DISCLAIMER – SPOILERS FOR THE FOLLOWING ARCS: Hidden Inventory Premature Death Jujutsu Kaisen chapter 0 The Shibuya Incident
Jujutsu Kaisen is a fairly recent Shonen Jump title by Gege Akutami which has gained worldwide recognition and massive hype over the past few years, reaching its peak of popularity with its anime debut at the beginning of October 2020. Undoubtedly, one of its bestselling points was its solid cast of characters, two of which are the topic for the blog – Satoru Gojo and Suguru Getou.
Satoru Gojo and Suguru Getou in particular are characters that caught my eye upon my initial reading of the manga. One being the strongest of them all, and the other seeming to pull the strings behind the scenes, implying his greatness via his powerful followers while never directly harming anyone until a certain point – it made me wonder what Akutami had in store for their story arc.
Well, in a complete subversion of my expectations, shortly after the Origin of Obedience arc, we have a look into Gojo’s life as a second year in JujuTech in the arc Hidden Inventory – alongside Getou playing the role of his best friend. The “strongest duo” as labeled by the world of jujutsu, was assigned a task that will change not only their lives but the course of Jujutsu culture as they knew it.
However, I want to focus on Gojo and Getou’s relationship specifically, and theorize if it was truly doomed from the start – or, if they had done things differently, it could’ve been saved. How will I determine that their relationship was saved given a certain scenario? The answer to that is probably “if any course of action could have prevented Getou from becoming a serial murderer”. Although, even if Getou didn’t become a murderer, I think certain outcomes could kill the relationship all the same.
The Hidden Inventory arc is all about how Gojo and Getou receive a mission to find the “star plasma vessel” and escort her to the higher-ups of the Jujutsu community as a sacrifice to merge with master Tengen to preserve his body and prevent making an enemy out of him. Riko Amanai, the star plasma vessel, is currently being targeted by a religious order vehemently against the merger called the “Time Vessel Association”, but is often referred to as the “Star Religious Group”, who has hired assassins to take her life, one name of importance being that of a Touji Fushiguro, a non-sorcerer born from the Zen’in clan, physically gifted via heavenly restriction, similar to that of Maki Zen’in.
In the three days as Amanai’s escorts, they’ve been attacked by about three different assassins, two of which came after Amanai for bounty money, a fake bounty placed by Touji to keep Gojo in check. One assassination attempt also ended in the kidnapping of Misato Kuroi, who was promptly rescued by request of Amanai and they spend the rest of their time in Okinawa to relax.
When they arrive back in JujuTech, the duo let their guard down, only to be ambushed by Touji the second Gojo’s Infinity was released. To the insistence of Gojo, Getou escorts Amanai to the school basement near where the merger will take place while he stays above to fight off Touji. As the two arrive at their destination to part ways, Getou gives Amanai a choice whether or not she wants to go through with the merger or stay and live her life with Kuroi and her friends, since the merger will essentially kill her existence and they secretly agreed to shut the process down and protect her if ever she no longer agreed to the merger. Tearfully, she admits she wants to go home, but as she reaches to take his outstretched hand, she’s shot in the head by Touji.
Touji reveals that he murdered Gojo and probably Kuroi as well and deeply disturbs Getou in the process. He attempts to take him down as revenge for his fallen friends but is swiftly defeated by Touji and nearly killed before Touji decides against it, worried about unleashing his curses to the world if he were murdered. Instead, he mocks the fallen by telling them that blessed sorcerers like them lost to a monkey like him – the term “monkey” being used as those who cannot use Jujutsu.
When Touji delivers the body of Amanai to the cult, Gojo returns as a dead man walking, as he raised himself from the dead using his reverse cursed technique, a technique that can be used to heal. They fight with pure battle lust, Gojo losing his sense of self like a madman, unlocking his insane powers during his heightened sense of post-resurrection euphoria and utterly destroying Touji in their battle. A short while later, Getou discovers the cursed spirit Touji carried around with him on his way to the cult building, inside where he finds Gojo with Amanai’s corpse in his arms.
Gojo asks Getou if they should murder everyone in the room in that present moment, as he can’t find it in himself to regret it if he did it right at that moment, but Getou tells him that “there’s no meaning to it”, as the perpetrators have already fled. Gojo wonders if meanings are even important, but Getou says it’s especially important to sorcerers like them, ending the Hidden Inventory arc and starting the Premature Death arc.
