequently throughout the story, but what exactly are they talking about with this? Because Domain Expansion is considered the very best of what a sorcerer can achieve with jujutsu, and for good reason.
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Though every person in the Jujutsu Kaisen universe (sorcerer or not) is born with an Innate Domain inside of them, only jujutsu sorcerers are able to harness and expand on the true power of an Innate Domain to expand theirs into an Infinite Domain.
What Is An Innate Domain?
If you’re familiar with the concept of the mind palace, you’ve likely seen it in assorted Eastern media before JJK. It’s based on a real-life phenomenon known as the Method of Ioci, which calls on revisualizing the world around you to remember important information, and it’s used in philosophy throughout time beginning as far back as Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Other well-known Eastern IPs like the Persona series use the concept as well, presenting themselves as the “palaces” and dungeons in the games.
Domains are exactly like these mind palaces: they’re spaces inside the brain that present metaphysically, offering a visual of the domain owner’s soul. In the world of Jujutsu Kaisen, everyone has an innate domain, but one needs to be a sorcerer to really tap into its power. It seems that ordinary people aren’t aware of their domains, but plenty of powerful jujutsu sorcerers know of their own, since Domain Expansion is the most powerful ability in the world of JJK.
Since Yuji and Sukuna both share Yuji’s body, the inactive character resides within his own Innate Domain while the other is in control. Sukuna’s domain is special, though, as he doesn’t need a physical barrier to expand it.
What Is Domain Expansion?
Just as it sounds, Domain Expansion pushes the limits of an Innate Domain to encompass the surrounding area, locked in by a barrier to keep the real world completely separated from the devastation that’s all but guaranteed to occur within. To anyone left outside the boundaries of these expanded Domains, they look like a black sphere, but anyone trapped inside will see the Domain of the sorcerer using Domain Expansion. A sorcerer needs to do a specific hand motion to perform Domain Expansion.
These Domains are completely infused with the user’s Cursed Energy, and so the owner of the Domain is vastly more powerful when fighting inside their expanded Domain. When an enemy is trapped inside with them (and any escape from a Domain Expansion is all but hopeless except for the most powerful jujutsu fighters), any attack the sorcerer uses will land 100 percent of the time and with that increased power level, making it an incredibly powerful battle tool.
Should two Domains be active at the same time, as a counter-measure against being trapped inside another user’s Domain, then the more powerful of the two Domains will win out. The more extreme the power imbalance between the two, the quicker the submission of the weaker Domain.
Jujutsu sorcerers use Domain Expansion quite often in battle throughout the present story in JJK, but historically, domains weren’t always meant to be used for killing – they were used to force someone into submission, but they came to be lethal in time as more sorcerers learned of just how far they could push the limits of their domains. Kinji Hakari still uses Domain Expansion in this way, playing pachinko and entering Unkillable Mode when he hits the jackpot (since the odds of hitting one are stacked entirely against him).
Using Domain Expansion drastically decreases the sorcerer’s Cursed Energy, though, leaving them fairly fatigued afterward, so it’s often used as a last resort. The number of Domain Expansions we see throughout the series is limited because of this.
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