I’ve been wanting to write about TG’s Amon/Juuzou foiling for awhile and the latest chapter gave me the opportunity so let’s go. (Some of my thoughts, especially as related to Amon, come from a conversation I had with the brilliant @lunaamatista)

Juuzou and Amon had two of my favorite arcs in the first TG, though in :re, I’ve found both their arcs’ pacing… it could be better. :)) Amon and Juuzou have inversed arcs in some ways in how their relationship to the CCG is portrayed in each series: in TG, Amon is accepted with the CCG, and despite working with the CCG Juuzou is an outsider and knows he’s treated like one; in :re, Juuzou is accepted and praised by the CCG, but Amon is lurking on the outside thanks to being turned into a ghoul. I’ve always been interested in how they foil each other, but in particular I want to discuss their foiling in relation to how they cope with their respective two major parental/mentor figures each: Mado Kureo and Donato for Amon, Shinohara and Big Madam for Juuzou, and how it relates to this theme:

The idea of growing up is connected to Jungian concepts of overcoming your parents (one of TG’s main themes) and doing that via arriving at self-actualization. Ishida directly drew our attention to this theme with what Yomo told Uta, and basically as this is the last arc the time for everyone to grow up is now or never. 

In the first TG, we see that Mado and Donato are highly similar. Both of them are sadistic child murderers, yet Amon rejects Donato and believes he is irredeemably evil, whereas he respects Mado so much he will do anything to atone for not preventing his death.

The discrepancy is obviously in that Donato was a ghoul and Mado a human, so Mado’s murdering is acceptable to Amon. But the thing is, Amon became exactly what he would have become had Urie Mikito not captured Donato: a child murderer.

In the recent confrontation, we see Amon accept what he needed to accept about Donato: that he loved him, and that Donato was evil but also loved him:

And in doing so, he accepts personal responsibility: he was twisting the world.

Perhaps this is the answer the the question of emptiness he posed to Akira earlier in :re.

Amon needed to reconcile the good with Donato, and he needs to reconcile the bad with Mado, because he still has not done that that we’ve seen as last time Mado was brought up he was praised–though Amon and Akira were still deciding to defy him, so that’s a good step.

So basically Amon needs to, at this point, assist Akira in giving those Fueguchi quinques back to Hinami, I believe. After all, he participated in this attack whereas Akira did not. And I would like to see an apology, to see Amon take responsibility for twisting that part of the world. After reconciling the good and and with both Donato and Mado, I think Amon might be ready to step out into the world, and decide how he wants to live his life.

Juuzou, too, is rescued from a ghoul and then essentially follows the same life Big Madam would have prescribed for him, just with the law on Juuzou’s side this time. The difference is that while Donato and Mado are more gray, Big Madam is definitely painted in an almost entirely negative light and Shinohara in an almost entirely positive light, and for good reason. But at the same time, they’re both murderers.

The tragic irony of Juuzou’s situation is that he sticks with the CCG under the guise of honoring Shinohara.

But he is actually just sticking to the lifestyle Big Madam set him on, forgetting that the reason he loves Shinohara so much was because Shinohara loved him like a son, not because Shinohara taught him how to murder ghouls. Like no, Juuzou, it hasn’t been decided. You can still make your own decisions. But at this point, Juuzou hasn’t gazed into that emptiness to see what the right decision would be. 

An interesting thing is Big Madam gives Juuzou the answer Amon has been trying to get from Part 1: why did you let me live? What was it about me?

But her answer is exactly what Amon would expect from a ghoul (like if Donato said something similar):

And that answer does nothing for Juuzou, just like it would have done nothing for Amon no matter what answer Donato gave him (whether it was the same as Big Madam’s or whether it was ‘because I loved you’). The answer will never be found in the past. It’s found in looking critically at yourself and taking what you have and moving forward with the good and discarding the bad.

I think why Juuzou’s confrontation with his abuser did not ultimately free him and instead ended with him affirming his commitment to his job (with the ease with which Amon accepted things in the first TG) is because he was not put in a position in which he had to critically look at himself, like Amon was forced to when he became a ghoul (okay it still took Amon… a… long… time. Lol). His squad serves as a buffer, and it’s beautiful because they are his family and they love him like Shinohara loved him, but personal responsibility for deciding one’s own direction is also necessary and no one is challenging Juuzou on this besides Marude just telling him–though it clearly hasn’t resolved because now Juuzou’s all stab stab stab again.

I do think something is building for Juuzou right now–which is why again, I think it makes so much more sense for Owl to be Hairu, someone he would know, rather than the ghoul who put Shinohara into his coma. But regardless it still probably wouldn’t be enough, which we know because of how Juuzou had no qualms about fighting Haise. What Juuzou needs, probably, is to find himself a ghoul, and then to see that his squad will not kill him–because they won’t. And he might realize Shinohara would not have killed him either, especially if Shinohara does, in fact, happen to wake up. Because they love him.

And then Juuzou might have to ask himself a similar question to the question Akira asked in 120:

Whom should I have been killing?

The answer is no one. But in terms of how to fix the world, or how to move forward? It comes from looking at yourself.

Juuzou already might as well be a ghoul in terms of murdering without a second thought. Hopefully he will soon learn the lesson being a ghoul helped teach Amon (well, sort of, could have been written better but that’s neither here nor there):

And make his own way forward, as Marude admonished him to do. (Even if he doesn’t become an actual ghoul, he needs to realize that he in essence is one already–that’s just a foreshadowed way I think would work narratively to help Juuzou arrive at that point.)