Yeaaaaaaaaaah. The Garden-name situation is very very strange to me, since Itori said Kamishiro Rize wasn’t her name but also everyone calls her Rize so maybe that was just Shachi’s Kamishiro… maybe names like Nimura and Rize were their names? Kichimura seems to have been one he chose for himself (since he wasn’t really a Washuu)… (and Souta his clown alias) or maybe Kichimura was his name and all the kids have Washuu names too but don’t go by them?
In short: I’m confused. Lol.
I think we got a bit from him before, actually!
But my impression of Tsuneyoshi is really the same, and I’m a bit surprised that people are assuming because he was kind acting he was actually kind. I’m not sure how kind he can actually be when he’s directly correlating love with rape in the case of Furuta’s mother, no matter how gentle he was with the children he produced through rape.
Hello hello!
And yep. This manga is one you really can’t read at face value without evaluating who is talking, what their motivations are, what the context is, etc. I have… a lot of feelings about this scene so can I ramble/rant about how absolutely horrifying I find this brief flashback, and what it tells us?
Yoshitoki saying to Arima that Furuta, a Garden child, was loved and doted on does not mean that Furuta was actually loved in any kind of meaningful way, or that he was spoiled–if anything it implies the opposite to me. Like, let’s break this down in depth.
Setting:
The Garden. A place where women are bred/raped to bear children and the children are trained as child soldiers. The fact that Yoshitoki associates Tsuneyoshi’s love of Furuta with his love of Furuta’s mother tells us he probably views both of them as objects to be controlled. He does not genuinely love Furuta nor his mother, even if he favors them, it’s for what they can offer him, not because of who they are. You cannot truly, unconditionally, beautifully love someone you are keeping locked up and imprisoned and physically harming. Keep in mind that this is chapter 173, and in chapter 73 of :re, we had Torso imprisoning Mutsuki under the exact same circumstances and saying he loved Mutsuki. If you don’t call that love, this is not in any way love. The circumstances are absolutely not different.
Furthermore, let’s look at Hairu. Everything we know about Hairu was her begging to be loved… through her accomplishments. She wanted to be praised and died seeking praise. Why would Furuta be any different?
The characters:
Yoshitoki, who presumably would one day wind up taking over for Tsuneyoshi and raping women like Furuta’s mother and fathering children. Of course he’s going to use the word love. Does he want to say “ah yes, the woman my father likes raping more than others and the kid I’ll one day use until he dies in the line of duty or old age at 30 if he’s lucky?” We cannot take Yoshitoki at his word here. He knows that this is wrong, imo, based on his wording, but he’s sugar coating it.
Arima. Someone who is being abused himself and trained like one of those people and who would go on to hate his life and the things he’d done. It’s basically asking us: do we think Arima was loved? That’s the kind of favoritism Yoshitoki shows Furuta, the same he showed Arima, which we saw was like one conversation. It’s not love. It’s you can be used.
What is actually said:
You can’t disentangle “he is loved, Tsuneyoshi dotes on him” from “he sits at the foot of the Washuu table; his ceiling is set.” Meaning, this was the best Furuta could ever hope for. A slave born to a mother who was a sex slave and a father who would only ever praise him for what he could do. He isn’t saying Furuta is spoiled; he’s saying the opposite. Furuta’s life is terrible.
Of course it’s not even remotely excuse for what Furuta would go on to do, but it’s supposed to help us understand, so that we, along with Kaneki soon probably, can empathize with him. It’s absolutely heartbreaking, and this scene is almost certainly supposed to make us feel for Furuta even if we still want him to lose, obviously, not be like “well of course he turned out that way he was loved and that wasn’t even enough he was just a bad egg.”
replied to your
:
What are your thoughts on furuta’s flashback and…
I think him wanting to sword fight is related to how he was practicing sword fighting with tsuneyoshi in the flashback.
Oh… you’re right.
I hate everything.
Thank you so much! So here’s a link to the translation I’m using: x
So the line about parents failing in raising you is specifically from The Black Goat’s Egg, Eto’s novel that connected Rize and Kaneki, the one about the son of a serial killer discovering his mother’s murderous instincts also run through him.