A year goes by, and Gojo and Getou grow in distance from each other. Gojo rigorously trains himself to achieve the full potential of his powers, taking the stepping stones of the present-time Gojo we, the audience, know of. Meanwhile, Getou is deeply shaken by the whole incident with Touji and Amanai and enters a deep, dark depression. As Gojo trains, Getou notices, he alone continues becoming “the strongest”, leaving Getou all by himself. Their duo missions become separate solo missions, and he barely sees him anymore, and he’s falling apart.
Since the incident, he can’t stop thinking on Touji’s mocking words, the ugliness of the non-sorcerers that clapped for the death of a young girl all in favor of worshipping an “undefiled god”, and he questions his reasons for becoming a sorcerer over and over, struggling not to falter. He meets a special grade sorcerer named Yuki Tsukumo, who shares her ideals with him, but his mind twists her reasoning into something “crazy”, as Yuki describes it. He says that he used to believe that non-sorcerers should be protected by the strong, but now he’s unsure if humanity is worth fighting for. It gets worse when Yuki tells him that Tengen stabilized, either they had another vessel ready in case of failure, or a new one was born. Getou seems to have taken it as it was: someone was always going to have to become a vessel and die, and that whether or not Amanai was the one who died was completely on the hands of Gojo and Getou at the time.
In September, he goes on a mission to investigate a cursed spirit that was reported to be kidnapping people from a certain village, causing abnormalities in their deaths. After exorcising the spirit, he meets two young, abused sorcerer children in a cage, where the non-sorcerer villagers have kept them and called them monsters. Getou finally snaps at this moment, seeing how these children were being treated by the so-called “monkeys” and massacres all one hundred and twelve non-sorcerers in the village, taking in the abused children and flees.
Gojo hears the news from his teacher and is in complete denial and confusion, disbelieving that his best friend could do something like that. Later in the day, he finds Getou in the streets of Shinjuku thanks to Ieiri meeting up with him and giving Gojo a call. They argue on a crowded sidewalk, Gojo unable to comprehend the madness that Getou has fallen into and saying it to be impossible; Getou tells him that if Gojo could do it, then it probably isn’t impossible. He tells Gojo that that was the life he has chosen and turns to leave, saying that Gojo should kill him if he wants, that there is meaning to it. Gojo prepares to aim his Purple technique at him, but can’t bring himself to kill his best friend.
Going forward nine years later, Satoru Gojo is 27 years old and a teacher in JujuTech. Two of his students were attacked by a high-grade grade spirit in their recent mission, and Gojo confirms it to come from Suguru Getou, who then arrives at the school to greet Gojo and the principal and announce his plans to massacre all non-sorcerers on both Kyoto and Shinjuku on the night of December 24.
On the day of reckoning, Getou comes back to the school to attack one particular student – Yuuta Okkotsu – to steal the incredibly powerful cursed spirit attached to him, Rika, and wreak havoc on the city. Gojo, in the streets of Shinjuku, is looking for Getou, before realizing his plan might have been to isolate Okkotsu all along, and teleports two of his students two back their classmate up. Four of the students, including Okkotsu, fight Getou until two students are gravely injured, and it enrages Okkotsu so much that he bounds his life to the cursed spirit Rika and nearly kills Getou, but he makes his escape.
Finally, bleeding out and missing an arm, Getou sits behind a wall until Gojo comes and finds him. Gojo admits to Getou that he trusted that he wouldn’t kill young sorcerers like that, where Getou scoffs in disbelief. He’s given a chance to say his last words before Gojo kills him for good, and he admits that he harbors no disdain for JujuTech, but in such a world that they live in, he knew he’d never be able to truly be happy. Gojo says something to him, but it isn’t revealed what he says, and it makes Getou deadpan for a second, before giving one last laugh, incredulous at the fact that Gojo won’t swear or berate him one last time. Gojo kills him, and then brings his body into the forests near the school facility, burying the body in the dirt himself.
Now, after summarizing a whole lot of history between them, the burning question is – would anything have changed if they did anything differently? Could they still have still been together and happy if anything changed?
From observation, I can tell that the root cause of their falling out would be the corruption of the overall community, but that’s not something anyone can change, so we can turn our attention to the instigator – the murder of Riko Amanai. Touji Fushiguro’s interference in their mission to escort seemed to be the cause of their grief. Looking back, I initially thought about if Getou instead chose to stay back with Gojo and have Kuroi bring Amanai into the basement would have worked out.
For a while, I thought that the additional manpower would have worked; as the strongest duo, they could have taken him down, preventing the death of Amanai and successfully stopping her from entering the merger and living happily ever after. However, the fact that Touji easily cuts through his white dragon curse, I think his plan would change from targeting Gojo alone to incapacitating Getou then using that to frazzle Gojo. If both Gojo and Getou go down, Amanai still dies in the end, and the possibility of recovering quickly enough in Getou’s case would probably work out. So, the theory would fail.
