#it doesn't make gojo inferior or superior like it does with him and geto | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

linkspooky · 3 months

Note

How do you feel about higuruma in the last couple chapters + how he died(assuming hes dead he seems pretty dead), normally characters with death wishes like choso for example are denied that wish, but it was granted for higuruma. just in a meta sense how do u think that served the story

The reason why Choso wasn't allowed to die, meanwhile Higuruma dies is less Gege being inconsistent and more they are two different characters with two different arcs. Choso's atonement arc is pretty clear, his arc is probably the most complete arc in the manga. Higuruma doesn't have an arc, he doesn't grow or adapt or change in time even though he has the potential to, and even though he's challenged head on by Sukuna and that's why he dies.

I don't mean to say that Higuruma is a bad character when I say that he doesn't have an arc, but rather his character remains static even though he is a well-rounded character. We can dive deeper into Higuruma's character though, to show what I mean when I say that his arc is static and that's the reason he died.

The Ugliness of the Weak

Everyone jumps to Nanami right away when looking for a character to compare Higuruma too, but while there are superficial similarities the best comparison is actually Geto.

Nanami is probably the prime example of a first grade sorcerer, he and Yuji are probably the only sorcerers who do their jobs for non-selfish reasons. Nanami could have had an escape from sorcery to make more money in a safer job, but he goes back to sorcery because he believes that work is more useful to society and worthwhile.

Admittedly, Higuruma starts in the same place as Nanami, wanting to do his work as a defense attorney even though the odds are stacked against him, instead of being a prosecutor or a judge because he doesn't want to turn his eyes away from others.

However, herein lies the rub, while they share the desire to do a job that's useful for others, especially people who can't really fight for themselves, and they both work hard thankless jobs Nanami never develops a superiority complex about it.

Nanami never thinks of the people he helps as weak and inferior. In fact, he criticizes for only fighting for his ego. He doesn't separate the strong and the weak as different categories, he just does his job out of a sense of duty.

Higuruma is compared to Gojo in terms of his raw talent as a Jujutsu Sorcerer, a modern sorcerer who learned domain expansion, and domain amplification in less than a month and then reverse cursed technique in a few minutes when pressed by Sukuna. He was also considered a genius at lawschool as well who could have easily climbed the ranks further if he didn't stay a defense attorney.

Higuruma does his job out of a perceived duty to keep his eyes open to justice, but he still looks down on those same people he's defending. He sees them as a category separate to himself, they are the weak defendants and he is the savior.

Now, who has a talent similiar to Gojo, started in a place of wanting to help the weak out of a sense of duty, while also harboring a superiority complex against them because he was considered such a genius? Ding, ding, ding you get no points for that one, it's Geto.

"The weakness of the victim. The weakness of the accused. Ugly that's what I thought every time I tried to help anyone." "What I saw was nothing out of the ordinary. A hideous evil, known to everyone."

They're both characters who had impossibly hard jobs who still put their noses down to the grindstone and did their jobs out of a sense of justice, or obligation, or because they upheld themselves to a higher moral standard, only to get sick of it from the sense that none of their actions were making a difference and also the ingratitude of people they were trying to save.

They're also, despite being geniuses incredibly fragile ego-wise. Geto has a hero complex, and when Toji easily defeats him, nearly kills Gojo, and kills Rika in front of him he's shown he's a normal person like the rest of the world and can't deal, even saying spiteful words to Gojo that if he had all of Gojo's strength anything he wanted would be possible. This is coming from Geto who had always treated Gojo like an equal and never envied him up until this point.

Then there's Higuruma who calls the victims of an unfair justice system ugly and weak because they ummm... stare at him.

LIke, wow! They're going to go to jail for a long time for a crime they didn't even do, and they're just a little bit upset about it?

How dare they.

They're looking for someone to blame because they're in a bad situation and they're freaking out?

This perfectly human reaction is called "ugly" because Higuruma sees himself in a superior category to these people. He calls empathy looking at someone's weaknesses, and he felt the people he tried to sympathize with and understand were ugly.

I mean yeah I guess freaking out when they were going to prison for a crime they didn't commit and blaming Higuruma who was overworking himself trying to help them wasn't very cash money of them, but you know what else isn't very chill?