It’s Kaneki, but the mother here is Eto, and his own biological mother (you could also say that Arima as his father figure is also a relevant point of interest). He never wanted to be like them because he never wanted to hurt innocents, especially children. He just ate 100 of them.
It’s Karren, for whom Mirumo completely failed to raise her. Her parents and family died to save her, and as the last survivor of the von Rosewald family, she then died to save Tsukiyama.
It’s Touka and Ayato, whose father, Arata, failed to raise them and left them to fend for themselves. Touka pursued vengeance same as he did. Ayato then left Touka to pursue his own interests. It’s Touka, whose father figure, Yoshimura, failed to raise her too, and she’s taken on his self-loathing, which isn’t a path to life.
It’s Eto, for whom Yoshimura and Ukina failed her. She believed Ukina had a baby just to get close to V, and uses her metaphorical son Kaneki for similar utilitarian purposes.
It’s Mutsuki, for whom his biological parents and Kaneki failed him, and he turns into a violent person like his biological father and like Kaneki, abandons the other Qs. It’s Urie, who hated his father for dying to save everyone else and leaving him alone, and Kaneki, who left him alone, who now is taking on the burden and barely escaped death doing so, and seems to still be doing that. It’s Saiko, whose mother sold her for money to live out her comfortable lifestyle, who seems to just want to live her own comfortable lifestyle. It’s Shirazu, whose father killed himself and whose mother left when they couldn’t cope with Haru’s illness, who dies saving the others… and leaves them.
It’s Amon, who has become exactly what he hated about Donato: a child killer.
It’s Furuta, who becomes as callous and cruel towards everyone including controlling the body of the woman he loves as Tsuneyoshi, his father whom he hates. It’s Arima, it’s Hirako and Ui with Arima in that they choose not to divulge important facts, and Hirako towards Shio and Rikai, as their father figure in Arima first abandoned them just like Shirazu’s father abandoned him–by ending his life–and whose next father figure, Hirako, chose to still employ them as child soldiers instead of trying to protect them. It’s all of the Garden children.
I’ve talked before about the Freudian themes of TG. if you don’t kill your parental figure, they will consume you and you will die. I wouldn’t take the ending too literally; it’s a poem, and poems are seldom to be interpreted at face value (the vast majority of these characters who are still alive I think will not die).
I hope that helps! Thank you for the ask.
Eto’s novel The Black Goat’s Egg,
from which we get our lovely ghoul organization’s name and which also
you know started our story with Rize and Kaneki bonding over reading it,
tells the story of a son who becomes like the serial murderer mother he
despises. The sins of the parents passing down to their children is a
major theme in Tokyo Ghoul (affecting idk like almost every character),
but let’s talk about Kaneki and Furuta specifically, and how they’re
paralleling their parents in the current events of the story to the
detriment of those they love most. (Thanks to @mercyandmagic for helping
me organize my rambling thoughts.)
Kaneki’s mother’s main
flaw is that she prioritized her sister above her child and prioritized
her kindness above his well being. While statements such as this “instead of a person who hurts others, become the person who gets hurt.
It is okay if you lose because of your love and kindness. Ken, a kind
person only needs those things in order to be happy” sound radically counter-cultural in the violent world of Tokyo Ghoul, it’s an extremely
unhealthy attitude to encourage a child to adopt (and a very typical
one for an abuser to tell their victim), and as we know, her parenting has led to terrible consequences for Kaneki.
But
that’s essentially the attitude Kaneki’s adopted when it comes to
leading this “revolution,” at least for the majority of his time as the
OEK so far. He’s taking quinques, but encouraging the ghouls not to
strike back against the CCG. While if humans and ghouls are ever to live
among each other violence clearly needs to stop on both sides, allowing
so many ghouls to be slaughtered is not nonviolent; it is cowardice
(and I say this as a pacifist myself).
However,
Kaneki is at least now taking some good steps in his determination to
get food for the ghouls in the 24th ward. But the reality is they are
going to need to fight against Furuta and the CCG in order to stop the
war, and they need to accept that. I’m not saying they should kill them all, but they have to do something.
