Tokyo Ghoul: A partial impression/review

Tokyo Ghoul was introduced to me by virtue of someone wondering if the screenname I was using had anything to do with the manga, back sometime in 2014. This led to a bit of conversation about the manga, and I ended up interested enough to give it a read.

For whatever reason I decided to write down a portion of my thoughts as I was reading through the story. I've been slowly leaning toward writing down thoughts and impressions of mine about fiction I am exposed to it, roughly as I am exposed to it, in general anticipation of Vigaroe posts, but I've mostly thought in terms of fiction I have reason to believe are widely known and influential, so I'm not sure what impulse drove me to do this for Tokyo Ghoul.

The following is a somewhat-cleaned-up version of the notes I wrote down. Mostly it's been altered to be less opaque to people who aren't me. Spoiler warning!



First impression: dark existential angst. OK, kind of cool.

Then the author seems to run out of ideas for how to play out angst centering around the horror of being a Ghoul, and decides to focus on "other Ghouls are scary and dangerous, and that's horrifying." Which is, honestly, a lot less interesting, especially because our hero keeps behaving as if he's helpless. If the focus was on him having trouble coping with how violence-centric Ghoul culture was, sure, that'd be cool, but this? Eeeeh.

Then the author seems to run out of ideas for that and transitions our man-eating hero into being treated as a completely ordinary teen with a completely ordinary job at Anteiku working with completely ordinary people who happen to be hunted by an organization dedicated to their destruction and staffed by insane/evil/insanely evil monsters. Never mind that he has to live on human flesh, the people he works with are mostly unrepentant killers, and the customers are mostly unrepentant killers as well.

They're all ordinary people being murdered by villainous authorities for inadequate reasons!

Obviously!

From there the author decides it's time to Shonen it up and have our hero have philosophical arguments with humans dedicated to killing creatures that can only survive by continuing to kill humans, because obviously the Ghoul-hunters are simply engaging in dastardly racism, rather than engaging in common sense. What?

Not to say the Ghoul should lay down and die for them, but it's a completely ridiculous face-off -you might as well have a story where a wolf corners a rabbit who is part of the Wolf Extermination Rabbit Corps, and attempts to convince the chaingun-wielding rabbit that it's ethically in the wrong for attempting to defend its species by killing wolves. It's stupid, and the fact that any of the characters take it even slightly seriously makes it really hard for me to take Tokyo Ghoul, itself, seriously. It's a bit disappointing after having a fairly strong start.

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Thinking on it, my issue with the multiple style/mood transitions is that they don't really come across like the author moving the story in new directions so much as they feel like abandoning the current direction. That the new directions make no sense and are inconsistent with the prior story and just plain strange/annoying (Where did our hero's best human friend go, anyway?) just compounds the problem, but my real issue is the "just drops the previous angle" aspect -like how our hero essentially stops thinking about the whole "my continued existence demands human death" thing and seems basically okay with being a Ghoul after the story moves past not only the existential angst but also the "oh god Ghouls are scary and dangerous and scary" phase. This isn't because he's found a solution or come to terms with the problem, and it isn't even because he has more pressing concerns -the story just forgets about it.

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Also the creepy nutjob Ghoul hunter gets killed, and it's like, supposed to be tragic or something (He's apparently married and his partner is very dramatically crying over his corpse afterward), but the guy is such a horrible creep every time that the audience sees him (And completely gratuitous in being a creep) that if I was a human living in Tokyo Ghoul's universe and saw this guy on a regular basis I'd be glad he died because he's worse than the Ghouls. The author put zero effort into establishing a reason for the audience to have even one positive feeling toward this guy, and tons of reasons to hate his revolting guts and hope he dies soon. Thing is, I don't think the author is being farcical? I'd like to think they are, really, since it would make this much less demented and creepy, but I don't believe that's the author's intent.

Also while we're on the topic of creepy-man, he's apparently been using Ghoul body parts to fight Ghouls, via Science! Our Ghoul heroine's reaction to this is, of course, to be revolted and pissed off, but at no point question how does this work nor why would anyone even do this. Seriously, what the heck is this crap? If I were in her position, I'd be too busy boggling at the idea that this could be done, and then at the idea that anyone would bother to try, to really process and respond to the part where it's grotesque and horrifying.

And then they immediately give us a flashback after he's dead, that doesn't do anything to make him more sympathetic. And then we get a "humorous" scene of him arriving in Hell and scaring the locals. In our horror manga.

What??

Afterward the story seems to be trying to explore the whole "secret society" aspect of Ghouls, only in a nonsensical way that shows that Ghouls are stupid, Tokyo-ites are stupider ("Let's lure a high-profile journalist to our secret restaurant and eat him." "Hey fellow cops, this high-profile individual vanished completely when he went to check out a restaurant in a city infested with Ghouls, could that mean anything? It's just not adding up for me." Really?), and our protagonist is yet stupider. ("I'm a Ghoul who can defend himself and protect these people by Going Ghoul, but I'm going to sit here in a panic and not do anything until I'm rescued by the guy who wanted to eat me in the first place. [and still does] Somehow, the fact that fear has historically triggered me to Go Ghoul doesn't count here." NO NO NO NO) Why.

After that travesty, we get to meet Nishio's human girlfriend who knows he's a Ghoul. Or maybe that was earlier. Whatever. Point is, she gets kidnapped by "the gourmet", because of course the only thing she can contribute to the story is "get kidnapped". Obviously the gourmet would know that our protagonist is vaguely familiar with her and fully expect that a fellow Ghoul would care about human beings. (When the gourmet lives among Ghouls who treat humans as meat on a pair of sticks, is one such Ghoul, and doesn't know remotely enough about our hero to reasonably guess that he's some weird exception)

Obviously.

