To me it feels like, right now, there are two levels to the CCG vs Aogiri fight happening.
One is on the larger level, on Rushima. It’s between organizations as a whole. The majority of the CCG’s forces against nearly all of Aogiri’s.
And the second is on a much smaller, individual level. An indirect struggle between Arima and Eto for influence over Kaneki.
In either case, it’s an idealogical struggle. The CCG is fighting for humans to be free of being killed by ghouls. Aogiri is fighting to bring in a new world where ghouls are free of being killed by the CCG. Both are fighting to prevent deaths on their side, by eliminating the other side.
With Eto and Arima, they’re both trying to impart their ideologies on Kaneki. Eto is trying to sway him into adopting her beliefs, into recognizing the world is wrong and that the people in charge need to be stopped. Arima and the CCG is trying to shape Kaneki into being his replacement, into being someone who takes orders without hesitation or question.
Kaneki is caught in the middle of the struggle between both organizations, both individuals, and both halves of the world. Each side is fighting to control him because the world as it is now is in a stalemate – each side needs something more to tip the balance in their favor, and Kaneki is that something. He could make or break either side if he decided to join one, completely, instead of being caught in between the way he has been since the beginning.
But that’s the point. He’s in between.
He doesn’t belong exclusively to one side, and he shouldn’t. He’s the bridge, he has connections everywhere, ghoul, human, CCG, Aogiri, :re.
Eto and Arima have been shaped by the world to be who they are, and they’re trying to do the same to him. But Kaneki has the potential to be something more, to choose a new and different path. To surpass both Arima and Eto.
Alright, so in regards to my last post [x] I’m getting a lot of questions/comments about the possibility of Hide bugging Kaneki to speak to him during his fight with Arima. After going back to double-check the two sewer scenes–YES!– I think it’s completely possible.
Three major things:
1. ) We know that Hide has a habit of tapping his temple when he’s thinking, but this little side-view looks a lot more like he’s pressing into his ear…
… the same way Haise and Akira are speaking to each other over their transmitters during the auction operation.
It’s possible that he got the idea from Kaneki saying “Hide, I’m hearing voices…”, and is reaching to give Kaneki his earpiece before running back to the control room where he came from (hence the lull of silence while Kaneki was walking alone towards V14).
Here’s the kicker:
2. ) This has been really, really bothering me for some time. Why the f was Kaneki wearing his eye-patch in this scene? And why is it on the wrong side?
Well, we know how smooth Hide is when it comes to bugging people (ie: sticking a tracking device to the bottom of Yamori’s shoe), so how does he sneak a wire into/nearby Kaneki’s ear– the right ear specifically?
Somehow he convinced Kaneki he needed it (probably easy in his loopy state), and slipped the device in while he was distracted. And now that I’m looking a little closer, the straps are frayed just like his suit, so it may have been make-shift (eliminating the “but where did it come from?” question).
3.) Through this scope, the hallucination of Hide’s voice could definitely have been an actual conversation. Note the little “spark” below Kaneki’s right ear, the same place we see an indication that someone on Arima’s wire is speaking.
Plus, Hide really only begins talking after Ken starts screaming in agony after getting shanked through the back of his skull (how he kept a level head after hearing his best friend getting mauled is beyond me…).
Bonus:
The chapter in V14 where Kaneki is “killed” is called “Severed Voice”. Ishida’s titles usually have multiple meanings, so this one could easily be eluding to Kaneki and Hide’s voices being “severed” from one another.
Alright, so I was 50/50 on whether I should write this, but since I just saw spoiler pics I’m going to go ahead and write it out really fast; another possible kakuja that’s been in my mind for a little while
In the beginning of TG, Kaneki fought for Hide’s safety from Nishiki, and Kaneki ended up quoting a line from Hermann Hesse’s “Demian,”
However, the full quote isn’t actually stated. The actual quote goes:
“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.”
