Tokyo Ghoul Season 1 Thoughts


Binge-watched Tokyo Ghoul and I don’t know what to do with my life after season 2. Season 3 is still a long way.
 
I first read the manga, but only the first ten chapters, and decided to watch the anime since from what I saw from posts on tumblr and other social medias, I think it’s visually stimulating.


“I’m not the protagonist of a novel or anything… I’m a college student who likes to read like you could find anywhere… but… if for argument’s sake, you were to write a story with me on the lead role, it would certainly be… a tragedy.” – Tikyo Ghoul Chapter 1 –Tragedy


The whole fucking anime is a tragedy! Gosh, I jumped in so unprepared for all the feels this anime would give me. I didn’t even mind the gore, decapitations and blood every-fucking-where! I flinched a thousand in those scenes but I was just so enthralled with the story. Everybody loves a tragedy.


Ghouls living among humans… how can that be said when it could easily be as humans living among ghouls?

Kaneki’s tragedy started when he went on a date with Rize, a ghoul that uses her looks to lure young men and eat them. This definitely shattered my, maybe even other bookworm’s, fantasy of a bookstore date. A heavy debris fell and crushed Rize dead. Kaneki survived that fateful, ironically, because of Rize. Rize’s organ was transplanted to Kaneki for him to live. This makes him part-ghoul.

Kaneki’s struggle with his hunger made me feel a lot of things. He was pathetic, yes, but it was as real as anything. But that’s just the tip of his problems. He couldn’t even function well in a community as a human, much so when he turned into a ghoul. People, or rather, the ghouls from Anteiku took him in and helped him. He found a family and friends among ghouls which he might not have ever considered possible when he was human. We are shown that ghouls are not all that bad. Some of them are even able to fall in love with humans.
 
The CCG is a special force that deals with ghouls. Investigators Moda and Amon are sent to the 20th ward looking for a mother-daughter ghoul that’s being protected by Anteiku. Eventually Touka and Kaneki face off with the two investigators which resulted to Moda’s death. Moda was a crazy character, but you can’t help but think that he was also a great one. He was dedicated to his work and took care and guided Amon well but he was merciless towards ghouls. Hanami’s mother was not even defending herself but Moda still butchered her. Vowing revenge, Touka kills Moda but feels remorse for it when she finds out that Moda left behind a family. Again, it shown that ghouls are like humans, they too feel remorse and guilt. And the CCG, especially Amon, is mourning the loss of a great man.
 
It tears me apart that these unnecessary deaths are mirrors of reality that are happening in our world. Yes this is anime, and yes ghouls might not really exist, but they could be metaphors of something else. The CCG could be any of the powerful group that has ever existed that sometimes forget their foremost duty and has succumb to hate because they got so used to the war. Their enemies killing their comrades and them killing their enemies. It’s hard to look beyond hate at this point.

Rize has given Kaneki yet another problem. An organization of ghouls is looking for her, trails her scent on Kaneki and takes him captive. He is tortured to the extreme causing his hair to turn white. He eventually defeats hos torturer and eats him, making him a kakuja.
 
Though Kaneki has accepted that he is more a ghoul than human, only after having a talk with Rize when she appeared to him in his delusions, did he fully accept himself a ghoul. This brought about a lot of changes to him, one of it is his striking white hair. After all the madness, Kaneki decides to join the Aogiri to protect the people he cares for in Anteiku, he says. I’m still trying to understand this bit.
 
Tokyo Ghoul is, without a doubt, one of the best anime I’ve seen so far. I highly recommend it. I’m still thinking about it as I type this and I think it’ll take me weeks to recover from it.

Season 2 review, probably next post.
 

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