The Yasuhisa sisters were considered failures, and it’s been bothering me for a long time. They were clearly functioning fine, but with the recent chapter’s closeup of Kurona/Their eyes, the marks below their eyes are a dead giveaway:
They’re scars from surgical staples, aren’t they? Leftover reminders of being human, like the scar on Keneki’s abdomen.
This leads me to believe that their bodies went through a period of rejection, which ultimately lead in their kakugan’s inability to activate. The ones they have now must be donors.
PS- I think this is Kurona imagining herself as one with her sister.
The angle of the “camera” is off too much, and the speech bubble acts like more of a divider than anything. There’s just no need for another eye transplant, unless Kanou was trying to fool someone, since her RC count is already high enough.
But what did Kaneki have that they lacked? He didn’t need an eye transplant, so why was he, a prototype, more successful than the real deal?
The answer is RC cells. Rize stabbed him through the abdomen, so not only did he receive Rize’s kohakou, but her kidney as well. He had a much bigger immediate boost in RC’s than either Kurona or Nashiro, and his body was able to accept the transplant straight-off. It probably helped that the kidneys– organs responsible for regulating fluids within the body– are located directly next to his new rinkaku, too.
So here’s the problem regarding the other two synthetic half-ghouls we know of, Takizawa and Amon. We don’t know much about their surgeries– even less about Amon in general.
They were purely human, and so one of them had to have a boost in RC cells in order for my theory to stand (especially after losing so much blood during the raid). So I found a little connection here that might have something to do with it:
The smartest of the investigators in the CCG and the dumbest of the executives in Aogiri. For characters who come from complete opposite places, they’ve ended up crossing blades more than once.
Which is important, because when an event repeats itself it’s a parallel and that repetition automatically draws attention to itself. The narrative is setting up Naki and Akira to be classic foils, and there is some interesting things you can learn about Akira as a character herself just by comparing the two.
There were some dark moments in this chapter, but let’s not ignore the moment where we found out that Miza and her clan literally dug their way out of a fantasy manga.
Look at them. Their like gnomes. They even all have their own weird helmets. They’re like subspecies of ghoul who lived entirely underground, carrying little backpacks full of shovels and lanterns and maps. They look like they’re ready to go on a D&D adventure.
I want to adopt all of them. Goddammit Suzuya. You can’t kill off the gnomes!
This is the strangest, most tonally mismatched tiny bit of random world building and I love it so, so much. I want to know so much more about these micro-societies of ghouls that actual grow up free of contact with human society.
(Also it’s interesting, given this origin story, that Miza is so well educated not only generally, but about “human” customs as compared to the white suits.)
This is interesting, judging by the marking on the eye of the figure above this is Kurona.
But also judging by the image below Kurona and Nashiro are either both there.
Or Kurona may have went mad after Kanou probably gave her her sister’s kakugan eye. So she feels like she’s right there…(He used Nashiro for parts when he deemed her unsaveable…)
Or maybe somehow, she did it herself… out of grief…
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.
I’ve been busy with work recently, but I’ve wanted to mention Uta’s mon for some time, and I think we should be getting some Uta soon-ish? Maybe. Maybe it’s my wishful thinking because I’m bored out of my mind with Kaneki’s lack of character growth.
Ishida let us know Uta’s tattoos follow a theme (”I thought of a theme and just drew from there”) and that they are somehow important or at least related to understanding Uta as a character (”What’s on his back? I’m not telling you yet”).
So, one of his tattoos is a mon. Mons are family crests that were first only used by the wealthy and the samurai, but as the use of family names spread, the mon spread too. Your formal kimono would be decorated with a mon, for example, for your wedding (in the TG calendar, Matsuri’s kimono has an (unidentifiable) mon on his wedding day). Their history is fascinating but most people nowadays wouldn’t be able to tell you what their mon is off the top of their head.