And Abraxas looks like this:
A chimera like being that transcends both God and the Devil, uniting all opposites into one being. He has a rooster or king’s head, serpents in lieu of feet, and a whip in his right hand with a shield in his left.
Kaneki’s original goal was to find a way fro ghouls and humans to coexist
“rooster or king’s head”: Kakuja beak and his possible ensnarement as the OEK
“serpents in lieu of feet”: he lost his legs last chapter, and instead of the reattaching it seems that they are growing back (most likely akin to his arm)
“whip in his right hand”: his harsh new claw for a hand
“with a shield in his left”: the only being associated with a shield in :re is Banjou, and he is currently running for where Kaneki and Arima are
There will be multiple kakujas in the series, and this one may be one of them
This might be a bit far fetched, but perhaps Furuta wants Eto to break out? By giving her the Shiono pâté, which contrary to the ‘stew’ the CCG gives captive ghouls, probably doesn’t contain RC surpressants, therefore giving her some much needed energy. If she does break out, it’s more likely she’ll go to Kaneki and Arima than to where Furuta is. Perhaps he wants her to be there to prevent the worst case scenario of Arima killing Kaneki? After all, he does seem to want Kaneki alive.
Oh nice find :). I myself was wondering about that because while it’s easy to argue that he gave her the patè to spite her I really don’t think it’s just that. Furuta and Eto are the ultimate Chessmasters. Just because they got a plan does not mean that have other plans as a fail safe. I guess it’s safe to assume that everything is going according to both Eto and Furuta’s plans.
Eto breaks out and she ends up intervening in the fight between the reapers. Based on her dialogue this chapter she knows what’s going on via Kaneki (he has her rc cells in him after all. Moreover it’s pointless for Eto to go to the compactor and I do wonder what Furuta is doing and whether or not he’s putting on a show for his V “friends”
So like you said, as long as Kaneki stays alive then it’s all according to Furuta’s plans. As long as Eto can get involved somehow with the reaper fight then it’s all according to her plans. Are they secretly working together? That I cannot say but I find it interesting that both their actions are slightly making it convenient for the other to carry out their plans.
What I’m wondering is that Furuta stopped Kaneki and Hinami with the belief that he could slightly divert attention to what’s happening with Arima and the :re crew. It could be something else entirely, it’s just too vague but things are definitely going to get interesting from here on out.
Do you ever think about Rize and how she’s Kaneki’s age, and how she had a horrific childhood that she escaped and then cherished her freedom and doing things she enjoyed, and then was injured and kept restrained and starved for over half a year while she had her kakuhou removed over and over and over, literally thousands of times, until she was finally freed, and by then had lost awareness of anything but her hunger.
I think about Rize a lot. And I think about how Rize commented that she and Kaneki had a lot in common. And that Kaneki spent six months trying to find her. And that he just wanted to speak with her, and wanted her to recognize him.
I want Rize to come back. I want to know what she’s been doing for these last three years. And I want her and Kaneki to meet again.
So, yeah I’m not going to be talking about anything nice in this meta, so this is fair warning, but it’s kind of hard to talk about anything pleasant. I would like to disclaim that I don’t agree with anything that happened in this chapter I’m just trying to explain it. I censored the pictures I used only text boxes but the things I talk about are still serious things that happen in the chapter
Yes. Absolutely. I’ve considered this confirmed for a long, long time actually.
Who benefited most from the Anteiku raid? Eto.
No one else had more to gain from the raid than she did. No one else had more reason to orchestrate the raid than she did.
Anteiku was holding her organization in check, preventing Aogiri from expanding its influence even farther. Her father and the other Anteiku employees were the only other ghoul organization capable of standing in Aogiri’s way.
In addition to that, she needed a new donor for a powerful kakuhou after Yomo (an Anteiku member) took Kanou’s previous donor, Rize. And, as we now know, she also wanted a V member with the signature undetectable RC cells. What better candidate than her father, a powerful ghoul and ex V member with her own kakuhou, and someone she hates? The only problem here is that he’s extremely strong, and has other strong ghouls with him at Anteiku.
