#like I’m just a lil sick of hearing people bash him just for not outright saying what was going on between them

[lunerabo]

Been thinking about making this post for a while and only recently figured out a good way to articulate it but I unironically think Gege’s kind of a genius for using what is most definitely censorship of a gay relationship to his advantage in writing whatever was between Gojo and Geto.

I think what a lot of people get wrong in saying things like how this was a perfect setup for a romance and it’s bullshit that he wrote all that just to label them as best buds is the fact that they’re forgetting that in general homosexuality is nowhere near as accepted over there as it is in the west. BL and GL absolutely exist but read any of them and it becomes very clear to you that the general attitude towards it is that it’s seen as a taboo fetish and not a preference. If you have that in mind, it suddenly makes a lot more sense why they’d want to censor it especially in shonen manga (even though you still get boys falling face first into racks large enough to have their own gravitational fields—something Gege’s also notoriously avoidant of, thank goodness). Not saying it’s right or that it’s not problematic, but when you take into account the differences in attitudes across the board, it’s easier to understand.

Gege’s aware of this. If he wasn’t, and was less careful about putting queer characters in the story, jjk would have never seen the light of day. We know he’s not shy about doing that, as proven by the existence of Megumi and Mai, who are both canonically bi/pan, Kirara, a trans woman, Mahito, who is genderless, and Kenjaku and Uraume, who are loosely implied to be nonbinary or genderfluid. The reason he can get away with this is because none of them are the larger-than-life hero holding the gaze of every fucking pair of eyes on the planet even in death. He’s already toeing the line with the aforementioned characters, for the same reason that other progressive authors only ever seem to make background and side characters queer but never the super important ones. Gojo as a character has a lot of fans and is arguably the thing that attracts readers in the first place, so it goes without saying that a less accepting audience would get turned off by the confirmed queerness of their favorite character. It also goes without saying that this would be very likely to cost Gege his job, so confirming anything is too big of a risk to take. All he can realistically do is tiptoe around it and lay out the signs and hope we read them right.

Gojo and Geto were not in a relationship and couldn’t ever have been simply because Gege wasn’t allowed to write that. So what do you do when something in real life is influencing the story like that? Ultimately, you have to find a way to use a roadblock like that to make it fit in seamlessly, and I think he did a really good job of it. Because the fact is actually that it wasn’t a perfect setup for a romance; the feelings were there but the lives they led were not ones that a relationship develops in, especially not after both of them fell off opposite deep ends in the different ways that they did. What it was a perfect setup for was tragedy. He can’t confirm a relationship but clearly he’s allowed to make them pine for each other, so being barred from bringing them together helped to create a tragic so-close-yet-so-far type of situation that fit everything really well, and made it that much more painful to see them ripped apart.

Idk. I’m tired.