linkspooky:

hysyartmaskstudio:

This part of the chapter is interesting, because its a consequence for Kaneki working and fighting for the CCG for years, and we’ve seen precious little of those. For three years Kaneki was one of the CCG’s top killers. Even if it was at someone else’s bidding, he still fought and killed hundreds of ghouls for them.

Now he’s acting like he’s the champion of ghoul kind but he has never actually been called out for how many ghoul lives he took. He’s never been asked to confront what he did, the orphans and mourners he created, and apologize. 

And here’s Hajime, showing up as an obvious shadow. He outright tells Kaneki that he was inspired by him and his violence, violence he used for the CCG.

Keep reading

This entire situation also smacks of another parallel with Kaneki’s other father figure, Yoshimura. For most of his narrative the focus of Yoshimura is a tale of his victimhood with V, of how V took both his mother and threatened to take his daughter from him, before ultimately closing in on his own life. However, it’s important to remember that V was originally a job offered to Yoshimura and not a life he was born into. 

There are of course, sympathetic circumstances that pushed him towards this decision. As Yoshimura himself said, he did not kill out of malice, but rather out of a sense of self preservation. Alone, all he could think of was extending his own life and ensuring for himself. 

Kaneki even says so to himself, the primary reason he is hunting ghouls is not because he thinks it’s the right thing to do or out of hatred towards him, his main reason is his own self preservation. He compares himself to Donato, a tool that has to continue to make himself useful to the CCG or else he will be disposed of. 

Kaneki takes it a step further though, he says Donato is not merely acting out of survival instinct. He’s also trying to find some self value, to prove himself to those above him. Despite the grisly work he was doing, in a way he gained what he was looking for, validation for his actions, a place of belonging, continued survival. 

When we’re introduced to Haise he’s precisely at the point where Kuzen would have reached before he met Ukina. Finally after all the struggle in the world, he was provided for both food, clothing, housing and shelter and no longer had to worry about those things. Even though he had a place to belong though, he still finds himself lonely. 

Perhaps Haise did make friends among the CCG but his time their was plagued by constant worrying about his own existence, and fear that he might lose his place. All fears which eventually prove to be true as the CCG obviously wasn’t enough of a home to make Kaneki stay once he remembered who he really was. 

Perhaps it’s fitting then the chapter after 8: Agent, where we see Haise’s first real insecurities manifest about his place of belonging in the CCG and also Haise attempt to resolve himself by reassuring that everything will be fine, others will take care of it for him that Haise finally encounters Touka. Which is of course, an encounter with a waitress whose more than meets the eye and has an agenda besides Kaneki’s own, yet an interestin in Kaneki all the same, the clear parallel with Ukina. 

This is of course the reminder that rather than a life that is just comfortable enough for them to survive, there could be another life, with a more deeper connections. One that is also fraught with inherent risk, s in order to be with Touka and Ukina, Kaneki and Kuzen had to sever all ties with their previous life behind. This is of course the point where both of them stalled.

Kaneki and Kuzen however, hesitate with this. Kaneki right now is unable to truly raise a hand against the CCG and still pities them as if he were one of them. Kuzen waits too long and fails to stand up against V in any significant way, and the end result is him being backed into a wall and believing he has no other choice but to kill Ukina with his own hands. 

This is all pretty clear stuff, but I outlined it because after making these initial mistakes both Kaneki and Yoshimura also fail entirely to try to face themselves and what they’ve done. They are both people who killed many, and not entirely for good reasons, sometimes they were selfish reasons. It’s a difficult quesiton of morality, about if it’s okay to kill hundreds even if there is a gun directly pointed at your head. One life can’t possibly equate to a hundred right? It’s not one I intend to answer either, but it’s one the manager and Kaneki definitely had to face. 

Yoshimura’s actions afterwards, heavily parallel the same mistakes that Kaneki makes no. After all, Yoshimura while saying that he wanted to totally protect his daughter, also while becoming the one eyed owl’s substitute specifically chose not to kill any more investigators. Which led to a distinction eventually and the suspicion that there were two owls, the oririnal “one eyed owl” and the second “No kill owl.”

The point is obviously, if Yoshimura’s goal was purely to recreate Eto’s appearance perfectly so that nobody would suspect her than he probably should have killed investigators. Otherwise there’s a clear behavior distinction between the two owls. Of course Yoshimura didn’t, and he refused to kill not really out of a greater scheme but rather his own reasons. His belief that he simply could retire, that he could walk away from his life as a cleaner, live in peace from now on and that would be enough. 

Of course, as I’ve said before every single character in this manga is a several times over murderer and not always for the right reasons either, so it’s hard to say whether or not a character deserves justice for trying to continue to live after all of those lives they took previously. However, I think simply ignoring who you were in the past and pretending to be somebody else entirely is not the way to go about it. 