Here’s Uta’s tattoo side by side with a mon it represents:
This is the 「虎杖」(itadori) mon. Otherwise known as Japanese knotweed (fallopia japonica). The japanese flower language assigns it with the meaning “Not what it seems” (figures, right?). “Itadori” means “taking pain”, and supposedly when you rub a stem or leaves over a scrape or bruise it’ll heal faster.
The itadori mon is easily recognizable because there are literally only two variations of it. To provide some scale, there’s some 6000 mons in total, and something like a 1000 different wisteria variations among them. So itadori is somewhat special. Itadori iirc is supposed to be one of the original mons – the ones used by those weathy families and samurais.
Fun fact! Itadori is so invasive that it can grow through concrete and asphalt. It can grow basically in any conditions. It just… survives.
So there you have it, a ghoul without a family but with a family crest and some more floral imagery in Tokyo Ghoul.
do you think amon could be associated with the moon? since Ishida always draws him as floppy during the night, and has had a moon behind him multiple times, like in chapter 47 of tg there’s a chapter cover of him looking up into the night sky at something (moon?) and his birthday in the calendar page has a moon. plus he is the deuteragonist in tg so I feel like we should see more of him soon
Good observation with Chapter 47, because the quote that accompanies Amon’s entire arc in association with the moon card perfectly.
“Amon’s quest to find himself’ which implies Amon as he is currently lacks a sense of self identity. Which also ties neatly into the mention of Amon as deuteragonist, because Amon’s chief job as a deuteragonist is to play foil to Kaneki. In fiction, a foil is a character who contrasts with another character, in order to highlight particular qualities of the other character. In essence a character who does not exist for their own self determinant purposes but rather to reflect another character. That is not only Amon’s central character trait, it is his entire role in the story.
That is how he represents the moon card, as the moon can provide no light of its own, and can only reflect the sun’s light.
I am rambling as opposed to writing a structured Meta, so bare with me.
But I have noticed the theme of “Choice”, and how it relates to Arima and Kaneki.
In Jack, Arima presents himself as someone that lacks choices. He explains that he simply goes where he is told to go, and does what he is told to do. When his cover is compromised, he explains to Fura that he will be sent away. He admits that he enjoyed being able to attend school and be around people his own age……but his superiors won’t allow him to stay. Fura refuses to accept this, and argues that Arima’s secret is safe and he should stay. Arima actually takes this to heart, and seems to have convinced his superiors to let him finish the mission.
But once Lantern has been eliminated, he can no longer stay. He tells Fura he will be leaving soon, and sent to his next mission. He doesn’t know where he’s going, and matter-of-factly states that he may die next time. For such a young man, he is already resigned to being powerless when it comes to his own life.
Arima is a person with no choice, or at least he presents himself as such.
In contrast, when it comes to his protege, he has repeatedly defied his superiors to offer him choices.
Arima makes a point of having his new protege choose his own name. He encourages him to take this first step himself, choosing the Kanji that would stand for his new identity.
Now we see Arima again pushing Kaneki to choose. He could have killed Kaneki many times over during their battle, but instead he spends much of their battle either observing him or lecturing him about his lack of conviction.
He’s placing things firmly back into Kaneki’s hands, forcing him to confront reality and decide what he really wants. He states what HIS choice will be, that he will kill Kaneki’s friends if he simply gives up and dies.
What he isn’t stating is whether he even wants to kill Kaneki or not. He has kept his thoughts to himself, and allowed his protege to remain confused about him all these years. But at the very least, it seems like there is some part of Arima that sees importance in Kaneki being able to choose for himself in the way Arima himself never was able to.
What I love about V is that its supposed to be a super secret organization but they also apparently have the most ridiculous meeting room in the world. LOOK AT THIS PLACE. Its Huge. V is literally written across the floor. WHERE DO YOU HIDE A PLACE LIKE THIS IN TOKYO? Why all the pillars of various sizes? Aesthetic? Who was in charge of these designs? I just have so many questions.
Relatable FE Quote or Something 