yuuji/solitude (joking but also not really)
oh my god i typed a load out and tumblr FUCKING ATE IT oh my god anyway here’s my best attempt at what i previously had. apologies if this is disjointed as a result!!
don’t joke, it’s my otp anon.
i actually have a ton to say on this that i touched on in the itfs ask, but the short of it is that yuuji is a very lonely person even when surrounded by friends. he cares about them, but has zero issues ghosting them and not thinking about them much ever again. i think it’s super interesting that KENJAKU thinks of sasaki, but yuuji never does, despite him previously being literally willing to die for her.
middle school and prior yuuji is very interesting for this - he has friends and acquaintances and if he met them again i’m sure he would remember them like he remembers ozawa. but outside that, they don’t factor in at all to any of his thoughts. we see him only from the pov of outsiders. this also ties in to yuuji’s domain and how he himself speaks of his childhood to sukuna — the only other person ever mentioned is his grandpa. the domain itself is devoid of people, except for him and sukuna.
modyuu is even worse about the ghosting. what i think is very interesting about yuuji is that he’s very astute to the feelings of others, despite fanon often painting him as oblivious. he knows these things aren’t what others would want, he just does them anyway (eg visiting his grandpa despite wasuke’s protestations, offering salvation to sukuna despite sukuna hurting megumi so badly). but yeah, modulo yuuji completely ups and leaves rather than at least enjoy his friends’ twilight years. he then pops back up completely unapologetically to see nobara. he cares deeply, but his version of care actually puts his own feelings before theirs. in this way he creates his own loneliness.
yuuji shares a lot of characteristics with gojou, and i think especially “ultimate strength… and the solitude it brings”. yuuji might not have been The Strongest in the way that gojou was, and i’m not suggesting his childhood was particularly unhappy, but especially as a young kid, being exceptional at something separates you from others in a way that’s isolating even as you’re celebrated for it. we see it in how yuuji enjoys physical activity but doesn’t want to play sports. partly this is due to his grandpa obviously, but i think on top of that he just doesn’t find it fun to win so easily. and then, ofc, in modulo, he ends up in gojou’s position anyway. and, unlike gojou, he runs from the responsibilities of being the strongest.
i think ultimately yuuji does care intensely for a lot of people, but he’s somewhat alone in a crowd for all that he’s deeply compassionate. his high intensity high voltage personality feeds off others’ energy, but when alone he doesn’t have that really at all. he’s someone who cannot bear to be alone but is also the architect of his own solitude in some ways, while in other ways it’s the tragedy of his circumstances.
