“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
   –Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

I could get into how this quote applies to Kaneki and Furuta’s narrative coping-mechanisms, especially with Kaneki and the tragic protagonist idea, but instead I want to ramble about Furuta and Arima, who foil each other extremely closely, and the weirdly different framing around them as characters despite them being even more like each other than they are like Kaneki. As a trigger warning this meta is going to heavily deal with suicidal ideation, because for a manga with the main theme of “live,” the framing around Arima’s death has been… odd to say the least. I guess this ramble (it’s really more a ramble than a proper meta, soz about that) might be an attempt to make some sense of a death I see as profoundly tragic and heartbreaking in the manga (Arima’s), via Furuta’s character.

What makes a villain, in TG? I think it answers the same paradoxical way it would answer the question of what makes a monster: everyone is a monster, and no one is a monster. To quote SnK’s Armin Arlert:

I don’t like the terms “good person” or “bad person” because it
is impossible to be entirely good to everyone. To some, you are a good
person, while to others, you are a bad person.

Everyone’s a villain to someone in this story, and so no one’s really a villain. Everyone is both victim and perpetrator. Everyone is a person. It’s not so much that every TG character receives redemption; it’s that our perspective on them changes first, and then most of them go on to live which means redeeming themselves to an extent. 

Commonly this week in the deluge of hate for Furuta I’m seeing the assertion that Furuta as the villain ruined Kaneki’s life (which Kaneki himself says is not the case in 159) and also Rize’s life. Which, I mean, sure, because he dropped steel beams on her and later mined her and teamed up with Kanou who originally mined her. But there were multiple years in-between those events, and the whole reason Furuta got his hands on Rize again was… not because of him searching her out and dragging her back.

It was because of Arima. Arima is the one who recaptured Rize and murdered the one person who truly, wholeheartedly, loved Rize unconditionally without wanting anything in return.

Arima is also the suicidal favored son of Tsuneyoshi who also carried out a
genocide against ghouls with the goal of making himself a villain with the hopes that someone (Kaneki, but Amon & Takizawa were also considered) would be strong enough to kill him and thus unite all ghouls to
take down the organization preventing them from living normal lives–but like, the other one, the not-Furuta one. It’s not a coincidence Ui went from clinging to Arima to clinging to Furuta. 

Does this excuse Furuta? No. His actions are condemned in every way by the manga. But why then does the manga seem to have a kinder view of Arima? Is it just because he loved Kaneki? Quite probably that explains the framing, since the manga likes to comment on how from a certain perspective anyone is a villain like the Armin quote above, a la Shironeki killing people we don’t care about and then Shiromutsuki going after people we do care about. (I wrote more about that here.) 

It’s perfectly fine and I have no problem with people liking one and not liking the other because either can be triggering, so that needs to be respected. But from a narrative perspective, if you say “cool motive still murder” about Furuta, it applies to Arima too. But it’s not that simple for either of them imo. Both Arima and Furuta were forced to become child soldiers, knowing they would die young, raised in a rape garden. They’re victims, too. In the end, Arima committed suicide, and it’s heartbreaking. And he didn’t have to die/it wasn’t inevitable, as Kaiko notes for us:

Hence I don’t think it’s a controversial opinion to presume that Arima did not want to live with his guilt (compounded by having years of depression after growing up as a child soldier). But why does everyone in a manga that discourages self-sacrifice and encourages living over suicide then laud Arima as the god of death who died at 33 for our sins (like the Jesus symbolism isn’t subtle)? There are some hints that the framing around Arima’s death is not something we should be taking as the manga honoring everything he did or saying the ends justified the means.

Motives matter in how you’re perceived–but they don’t actually matter to the victims who are still, you know, dead, or missing their loved ones.

Touka and Ayato will never get their mother back. Yomo will never get his sister back. Rize will never get Shachi back. That’s even what Furuta’s using to taunt Kaneki in the most recent chapter: the fact that no matter what Kaneki does, it isn’t going to bring the dead back. (I think we all can agree that whoever Owl is–probably Hairu–it isn’t a life worth living.) What’s done is done.

Kaneki himself acknowledged that he had a role in creating Dragon when he decided to bear the weight of his sins. Was he solely responsible, no, Furuta orchestrated it of course, but the manga and Kaneki accept responsibility for his role in it too; that’s all I’m saying:

Good for you, Kaneki, grow my son grow. It’s like what Urie tells Mutsuki: admit what you did. Face it. That’s the way to redemption, not in dwelling on the past (it’s also what Hsiao tells Aura during their fight).

Like Arima, Kaneki earlier did not want to live with the memories of what he’d done, so he tried to kill himself. Mutsuki, the same thing, but both of them chose to live. All of these suicidal characters are plagued by guilt for things that both are and are not their fault.

So how does this apply to Furuta? Well, if motives matter, does the fact that Furuta wanted to take down the Sunlit Garden–aka not really different than what Arima wanted–matter for him? I think the manga and all us readers might initially be like well… not when it comes to the people he harmed like Kaneki, like Rize, like Hajime. Because that harm remains. Good motives don’t justify the pain. If you act like a villain, with good intentions or not, aren’t you a villain? Or maybe, perhaps, there are no villains, and no protagonists? Perhaps there are just people. But objectively, if we say that about Furuta, we have to apply that to Arima as well–or perhaps his motives do matter in terms of his value in the story, just like Arima’s do. 

So if Kaneki decided to live and bear the weight of his sins, knowing
much of Tokyo will never forgive him, and Arima could not, Furuta needs to be offered the
same opportunity, like both Kaneki and Arima had that choice. Furuta is not narratively condemned to die any more than Arima was, and that’s the point. (Keep in mind that given that Furuta and Arima were both given favor explicitly because of their innate talent–aka what they could do–so the concept of facing wrongs and trying to right them has got to be absolutely terrifying, because I doubt failure was much of an option in the Garden (especially if freeing Rize is indeed what cost Furuta his favor with his dad).) If Furuta rejects this offer, as he seemed to kind of reject the beginning of Kaneki’s empathy this chapter:

…well, choices matter, so it really is on Furuta to decide whether or not he truly wants to die or whether he wants to live. If the manga fulfills his suicidal wish, he needs to regret it firstly, and it should then be used to dismantle
the “St Arima who died for our sins” attitude by illuminating the tragedy of it all. Like, if Furuta isolated himself, so did Arima. Characters note this multiple times, and it still breaks me because Arima too didn’t believe he deserved to be loved. Furuta just took the mask off Arima as the CCG’s mascot of sorts, and off the CCG as a whole. Which is what Furuta’s entire role in the manga has been–taking the mask off the CCG’s actions, off Ui’s, off Kaneki’s, off Mutsuki’s, off Arima’s. 

If Furuta does choose to live, it has to be used to show that
if Furuta could recover, so could have Arima–not to condemn his choices, but to portray them honestly as tragic. The fact that our other two suicidal parallels, Kaneki and Mutsuki, are recovering show us you can recover from the darkest of spirals, but it’s up to you to decide to redeem yourself, or drown. Importantly both Kaneki and Mutsuki had people to cling to, but Furuta, like Arima, has isolated himself. However, if Kaneki truly empathizes with him, that could help convince him it isn’t hopeless. But I don’t know; personally I’m not entirely that optimistic but I’m a pessimist about all characters living usually (sorry Yomo I thought you were gonna die like a million times) so who knows.