Another thing could be that Gojo not putting down his Infinity in the first place. It’s risky, but maybe he should have waited until they were inside to dispel the ability, maybe then Touji wouldn’t have attacked then. Except, I also think it’s a lost cause, he would probably get desperate and attack last minute. Another factored risk would be the fact that Gojo could fry his brain because it was running for a whole day and a half by then.
Getou could have also taken a suspense horror genre type of move and hidden her somewhere for the time being. While Gojo fights Touji, he could have gone and hidden with her somewhere in the Star Tomb and entered various barriers. Maybe within one of the barriers, he could have told her about their decision to protect her. I think the possibility of success is next to nothing, but there’s a small chance it could fool him enough for long enough to either leave the school or enter the merger. Touji’s heavenly restriction gives him heightened senses, which is how he followed Getou in the first place, and if Amanai were to attempt an escape, he’d probably stop her and kill her. I don’t have too much faith in this theory, either.
The alternative I have the most confidence in would be if Gojo and Getou had told her about their decision amid the Okinawa trip. They’re far away from Touji already, and if they had given her the choice and she agreed, they could have gone on the run from there. I doubt that Touji could find them if they went far enough, especially since the Gojo family owns a jet. The duo could have laid low and quietly relocated them somewhere far away. The only problem would probably be whether or not Amanai agrees, since her decision from the plot hinged on the good memories she made with her friends, but the chances of her agreeing would still be decent. I think Touji wouldn’t target her for too long either if the star religious cult realizes she has no desire to take part in the merger, calling off the monetary reward. This theory, I feel, holds the most potential.
However, let us say Amanai still gets murdered and the events in the star religious cult take place. Gojo still rises from the dead and Getou still has to stop him from killing the entire cult. That was their beginning of the end, but maybe they could have mended it somehow. Getou enters a deep, dark depression due to their mission failure, furthered by Gojo leaving him alone all the time. Would their relationship still have survived if only this situation were handled differently?
My theory here is that during the one-year time skip after Gojo’s resurrection, he goes through an episode himself, but handles it far differently than Getou handles his trauma. While Getou completely buries himself in his thoughts, Gojo seems to forcibly push the thoughts out of his head, as if he were performing his Infinity technique in his brain. He constantly trains to become stronger in a short amount of time, to what I presume to be his coping mechanism at work. He probably wants to be able to protect Getou the most after losing Amanai and dying to an enemy like Touji which, while justified, is not an excuse to neglect his connection with Getou in favor of being his protector.
It’s an interesting thing, back in the star religious cult building, Gojo suggests a massacre to Getou, who notices his pain and drags him out of his head, saving him in a way back then; yet, when Getou is trapped inside his mind, he barely notices anything wrong and jokes around like usual. He even comments on how skinny his friend has become, but believes the lie that it’s only “summer stress”.
I believe that Getou could have been saved if Gojo had noticed more. The coffin that was Getou’s distortion was his encounter with Yuki Tsukumo, who had unknowingly given him the idea of massacring all non-sorcerers. If there was an intervention, and if Gojo was part of that intervention, I don’t think he’d have gone down the awful path we witness him going down.
I do believe that their relationship would change in a way no matter what if Amanai were to die, but I think, had Gojo only been there for him more often and paid more mind to his best friend’s wellbeing rather than his protection, then instead of the relationship going up in flames, their bond would grow ever stronger as a bond forged in hardship.
In conclusion, yes, if a few different choices were made, maybe the friendship between the two would have been preserved, and that there could be two different ways that it could be done. One is to disobey the mission details and run away with Amanai, and the other simply being “Gojo should have paid more attention to his boyfriend” for the Premature Death arc. Granted, were the first option to be chosen, Gojo would likely never have taken in Megumi Fushiguro, then, in turn, he’d never have met Yuji Itadori, and the students at the beginning of the manga would have died, and Sukuna would have never manifested. The second option would probably be better, but I doubt that Gojo’s attention would magically make the trauma vanish, but I believe Getou would just be a jaded teacher with questionable morals but a heart wanting the best for everyone.
Final thoughts, it’s unfortunate that events played out that way. Gojo never destroyed Getou’s corpse after killing him, opting to bury him in the woods, allowing him to be possessed by Noritoshi Kamo to bring about the age of curses. When confronted with the corpse, Gojo’s capture in the Prison Realm was due to his weakness towards his best friend. I’ll tell you, I started crying during the scene where he knew it wasn’t him, revealing how much Gojo loved Getou even until now. In the end, all we can do is theorize what-ifs and look forward to what Gege-sensei does with their characters.
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