Gojo Satoru, Getou Suguru,

and the Death Grip They Have On My Heart

I never thought I’d get so attached to two characters while

watching/reading Jujutsu Kaisen. Their relationship and all of the content that
comes out of it, the way even the author practically made them for each other,
grips my heart in more ways than one. I don’t really make art of them a lot
despite them being my favorite duo in JJK, but my Twitter profile sure is filled with
art of them, together or separated. I am now taking this time to go through their
characters, history and figure out why I like them so much. (Also this has spoilers
for Jujutsu Kaisen, sorry!)

SatoSugu, Separately

Gojo Satoru

I’m not gonna lie, but as it is with everyone, I really liked

Gojo because he was pretty. As shallow as it sounds, it’s the real
reason I first got into him. The next thing that got me falling
for him was just his personality. For the strongest jujutsu
sorcerer, he definitely doesn’t act like it sometimes. He’s very
nonchalant, playful and in the fandom’s eyes, he’s almost childish in a way.

As I read through more of the manga, it just solidified my love for his
character. He appears to be extremely confident in his abilities and reputation
as the most powerful sorcerer, having an extensive amount of pride and
arrogance. He is convinced that he is the strongest in the world, which he
technically is. He is capable of being cold-blooded. He will prioritize his
enemies' destruction over saving innocent people when he believes that the
sacrifice is unavoidable. However, this only applies to people killed by his
opponent. He will not do permanent damage to or kill anyone innocent to
gain the upper hand.

He doesn’t really have respect for the jujutsu higher-ups as they have
old-fashioned ways. Gojo’s goal is to reform the jujutsu world from the bottom
up through education. He hopes that one day it will result in having a new
generation of sorcerers that can become his equal. It’s the whole reason he
became a teacher at Jujutsu Tech High.

Despite all the haughtiness and strength, Gojo is still human. He’s only
made out to be this sort of “god” because of the abilities he was born with. It’s
a “gifted child” kind of trope thing I can very heavily relate to. The only
difference is that Gojo is carrying it into adulthood, the pressure of carrying
his clan’s name and the title of “the strongest sorcerer” on him. He has felt
grief. He was visibly panicked and distraught when he learned his best friend
(Getou) had become a murderer. Getou’s change made Gojo become more
level-headed, instead of turning disruptive and chaotic.

He couldn’t bring himself to bring Suguru to his

execution, postponing it for 10 years. He attempted
to reason with him, but in the end, he had to
accept the loss of the one person he truly saw as
his equal. The trauma over this ultimately became
his downfall in the Shibuya arc.

Being the strongest sounds like a great thing, at

the same time it sounds exhausting. Gojo got so
swept up in his own self that he forgot to look
around, even at his best friend. His arrogance as a
 teen rendered him blind to and cost the one person he relied on and
felt equal to.

Gojo Satoru is a complex character that throws my mind and heart

through a rollercoaster of emotions. He’s more than just the pretty bastard
most fanart of him depicts. To me, yes that’s one part of him, but he is also a
person who can never catch a break because of the expectations he needs to
hold up, whether he likes it or not. Someone who looks doomed to be alone.
As he said it himself, "throughout the Heavens and earth, he alone is the
honored one."

Getou Suguru

I remember my mom asking me, “Why do you like him? He’s a villain,
isn’t he?” She has only seen the anime Getou (which frankly, isn’t the real
Getou at that point… but that’s another story) but Getou Suguru, in Gojo’s
past, is someone I fell just as hard for.

For me, he was someone who matched Gojo’s energy well, despite
seemingly being Gojo’s opposite. He’s the kinder and calmer one of the duo
when they were in high school. He believed that sorcerers were meant to
protect non-sorcerers. Gojo argued that Getou shouldn't be proud of himself
for being righteous and applying reasoning to jujutsu was stupid. But to
Getou, righteousness and reason meant everything. And so, he strove for it
too.