The easiest solution to that is of course, making him a target for the CCG. Get the CCG to do all the work, and she can sweep in at the last minute and reap the rewards.
On top of all of this, when we saw the flashback into her childhood, we saw a scene where she stopped in front of Anteiku, saw her father smiling at the members inside, and was so overcome with rage that she destroyed a manuscript she was carrying. I think it’s obvious she held a grudge.
And, in Sasaki’s words, “she wants to destroy everything”. Doesn’t this plan, where she benefits enormously while at the same time destroying everything Yoshimura loves, sound like exactly the kind of thing Eto would do?
The interesting thing here is that she’s furious with him for leaving her, for being absent in her life. He regrets that, and built Anteiku as a place for her to return to, and spent so much time waiting for her. And then she came to Anteiku, and she destroyed it.
So I’ve noticed in the manga how characters constantly remark on the young age of the Quinx and several other investigators, like Juuzou. Some of these investigators are first-class as young as 16, and they don’t even seem to be as prodigious as Arima.
However, it wasn’t always like that. In the earlier volumes of Tokyo Ghoul we get many examples of middle aged or older investigators, like shinohara, or Mado. Even Amon seems much older than the kids in :Re. The examples of younger investigators were all third or second class, and they were considered the best of that age. (Think Mado Akira)
And then I realized that the excessive promotions and advancement of younger investigators is out of neccesity. There’s no one left. The heavy tolls of the 20th ward battle, the raid on the ghoul prison, the invasion of the auction, all of these forced the CCG into taking younger and younger students into their ranks; propelling them upward before they are ready. Some students don’t even want to be investigators or fight, and have little drive because of it. (Saiko)
Let’s compare Tooru and Amon. When Amon is given Akira to be her mentor he is a first class investigator with multiple large cases under his belt. He’s killed multiple important ghouls and taken part in multiple larger operations, is renowned for his physical strength and achievements, And is in his mid to late 20’s
When Tooru is made a first class, he has taken part in one large scale investigation, has killed no notable ghouls, has very little combat prowess, and is only known for being a quinx (and can’t use his kagune), and is 20 years old.
The CCG took a younger, weaker, less experianced investigator and put him at the same rank as what a senior investigator would have been at a year before. It shows that during the early events of :Re the CCG is begining to fall apart, unable to survive the constant battles and war with the ghouls.
This is such an excellent observation of how much things have changed for the CCG.
During the original series, Amon being promoted to First Class at 27 is considered an enormous achievement. Takizawa states that many retire at that rank. Veteran Investigators near the end of their career are First Class, with it nearly impossible to make the leap into Associate Special Class or Special Class.
There’s mention in :Re that the growth of Aogiri Tree has resulted in many more chances for achievement and promotion. They are indeed promoting people are a much faster rate than any other time in CCG’s history. They are scrambling to manage to deal with the threat of Aogiri, and the overall increase of Ghoul Aggression thanks to the destruction of Anteiku. Good going, guys.
And indeed, it seems like they are suffering much greater losses per operation than at any other time. Thanks, Matsuri. They simply cannot keep up with the demands, and it seems that rookies are being shoved into dangerous operations sooner and sooner. It seems that major combat operations were uncommon in the past, but it seems very common in :Re and there is little effort to minimize the risk to rookies in comparison to the past. (Marude didn’t put less-capable folks on the front lines, but Matsuri throws bodies at the problem like human life means nothing.)
I will probably never shut up about Yamori trying to channel everything good he had left in the face of his upcoming psychosis into literally adopting children who lost in fights. Naki, Hooguro and Shousei (and lbr 200% Gagi and Guge too since they couldn’t even use kagune) had all lost their fights and were subsequently allowed to be a White Suit. You win? You can fend for yourself, fuck off. You lose? Come on in, Yamori’s son needs playmates and if Yamori is good for anything any more, it’s killing shit providing for the family. Have you seen how they all respect him? How Naki loves him?
