This isn’t a meta so much as speculation + what I would like to see. 

Itori starts this question by telling Kaneki that a ghoul named Kamishiro Rize does not exist… but also that Rize is the key to everything. Which the latest chapter reinforced.

This is foreshadowing both for Rize’s past in the Sunlit Garden (was her original last name Arima? seems possible), but also for her role in the story going forward, in which Rize is not given agency since her attack on Kaneki. She’s first captured and mined by Kanou and then she loses her mind. She’s then recaptured in :re and taken to the lab again, where Furuta turns her into the Oggai. She appears in Kaneki’s mind, but she’s just a hallucination in Aogiri, unable to speak for herself. Kaneki instead projects the worst of himself onto her and this continues. Furuta becomes enraged she wasn’t grateful to him for freeing her and lashes out. 

Personally, if Furuta and V are intending Rize to be some kind of final Dragon/Boss, I’d like her to subvert that expectation in the end. Because the Rize we have known has been a plot device more than a villain, an unkind person yes, but someone who never deserved the things that happened to her. Unlikeable people are victims too, and I would really like to see Rize say “fuck it” to Furuta and his expectations one last time. He’s someone who, while I love him, has repeatedly seen himself as a god in her life, as someone who can give and take her agency away from her (and V has as well, given what she was born to do). 

Rather than the ending be Rize being killed by Kaneki as the Revelation/Kaneki as Christ symbolism seems to hint, I would like Rize to say “No” to Furuta’s plans again, as saying “no” to expectations is something Rize does best. I’d like her to begin by not eating him, leaving him alive to witness her defiance of the constraints he repeatedly places her in.

If Kaneki’s identity is a giant question mark to us, and it is, so is Rize’s. Kaneki willingly submits himself to the loss of his agency, Rize does not submit but loses her agency all the same. If Kaneki is going to take his agency/responsibility the next arc, as the story seems to be setting up for him to do, I would love to see Rize, a foil and parallel of Kaneki, do likewise in the end–choose not to be some sort of villainous Dragon, or (more likely) choose to stop. 

That would be hard to do, of course, given that facing all you’ve done is something that Kaneki could barely do and Rize even said so (hallucination or not it seems pretty likely Rize wouldn’t really want to do this)

Plus. Rize doesn’t have the world working together to save her. But there are a few people who might try to stop her without killing her. Banjou possibly, Yomo, Uta if he is the previous Nagaraj (for Yomo’s sake lol), Kaneki even, and Yoshimura in the lab who made that promise to Shachi. 

Basically I just want to learn who Rize is, and for her to choose her own path rather than serve as a plot device for Furuta and Kaneki.