This of course ends in a dramatic confrontation in a church where the gourmet spends far too much time talking and being Evil Upper Class, and not nearly enough time actually doing anything, during which Nishio is dramatic but useless and our hero is even more useless, albeit less dramatic. It's also revealed (I say this as though the story realizes this is what it is doing, but it doesn't realize it I suspect) that taking one bite out of a human being (Our protagonist, specifically) is enough for a Ghoul to temporarily turn into a superhuman among superhumans, because logic. (To be fair, they could reveal that our protagonist is a special exception because he's a weirdo half-Ghoul whatsit, but I honestly doubt the author is thinking this and doubt they'll ever think of it, let alone use it)

Literally the only good thing about this sequence is our hero decides to contribute by letting the female protagonist take a bite out of him. Even that was handled incredibly poorly. There's also this thing about her wanting to kill Nishio's human girlfriend because she's a witness to them being Ghouls, and Nishio being all "no" and our hero being "hey please don't" because he's whiny and useless and the girlfriend herself remarking that the female protagonist is beautiful, which is enough to cause her to leave and think about things because, I guess, she thinks of herself as too revolting to be beautiful. I guess.

Next plotline: our hero has been kidnapped by Ghouls!

Naturally, everybody wants to save him. They all care so deeply they're willing to risk their lives for him. Because. Male lead. Including that the female lead is abruptly clearly totally in love with him, even though at every step prior to this point she's found him to be an annoying moron she hates having to put up with. Naturally. Oh, and naturally the "gourmet" is somehow not dead, with a nonsensical explanation about how he ate part of his own arm... which explains nothing, since we saw him die. It's a blatant, badly-handled retcon. Oh and this includes Little Girl Ghoul is on board with suicide-rescue plan.

Also in general the story has been incrasingly "softening" the female lead by virtue of undermining everything we know about her, with it getting particularly bad now that the male lead has been kidnapped. It was one thing to have her killing Investigators to avenge Little Girl Ghoul's mother being killed -she was a badass with a soft spot for children, which she shows through murder. Fair enough. But this crap where she eats the (inedible) food her human friend made because it represents how her human friend cares about her or some such nonsense? No.

Around chapter 60 the story takes a sudden, violent turn for the dark. Super-torture land, managing to be stomach-turning even though almost nothing is actually seen. Wow. I am, on the one hand, pretty impressed, and on the other hand kind of baffled it took 60 chapters for a story centered around monsters that consume human flesh to become stomach-churning.

Meanwhile over with the Anteiku folks+the gourmet, they split up into a group even though they think they know where Kaneki is and are supposedly here entirely to rescue him. Ugh, the torture sequence made you look competent, author, why are you doing this? What's the point of splitting up, exactly?

... OK I'll admit Badass Kaneki is actually pretty cool at this point with the "half-kill you by breaking half your bones" and "hi gourmet if you try anything you die" and so on. There's still tons of idiocy going on -the manga is still pretending that Ghouls are a minority that can live peacefully with humans if both sides get past their prejudices which is obvious nonsense- but it's getting better, surprisingly. Most notable fail point is continuing to pretend Touka and Kaneki love each other and having Kaneki refuse to let Touka come along and help (Because girl) and Touka taking this meekly. (Because girl, never mind that it has nothing to do with her prior personality)

.... why are we timeskipping forward six months and revealing there's a human-made prison to hold Ghouls. Why on Earth would there be a prison?? The whole goal is extermination! This makes zero sense. Returning to my rabbit/wolf metaphor, we have rabbits feeding other rabbits to wolves because... um... killing wolves in self-defense is murder? Or something? This makes no sense. At all.

Then I lost interest because, seriously, the manga is just... ugh.

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There's some interesting ideas here, but I can't get past how the story wants the audience to take seriously blatantly absurd concepts, nor can I get past how characterization is wildly inconsistent to serve shifting goalposts. Example:

Touka starts the story as a scary, largely unemotional individual with no moral qualms about her survival being predicated on human death when it serves the story's goal of having Kaneki angst about being a Ghoul, and then angst about being surrounded by scary Ghouls.

Then once that's done and the Ghouls are being treated like a minority being discriminated against, the author seems to abruptly decide she's going to be the male lead's love interest, probably by virtue of her being the only option that's remotely plausible and already existent. So suddenly she has a softer side to her -but since the story is playing up Kaneki being scared and feeling helpless, she still gets to be badass and scary, leading to the pretty awesome sequence of her fighting to save a Ghoul child.

And then finally Kaneki gets tortured and becomes a (psychotic) badass himself and before it's even actually happened the story has already started on trying to make the audience forget that Touka was ever a competent, terrifying individual in her own right. Why, exactly, could they have not become a scary couple?

Touka isn't the only character that suffers from this kind of thing -she suffers from it more than other characters do, but that's primarily because she's one of the first non-Kaneki characters to enter the story, and has more longevity than, say, Mr. Creepy Investigator. Other characters simply don't exist long enough to be subject to it as badly. It's endemic to the story, with even Kaneki himself shifting in characterization for no real reason to serve the story's goals -Badass Kaneki produced by torture is the first time he's changed for any kind of actual reason in-story.

The art is interesting, the individual scenes are usually handled pretty well, but Tokyo Ghoul falls apart if you're reading it for the long haul, and even individual sequences can fall apart by virtue of being just plain obviously bizarre and nonsensical. (Again: why is a Ghoul prison a thing?)

Disappointing.