This was going to be a post on Arima’s general fighting style but I’ll be focusing on just one thing this time.
Alright so I wrote this some time ago but tumblr deleted it when I clicked ‘post’ instead of … you know …actually fucking posting it.
So here I am, back to typing this out once again now that my bitterness is subsiding. It took me so long to get it all down too and now I’m doing it all over again :D
The main two points I want to focus on when talking about Arima’s fight vs Kaneki is that:
He depends on his sense of hearing to be able to fight.
The signs start to point toward this in the first panel between Kaneki and Arima.
Arima already has problems with his vision and the dim environment of V14 (night vision being a serious weakness in people with Retinitis pigmentosa, something that Arima might have), along with the distance between him and Kaneki made it very unlikely that he’d be able to see him when he walked in.
But he could hear Kaneki walking in (cue the creepy head turn).
Note the shading on Arima’s eyes. I’ll be pointing out the parts of chapters 137- 139 where there’s a lot attention focused on how his eyes are presented.
At this point Arima is unaware of who Kaneki is and he’s just as disinterested in him as the ghouls littering the area. He’s running on autopilot when he starts walking towards the direction where he last heard footsteps.
The glare on his glasses shows his state of ‘blindness’.
In general this is something you’ll see a lot with Arima when he’s concentrating - in this case it means he’s not bothering with paying attention to his vision because it’s more efficient for him to focus on his other senses - specifically his hearing. Think of it as a state of hyper-awareness. Keeping his body physically neutral and mind focused are the two best options for a fighter with his disadvantage.
And again on the same page we see the panels focusing on Arima’s eyes.
Blank, unfocused, distant - still walking towards the place where he last heard the footsteps.
Throughout all this Kaneki is frozen in place since first stepping into V14. He’s panicking and unable to decide on his first move.
Kaneki finally made a sound by stepping forward.
In that instant he’s impaled by Arima in the very next panel.
Note the position of Arima’s eyes. He’s not even sparing a glance in Kaneki’s direction. Still efficiently maintains his neutral stance.
Kaneki recovers but when he steps away in an attempt to flank Arima,
another immediate follow up to the sound.
The same pattern repeats itself above: eyes turned away from his opponent, never actually looking at Kaneki or where he’s hitting him. His face is turned downward in concentration.
You can also see that Arima has finally dropped his stance for something much more severe. When looking at the dramatic position of his left foot, it’s as if he’s a split second late in reacting to Kaneki’s movement and is catching up after having an “Ahha, found him!” moment.
At this point Kaneki completely freaks out and becomes an elephant in the room.
Swoosh swish indeed (no doubt Arima enjoys fighting).
Maybe if he was a bit more tactical with his kagune’s movements he may have gotten somewhere with this.
It’s only when Arima hears Kaneki reciting Hakushuu,
that he pauses to give us that famously out of the blue expression.
“That’s … not supposed to happen.”
No but really, hearing this poem was probably what snapped Arima out of his hyper-focused autopilot and made him want to at least attempt to see what was in front of him.
It didn’t take long after Kaneki telling him the author of the poem for Arima to finally put the pieces together and figure out who it is he’s fighting.
Then randomly, Arima starts telling Kaneki that if he pays close attention he can tell that it’s raining outside by the sound of the flowing sewer water.
This is relevant to one of the main points I’ve been mentioing: Arima is a person who’s dependent on his sense of hearing.
The fact that he would point out something as obscure as this shows that he’s a person who pays attention to the sounds in his environment and has experience in using it to analyze his surroundings.
But I don’t think this is the result of just practice. I think it’s also possible that Arima has a better than average sense of hearing due to genetics.
He’s 16 during JACK, an age where serious stages of vision loss are rare. I’ll assume that during that time Arima did not go out of his way to hone his sense of hearing because he could still depend on his eyes, yet…
he did something that made the fandom question the species he belonged to. How could he have pinpointed Yamori’s position so precisely? Most likely because genetically speaking, Arima was born with an impressive sense of hearing.
Whatever it is the Sunlit Garden does to their children, that trait may be the result of it.
Anyways, that’s mostly what I wanted to say. Also the post isn’t implying that Arima was literally blind during V14.
The dimly lit underground enclosure + Arima’s habit of shirking his deteriorating vision aside during battles was what resulted in him behaving as if he were.
That is all thanks, feel free to message me about this because I left out some explanations because I didn’t want the post to get any longer. Hopefully that didn’t lead to any confusion :(
Bonus: I only decide to rewrite this because the people in my TG chat were seriously having fun with this shit.
I present to you: Arimasaurus-Rex