How is Tokyo Ghoul so bad? Let Me Count the Ways.

Before I start listing the reasons why Tokyo Ghoul is so infuriating, a little background may be necessary. Folks, I read every single chapter of Naruto. All of them. And I never once liked that goddamned thing. Why did I keep reading it? Really I’m not sure. It was so ubiquitous I couldn’t avoid it, maybe. Perhaps I expected everything to pay off at some point and make me feel like the whole ordeal was worth it. Most likely it was the sunk cost fallacy working its way through 700 chapters of garbage.

Speaking of garbage, the same thing is happening to me now with Tokyo Ghoul (now Tokyo Ghoul: re). We’re 281 chapters deep if you count the two series’ as a whole, and you should, because re takes place directly after the original. At this point the whole thing is a tragic fucking mess of epic proportions. Let’s dive right in and deal with the most recent issue first:

What the Fuck is Even Happening

The plot is completely impossible to follow. This criticism should be particularly biting from a fan of anime, manga, and Japanese RPGs, because those types of media have a pretty high baseline for inscrutable narratives. And yet Tokyo Ghoul has somehow found a way to be at least three standard deviations above the norm of WTF set by its own genre.

It definitely used to make sense. Back when there were fewer characters (SEE BELOW) they had a pretty cohesive narrative. Kaneki Ken is turned into a ghoul (a human with special powers who has to eat humans to survive) when he ‘accidentally’ receives a ghoul organ during an emergency transplant operation. He meets some fellow ghouls, tries to find a way to live that is comfortable to him, and tries to reconcile his life as a human/ghoul hybrid. This is fine.

The cracks start to show directly after the culmination of the first arc, which is summed up in the first season of the anime quite nicely. Ken is tortured, brutally, by a ghoul known as Jason, and this wakes him up to the fact that he needs to stop being a whiny little shitbag and embrace his inner ghoul. He goes full ghoul, eats Jason, and now we can have our story about ghoul liberation, right? NO SIR.

No, instead we go elsewhere where an organization has appeared named Aogiri Tree, and they are fighting the CCG, the counter-ghoul organization, but not for the same reasons that Ken’s group is fighting them. By the end of this encounter we’ve also introduced the Clowns, a ghoul gang of… yes, clowns. So things are already getting a bit uh… messy. At this point they still had a chance to right the ship, though. Give these groups background, compelling, distinctive characters, and good motivations for what they’re doing. Also, maintain a focus on the actual story which, I think, is still Ken wanting everyone to get along…?

But then we just go right off the fucking deep end. They have battle after battle after long battle. Each battle introduces NEW groups who have their own reasons for fighting which are almost always initially a COMPLETE LIE and will be changed in 30 chapters. The series also plays VERY fast and loose with allegiances. Members of Ken’s crew are also Clowns, who are also members of the CCG? Who are also part of a secret family that has always run the CCG? This is all before we move over to Tokyo Ghoul: re, which adds in the Q squad, a memory deficient Kaneki, groups within the CCG who DEFECT TO KEN’S SIDE because they were ghouls all along(?!?!?!). If that doesn’t sound like the tragic mess it is, I haven’t even mentioned yet:

All the Characters Look the Same, and They All Come Back to Life

So when Tokyo Ghoul killed someone, in the beginning, they stayed dead. This is good! If you have a way to revive people, death stops meaning anything, and your story has no stakes. It’s hard to come back from something like that. Once the first dead person in Tokyo Ghoul comes back, by god they all come back. The final nail in the coffin for me was when Amon came back a few months ago. Amon was the secondary protagonist in Tokyo Ghoul, pre-:re. His death was surprising, and brought me back into the story. But now here he is, not only revived but like… seemingly just fine. He isn’t a shell of himself, no scars, his brain seems fine. He’s just here. And uh… on Ken’s side now. Sure guys.

Beyond the impermanence of death in this series we have a grander issue with the art. The artist, whose name I refuse to learn by god, has made the stylistic decision to make everyone, well, here:

Yeah. It’s scratchy, I guess, is the best word. So that’s part 1 of the problem. Part 2 is that as the story goes along, things get very psychological. A ton of pages take place in Ken’s head, and for several characters it’s intentionally difficult to discern reality from psychedelic fantasy. Part 3 is that, to begin with, the characters look pretty similar! Even by manga standards these guys are hard to tell apart:

See?

Part 4 is that, when these characters return, the artist likes to show they’ve changed, but because his art is so samey, he tends to REALLY change their look when they return. Every single one. So when people come back, I have no idea who the hell they are because PART 5 is that there are way too many characters in this series. They add 5 new characters per 10 chapters of manga. Hell, they just introduced the founder of the Clowns. This should have been a huge deal, but instead she/he/it gets killed by Urie in 5 chapters. We build all this time, and that’s it? I mean I’m sure it comes back, because, as we’ve covered, that’s what characters do in this manga, but man what a way to kill that reveal. And it happens all the time. It took me SO LONG to figure out that the girl being accused of being a sympathizer is Touka’s friend from way back at the very start of the manga. That was an important character, too! Imagine all the other things I’ve missed because I can’t keep track of every character who’s been in this manga for 10 total chapters.

They’ve Lost the Plot

In addition to the above, from what I can tell we’ve completely abandoned the main drive of the story, that humans and ghouls should strive to coexist, in favor of this Furuta stuff where he’s taken over the CCG because he wants to (…?). Furuta was a clown, but apparently he was, that whole time, also a member of the family that runs the CCG. So… he goes back to lead the CCG, and I guess nobody there thought to see if he was a Clown before? AND, while he does this, the Clowns still seem to be following him? But he’s also murdering all ghouls as his main initiative. I know the Clowns are big into chaos, but COMPLETE GHOUL GENOCIDE cannot be their objective! And why does Furuta even want this? He’s clearly a ghoul! None of this is explained in the least. Not his membership in the Clowns, not his ascent to the head of the CCG, not why he wants to exterminate his own race. Nothing. The fuck is happening?

This story was originally about a guy trying to gain equal rights for a group of oppressed people at its core. Now it’s just a giant, disgraceful mess. Every new chapter I read ADDS PLOT POINTS and closes none of them. I almost read it like I’d read about the making of The Room. I’m just interested in how much worse it can get!

(Fuck this manga)