"I guess I don't know for sure that we're in an anime, it could be a manga or maybe even a movie! Although if it's a movie it's, like, actually several movies, there's been too many plot-relevant events already to fit in just one movie.

"...the part where I have super-everything and don't know why and no one I've met knows or has told me why either is just straightforwardly true, though."

"Okay but if people just kind of have super-everything for no reason then why is the world like this! Why isn't there, um, someone with super strength and super speed spinning a very big generator to power Tokyo, why don't the Olympics have, have." He waves a hand towards Itadori. "That!"

"See, that's what makes me think this is an anime! Anime logic doesn't explain those things, they kinda just happen. And I always figured, you know, if I went to the government with super-everything then it would turn out the anime was about, I don't know, a dystopic setting where people with superpowers exist but are kept prisoner by the government as slaves or something, and that anime would suck. ...this one kinda sucks too, I guess, to be in, I don't know if I like it better than that."

"But narrative tropes are things that we've made up, not things that actually affect reality—" uh, no, Junpei, you know curses exist and are really made by what people think are scary, try again, "—Actually no I guess they do, considering, but the scale and planning of plotting media in real life is so exponentially beyond the scope of things being made real because people think they are! Entire complicated anime plots just because the general public watches a lot of anime, that's, like, at the very least people watch different anime, how do the chosen protagonists sort themselves, who gets picked to be a protagonist, and if this is a thing about reality then why haven't we noticed it before, making up stories isn't new, humans have been doing it for millenia!"

Blink blink. "I like you. Also we should go somewhere else, your teacher is bound to succeed at retrieving his pants from the tree and come back here be overbearing and insensitive at you."

"What? Oh. Yeah. Yeah he's always like that and I have no idea how to make him stop so avoiding him is best."

Itadori shrugs. "Some people just are like that. Let's go, then," he says, and starts walking in some direction he probably didn't pick at random.

He trails after Itadori, desperately trying to figure out if reality is or is not hacked by media tropes, and where they would have historically shown up if in fact they were. World War II is very explicable, in an anime? Except history's often not quite that tidy, is it, and humans definitely like making much more simple and straightforward stories. Is magic trailing along behind what people are doing and nudging them along to do things that make tidy narratives?? How would that even work, what would that look like, what examples might show up in ways he could verify...?

He finds somewhere by a river and sits on the grass there. "You know, one possibility is that the universe started existing only a few weeks ago," Itadori muses, "when a mysterious boy with anime hair and eyes coincidentally showed up at—" Uhhhh he did not think this sentence through in advance and now he's remembering his grandfather's dead. He skips a beat, then continues, mostly-successfully hiding the waver in his voice. "Showed up where I was, with a convenient plot-relevant explanation for some stuff that had happened—that I remembered having happened—I guess that's pretty self-serving, I don't really know that the anime is about me, maybe I'm just a backstory character, maybe you're the protagonist actually and the universe started existing whenever you first discovered curses," and he's paying attention here, depending on Yoshino's reaction to that word... well, that could imply someone already met him and taught him things, right? "So this could be episode one or two and all my memories are fake."

"..... That would be the worst though!!!!"

Huh. No reaction. Itadori had sort of been expecting the plot here to be related to Yoshino having some secret undisclosed source of information about curses and magic that would be relevant but maybe not? Still keeping an eye out, anyway.

"I mean, it doesn't make much of a difference, does it? If the world started five minutes ago I'm still me and you're still you and we are still going to do what we are going to do and our relationships aren't fake even if they didn't exist before."

"Yes it does!! Because then reality is, is being simulated and we can be turned off and on again at anime-god's will and the implications for that are horrific both on a personal level and at a societal level, and, and. My head hurts. If reality is being affected by what we think it is, then stop thinking we're in an anime, it's not fair to everyone else present!"

"—what? I don't think I can change stuff just by thinking we're in an anime! That would be kinda terrifying!"

