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this is more of a rant than a really well thought argument because every time i think about the ending of this story it pisses me off. this isn't friendly to tushan jing also. AT ALL.

cdramas, especially historical/xianxa dramas, don't have the habit of having an actual layered female protagonist besides the "she's the pretty one, female warrior, intelligent and tatictal fighter", mostly in the recent ones.

xiao yao was a breath of fresh air for me, honestly. just from her introduction, you can grasp exactly the type of character she is. she is lost, without anyone, with the crippling fear of abandonment, longing for love and family, but knows how to prioritize herself, to protect and set aside her feelings because of that. she knows that she is alone in the world. she's firm in both her decisions and feelings without losing her sentimentality.

tong hua gave us three incrible, layered, and interesting main characters with both good and bad characteristics. each character appeals to a different kind of vulnerability, having vastly different backstories and interests. then... we have the fourth one.

among the love interests, while cang xuan is shown to be the more controlling, brain type of character and with the whole palacial backstory, xiang liu is the troubled warrior with a promise to fulfill, and tushan jing is the supposed money genius who was discarded by his own family. they all have their own traumas.

xiao yao is shown to react vastly different to the three of them, with cang xuan holding the highest regard to her at the beginning of the show. as the story progresses, we see his place in her heart slowly waver and sometimes even crumble. xiang liu is the adventure, her deepest desires, which she doesn't dare voice out, the reckless but free spirit, and volatile emotions before anything bad actually happened to her. tushan jing is the sense of security: he appeals to everything she ever wanted, stability, a sense of belonging.

however, out of the three, tushan jing is the one who keeps breaking his word to her the most. and this is what pisses me off about it: xiao yao is introduced as a character which is unforgiving to those who betray her trust mostly because of her abandonment issues and trauma. and tushan jing breaks her trust a lot of times, but her character, someway, somehow, is always tweaked in a way that it isn't done with any other character (even with cang xuan, which is presented to be the most important person in her life) and she ends up forgiving each and any transgression he commits, regardless of the consequences.

tushan jing forms a whole new family without her. he lies, spies and manipulates her emotionally because he knows she only feels comfortable in a position of power in a relationship. he presents himself as an inoffensive person, and every single thing he does is just a slight error done out of worry for her. nothing is ever obsession. nothing is ever against her wishes. he's undecisive and cowardly but still appeals to her with his own insecurity. he presents himself in a position she once was and had no one to help her.

and these are all things she criticizes in the other two main male characters. she hates when cang xuan tries to control her, she hates when xiang liu does things against her wishes.

one could argue it's because of love. but she loved cang xuan. she loved xiang liu, even if she never voiced out. what was so different about tushan jing? well, i will tell you what: the romance, the ending couple, needed to be credible.

so this seemingly flawed, vulnerable, but also questionable decision maker of a character (as the other two male leads are) is painted in an almost innocent like image, just for it to make sense for her character to end up with him. he's at least the lesser evil of the other two. he's "harmless."

in the novel, this distinction is way clearer. a few scenes and moments were tweaked and cut out for the main couple's end to make more sense.

every time i watched xy interact with both cx and xl, it was interesting. you could see new facets to her character, understand her more. the most tension paked scenes were also between them. with tj, he was in the spotlight. she turned backwards for him, for the sake of his happiness and the stability of their love and relationship, just for him not to feel inadequate. and that pissed me off. because the whole thing that made me interested in xiao yao in the first place was how her character had her vulnerability and sensibility but still maintained her worth and sense of self. she learned how to prioritize herself without being selfish or a pushover. it seemed that in her scenes with him, for the sake of the romance, the characterization all went out of the window.

for me, honestly, regardless of shipping and chemistry between the actors (which were both better with cang xuan and xiang liu), xiao yao should've ended up alone. not because i believe "powerful female characters" should end up alone. but because, unfortunately, each romance line had her or one of the male characters sacrifice something that was deeply linked to who they were as people. she was a damaged person who gave herself the well-known "fairy tale ending" because that's how she saw herself attaining happiness.

she ended up with someone who pretended to be pathetic in front of her to appease her ego, but still couldn't be upfront about her, couldn't actually help her in any way that mattered and caused her visible distress because of his meek personality. she ended up with the image of a perfect, nice, and healthy relationship because tushan jing was the only one insecure enough to paint her an image of himself.

no, not all characters had great developed relationships or arcs. no, gojo's death wasn't out of character. but yes, it was a fast-paced story that sometimes hindered its cast of characters and plot points because of how quickly it was moving.

i feel like the only thing we needed for it to have greater arcs and characters was for it to have a little bit more of time for the characters and the fans themselves to digest and understand everything. sometimes, leaving things to be read in between the lines with such fast-paced story gives way for a lot of things to be missed, forgotten or misinterpreted.

sadly, i feel like that's what happened to the story towards the end. nonetheless, i appreciate it a lot. it gaves us, the audience, a new perspective on the stereotypes of shonen. i personally feel like gege wanted to stray more out of them, but he unfortunately couldn't (as he sometimes talked about in his interviews).

from beginning to end, from birth to death, gojo satoru was made to serve jujutsu society.

you can count on one hand how many times the other characters are shown to really care about his mental, emotional and physical status beyond the fact that he can actually fight to protect them and the world. this is just how his relationship with others was. he was more an entity than anything else.

the few who got close (suguru and arguably sukuna) and tried to get close (shoko, yuji, yuta...) were still met with a barried he put between himself and other people, mostly because gojo himself recognized his role as the strongest, and to a point even enjoyed it. he didn't care for his family, had a few friends and wasn't even the typical mentor figure you usually see in anime. even the way megumi talks about the years they spent together is proof of that.

the people in this world mourning him as the strongest is something they need to do. but people mourning him as gojo satoru, the man, don't really exist in it anymore.

gojo only cultivated superficial relationships with every and anyone that came his way because he actually acknowledged his importance to the world. that doesn't mean, somewhere, somehow, deep within himself he didn't long for it. unfortunately, he didn't achieve that in his lifetime.

gojo wasn't written to be a happy character. he was written to show what the pinnacle of jujutsu society has to offer: tragedy, loneliness and war. however, that doesn't mean he was unfulfilled with it: he liked being the strongest, he liked fighting, he liked being gojo satoru.

people who cared about him, he acknowledged them. helping his students, his friends and colleagues. people who didn't, he dismissed. that's who he was.

so no. i don't think people "moving on" from his death is out of character. i think it's pretty much spot on to his character setting. he had his own version of a happy ending: dying in battle against his greatest enemy, meeting a loved one in the after life, and helping build a better society/world to the youth he fiercely fought to protect.