Getou’s moral compass was built to point in the

wrong direction eventually. While his ideals sound
positive at first, they have their flaws. He had a clear
line between who was perceived as “weak” and
“strong”. To him, the weak and the strong were two
distinct “beings” themselves. Thus, he (and other
sorcerers) had an obligation to protect these beings.
The duty he and fellow sorcerers held was the true
meaning of their existence in his eyes. Though, this
belief of his mainly came from not experiencing the
brutal reality. Toji Fushiguro, someone who blurred the
lines between the weak and strong, was the one to bring that down on to
Getou. Toji is self-serving, and he does not care about righteousness. He is
strong without being a sorcerer. He is all that Geto had never thought of
happening personified. This wavered his view of the world.

It was after a mission where the person he and Gojo were supposed to
protect died, his true encounter with the ugliness of non-sorcerers, when
things started to change within Getou. This is the assumed point where he
started to turn “evil”. Though, there is no actual clear point. Getou’s spiral into
the worst was a combination of his experiences with people, the flawed
system of the jujutsu world, his own ideals, and a bit of bad luck.

He was torn. He was fighting himself with the very thing he thought
was absolute: righteousness. He felt that he was wrong because he had failed,
both his duty and his ideals. He used to think protecting non-sorcerers was
right but began doubting if they're worth fighting for. He was unable to tell
the difference between the preciousness and ugliness of the weak,
comparing being a jujutsu sorcerer to running a marathon where the end of
the road is just a mountain made of his fellow sorcerer's corpses.

Then along came Yuki Tsukumo to push him further into his spiraling
decline. Yuki inadvertently gave a purpose to Getou’s hatred for non-sorcerers.
She advised him to choose between the side of him that's devoted to being a
jujutsu sorcerer and the other side that looks down on non-sorcerers. Until
this point, he just knew he hated weak “monkeys” (non-sorcerers), but now he
could see them holding the strong down. This point is also where he
generalized that sorcerers are all good and strong.

Getou would never act unless there were reason and meaning to his
actions. But now, there was meaning to the festering negativity towards
non-sorcerers. All that had happened, and was
happening, was thanks to “monkeys” alone at the
cost of the strong. All for ridicule and hatred. His
feelings were set into stone. He hated the weak,
and now, he could kill them too. It had a purpose,
and he would go ahead to achieve it. Maybe he
knew it would earn him hate, and it was genocide,
but all he could see was the greater good. A way
to stop an illogical and unfair cycle of the strong dying for
the weak. If it were to protect the strong, he would now
do it over and over again. At that point, he did not care if
anyone understood him anymore.

The event that finally cracked him was his final

mission. He found two young girls being mistreated by
non-sorcerers for having curse-related abilities. He made
his final decision at that moment, rescuing the girls and
killing everyone in the village that mistreated the two. He
officially became a curse user, leaving his Jujutsu High pin and all the
memories of the school, his classmates and teachers behind. Contrary to
what Gojo’s goal is, Getou decided that he doesn't like monkeys and will fight
for a world of only sorcerers.

Getou was an incredibly kind person. He was polite, and he was caring.
You could even say he’s a little more emotional and sensitive than average. He
took the mess of his experiences and felt them to a greater degree because it
was all personal to him. He did not deserve any of the things that happened
to him. But they did happen, and his spiral down the dark road was inevitable.

Even then, he was still Getou Suguru, with his ideals finding a stable
ground to rest on. His compassion didn’t go away, but he redirected it to the
strong now. He was righteous to the very end. He killed his parents because
they did not fit his ideal world. He took on a “new family” he strove to protect,
going to great lengths for them. He didn’t need anyone to understand him
anymore. He knew what he needed to do, even if it came at the cost of
sullying his name.

To me, Getou is an even more intense rollercoaster to ride. I think of him

as someone who had the right ideas but was led down the wrong path.
Watching someone spiral into darkness when you’ve seen them at their
greatest hits way too close to home for me. It’s the desperation of wanting
him to get back on track but not being able to do anything about it (besides
write fanfiction of it, of course. But nothing can ever change canon, sadly.)
Getou is just as complex as Gojo is, and even though he’s part of the “villain”
cast, with his history and background I can’t help but feel a little sad for him.
He was someone who needed a hand from a person he relied on. But that
person was too busy with himself to even notice. When Gojo did notice, it was
truly too late.

SatoSugu, Together

Now, this is where it truly starts to tear me apart.