Furuta’s raid of the 24th ward seems destined to provoke Kaneki finally into grasping the stakes (by going after those closest to him) and fighting back.
That isn’t the only way Kaneki’s still paralleling his mother though: let’s turn to Kaneki’s mother’s essential abandonment of her child.
She may have still been there, but by prioritizing her sister’s well
being and working herself literally to death, she essentially abandoned
Kaneki.
This has resulted in Kaneki’s major fear of losing those close
to him, which leads to him desperately trying to keep people close to
him… and then abandoning them when he feels like it.
I’m
apparently never going to stop talking about this panel. But this is
the thing: Mutsuki’s asking Kaneki why he chose ghouls over them, the
Quinx, the ones Kaneki himself referred to as his children. Mutsuki’s
asking Kaneki the same questions Kaneki essentially has always wondered
about his mother: why did you choose them over me, when I needed you too?
His abandonment hasn’t just hurt Mutsuki. It hurt Urie, it hurt Saiko. And it’s set all of them down tragic paths reminiscent of the path Kaneki has himself walked. Kaneki
repeated his mother’s mistake in that he prioritized ghouls over his
Quinx children (and also lends a double meaning to the fact that the
organization he went to lead is named after The Black Goat’s Egg).
Now Kaneki’s expecting a biological child with Touka (who did make the choice to protect her child at a high cost), and if he wants
to be any kind of decent father, he needs to face the fact that, despite
the growth in his character, he’s still in some ways repeating his
mother’s mistakes, because it is in facing mistakes that we change.
And
unlike his mother, who is dead, Kaneki still has time to rectify his
mistakes. Three of the Quinx are still alive and one is probably going
to be undead. And it’s not just the fate of Kaneki, the Quinx, and his
unborn child that depend on Kaneki being able to break away from his
mother’s shadow: the entire world depends on this. Goat’s mission is to
unite the worlds of humans and ghouls, and to do this he’s going to have to
confront the question Mutsuki asked of him: what do Suzuya, the Qs, and everyone else at the CCG mean to you? Simply
not allowing them to be killed is not enough. Kaneki’s mother, too,
kept him alive, but that was not enough. If he loves them and doesn’t want them to be harmed, he needs to try to reach them rather than just avoiding them. He needs to break this habit of
abandoning the people he loves out of his own insecurities and fears,
and as much as is possible, reconcile with those he can. This revolution and the fate of Kaneki’s loved ones all hinge on Kaneki’s ability to choose a different path like Touka has.
And
as Kaneki’s dark foil, we have Furuta, who has also become just like
the father he presumably hates. There’s a sharp, dramatic contrast
between his statement here, in which he says he cannot bear the idea of
Tsuneyoshi using her as a womb just to produce
experimental children:
…and
this, in which he’s now imprisoning her and using her body as a tool to create children, exactly the
thing he earlier said he couldn’t bear the thought of his father doing
to her:
And
much like how Tsuneyoshi only viewed his children as tools essentially,
Furuta’s become the exact same way. As far as we know, he seems to only
view the Oggai as tools to kill ghouls.
The
difference is that Furuta does not still have a chance to rectify
things: he has chosen, and he’s chosen this path of comic tragedy. Rize’s unlikely to be sane after all this, and I’d go so far to
say that what he’s done to her is completely unforgiveable, whereas
Kaneki might still be able to reconcile with at least some of the people he abandoned (namely the Qs–yes, even Mutsuki). Furuta also
probably does not want to rectify things. Like his father chose to hurt the women and use the children in the Garden, Furuta’s chosen to harm Rize, and to harm the Oggai. Like his mother, Kaneki keeps trying to avoid choosing, but really not choosing is a choice. If Goat is going to succeed (and I think they will eventually), he needs to decide whether he really wants to run a revolution. If he wants to be a good father, he needs to choose his child and face his shortcomings in regards to the Qs. Kaneki can still write his own story; Furuta’s already written his own end.
hamliet 