By S. Adila
Edited by Nadya R.
Source: https://pin.it/xi2RIWARX
“Haven’t we had enough Gojo Satoru?”
With the last stroke of drawing of Jujutsu Kaisen, one of the most prominent manga produced globally has finally met its end after Gege Akutami, the very mangaka, set down his pen after 6 years of trying to reach his fans’ demands. The definite ending, however, arose countless complaints in tandem with praises by his readers because apparently everyone can make their own interpretation out of it.
One of the complaints, however, is orbiting one of the renowned characters in Jujutsu Kaisen, namely Gojo Satoru. The one that I can confidently call a tragic character, the one whom my heart goes to. Understanding his character is not like a walk in the park, probably to some, but there are worth-mentioned characteristics of him that make him a perfect tragic hero representation.
Briefly, he is a notable sorcerer. The manga’s setting declares him as ‘The Strongest Sorcerer’ because he’s born with an outstanding, rare curse technique after hundreds of years. Living as the strongest is not a luxury. Canonically, he’s lacking emotionally and was deprived of basic social interaction at such a young age due to the relentless amount of honing his skills—so he can handle the power he didn’t even ask for and bear the title that only seems to weigh him down.
Aristotle, in his ancient treasure, Poetics, defined a tragic character as a character who is explicitly a noble man but akin to a human, imperfect, and prone to mistakes, of which the mistake will be his absolute downfall. A tragic character must also be able to spark some kind of vulnerable emotion in the audience, like a sense of pity and fear toward the fate of the tragic character.
Going back to Gojo Satoru, he is a notable character in the popular Japanese series. A sorcerer and pinnacle of jujutsu (sorcery) that causes people to either shiver in fear or idolise in awe and admiration. Notwithstanding the fact that he is all these names and the epitome of a perfect man, he’s terribly flawed, which is interesting, a little bit intriguing, because this shows that he, with a power that can snap a country in a blink, is flawed. His humane side is what trips him into a severe blunder, which occurred at the peak of his youth. Failing a mission and having to carry the corpse of a girl he took care of for days seems like the tip of the iceberg, a warning for something enormous underneath like a deadly siren.
One after another, things happened, but the initial mission ceased to succeed, leading to the death of his best friend, whom he had to kill with his bare hands. Everything went south and for the worst, but he strived stronger, putting on a pretty mask to sweep the crumbling vessel beneath it all. Flipping a coin, I would say he is the darker side of it. A bit rusty, a bit hidden over the drape of a shadow. He was supposed to be this powerful, incredible person everyone—mostly him—thought he should be, but his fate seems to have a different route for the loneliest man on his pedestal, and his mistakes, including his excessive pride, haunt him alive until the very age of twenty-nine.
I would say his downfall is a bit too tragic for a merely 2D character. At the fresh age of twenty-nine, his sole mission is to repent for what he has done to eliminate all those dreams that crawl into his mind. In making him a tragic character, unfortunately so, the supreme sorcerer of the modern era falls under the hands of the king of curses, a death that no one could’ve predicted because his students and colleagues believe in him. And his tremendous confidence, and his words. “I’d win,” by the end of it, is just a statement that even the man himself couldn’t fulfil.
He died in a gruesome way. A death no one has seen forth. Horribly so, even after his soul no longer bears his physique, he gives consent to his students to use his body for a greater means. If it comes to it, which it does, his body was used once again for the ongoing battle, making use of the last bits of the strongest sorcerer alive.
“If I cannot be wanted, I will be needed, and if I cannot be needed, let me be used until there’s nothing left of me.”
And I have never found a perfectly written quote to describe him, which, in my humble opinion, is a character that I can call a tragic one. The tragic character.
Referring back to the very first quote I wrote at the beginning of this article, he was the one who confessed that to one of his students, vulnerably so. And it just shows how human he could be. How, by the end of it, Gojo Satoru is just a character created to fit the mould of the tragic character.
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