Tokyo Ghoul's Tragedy

Tokyo Ghoul is a neo classic anime that elicits strong emotions. It’s gut-wrenching, violent, action packed, disturbing and intense. The metalcore op and the cyberpunk /atmospheric soundtrack coupled with writing that blows minds and can also blow chunks, gives the show artistic highs and lows that make me feel like I’m on my fix, man. Before I watched Tokyo Ghoul I’d heard two things about it. #1 that it’s a metal, giant bamf of a show. And #2 people loved it, until that love turned into anger and disappointment. Did the hate originate from Kaneki masks at Hot Topic? Or perhaps because Kaneki is a weenie? Maybe it was the unapologetic gore or that people drink coffee at night all the time and no-one has trouble sleeping. No, it’s something else, something far more heartbreaking. So if you’re ready, sit back, relax and prepare your tasty, fleshy self for a dive into the headspace of Kaneki. For a heavy, philosophical cup of bitter black truth coffee. For what makes him the most loved and hated character in modern anime. This is the story of Tokyo Ghoul’s Ken Kaneki, the story you never knew. Hi I’m Grant. I’m told I’m a wishy washy guy. I kind of agree. I enjoy weird books and watch anime. Welcome to the Story You Never Knew. I’d like to turn your attention towards Ken Kaneki, a half human, half ghoul. Ghouls are exactly like humans, except they’ve got cool eyes and need to feast on human flesh to survive. But they don't just need human flesh, they crave it. Everything else tastes like that time you drank that beer can with all the cigarettes in it. Ghouls are also 4 to 7 times stronger than the average human, can survive for a month or 2 on a single body depending on how thicc dat bootay is. They have heightened senses and basically super powers. They’re monsters, but they also have feelings, and Kaneki is forced into their world. He gets a crush on this cute librarian-looking girl named Rize, a simple surface level attraction. He asks her out on a date and boy do they go into it. Walking back in the black of night. The funny thing about life is you never expect it to end. You never get in the car expecting a crash, but it happens in an instant. That night was Kaneki’s crash, and he went out the windshield if you know what i mean. Rize loses control of her hunger for Kaneki’s sweet, supple flesh. And not in a sexy way. Turns out she was a ghoul the whole time, a binge eater no less. Kaneki’s not into it. Mostly because his insides were being placed on his outsides. Fortunately, before he’s completely ripped to pieces by this worst-girl, some very heavy things fall off a crane and smash her. Rize’s dead, and with Ken barely alive, a surgeon transplants Rize’s organs into him to save his life and also because it’s a fun science experiment. Turns out if a bunch of your organs are ghoul organs but the rest of you is human...that makes you half human half ghoul. A ghoulman! A Humoul… with incredible healing powers. And so her insatiable hunger is passed onto Kaneki. And that hunger strives to control him. The gnawing twinge of hunger has always been enough to drive armies against armies. Every empire that ever conquered its way into existence has done so under the guise that those who serve it will never go hungry again. Hunger is the driving force behind every thought we have, every choice we make. It’s why you get out of bed, it’s why you go to work. Boil it all down, it’s for food, to survive. Hunger is our need for life, the feeling that pushes us forward. We live in a society that diminishes hunger’s role. Grocery stores on every corner. Shops upon shops all selling whatever we need. But if food became scarce, we’d kill each other, for meat, for sustenance, to live. Pets, family, friends, we don’t like to think about it, but they’re all food in the end. History has shown that when humans have nothing, they’ll eat anything. The Donner Party, the Siege of Leningrad, the Famine of Povolzhie, events as recent as World War II. Hunger controls our lives, whether we want it to or not. And an insatiable hunger, stronger than that of humans, is forced upon Kaneki. He's pushed into a world where he must fight against himself. Two sides are warring within Kaneki. One is human and tells him flesh is as disgusting as the methods required to acquire it. The other is ghoul and needs said flesh to survive. This dichotomy within Kaneki originates from his mother's beliefs. Kaneki's mom was a generous lady who was also pretty hump worthy. She helped those around her so much she literally worked herself to death to pay for her deadbeat sister’s lifestyle of uselessness. She always told her son, “it’s far better to feel pain yourself than to inflict it on others.” Kaneki's hot mom cared deeply about the people around her but she lacked a basic survival instinct, the ability to assert her own needs. Kaneki inherited a plethora of these meek qualities. Kaneki’s character is an internal war between a kind but weak human and a cruel but pragmatic ghoul. This war in his head reflects the one going on outside. Both humans and ghouls despise each other with some