THE PAST

Getou and Gojo went to Tokyo Jujutsu High together to become jujutsu
sorcerers. They had conflicting beliefs and morals, them being that Suguru
believed in the strong protecting the weak, while Satoru would rather do
whatever pleased him instead. Their clash in ideology caused them to argue
and clash heads as teenagers. Despite their differences, however, they still
grew to become best friends and often fought together in battle. Their bond
was close enough that seeing Getou again after his death was the only thing
that made Gojo lose his otherwise undeterred calmness during battle.

Getou was basically Gojo’s moral compass. When Gojo asked Getou
whether he should kill the cultists who killed the girl they were supposed to
protect, his friend reassured him that it would be meaningless, and there
always needs to be a reason for a sorcerer to take a life.

As time passed, Gojo perfected his cursed technique. Gojo was half of
the strongest duo, but now was rapidly progressing towards becoming the
strongest. The farther Getou was getting from his purpose, the farther his
best friend was getting from him too. Even Geto and Gojo’s abilities were a
symbol of the irreparable rift that would split between them. They oppose
each other in its essence: Gojo’s technique allows him to be untouchable to
his enemies, while Geto is forced to consume curses in order to defeat them.
Like clockwork, he had to swallow curses over and over. Curses that tasted like
indescribable grossness. Curses that non-sorcerers created themselves. Gojo
wouldn’t understand Geto’s suffering from the distance where he stood at.

And then Gojo really did become strongest. He could do anything he

wanted – things that were impossible for the others to do. When before Gojo
and Getou were both the strongest, now it is only Satoru Gojo, leading Yaga,
their teacher, to send him on more solitary missions. It left Suguru alone most
of the time, and it may have caused the change in his mental stability. Getou’s
endless cycle of having to consume curses, aided by his loneliness, lead to
him feeling isolated and depressed with no visible way out of it. At this point,
Geto didn’t even crave empathy from Gojo anymore because he had already
reached his zenith. And he didn’t hate Gojo either at any moment. It was
simply how they were meant to be – picking different paths.

After a talk with Yuki Tsukumo, Getou decided he does not feel that
devoted to the version of this world where he has to fight curses all his life to
save the lives of ordinary people. Following this was his mission where he
rescued two girls with cursed abilities while massacring the rest of the village.
From that moment Geto chose to stray from the path of humanity, starting
his own fight for the world free of non-sorcerers and at the same time curses
born from human vices.

The news of his best friend becoming a

curse user and having to be executed on sight
stunned Gojo. Getou did not inform him on
anything of what had happened, and he
certainly did not expect anything like that from
someone as morally stable (or so it seemed) as
his friend. It is explained to Gojo that Geto, who
is now considered a curse user, left his home
and it is apparent that he killed his non-sorcerer
parents. This further sent Gojo into shock and
refusal.
 Gojo quickly found Getou (through means of their other classmate,
Shoko) and demanded an explanation for his actions. Getou told him there is
not much to it, besides what he already said to Shoko about his new vision of
the world. They argued, with Gojo calling back to what Getou had said before.
That there is no meaning in killing innocent people. Gojo told Getou that his
goal is unattainable, leading Getou to note that this remark is very arrogant
on Satoru’s side, considering he is now the strongest. After all he has said “If it
is possible for you, can you really go around telling people it is impossible?
Are you the strongest because you’re Gojo Satoru, or are you Gojo Satoru
because you’re the strongest?” Gojo became agitated and was ready to use
his powers against him, but when Getou says that he is free to kill him if he
wants, if he finds meaning in that, he hesitates.

In the end, Gojo was unable to bring himself to kill his one and only best
friend. Even when his friend has strayed far from the path they were originally
on, he still considers him as his friend. Gojo admits that being the strongest
does not grant him every wish and some things are beyond his control — he
cannot save someone who did not want to be saved.