"Well it's the natural logical reasoning for it, isn't it? If reality is changed by how people think it works, then purposefully thinking it's one narrative or another is in some way, unconscious or not, a form of steering! You just said that if you had gone to the government about your superpowers that your genre of anime would be different. Anime is not a law of physics that was impressed upon reality, it's a thing people made. And if it's a thing people made because there's an anime-god writing us or whatever, that's terrifying, and if it's a thing people made that is now reflecting reality, that's also terrifying, and, and." He huffs, upset. "I have come to the conclusion that everything is terrifying. Again."

What a useful conclusion to have made, you really are enlightening the world with your brilliance, Junpei.

"That's... not quite how I was thinking about it. It's more..." Pause. What exactly was he thinking? "If... someone were writing a story about me... then this has to be a story that's consistent with a person I am, right? So if the person I am wouldn't end up in a government facility that must not be the story I'm in, and so I'm not in it because I didn't end up in a government facility." Perfect logic, that. "But I don't—well, didn't—it had never occurred to me that I could be changing actual stuff that happens just because of what I'm thinking. If nothing else, I died once."

"What!! People can die and then get better!!!!"

"It's... complicated, please don't try it, there were very special circumstances and I can't even tell my loved ones I'm alive—not for any supernatural reason!" he interrupts himself to say, before Yoshino can work himself up to an even bigger panic. "Just because of, um, politics. I'm going to, eventually. But I need to become stronger first."

"What!" adds Junpei, a little plaintively.

"I'm going about this the wrong way," he says, running a hand through his hair. "Let me start over. Hi, I'm Itadori Tōkan, jujutsu sorcerer in training, it's nice to meet you! Let's have a conversation about weird magic stuff in an order that doesn't present all of the bizarre conclusions in terrifying ways!"

"But I've already come to all of the bizarre conclusions and don't think I could possibly forget them now and, and." He scrunches his eyes shut and whines. "Hi, Itadori Tokan, jujutsu sorcerer in training, I'm Yoshino Junpei and I don't know what a jujutsu sorcerer is. Are there other types of sorcery? Is that a branch of sorcery?? Should I stop asking questions because I'm somehow going to ruin the conversation and make it existentially terrifying again??"

"You don't need to forget them, just hold them a bit so you can have some context for later. And questions are fine. As far as I know, the only type of sorcery around is jujutsu sorcery, but I've only known about jujutsu sorcery for a few weeks now and there might be a bunch of things I don't know about." He doesn't mention his anime logic-derived theory that there won't be anything else because the system feels narratively complete and anime tends to go for reasonably self-contained stuff.

Except Naruto. Fuck Naruto.

“I. Okay. And the thing you want to talk to me about is the, um, horrible magic murders??”

Yeah, it was pretty obvious. Itadori just nods, growing a bit more serious. "Yeah. Did you happen to see anything or anyone that could be responsible?" He lifts the little curse he's holding up to eye level. "Since you can see these."

“Um.”

Okay so on one hand, yes he definitely did, and probably should tell the strange loud insane person with magic, but on the other hand: Mahito is terrifying and could very easily do the same thing to Junpei, too, and furthermore he’s like, a baby born from evil spite magic who’s trying to figure out how to person. Probably when there is a baby you should… not immediately throw it to the baby police. Except, you know, the murders. The admittedly probably justified murders, considering the victims, but still.

“I feel like you know the answer to this question already, and you’re seeing how I answer it, which makes me want to shrink into an unhelpful witness ball who hides behind a lawyer that I don’t actually have, and actually did you set up the curse showing up to see if I would see it??”

Blink blink. "Did I mention I like you? Um, sorry about the unhelpful witness ball. I wasn't personally the one who set the curse," another opportunity for Yoshino to react, but Itadori thinks he won't, "there but I was part of the plan, yeah. If you couldn't see it then no foul, I'd get it later; if you could see it and could kill it then we have an unknown curse user; and if you could see it and didn't kill it—well, here we are. Didn't count on the teacher, though." Sigh. "Ijichi-san should really learn to think before he does things, and look before he thinks." He gives the curse a squeeze and it squeaks like a toy. "This one is harmless, the worst it can do is make you have a bad day, maybe a headache or your pencil breaks or your lunch bag leaks into your backpack or something like that."