exceptions. Beyond the gore and the horror is a philosophical crisis: a roaring moral quandary that combines with gnawing hunger to drive even a mellow-mannered fellow mad. As the bridge between ghouls and humans, Kaneki is a weird conduit for these mixed and confused feelings towards everything. He’s confused all the time, he’s conflicted all the time, scared, grossed-out, REACTING NORMALLY to things that would upset your average non cannibal person with compassion. At every point along the way he’s done what I would have done. And probably you too. Imagine seeing a corpse being feasted upon while one side of you sees it as delicious food and the other as rotting flesh? Would you be a super duper hero and feel unphased by it all? Or would you suffer like Kaneki did? Your reality turned on its head, a constant worry you may give in and take a mortal bite out of your best friend. Also the organs of the girl you liked are now inside you, which I might call even more successful than getting laid or landing a girlfriend. New game sodomy + It’s so surprisingly intimate This scene is where the clash between human and ghoul comes to a head in a transcendental space where Rize is alive within Kaneki, a literal representation of the ghoul versus human struggle. But this struggle doesn’t last forever, it comes to a conclusion during Season 1’s finale. A bad man named Yakumo Oomori has kidnapped Kaneki because his ghoul-human mix makes him an interesting specimen. And also a threat. Yakumo himself was kidnapped many years earlier and was subject to terrible torture techniques. The worst, mind-shredding pain, suspense, and fear all tangled together in Oomori’s head until he broke free. Now, he’s using the same torture techniques on Kaneki. Oomori makes our relatable weenie count down by sevens from 1000 while he cuts off his fingers and toes one by one. When they grow back (due to his healing powers) Oomori does it over and over and over, the counting is a trick to keep Kaneki consciousnessly hanging on to every excruciating moment. Geeze Vegeta calm down. Until this point, Kaneki’s mother’s words had stuck with him. During flashbacks in the midst of torture, we hear Kaneki’s mom tell him, “it’s far better to feel pain yourself than to inflict it on others.” This was the motto that carried him through life. The string of words that kept him kind, understanding but also timid and naive. Rize rubs his idealistic world view in his face. She calls his mother worthless. If she had the guts to cut her deadbeat sister off she wouldn’t have worked herself to death. She wasn’t kind. She was weak. It was because she didn’t have the power to hurt others that she couldn’t save herself and she couldn’t save Kaneki from growing up without a mom. Because Kaneki embodied his mother’s words, he didn’t have the power to save anyone, not even himself. It’s only when he accept’s Rize’s mocking plea that feeling pain isn’t better than inflicting it on others that Kaneki literally takes her into himself. He bites into her, merging with her cynical psyche, still promising that he won’t let her be in control. Unfortunately, that promise was a lie. Kaneki does escape, he gets his revenge and it was exactly as awesome as you’d expect it to be. But then it’s over. His revenge is bittersweet, his kindness gave way to brutality. The Kaneki we knew is gone. In episode one of season 2, Kaneki is a lot more Rize than he is himself. When Touka, his good friend and love-interest, spots our now-white-haired, no longer weenie and talks to him… he just stands there. Perpendicularly. Profoundly. Oh how profound. We get it. You were brutally tortured and experienced unimaginable pain. Centipedes crawled through your sinuses and stung you and you twitched, screamed, had your already painful life shattered into sharp pieces that were forced back down your orofaces. But this...THIS! Was rather abrupt. White-haired Kaneki is exactly how I’d imagine myself if I was 14 and suddenly got uber powerful thanks to an experience that justified me being an edgemaster emo kid. Not hating on the look. Just the guy. He never struggles with Rize after his realization. He just becomes her. Plus emo. In season 2, we rarely see Rize. It’s as though she so seamlessly intertwined with him that she ceased to whisper in his ear and instead just took direct control of his nervous system. There’s no battle between who he was and who he has become. He’s just a main character who is no longer himself. And I get it. Kaneki had a gorgeously, powerful and traumatic experience. I’m not discounting the brilliance of the season 1 finale. I’m not discounting that it SHOULD have changed Kaneki forever. I’m just saying there should have been a shred of what he represented to begin with. You could say the bridge between two worlds was no longer caught between two ways of thinking. Ken Kaneki was no longer at all tormented by what he demands of himself versus what the world demands of him. Eventually, in order to unlock his full potential and save the world from fighting itself into chaos, Kaneki had to cast away his doubt, his naive optimism and