The need to constantly escalate and increase the threat level and reveals, mostly? Like Tokyo Ghoul ended with Eto, the little kid in bandages from Aogiri turning out to be Yoshimura’s daughter, the One-Eyed Owl, the head of Aogiri, a One-Eyed Ghoul, and Takatsuki Sen with a flesh mech. Also Arima appeared and fucking destroyed our protag. Anteiku was burned. Everyone scattered. Shit was fucked.
And Ishida had to go UP from there.
It’s related to the (TV)trope of serial escalation.
But honestly, I don’t think we needed it. At all. I don’t think we needed the Kirishimas and Yomo to be able to do in life what Arima use Hikari kakuhou to fuel in death. I think it was plenty clear that the CCG uses the organs it harvests to fuel energy weapons that are not exactly the same as the original kagune. Don’t get me wrong, it’s bad ass, but I don’t think it was necessary.
I think Yomo and Touka could have been really formidible fighters without it, based on other abilities. The fact that Touka blocked higher mind and Aura’s quinque with the burst of her wings was amazing. She didn’t need to be able to shoot lightning. She had her ukaku already.
And it kind of seems like Yomo’s actual fighting ability has been nerfed with this lightning reveal. I mean, I know that he just fought Arima and Arima fights on a ghouls level at least plus had a two quinques plus wasn’t protecting two people with his life, but… but Uta comes off as a bad ass fighter because he’s strong and he fights like he gives zero shits, and because he uses his natural ghoul abilities to his advantage not because of whatever cool trick he is inevitably gonna pull out soon (which I’m probably gonna love, tbh)
Tatara’s huge bikaku, wielded like we’ve never seen someone wield a bikaku before would have been amazing to watch. Bikaku got a lot fancier in :re, with the three-blades and especially with Mutsuki, but the single tail deal that Minami, Tatatra, Nishiki, and Big Madam have has been shown to be plenty deadly, and I would have loved to see Tatara wreck the CCG’s shit with that. Bikaku’s could really use something like that.
But all this said, I don’t think any of this was unplanned.
Narukami has always been made from Hikari who has always been Yomo’s sister and the Kirishima’s mother. And it’s always shot lightning.
Tatara has always been named Tatara (ie smokestack) and he’s always been from the Red Tongue company and he’s always worn the mask over his face, not his tailbone.
I think Ishida has always had this whole thing if not fully storyboarded, at least outlined.
He’s been holding these reveals since the beginning. That doesn’t mean they start being more believable or stop stretching the credibility of the world that had been built until then, but I don’t want to make it sound like I think Ishida is scrambling for something to keep us interested or whatever.
In fact, quite the opposite – because in his mind, Tatara and Chi She Lien have always meant the weird 4000c firebreather shit and the Yomo family has always had lightning in their blood, none of this probably seems as suddenly shonen to him as it does to us.
He may have explained it to his editor back at the beginning too, so who knows if there is anyone but the weekly readership who feels like these developments don’t fit so well into the world.
It’s one of the issues with being a content creator. You always know way more about your world and your plan for it than your readers. So just because something seems perfectly reasonable or well built up or within parameters to you, it might seem completely bizarre to the readers. (Or occasionally vice versa – we have no precedent, for example, for how common it is for ghouls to subsist nonviolently, because we were introduced to ghouls in a group where quite a few did.)