The aspect of this that gets me heated and grinds my gears like no other fanon representation ever has is that Geto's character is grounded in and defined by emotions.
Geto, while seeming to come off as level headed in his initial introduction in the Flashback Arc is pretty quickly shown to be the more emotional of the two. He gets easily annoyed with Gojo when Gojo goads him into a fight over his beliefs. He admonishes Gojo for how he treats others and cites how Gojo's actions make other people feel. He looks out for and caters to Riko's emotions from almost the first time he meets her all the way up until her death. He lets his emotions get in the way when he fights Toji and its in direct counterpoint to his fight with the Curse User earlier in the Arc; his attacks are direct and obvious instead of thought out and cunning like we saw before because he just got told that his best friend is dead and he's (rightfully) upset about it.
And then you fast-forward a year and he still hasn't let any of his trauma go. Emotionally, he's a mess and it affects everything about him. He doubts himself, he doubts his job, he doubts the kindness of others, he's lost weight, he's haggard in appeance, and he can't fix any of these things because he's stuck in the middle of a depressive slump due to trauma.
The Geto at the end of the arc is markedly different than the Geto at the beginning and its because of his emotions. Its because he can't process them. Its because he's being pulled in too many directions by them. His love for his friends. His grief for Riko and Kuroi. His anger at the SPV association. His worry over Gojo growing stronger and the sense of abandonment that comes from that. And when he tries to bring logic into what happened instead of processing his trauma from an emotionally intelligent standpoint, it makes his entire spiral worse and leads to him losing his way even further.
Geto, at his core, is an empathetic person that had his faith in the kindness and compassion of humanity obliterated in the harshest way it could be and then was left with no way to properly process or cope with the fallout.
On the other hand. Gojo is a character that wears his personality on his sleeve, while hiding his true emotions from others. At the beginning of the arc he pretty much never lets his actual feelings out to play. He challenges and picks on other people's emotions for kicks and gives witty comebacks when the opposite is asked of him. A lot can be said about how this is defense mechanism, and yeah, I do think that its a learned behavior so that people don't want to deal with him long enough to actually get to know him and see the chinks in his armor. It keeps people out, it protects him and his heart, and its an aspect of his character that he continuously displays well into his adult life.
Gojo showing his emotions is rare. Gojo letting the emotions of others effect him is rarer still. But the flipside is that whenever he lets himself make a decision based on empathy or lets his emotions take control instead of his logic, it backfires on him every. single. time.
He makes the decision to give Riko one more day and it leaves him exhausted and vulnerable to attack. He nearly dies, Riko dies, everything falls apart. When confronting Geto in Shinjuku, he lets his anger and hurt rule his argument and isn't able to connect with Geto properly. Neither of them listen to each other and Geto, seeminly level-headed in their argument, throws one of his greatest fears into his face. After Geto's death, he can't bring himself to dispose of Geto's body and it makes it possible for Kenjaku to get a hold of it for his plans. When Gojo sees Geto again in Shibuya, he can't keep his emotions in check and it's what allows him to be exiled.
Quite literally, Gojo being emotional is a bad thing for him in the same way that trying to make sense and bring logic to his experiences was bad for Geto. When the two of them swap these aspects of their personalities, it ends in tragedy for themselves, for others, for the story.
dededos
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
prguitarman
izzy806
ellievsbear
