Furuta's plan wouldn't hace work without kaneki a person that made bonds with ghouls and ccg investigators, reason being when you unite people to fight against one big enemy it is only momentary peace since once the enemy is wiped out they return to fight against each other and being hostile. Like the countries of the first world during war and after it. They still view each other as enemy or resources. So furuta's plan wouldn't have work because it was an ilusion of peace
Seeing the bad in you or other person or system doesn’t make you change anything. No one cares because it is not someone of their circle, you only get them to care if you emphatize.
I’m sorry i can’t with the narrativa you are painting of Futura the only hero the only one who did things when reality is kaneki wouldn’t have achieve it without furuta’s plan and furuta’s plan wouldn’t have worked without someone like Kaneki. Eto also played her part with aogiri by showing that ghouls are not just this monsters. You guys just take away any other characters achievings abd put it only to Furuta.
Anon, I’m not against empathy. I love the power of empathy and reaching out past your own circumstances and stories of how understanding can humanize people who actively look beyond the point of no return and actively seek to dehumanize themselves.
1) It’s a Furuta meta of course I talk about Furuta. I barely talk about Kaneki because anons asked me to stop talking about Kaneki so much in my furuta metas and only talk about Furuta.2) it’s a Furuta meta that talks about the period of Tokyo Ghoul in which Eto is specifically dead. 98-143 about where Kaneki is acting as the bureau chief. Of course Eto doesn’t have much of an impact because she is dead and outside of the narrative. Eto’s actions at that point are leaving Kaneki and I already did analyze what that was, it was creating a narrative to move people the same way that Furuta did.
My problem with Kingneki isn’t that he used empathy to solve things and that I think empathy is a weak solution to these kind of problems. I was actively counting on Kaneki to show empathy and to shake off Furuta’s narrative and escape from it by showing him that people are willing to have hard conversations, and talk things out if it will lead to mutual understanding and it doesn’t have to follow a narrative that hard manipulates people. I wanted Furuta’s narrative to be broken by the power of genuine human connection with Furuta thought he had to forgo because people couldn’t be convinced to care by any means other than trickery.
I’m not trying to spin the narrative of Tokyo Ghoul in any way. Of course it’s my reading but my reading doesn’t invalidate your reading. Feel free to not listen to me. I am in fact a dumbass. But what I’m writing is my honest reading of the source material. I’m going to give justification for why I think certain things and back up my arguments and that’s the best I can do. I’m fine discussing this with you anon, and I don’t think my reading invalidates yours in any way. But I can’t read something the way you do, we are in fact two distinct people with different perceptions.
I want Kaneki to be empathic. The parts of his character that I take issue with aren’t his empathic traits, it’s his violent traits. Kingneki is pretty much by far the least empathic Kaneki of them all. 101 starts with Yomo and Take just going “We don’t need to talk things out, we can just believe in the same person even if we don’t agree with each other as long as we’re fighting on the same side.”
Like this isn’t mutual understanding empathy. It’s a decided effort for the characters to just not talk about their feelings and not make an attempt to work out their differences, because it’s easier for them to both blindly follow Ken Kaneki rather than go through the awkward process of trying to work things out. This conversation gets no follow up, and basically the rest of goat is like that.
One of Kingneki’s acts is straight up using right of the strong to convince Naki rather than talking things out with him, you know that incredibly unhealthy worldview that Yamori taught him that drove him insane earlier. Then he ends the fight not trying to convince Naki that there are better ways for him to live than rihgt of the strong, and also that he as a ghoul should be fighting to uplift himself from his station which is what the purpose of Goat should be about. Kaneki word for word tells him to die like a dog.
Like, Kaneki very consistently says in his kingneki phase that he doesn’t care about people unless he directly knows about them or is invested in them in some way. That’s not empathy.
Even Naruto when fighting to protect his friends goes out of his way to learn the stories of the villains he’s fighting against and empathizes with their circumstances that led the to this place. Like, the narrative calls on Kaneki again and again to try to show empathy for these people and he just doesn’t as Kingneki. Kingneki cares about a very selective few group of people and the rest he doesn’t look at. He doesn’t empathize with Mutsuki, he doesn’t empathize with Hajime.
Like, even the people that Kaneki personally cares about. Remember how Hinami had an emotional breakdown because she had to keep being around Akira for Kaneki’s sake and it made her very uncomfortable and she felt like she couldn’t share her feelings with him? Was Kaneki ever challenged by the narrative to come up with an understanding of Hinami’s personal feelings and grief in that case and understand that while Akira might be important to him Hinami might feel differently on the matter?
I love the theme of empathy changing the world, that empathy can get people to be convinced to care, however that’s not the way Kaneki’s story resolves. Kaneki wins because he’s a figurehead as king. It’s a nameless king because it could have been anybody, he just needed a lot of followers to obsess over the idea of him to move and motivate them. It’s not like Kaneki showed those ghouls any special care or compassion, he basically almost starved them to death because of his own personal hangups about killing CCG officers. Yet at the same time if he cared so much about the CCG he also made no effort to contact his friends among the CCG or try to reach out to them and convince them he was still a person even if he had sided with ghouls and that he still cared about them and the bonds he made at the time still mattered.
Kingneki doesn’t really reach out to people, even his old friends at the CCG, he very consistently tries to rely on right of the strong instead. He says “Good, I get to fight to proect” when him and his old friend Juuzou are about to kill each other without even trying to have talked things out. Even though Juuzou doesn’t even want to be working for Furuta at this point Kaneki doesn’t try to sway him.
I do think there’s a genuine empathic part to Kaneki’s character, but it’s really present in earlier nekis like Kuro -> Shiro -> Haise. Those are the kanekis that make an active effort to imagine the circumstances of other people actively outside of themselves. I don’t think empathy is just caring very selectively about the people around you that you care about. I think empathy has a distinct quality of reaching out and trying to understand the circumstances of people who are not directly right in front of you, who don’t think about the world the way you do. It’s acknowledging that people besides yourself have feelings, and that those feelings matter.
i believe in a narrative of empathy to change the world has power, I believe in caring for people, I don’t see it with Kaneki though. Specifically kingneki and the king and dragon arcs. What we get is don’t care, and right of the strong. What we get is Kaneki telling a child soldier who was born into servitude to die a half life that the world isn’t wrong or in need of reform, it simply is. See the thing is, my point is, that may be true for Kaneki, but it’s not for Furuta. For Furuta the world was wrong and it needed to be fixed in order for him to overcome his circumstances. There wasn’t a chance for him to pursue personal happiness in spite of the world and try to find fulfillment in some small part of it, because he would have just died for fodder of the Washuu. Kaneki isn’t trying to transform the world with empathy, he basically only cares about the people he already cares about and loves and that doesn’t change throughout kingneki nor is it challenged. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong for Kaneki to try to fight for his friends, and want to be motivated by small personal bonds rather than the whole world but as I said if Kaneki wanted that he shouldn’t have gotten involved in the politics that affected several other people besides his small friend group that he decided to take responsibility for. That’s just a contrast of their narratives until the end, Furuta was a character deeply involved in the politics and conflict of the world because he was born into it, Kaneki’s is a personal narrative from beginning to end.