It’s only years later, when Gojo had officially become a teacher at
Jujutsu Tech, did the former duo cross paths again. Getou stages an attack on
the school. He is defeated by Okkotsu Yuta, one of Gojo’s latest students. Gojo
found Getou in an alleyway somewhere on the campus, where they held their
final conversation. Gojo admits that he still harbors trust for him, and that is
why he was sure Getou would not kill any of his students. Getou said that
despite everything, he has no hard feelings against anyone from Jujutsu
High, but still, in the world they live in, it's impossible for him to be happy. In
his reply, Gojo's final words to him are unknown, but whatever he said made
Getou laugh for the last time in his life. After that, according to Gojo’s own
words, he ends Getou’s life. His one and only friend, his moral compass, the
other half of the strongest duo, died by his hands.

–Or so we thought.

THE PRESENT

On October 31, 2018, Gojo arrived in Shibuya where he would come face
to face once more with his (former) other half. Though, something isn’t right
with this Getou. The person had Getou’s face and talked to him as if he knew
Satoru in person, the entity mentioning that it has been a while since they
last met. Gojo demanded that the entity tell him their actual identity. Getou’s
imposter insisted on being Suguru, mockingly accusing Gojo of having
forgotten him. This didn’t convince Gojo in any way. He did not believe his
perception, it cannot be him, even with his ability telling him that the body
and the cursed energy of the person in front of him belongs to no one else
but Getou.

It turns out that it was indeed not Getou Suguru. The imposter admits
to be an ancient entity, known as Kenjaku, that had an ability to take over
bodies and use their cursed techniques. He tells Gojo that him obtaining
Getou’s body was Gojo’s fault as he did not get rid of his body properly after
killing him.

This ultimately led to Gojo being captured and restrained. Gojo Satoru,
the strongest sorcerer in the world,
had only one weakness that makes
him shake even just a little. It was his
one and only best friend.

Before being sealed away

forever, Gojo made one last remark
referring not to the impostor, but to
Getou, as if he was still alive
somewhere in there. He called out to
any remains of his friend’s
consciousness left in the vessel and shamed him for letting somebody else
use his body. Surprisingly, Getou’s body responded to it, his right arm
grabbing himself by the throat and trying to strangle himself. Kenjaku
laughed at this, noting it is the first time something like that happened. Gojo
got annoyed at this, asking him to hurry up and it prompts Kenjaku to close
the gate.

News then spread out that Gojo Satoru has been sealed by “Getou
Suguru”. Despite being sealed by him, Gojo was suspected of working with
Getou because of his connection to him. The higher-ups of the jujutsu world
believed Gojo faked Getou’s death, and caused the Shibuya incident. For that,
Gojo is permanently exiled from the jujutsu world, and removing the seal
from his prison is considered a criminal act.

The two who were the strongest, both shunned by the jujutsu world.
One who spiraled down a dark path and used, the other suspected of a crime
he did not commit because he could not let go of his only friend.

The Conclusion

It’s a tragic story. The events of the main

story are directly caused by what they meant to
each other during their lives, the way Getou died,
how it affected Gojo, the way he could not get rid
of the body afterwards. After postponing Getou’s
execution for 10 years, Gojo finally gives in, but
even after his death deems him his one and only
friend. The memory of Getou and the shock
caused by seeing his face during the Shibuya
incident, turned out to be Gojo’s only flaw that
lead to fatal consequences.

My love for the two is a lot of me projecting bits of my own life and the
friends I have onto them. Despite being practically surrounded by people I
call my friends, there are only a few or should I even say only one person I
really lean on. Being a moral compass, watching someone spiraling into a
dark path (though thankfully I pulled them out of it), there are different
aspects of these characters that I can relate to, even if they’re on a smaller
scale (seeing as this is a shounen anime and everything is pretty much
dramatic in them).

Seeing myself in the two characters has caused me to become

attached to them. They’ve become my comfort characters that either give me
happiness or extreme sadness, depending on what pops up on my timeline.
The what-would-be’s of SatoSugu shenanigans during their time or the
what-if’s of Gojo being able to bring Getou back to the right path. All of these
tug at my heartstrings in every way possible.

In the end, the strongest sorcerer duo written by an amazing author,

with all their intricacies, complications, and stupidity that make me laugh
sometimes, have my heart in a death grip that I can’t escape from and I’m not
complaining in any way about it. (Well, maybe sometimes when I’m bawling
my eyes out over some angsty fanfiction)