hey hey there’s some koi fish on the blade collar of Furuta’s katana.
Long life, strength, and prosperity.
EDIT:
There’s a legend that a school of koi fish were swimming up the Yellow River and were met with a huge, powerful waterfall. Some of them were discouraged, but still many of them were determined to make it on top. The demons were laughing at their pointless efforts, making the waterfalls taller and taller…
until eventually one little koi put all his strength into it and leapt to the very top. The gods were proud, and rewarded him by transforming him into a *drumroll*
DRAGON!
And that’s how dragons are born: by breaking through the “Dragon’s Gate” with strength and perseverance .
Oh wow, this is really interesting! I’m desperate for more information about this dragon Furuta mentioned.
There was one thing I rather liked about in this chapter. When Urie emerges from Roma’s stomach and starts to think about the situation, you can see that he is still bitting his tongue, keeping some thoughts locked up. When he kneels down in front of the bleeding Kuroiwa and as he starts to say how Urie reminds him about his father, there Urie is also shown without a mouth.
But as Kuroiwa is about to contine, Urie stops him. Urie screams, shouts from the top of his lunges and tells the revelation he had earlier. About what he has learned about himself, what others made him see that he refused at first to acknowledge. That it was no one’s fault. And the chatacter, that usually bottled up his thoughts and emotions inside him, and that is known to be drawn without a mouth, has an the entire lower panel dedicated to show his mouth, teeth and the words that he shouts.
He likely did not have to even shout there, and I think it tells how much Urie wanted to say these words, to Kuroiwa and probably to himself too.
Marude has no previous connection to Urie, and thematically it makes little sense for Akira to be relevant at the moment. There is however, one last person relevant to this scene that was left out of the proceedings.
The person who left behind the evidence that allowed Urie to sniff out Furuta, was Matsuri himself. Matsuri was also present at the Marude/Washuu scene which this scene is obviously paralleling, if not directly in the room at the time. This time Matsuri being the one to shoot the Washuu chairman in the head, rather than simply being the person to stumble in upon it afterwards makes an interesting parallel for a reversal of situations.
Also, Matsuri is the only one who has decent reason to have been following Urie around in what was otherwise supposed to be a secret meeting kept under wraps between him and Kuroiwa. After the death of the Washuu, Matsuri’s attention and priorities focused only to Urie.
The use of a sniper bullet as well, rather than direct interference fits Matsuri’s style. It’s been shown that even when cornered in a fight he wasn’t really able to produce a kagune despite being a full blooded ghoul. It is even possible that the mainline Washuu do not have this trait.
Matsuri has always been the type to only sit back entirely from the battlefield and watch. When he gets directly involved he loses himself in it. He’s a better strategist than a direct fighter, which fits with the position of a sniper.
Also there is this, still unused piece of calendar art. One which depicts Matsuri and Urie as opposites facing off. With Urie as Dracula and Matsuri as Van Helsing. This parallel however is one yet to be truly fulfilled with Matsuri’s sudden dropping out of the plot.
However if Matsuri were to reappear here in order to save Urie, it might make a few things about his character arc click into place. Number one is that Urie has always slowly been transforming himself into a full ghoul by pushing his own frame to the limit. It’s been a bit odd that Urie somehow shifted immediately back to normal after his frame out when Dr. Shiba warned him there was no going back from that point.
Unless of course, Urie was eating RC Cells prepared for him by Doctor Shiba the same way Sasaki is theorized to have been. This would explain Urie’s sudden unfathomable power increase to take down an SSS ranked Kakuja when he could barely handle himself against Donato last time around.
The point is of course that if Urie was saved by Matsuri here, he wouldn’t really be as saved. It’s more of a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire There’s a reason that Kuroiwa was killed, despite Urie’s sudden last minute revelation.
It’s because Urie’s revelation was not enough. The mindset that he can hold everything on his shoulders is exactly what led to his last framing out. Saiko even said so directly that it was a quality shared between him and Sassan. The same central issue that has yet to be resolved. The only thing Urie has diagnosed is it’s cause, and thus he’s doomed to watch helplessly as another person dies in front of him again that he could not stop.
Matsuri saving him really would only prolong that pain. An escaped Urie would no longer have contact with the CCG, and likely not even have the CCG’s RC cell formula to keep him fed. His only ally at that point then would be somebody he hated, and a full natural born ghoul.
Urie’s arc has always been about him slowly becoming a ghoul, the thing he thought he hated and blamed. It makes sense for his consequence now to be to lose his position and safety net within the CCG and become a fully branded ghoul cast out and forced to survive on his own.
I just read “Kojiki” for class and I still can’t figure out the meaning behind the title of chapter 137, “Izanagi”. Well, unless it’s a not-so-subtle allusion to how Izanagi couldn’t accept the death of Izanami, his sister and co-creator of the world, and went to the underworld to retrieve her. I guess that this could both be an allusion to the revived corpses of Furuta’s zombie army or to Kuroiwa senior’s supposed death(?) and how it could possibly tie to his childhood trauma of losing Mikito, especially now that he seemed to be opening up to him.
That, or maybe the allusion is more subtle. When Izanagi visits the underworld, Izanami tells him that she can’t go back because she already ate the food of the underwold, but that she could try to convince its lord to let her go, if only he promises not to look at her. Predictably, he does, and sees her for the real monster that she is, and runs away terrified, while she furiously chases him. Now, I’m not really sure how this could tie with the current happenings of TG, but if I may hazard a guess, I’d say that this could be a reference to his soon-to-be(?) reunion with Shirazu in his zombie form. Ever since Shirazu’s death, he’s been determined to bring his corpse back (the comparison is a bit stretched here, I know), because of what he said about how funerals are for the people who were left behind to move on, but then, the moment he’s actually faced with Shirazu’s corpse, he is horrified by the revelation that having his (revived) corpse back doesn’t give him any closure, but actually makes his grief even worse because he’s faced with the reality that he couldn’t save him from such a horrible fate, the zombification?
This way, even if Shirazu doesn’t reappear immediately, the connection to him would still be there thanks to this panel:
Which, in turn, is a obvious reference to Kaneki’s words to Urie when Shirazu died:
Which only goes to show how little Urie’s grown as a character, and how he’s still putting people on pedestals and blaming himself instead of the system that made him an orphan in the first place.
hamliet 