He spent time explaining abstract concepts to Naki and refused to subject him to the worst of his mental instability.
I have bouts of feels regularly because of Naki and Yamori and how Yamori was vicious and brutal and knew he was fucked in the head but still wanted to have something good and beautiful.
I don’t particularly like Yamori, it’s very hard to like him. But as a character who was caught in this particular circle of violence and chose to perpetuate it to survive (just as Kaneki did later), he is fascinating.
And then Ishida goes and gives us Miza, who also adopted probably every ghoul child she could find into the Blades. When Urie says, “The Blades are all malnourished and small”, you just know they are underfed children, because Miza wants children fiercely but conceiving is hard for a ghoul.
have a happy
fucking birthday this month eddie, this manga seems to be saying to me, because naki is about to get majorly fucked and you will cry
Oh man, these feels. I think so much about how complex Ishida makes his character, even the most vile of them.
Yamori is such a fascinating character in his complete duality. He remains completely vile until longer after his death, when we begin to have glimpses of the other parts of him. He was a sadistic monster that thrilled in repeating the suffering he’d endured. But he was also someone that chose to surround himself with the outcasts and the losers. He made a gang/family out of people that wouldn’t belong anywhere else.
Naki, Gagi, and Guge are all disabled in some capacity.
Nico is viewed as a “sexual deviant”, and shunned or mocked because of being a Sexual Minority and interested in BDSM.
Yamori befriended them all seemingly without a second thought, and didn’t give a shit what people thought. We know that he could be violent towards them, though much of it seems to have been with consent (Naki and Nico both enjoyed being hit by Yamori, and speak of it with fondness). When he turns on Nico during his “CHOOSE” session with Kaneki, the violence against Nico is primarily verbal and the physical violence is far more restrained than anything he inflicts anywhere else.
The White Suits are just such a fascinating group, over all. Just seeing how much loyalty and family bonds there are, in a group founded by /Yamori/. There’s something eerie about how similar Kaneki and Yamori became. Thinking what Kaneki could have become, had things gone a bit different.
Well, Kaneki did kill and eat an inordinate amount of people directly following his stay at No Fun Allowed Casa de Aogiri. So much so that when he donned his mask three years later, ghouls still run away from the sight of it. I actually don’t think they are all that different, Yamori and Kaneki. After all, they both used the same coping method – becoming their abuser. For Yamori it meant, probably, a complete breakdown of his own self, although he tried to build something on the smoking remains. Kaneki just became suicidal and won’t learn from his mistakes (such as throwing away the bonds he created with people and generally being in denial until his life blows up in his face. I understand why he’s doing it, but I don’t condone it and at this point it’s just tiring.)
I’m also interested where the Nico being shunned theory came from? I would argue that everything gender or sexual orientation-related we’ve seen was negatively coded only among humans. Ishida explicitly positions ghouls as a minority and borrows heavily from sexual minorities’ lingo (see: ’born this way’ at Eto’s press junket). So for example neither Tsukiyama’s bisexuality, nor Uta’s queerness get discussed so much as just accepted. The only thing ghouls judge people on is power, and
Nico is pretty much always recognized as a powerful ghoul, which is one of the reasons he can identify and present as loud as he wants – his power is undisputed and if anyone doesn’t like him, it’s not because he sucks dick. It’s because he’s too strong. This is why Ishida also explicitly does away with patriarchal structures of Japanese society among ghouls to the point of mocking them sometimes. Because power is more valuable than sexual orientation or gender or age.
Sorry, I rambled there at the end. The perception of Nico in the fandom has always mystified me. That aside, yes! Yamori and his kindergarten of lost children was such a perfect and unexpected character development. I love how Ishida fleshes out his characters with a few words and a panel here and there ♥
Yeah, ghoul society seems to focus more on power than anything else. But when you pay attention to small details, you notice some of those negative aspects of human society leak into them as well.
