bloodycarnations:

arminarlert:

oneeyedkingeto:

shining-eye:

oneeyedkingeto:

I keep seeing a certain kind of conversation and I just want to add my two cents, if anyone even cares.

I don’t think the takeaway is that anyone could become like Torso given the right circumstances? I think it’s that Torso became Torso because he as a person had that potential, and then the circumstances drew that out of him.

There are many characters who go through horrible experiences and react in different ways. We can’t say anyone but Torso would end up like him in his circumstances because he’s the only one who will ever be in those situations, and he’s the only one who is, well, him.

There are core characteristics and there are circumstances, and both combine to make a character.

I pretty much agree with you, but some people are pointing out that the needed characteristics can be found in ken and many of them are shared with tooru.

I think Kaneki is a kind and caring person and he’s always been shown to be one. The CCG even put in a report that he’s extremely empathetic. He loves people and he doesn’t want to hurt them. His circumstances did change that at one point, and made him believe that the only way to protect the people he loved was to hurt others, but he didn’t lose his caring core.

I absolutely do not think that Kaneki would end up like Torso. There are similarities in their pasts to be sure, but they are very different people.

Mutsuki too is a kind and caring person, unlike Torso. They may have similarities in their pasts, but they are not the same.

sorry to jump in here, but i think there’s definitely a huge difference between mutsuki, kaneki and torso. if we even examine seidou and kaneki, who both went through the same ghoulification process, as well as torture, and turned out completely differently. 

while mutsuki and torso share the same past of being abused by their fathers, you have to see the difference in their personalities- for whatever reason, torso decided to hunt down women who reminded him of minomi only to murder them and dismember them for his own pleasure– kaneki and mutsuki have been shown to have experienced abuse that has changed them but not into the people who were abusing them, nor did either of them exhibit pleasure from hurting others. 

somewhere down the line torso started hurting people because he wanted to, whereas mutsuki first used his kagune to comfort urie, and kaneki only fought to become strong enough to protect others. 

Sorry to jump in, but I was one of those people who first drew a parallel between Kaneki and Saeki. If this post was meant also as a reply to mine, I just wanted to specify a few points. 

First of all, in no way I meant to say that Kaneki and Torso share the same characteristic or that everyone could’ve ended up as Torso, given the right circumnstances.

My point was something else entirely: I was talking about bad writing (and thus bad narratives concerning Villains) and I was doing it by contrast, that is by praising Ishida’s skills in portraying a realistic and deeply well though antagonist.

The villain tropes I’ve seen most often portrayed in mangas are the following: 

1. The character is inherently evil and so no redemption nor empathy from the target audience is possible.
2. The character is not inherently evil but they turned into an antagonist after something terrible happened to them, making them “diverge from the morally white” path.
3. The character is as much as an evil person as the main character, their motives are anything but evil, they just happen to be on opposing ends to those of the main character.
Or 4, Torso’s case, the character was mentally unstable from the beginning, but only took the morally black path by chance. 

Sure, you may argue that Torso is also an example of point 2, and I would respect your opinion all the same. People are entitled to relate to characters in the way they feel appropriate after all. But I personally think that Young Saeki could still have been saved. What impacted his frail psyche in all the wrong ways wasn’t just Minomi’s death. That was just the final nail on the coffin. He was a phylosophical zombie since the beginning. And he felt that way because he couldn’t fully relate to others. The only other people beside his own father he’d ever came in contact with (before Minomi) were corpses, and so the first thing he thinks when Minomi reaches for his hand is that she’s warm. 

But despite all those red flags about his mental sanity, he was getting better. Human contact (both literally and metaphorically) changed him. He genuinely wanted for Minomi to escape her “family complications”. He wanted to be the one saving her. I don’t think this is a sign that he is an inherently evil character, or that he was this super cold and uncaring person he is now since the beginning. He was unstable, sure, he probably needed therapy anyway, too, but honestly it annoys me when people insist that he’s this one-dimensional character only meant for tragedy and bad plot twists. He was a random guy, a victim of abuse like so many other morally gray characters in Tokyo Ghoul, and later he became a villain because something didn’t quite go the way it was supposed to. 

Do we know for sure that he wouldn’t have become an abusive and pshychotic serial killer if he and Minomi did manage to escape that town? Of course not, and that’s not what I’m saying, either. I absolutely do not empathize with Saeki nor do I condone any of his actions. I’m just saying that sometimes villains don’t need a reason to be villains. Sometimes they just end up as ones also because of a trick of fate. 

Saeki doesn’t have an ultimate goal like Eto, or Kanou. He didn’t choose to become mentally ill, either. He was the result of a secluded education, of the lack of affection on his father’s side, on his own shy and introverted personality, and who know how many other factors. 

Also, In a sense, Kaneki did become an antagonist, too. Post torture, he becomes the antihero of himself. His personality still stayed fundamentally gentle and caring, but because of that, and because of his own traumatic experience (the torture), he ended up constructing this mental idea of a second personality that could be “switched on and off like a light switch” (I can’t find the exact panel but I’m sure you remember it), aka his “Shiro” persona, and later the Centipede one. When he lets himself become violent, he shows some traits that are usually associated with pshychopathy: lack of empathy (need I remind you of the ghoul restaurant, or the fight with Ayato?), irresponsibility, selfishness, violence, yaddayaddayadda. The only true difference is that, as I said, for Kaneki this is just a persona that he puts on and off. A borderline dissociative identity disorder, as I see it. He still remains the kind-hearted person he was as the black-haired self he still idolizes in his mind. 

If I drew the parallel to Kaneki it was to say that both of them are rooted on shaky and morally gray foundations, not really to compare their personalities, so if you guys were really referencing my post, I think that you’re twisting my words a bit. Their personality is fundamentally different, that’s not up for debate of course, and that’s why one ended up as the main character and the other as one of the antagonists. One of them used his inner strength and his fundamental empathy to pull himself out of his own misery and start afresh from a traumatic experience, the other instead let himself drown in it because he’d never been able to fully understand his own feelings. It was exactly the relationship they had established with others that shaped them and let them become such opposites. Kaneki had known love. Saeki hadn’t. 

So I guess that what I was trying to say is that both circumstances and education make a difference when it comes to good narratives for writing villains, and they usually go together with a well written trauma/drama. The last one without any of the other two makes for bad writing, imho. But Ishida is above all of that, and he proves it times and times again with his muti-dimensional and gray characters.