#I swear if Yuta dies I will personally hunt Gege down

[elsartzz]

I love him your honour.

[linkspooky]

The Protagonist of Another Story

Aren’t protagonists just the worst? Just assuming everything revolves around them you know, like they’re the main character of some story? Gege has stated several times they want to write a story where no one single person is right, where they can’t always be correct no matter how good those intentions are. I believe he’s continuing that theme by now introducing another protagonist just like Yuji, who assumes he’s the hero of this story and making them fight each other. More on the relationship between Yuta and Yuji under the cut. 

1. Heeeeeeeeere’s Yuuuuuuta.

A stated by Gege themselves in their commentary for this week, Yuta’s central character trait is his indecisiveness. In other words, Yuta is lacking so much in confidence that he doesn’t make decisions for himself and instead relies entirely on what other people say. 

Yuta’s central flaw he’s confronted with in volume zero is his codependency towards others. He relies on other people to validate him, to tell him that he’s a good person and that he’s worthy of living. 

There’s nothing wrong with this desire, it even parallels Yuji’s in a way. Yuta wants to be surrounded by others who tell him it’s okay for him to keep on living. Yuji wants his life to mean something, he wants to help others so he’ll have plenty of people surrounding him when he dies. It’s basically the same desire, a desire to help people and be needed by people so they won’t have to be alone. 

However, there’s two layers where this behavior can also be a problem, especially when applied to Yuta. Maki is the first one who calls it out. Is Yuta actually a good person, or is he merely acting like one to treat him nice. 

Yuta is entirely passive, and rather than active control of circumstances he tends to play the victim and pretend to be helpless. He believes himself to be a good person who hasn’t done anything to deserve what’s happening to him, and that can make him blind to his own faults. Like a person who has been bullied in the past, who acquire a victim complex, and now sees any kind of conflict as someone attempting to bully them. Yuta doesn’t seem to ever realize when he might be in the wrong, because his view is that in every situation he’s just a good innocent person being bullied. 

Passive isn’t good, it’s just passive. Yuta has a hard time seeing when he’s at fault in situations. Such as when he believed for several years that it was Rika who cursed him, when  in fact it was the other way around, he was the one who cursed Rika.  

Yuta is also, someone completely codependent. He’s so afraid of losing people that he can’t function without them. This also informs the reason why he cursed Rika, because he himself couldn’t let go of her. Yuta learns in volume zero that he has to let go of old friends, because he can always form new friends, he can always find new reasons to keep on living, however he clearly hasn’t completely conquered this flaw. 

His lack of faith in himself, his codependency, is what ultimately leads to his indecisiveness. He can’t have faith in his own decisions so he puts faith in the people around him instead to reassure him and back him up. However, this makes him insanely protective of the people around him, because if he ever loses him then Yuta’s fragile world comes crashing down. He is entirely dependent on the people around him in order to keep living. 

Yuta doesn’t actually care about the world at large. He doesn’t even care enough to argue with Geto about his points. He’s not even sure that Geto is the bad guy, he literally just wants to kill Geto for hurting his friends. 

For Yuta, all that matters is protecting his small little bubble of friends. He’s learned that he can make new friends,but not that the world exists at large outside of his greater bubble in sorcer society. 

2. Me, The Protagonist of Reality. 

So, Mahito kills one of Yuji’s friends right in front of him. Yuji then swears bloody violent revenge, doing whatever he can to take down and kill Mahito, unable to move on until he’s punished Mahito for the crime of killing Junpei. 

In this situation, Yuji is the good guy, and Mahito is the bad guy, right? Therefore Yuji is justified in only thinking of Mahito as someone he must kill. However, Yuji has a tendency to assume that he is the good guy in every situation. Yuji believed in a very simple story, that he was good and the people he was fighting against were evil. 

Even when the story grew more complicated, Yuji just decided he didn’t have to think too hard about his role in things. He didn’t have to think about the bigger picture, he just had to kill his enemy. 

Mahito is very much a straight forward bad guy, but the problem with this line of thinking is that not every situation is going to be as black and white as it was with Mahito. The problem with the decision to just not worry about it and not think things through, is that when you get into one of those gray situations you won’t be able to realize that you’re in one. Killing for revenge is wrong, because it’s not usually a straightforward story. Now, Yuji is on the opposite side of the story. 

Yuji’s direct actions cut Inumaki’s arm off. It is a very grey situation. Yuji made a choice to walk around with Sukuna in his body, knowing Sukuna might be able to take over at any time. At the same time it wasn’t Yuji’s intention to hurt Inumaki in this way. 

The same way that Yuji doesn’t want to think about the moral grays in his situation. It’s very likely, that Yuta doesn’t want to think about how his situation must be gray as well. Yuta right now sees himself, as Yuji saw himself to begin with, someone killing for revenge in order to punish them for hurting a friend. 

I really think it’s much more interesting if Yuta actually does want to hunt Yuji down, rather than secretly pretending to be on his side all along, because it’s a direct consequence for both of them declaring they don’t need to think about these things. If you don’t want to decide for yourself, then others will make your decisions for you and you get used. 

Straightforward revenge has always been a mistake for the characters before. When Choso wanted to kill Yuji as punishment for killing his brothers, the consequence to that was him nearly killing someone who could have potentially been another of his brothers. This might be the parallel to the Choso situation, Yuta wholeheartedly believes that Yuji is an enemy he must kill and it’s a consequence for both of them. 

They both think they’re on the good side. They both believe they’re on the right. Yuji wants to help people, and Yuta wants to protect his friends but they don’t think of the greater interpretation of their actions, because they both assume they’re good. 

However if they can’t both be the good guy then what else can they do? PROTAGONIST BATTLE! COME ON, PUT YOUR DUKES UP!  WHOEVER SURVIVES GETS TO BE THE REAL MAIN CHARACTER OF REALITY.