Nico is someone that has enough power to be feared and not messed with. But Nico is also someone that people do make nasty comments about, and look at in a negative fashion. Ayato, for example, uses “Okama” as an insult and a slur when discussing Nico. There are some snarky moments from unnamed folks in Aogiri, in terms of judging Nico.
Tsukiyama also earns disdain as a result of his sexual orientation and flamboyant presentation. People refer to him as a pervert and a deviant, which is part of the reason that he has such a bad reputation among ghouls.
Uta is someone that we are told can do whatever the hell he wants, because people are TERRIFIED of him.
So the rule seems to be that as long as you are powerful, no one will bother you about being non-conforming. But they will still probably talk shit about you.
Ah yes, here we are again trying to suss out what is artistic flourish, what is merely part of the composition, and what is deliberately placed tarot numbers and symbolism.
This one is particularly hard because this?
This is chock full of Ishida’s artistic flourishes and chaotic bits of movement lines and special effects squiggles and shapes.
Before I continue, a few necessary caveats for this post. First, the one I try to put on every tarot post that tarot is designed to be very vague and open to interpretation. It is designed based on archetypes and universal themes found both in fiction and in real life, so it is often possible to find an application for a cards meaning in a situation just because of the openness of the interpretation and the universality of the themes. Especially in real life, where everything is always multifaceted and complicated, and in fiction that does well in emulating the complexity of real life.
The second caveat comes from literary theory – namely reader response theory – which states that there is meaning to find in any text beyond or regardless of the intent of the author. Or in the specific case, regardless of whether a specific set of lines is an intentional tarot number, as readers, we can still use the universal themes and archetypes on any given tarot card to find additional meaning in a scene.
Which is to say that even if something isn’t a tarot number, pretending it is might still give us insight into the scene, and conversely, just because pretending something is a tarot number gives us insight into the scene, doesn’t mean it is an intended tarot number.
With all that out of the way, let’s look at Renji’s hand –
My first thought is no, that isn’t a tarot number 4 – it’s just the composition of the shape and creases of Renji’s hand, mainly because the tarot numbers tend to be very deliberate and complete lines. Compare this to the 2 in Renji’s hair in the previous chapter, which is clearly set apart from the rest of the lines and shading that make up his hair.
In fact, I’d almost be more inclined to argue it’s a 7 but the one line shifts into fading. And there are no mirror image or sideways standard readings for tarot.
There’s also the fact that the reverse 4 doesn’t fit this situation all that well unless we are meant to project it not on Renji or his situation (which is odd, given that he’s the subject of the chapter) but onto Kaneki, who shows up on the next page, or Arima, who he’s attacking. The 4 is the Emperor, and it’s a huge Father Figures and Authority card. It’s about masculine figures and masculine roles from father figure to domination. In the reverse, it’s about excessive control, rigidity, inflexibility and domination.
It’s a very Arima Kishou card, so if you think this is meant as a tarot, then take note that Yomo, the best, most supportive and emotionally well reasoned guide Kaneki had is pointing it along with a physical attack at Arima Kishou, the, uh… Arima Kishou…
But since you sent me tarot hunting around Renji’s hand, did you notice the possible reverse 17 up there?
The Star is a very fitting card for this situation (and, if you think we’re following the Fool’s Journey, then it’s the step we’re at and the one standing between the obvious Tower of the Tsukiyama Operation, and the ever exciting Moon arc…).
Everything Renji just got done saying that Touka and Ayato mean to him. In reverse, (what Arima and the threat of losing them represents), the star means
Lack of faith, despair, discouragement
If that is supposed to be a reverse 17, I wonder if that isn’t supposed to be one of several arc numbers we might get, though I don’t really remember those being too much of a thing in the past.
Still – the upright and reverse meanings of the Star might be things to think about in this arc, and probably also the Rushima one. I imagine those meanings and the contrasts between the two might continue to be major themes. They certainly have been so far between Kaneki’s lack of faith, Renji’s whole inner monologue about inspiration and hope and despair and such, and all sorts of reunions…
Relatable FE Quote or Something 