Jujutsu Kaisen: How Did Suguru Geto Become The Main Villain?

This article contains spoilers for the Hidden Inventory/Premature Death arc of Jujutsu Kaisen

The way that the timeline has unfolded in "Jujutsu Kaisen" can definitely be a bit confusing for fans who haven't read the manga by Gege Akutami. Spread across three different timelines in reverse chronology, it's easy to see how watching the story as it's presented in the anime can be confounding, specifically when it comes to characters like Suguru Geto (Takahiro Sakurai/Lex Lang).

After all, when we first meet Geto in the "Jujutsu Kaisen" anime, we don't even know who he is. He's merely a member of the shadowy group of powerful cursed spirits who are seeking to take out jujutsu sorcerers in hopes of unleashing further curses on humanity. All the same, this changes drastically when we see him as the main antagonist in the prequel film, "Jujutsu Kaisen 0."

While we can infer that he has survived as a cursed spirit himself after his death at the hands of his former friend Satoru Gojo (Yuichi Nakamura/Kaiji Tang), this still doesn't explain how he went so far beyond his good-natured, responsible character arc in the current episodes, which flash back to when he and Gojo were still close.

In the flashback section that encompasses the first arc of "Jujutsu Kaisen" Season 2, we see a very different version of Suguru Geto. While Gojo's freewheeling devil-may-care attitude dismisses morality and righteousness altogether, Geto argues that it is their job as jujutsu sorcerers to protect regular humans from this hidden war.

This is a far cry from the character who Geto eventually becomes, a Magneto-like villain who sees sorcerers as the next evolution of humanity. As his personality and motivation begin to change, his moral code does an about-face, leading to the villainous character who we meet in "Jujutsu Kaisen 0."

The main prompt for how Geto's attitude changes toward humans comes from the selfish and prejudicial nature that he perceives in non-sorcerers. What seems to finally set him off for good following the death of Riko Amanai (Anna Nagase) is an event in which he witnesses villagers persecuting two curse users and decides to take out his rage on the denizens of the village. Here is where the character that we're more familiar with first emerges, showing that Geto's once-noble nature has been corrupted by these traumatic events. 

This leads us to "Jujutsu Kaisen 0," which sees Geto as the antagonist. Here, he hopes to defeat Yuta (Megumi Ogata/Kayleigh McKee) and absorb the cursed spirit of his deceased childhood friend Rika (Kana Hanazawa/Anairis Quinones) in order to make himself more powerful than ever. However, he is defeated by Yuta and Rika and subsequently killed by Gojo.

The most confusing aspect of the current timeline in "Jujutsu Kaisen," which the series will be returning to with its coverage of the upcoming Shibuya Incident arc, is how Geto is still alive and how he went on to become the main leader of the cursed spirits that are attempting to kill off the jujutsu sorcerers and potentially wipe out humanity.

Given the nature of "Jujutsu Kaisen" and how easily someone or something can become a curse, the most natural scenario seems to be that Geto has become a cursed spirit himself and has just retained a human facade, much like his co-conspirator, Mahito (Nobunaga Shimizaki/Lucien Dodge).

After all, the two also share a connection in the noticeable scars on their faces. Still, with over 100 chapters remaining to be covered from the "Jujutsu Kaisen" manga, it would seem that there's plenty of story left to tell in the series and that anime fans will just have to be patient as the explanation behind Geto's survival is explored down the line.