There are a lot of posts coming out about Furuta this week and what is going on in his mixed up head and a bunch of them are making a similar claim that there is some sort of “ghoul nature” or “ghoul side” or “ghoul instincts” we are seeing with that final panel.
This is a mistake that a lot of characters in the series, especially CCG officers, make, but there is no such thing as “ghoul nature” in terms of an inherently sadistic personality or an inborn lack of empathy. Ghoul nature is limited to their required diet and the fact that their hunger will take over if it is not sated. But ghouls are born with the same capacity for emotion and empathy as humans. The idea that a ghoul cannot be a good person, cannot genuinely be friends with a human, cannot genuinely desire to keep people safe – these are the lies that Amon struggles against after he encounters Kaneki.
The conversation to look back on is the one between Yoshimura and Kaneki after Kaneki escapes from the ghoul restaurant in chapter 40.
It’s worth noting, in retrospect, and in light of this chapter, that this is right after the first appearance of Furuta as well. So if anything, we should be paying special attention to this conversation.
Ghouls are not inherently unable to empathize. They are forced to become that way. And as we see over and over, even then they don’t really end up killing their emotions all together. Nishiki, who is introduced as someone who clearly thinks life is cheap – not only human life, but ghoul life – is shown to actually care deeply about those close to him. Tsukiyama, who we assume this conversation is about on the first read, is proven to actually have all those emotions in him, just buried.
This is part of what people are forgetting, I think, this week, when talking about how Furuta has a “ghoul side” and has been running from his “ghoulish impulses.” There is no ghoulish impulse to kill. Hinami is proof of that.
Furuta’s sadism isn’t because he’s part ghoul. Let’s not forget that Kanou is human, as was Kaneki’s mother and aunt. That Tokage and Kijima and Mado Kureo were human.
The other thing that I think mixes people up is that Kaneki, for a long time, thought about himself as having a ghoul side and a human side, a tendency only exaggerated in fan interpretation. But that was never true.
It is true that Kaneki has a tendency to dissociate the violence he is capable of from his sense of “true self” and his gentleness. It is true that after his torture, Kaneki’s defense mechanism was to shove all the parts of himself he felt uncomfortable with but deemed necessary onto a notion of himself as a ghoul so he could retain a sense of himself without them.
But there were never really two Kanekis. There was the part of Kaneki still clinging to the notion that it is better to hurt than hurt others, who was terrified of becoming like his mother and hurting those he loved, that wanted to be innocent and far away from violence, and this was the part that we see smile and cut Hinami’s hair. But after his torture, Kaneki embraces the necessity for violence. The impulses he has to hurt others, though, are not because he is a ghoul. They come from being raised by abusive people and seeing abuse from a young age – and even if he would never act on it, learning abusive patterns of behavior. They come from being tortured. Not from being a ghoul.
The fact that Kaneki ascribes these impulses and this behavior to something from Rize or Yamori is a coping mechanism and not a reality.
In fact, it’s almost as if Ishida has preemptively realized that we might make this error with this reveal about Furuta and thus put it right after Kaneki’s own revelation that it was never true for him. That it was never Rize. It was always him.
This is not to say Furuta doesn’t have a complicated relationship with the fact that he is a half ghoul. He clearly does. I don’t think there is any part of his identity he doesn’t have a complicated relationship with.
If Furuta, like Kaneki, has chosen to think of his ghoul half and his human half as somehow distinct, it is not because they fundamentally are. It is because he has chosen to do so or because doing so is a defense mechanism. Furuta the ghoul doesn’t have any traits Furuta the human doesn’t have because they aren’t different things, unless Furuta maintains a false notion that they are.
But we’ve seen him being plenty sadistic before.
So I see no reason to assume he has any sort of ghoul side at all. Not all half ghouls do. Eto doesn’t. She has an alter-ego, sure, but not a “ghoul side.”
Furuta wears a lot of masks and has a lot of personas. His dialogue in the last panel may have been a change from the persona he was using in the rest of this chapter, but it isn’t one we haven’t seen him use before, even while acting the part of a human. It’s a switch from Furuta playing the wacky child using humor and regression and out of control gestures as his set of coping mechanisms and redirects to Furuta the in control sadist who uses displays of dominance and threats. It isn’t a new mask or a new side. He’s switching masks, I think, not revealing something new.
Now, it’s certainly possible he grabbed for this mask because the other one had started to crack quite a bit there, started showing some of his genuine fears, started letting some of his genuine traumas bleed through.
And while I don’t think Furuta has a split personality or a hidden ghoul side, I do think he has an unstable sense of self and plenty of issues with all sorts of parts of who he is.
It certainly seems like he’s been holding out on revealing his ghoul abilities for some reason other than just keeping his cards close to his chest. He might very well dislike having to rely on his ghoul strength for one reason or another. At this point, I don’t know if we’ve seen enough to say why.
It’s possible it has something to do with his desire to maintain control and the possibility of losing control over himself while using his ghoul abilities. This is Kaneki’s big fear, that he will turn into someone who hurts the ones they love. That’s why the most devastating things for him were almost eating Hide and what happened with Banjou in Kanou’s lab.
I imagine whatever it is for Furuta, in a way, it will foil this. So maybe it is the same fear, but for different reasons. Or perhaps the parallels lie in the fact that relying on their ghoul abilities brings back memories of trauma. I think it’s very likely that as a child under V’s thumb, Furuta, the half-ghoul experiment, was treated harshly and that he likely associates his ghoul side with what V made him and with V’s control over him.
The way the V member yells at him to fight and the way that Furuta waits until they are all dead to actually activate his kagune makes me think that it was the parts of him that were ghoul parts that V controlled and conditioned as a child. Rather than associating this violence with someone else’s abuse he fears he’ll become, I think Furuta might associate relying on his ghoul abilities with the abuse he received and doesn’t want to relive.
Rather than hiding from his “ghoul side,” or his “ghoul nature,” I think Furuta might be hiding from his past.
Of course, it’s all a guess at this point. We’ll have to see where he goes from here.
black and blue, turning and overturning the things i’d chosen countless times. forever repeating the same actions. endlessly useless. ungainly. awkward. indecisive. weak. that is what i am.
Relatable FE Quote or Something 