Kaneki sees himself in Yoshimura. His decision to jump into the Anteiku raid was perhaps a suicide attempt, but I also think Kaneki’s conscious decision to sympathize with Yoshimura and want to see him brought to a happy ending and a reunion with his daughter. Kaneki saw himself in Yoshimura, and he saw that Yoshimura was lonely still despite giving love to everyone around him and being loved by everyone in return, but he couldn’t quite piece together why.

Perhaps this is why, the same reason for Yoshimura’s loneliness is now being reflected in Kaneki. He was lonely because he couldn’t live with himself, and therefore couldn’t open himself up to everybody around him. Most importantly though, he couldn’t open himself up to his daughter, or truly face her in any significant way. 

All he could do was find half measures in order to keep living. “I want to hold my daughter in my arms so much, but V won’t let me”, and “One person alone isn’t enough to fight V, so it’s not worth trying.” Those kinds of thoughts were the ones that held him back. His fear that he couldn’t, that he’d fall short, so it wasn’t really even worth trying to begin with. “If only, If only” is a thing you can say an infinite amount of times to come up with an infinite amount of reasons not to do something. 

I think it’s important too in this parallel when Yoshimura brings up Eto again, that Renji stops and falters, and finally says the reason he won’t face Touka and Ayato is because he himself is afraid of what he’s done in the past, and therefore doesn’t think he can help guide them. It’s his own deficiency that stops him from guiding others. 

So Kaneki and Yoshimura are pushed into corners by these parallel situations, first there is V pressing up against them restricting their freedom, Kaneki is hunted on the surface and pushed down into the 24th ward where his options become even narrower and narrower by the moment. At the same time though, there is their own self that they do not want to face. Kaneki has ties in the CCG that he doesn’t want to acknowledge that he abandoned especially in the Q’s, he has a career of killing ghouls willingly for his own survival, even those among his inner circle of friends especially Tsukiyama. Yoshimura was a cleaner who killed many for V and helped spread their power and did so basically for a place to live and food to eat. They have reasons, things they did in the past, that drag on them and also make them doubt themselves. Their self doubt then pushes them to make them feel helpless in their situation, or to be afraid of choices they make for the ever lasting fear that every choice might lead them to the wrong choice, to losing even more. Therefore it is better just not to choose at all, and spare themselves from having to be the one to decide.

Yoshimura sees the same thing when he’s backed into a corner by V, he’s told to “Choose” and the choice he makes is so horrific he never wants to choose again. Kaneki also shows signs of buckling under the extreme pressure he’s put himself under, to feel as if there’s nothing he can do against the entirety of V when he is one single person. 

There is something else that this great self doubt does though, that makes it so Yoshimura and Kaneki are not just harming themselves by their actions and hesitance. By eternally being stuck in their own head, their own lament, they grow more and more detached from others. To the point where Kaneki sees Eto, who he knows her entire story and her similiarities to himself, who the manager who was somebody he cared about specifically said values her more than his own life and asked Kaneki to save her, and he says this to her.

He refuses to save her. No really, he can’t save her. The reason he can’t of course is what’s listed above, Kaneki can barely look past his own pain at the moment. He’s so self involved that the struggles of others, the value of lives that others lead, just can’t occur to him. 

Yet, he is positioning himself as a savior to others. What that results in, and what that resulted in with Yoshimura too is that he’s unable to actually be of any help to the people he needs to save the most, when he needs to save them the most. 

If he were to find some way to live with himself, to grab some of his own agency, then perhaps he would have been able to. To act more decisively, rather than stumble like a chicken with it’s head cut off, into these situations where his back is pressed up against the wall. 

Touka asks Yomo why it is that Yoshimura and the others have to die when the time for the Anteiku raid comes along, and Yomo answers simply it’s because time has run out for them. 

They’ve spent far too long, living while running away from their crimes and unable to truly deal with the guilt in their heart, and when the time came they decided that the best way to resolve it was to simply die for it finally. 

However, Touka is young and not yet plagued by guilt so horrid that it’s rendered her non-motile. There is still a future for her, because she could still possibly find some way to live with herself. 

That’s what Kaneki needs to do to, not to simply try to live on without the guilt, or to die by it, but rather to truly face himself and try to come to some reconciliation between his disparate parts. Telomeres or not, the reason Kaneki acts like he’s slowly dying from a thematic standpoint is because he has still yet to answer the question of how he is supposed to live with himself. The fact that he can live, that there is a future for both him, Touka and the Baby is something he should fight for. As long as he doesn’t give up on that possibility, there’s still a chance. Kaneki himself isn’t doomed to tragedy, an ending where all three of them lives is still a possibility.  

Perhaps that is what those who’ve had their hands drenched in blood by the world can do to redeem themselves, some way other than death. To continually fight for a better world, so the circumstances that led to Kaneki and Yoshimura’s own tragedies will not repeat themselves.