Flipping out and murdering a bunch of people the exact moment you're granted a power like Jujutsu by the culling games. Geto and Higuruma see themselves in a category superior to the weak people who sometimes aren't perfect victims and sometimes aren't grateful for their sacrifices, but when given power how exactly do they use it?

Geto after snapping quickly takes over the same cult that killed Riko Amanai an innocent girl, and uses it for much more nefarious purposes. Higuruma quickly becomes a much worse person than the supposed ugly crimminals he was defending the second, the literal second he's granted power.

Geto and Higuruma are just as capable of being bad victims as the same kind of bad victims they looked down on. They're just as affected by trauma, and just as willing to do bad things when put into bad situations because guess what... they're still human. The strong are equally as human as the weak. They see themselves as better than others, and their altruism isn't 100% altruistic (but to be honest no altruism is completely unselfish) because it comes from a place of perceived charity work. When they are hit with the realization that they are just as human, and therefore just as capable of erroring they can't cope.

Which is where we finally get to my point, if Choso is not allowed to die for atonement then why does the story kill off Higuruma and grant him his death wish?

Here's where I tie him to Geto again. (A lot of characters parallel with Geto really including Yuji several times but that's a different post, like Higuruma doesn't have nearly the same bodycount as Geto and he doesn't have any genocidal ambition but that's why he's a character foil and not the exact same character.)

Arguably, Geto also had a death wish that was granted by Gojo himself at the tragic end of Jujutsu Kaisen Zero. While he never directly says so like Choso and Higuruma do there are plenty of lines that indicate it.

He says that he can't be happy from the bottom of his heart in this world, that's the same as basically saying he can't continue living in the world. Years earlier in Hidden Inventory in a panel that parallels this scene he also says that he'd willingly let Gojo kill him and there'd be meaning in that death. At the end of Zero, Geto is crawling away from Yuta ready to continue the fight again and when Gojo suddenly appears he basically makes no attempts to resist.

You could even say that Geto was throwing his life away in pursuit of an impossible dream to begin with. In the light novel adaptation of this scene, the narrator even speculates that the world was simply too cruel a place for Geto to live in.

'...no matter what, I hate non-sorcerers. But it's not like I hate everyone at Jujutsu Tech. It's just...' It's just that it was what Geto had to do. In some ways, Geto and Yuuta were the same. Geto was too sincere. To someone like him, the reality that the world of sorcerers presented to him was just too cruel. '...that in a world like this, I couldn't be truly happy from the bottom of my heart.'

So arguably Geto had a death wish too, and that wish was granted by Gojo in the end, while Choso's was denied.

To live for the purpose of being yourself. And for that goal, Geto could only continue to pursue his twisted dream, drowning himself in the curse that lies in the gap between ideal and reality. This was the final confession of a man who could only choose to warp himself, who had erased himself in pursuit of his goals. The only person who could bear such a curse was Gojo Satoru.

The prose even further compares Geto to Yuta in how they're too sincere, and how Geto can't change himself in the face of a cruel world. Geto dies not because of his death wish though that's part of it, but because of his inability to adapt and grow.

Then we reach Higuruma, who is literally a DEFENSE ATTORNEY, who is supposed to sympathize with accused murderers, and even actual murderers that he has to defend at court. Yet, this DEFENSE ATTORNEY, can't see a single reason to live and atone and redeem himself for the murders he's committed.

Higuruma's a defense attorney, but his cursed technique is a prosecutor and a judge that hands out death sentences. Despite his stated goal of being a defense attorney and wanting to sympathize with human weakness, in the end he cannot forgive crimminals and he also cannot forgive himself.

If anything, the difference between Choso and Higuruma is that Choso still has things to live for. He has a death wish and a wish to atone, but what keeps him going is his desire to protect Yuji. Higuruma the DEFENSE ATTORNEY has given up his role as a protector and is only dealing out punishments.

A character who is still capable of growing and changing in a narrative usually lives, unless they're a mentor to be sacrificed like Nanami. A character who does not grow either doesn't get screentime or they die. Higuruma couldn't see forgiveness or atonement for crimminals, he could only see punishment and because of that when he became a crimminal too he accepted his punishment and died.

#higuruma hiromi #jjk higuruma #jjk meta #metasks #geto suguru #itadori yuji

111 notes · View notes