desire to help others even when it doesn’t make sense. Kaneki had to learn the art of selfishness if he was to transform into something resembling a hero. But as far as what that really meant, that was addressed and then cast aside once Oomori was killed by Kaneki. By all means, I’m happy the creep is dead. However this theme of being caught between two understandings, two worlds, was traded for the theme of “yeah I know how hard life can be” as soon as Kaneki didn’t bother to turn 90 degrees that one time. Our protagonist... was not the same character. Actually, director Shuhei Morita was told by manga creator Sui Ishida to go his own direction with the anime...and also not chip away at the story of the manga. Not an easy task, he was pulled in opposing directions, having to hit the important story points while also feeding his creative freedom. This tug of war resulted in the disappointing Kaneki in Season 2. He was a kid raised to believe it’s better to feel pain yourself than to inflict it on others. Then he’s confronted with a biological destiny that makes him crave the product of murder. It’s a philosophical mind-bend best captured by doubling over in a gross ally, sobbing from excruciating hunger pangs at odds with your deep fear of hurting others. A very human, thinking mind is fighting a very primal, craving one. It’s the war between a cultured monkey and a slobbering animal. It’s the one we’ve been fighting for millions of years and it’s one we’ve won enough battles against to be civilized enough to have a civilization. Kaneki stopped fighting that war. He was the moral compass we all needed and his agony was an unpleasant reminder of what makes us human. Keyword: was. Because he gave all that up. Save for the idea of friends and family. Well actually his family is dead. It’s just friendship. For example: Hide! Kaneki’s only real tie to the human side of things by the end of season 2. They’ve been friends since childhood, since both of Kaneki’s parents died and left him alone. While Ken is nervous and skittish, Hide is peppy and confident. This chill, blonde, dudebro was a beacon of light in the old days, and he remains one today. He’s such a perfect tie for Kaneki to his old, human life. Everyone else Kaneki knows are Ghouls. While it is a little odd to see Hide get official with the CCG, he is the foundation for Kaneki’s old life he’s grown incredibly distant from. Then this happened. RIP RIP connection to everything Kaneki represents to us! Without any human friends, what’s to keep him caring about humans? Thanks to Season 2, our realistic human was replaced with an OP hot topic model with no hold on his mother’s morals. The mascot for weenie hut juniors is now the spokesman for the edge-bucket! When Hide bled out, Kaneki lost every shred of idealism. Not that he had any since being tortured. Kaneki was the connection to both worlds, a connection we needed to relate to the show, his mother's words are what defined him. When he threw them aside and never considered them again, Kaneki threw himself aside. He was the person we wanted to be, who we sympathized with because of our own moral boundaries and natural weakness as humans, without that we lost what attaches us to the world of Tokyo Ghoul. Kaneki is powerful now. He’s focused, he’s unyielding, but the heart of his purpose, that one we connected with as we watched from our own world...is now missing. We lost our link. Our reason for watching, our reason for understanding. The man we grew to love, the divide that made him believable, disappeared after that finale. And now what’s left is just a shell of Kaneki. His inner, excruciating tension has been silenced for a sad, focused quietness that no human can relate to. I feel nothing when I used to believe in his pain. I relate to nothing when I used to see his divide in myself. Kaneki was in all of us, you, me, everyone. And now he’s in none of us. His fight was ended just before he became a powerful fighter. That’s the tragedy of Tokyo Ghoul. The story of Ken Kaneki: The Story You Never Knew. And that’s my take on Kaneki. Tokyo Ghouls universe is pretty trippy. Full disclosure I know I didn’t even talk about Tokyo Ghoul: re. If you’ve seen it you’ll know why it’s not technically necessary for a video about Kaneki. But more importantly I’ve been taking a deep breath before I jump into it because of...the reasons I talked about. I’ll be back to Tokyo Ghoul. But given there’s another big “main character reset” for the last season I’ve been procrastinating on watching it..for a while. I’m looking forward to it, I’m just mentally preparing to piece together who the main character is now exactly. I think that makes sense. If you liked this video. Like it! If you didn’t...don’t like it. Also check out this story you never knew on Spike from Cowboy Bebop. It was the first video ever hosted on this channel so it’s got a bit of a special place in my heart. Or check out mike’s video about why the promised neverland is better than you think. Up to you. I’m Grant. I’ll see you on that subscriber feed. If you subscribe and hit that bell. Snuck that one in there.