I wasn't sure whether to submit my practically-an-OC-atp au version of Kaneki or my actual Tokyo Ghoul OC, so I decided to just submit both and let y'all pick! Feel free to draw whoever, no preference!
@tokyoghoulartfight2025
[Tokyo Ghoul OC(s) here]
Mint Legs Kaneki:
Name: Ken Kaneki (Dislikes being called his given name "Ken".)
Species: Natural-born Full Ghoul
Age: 18 (As of the start of Tokyo Ghoul. Feel free to age him up or down as required.)
Born: 20th Ward of Tokyo, Japan. Same birthday as Canoneki: December 20, 1992.
Education: Been through the whole public school system of elementary to high school, which is almost unheard of for ghouls. Currently enrolled in Kamii University as a Japanese Literature Major - which is a tough school for humans to get into, nevermind your average ghoul.
Gender: Usually presents as male. Occasionally does drag on queer club outings with Nico. Is questioning being transfeminine nonbinary or a trans woman.
Kaneki’s okay with any pronouns. He/him is default because of how he presents and it's perfectly fine to use, it feels neutral to hear it, no dysphoria triggered. She/her gives her gender euphoria. They/them is rare to hear, and as a result it’s pleasantly ambiguous and relaxing and kinda heightens that middleground fluid space they feel their gender exists in.
Has very little to no gender dysphoria. Has a lot of gender euphoria being feminine, though.
In “girl mode”, regardless whether it’s drag or casual, she has a confidence that’s clear in her body language and voice, but she doesn’t realize it herself.
Appearance: Basically, the design of Oneshot!Kaneki: Black hair, with bangs parted to the right. Grey sanpaku eyes. A small snubbed nose. Pale skin. Broad shoulders.
Height: 178 cm / 5’9”. Nishiki's height, basically. He's taller than Canoneki, by about half a head. Touka reaches just above his shoulders.
Weight: 71 kg / 156 lbs…? I’m bad at weight calculations, sorry. He’s broad and built and is at average to low average weight by human standards. By ghoul standards, where some form of starvation is the norm, he’s considered slightly above average weight. And while he is a bit heavy for a typical human to lift, those who try are surprised to find that he weighs a lot less than he looks.
Blood-type: AB
Kagune type: Rinkaku.
I took Canoneki's centipede kakuja, took off the armored appearance and made it a normal rinkaku, and changed the colors to be based on on a Mint Legs Centipede.
It typically forms as only 2 tendrils, but he can form it as more if needed - the tendrils will just be thinner, if so.
When softened and used gently, the claws are prehensile and can be used almost as fingers of a giant hand to help grip and hold.
When in battle, the claws will stick out and sharpen and will give a mace-club-like effect when swung, doing extra damage.
Alias: Joker, Mukade* — Rate S~
(*Mukade means Centipede and was Canoneki's kakuja name. Here I'm keeping it untranslated, though. So that he can be renamed to Omukade if he ever becomes a kakuja.)
For all you investigators out there? Here’s how his ghoul file appears if you look it up, all the information the CCG thinks they have on him:
(Btw, the human trafficking claim is (mostly) false. He was young and dumb and fucking around with Uta and the clowns and invited to an auction-like ghoul event for fun and far too late realized what it was. The CCG crashed it and saw him there and assumed that because he was a clown, he was inherently involved with all the dirty work.)
Also of note: He has no reported human kills on his file. This isn’t exactly advertised, for obvious reasons, but if any investigator looks for his kill count, they’ll surprisingly find it’s at zero. (Whether they take this as evidence that he’s a morally upright ghoul, or a ghoul who cruelly keeps his victims alive (especially in combination with that "human trafficking claim"…) that’s up to you.)
Likes: Literature, drinking coffee, humans
Favorite Literature: Sen Takatsuki’s The Black Goat’s Egg.
Sexuality: Bi-Oriented Cupio Caed-AroAce. He’s aroace because of relationship trauma (put simply) he experienced at 15. He was allo bisexual prior to this. He still retains a desire to one day have a romantic and/or sexual relationship, and he’s willing to be with any gender, but he no longer experiences any attraction.
Hobbies: Coffee Making - at Anteiku, for himself, for his friends. Reading. Small outings with small friend groups.
MBTI: INFJ
Personality, with friends: He’s quiet by default, but content around the people he cares about. If there’s a topic or conversation, he can potentially not shut up. He’s usually serious, but he does have a playful side. Him and Touka are physically aggressive and a bit rough for playful fun, being ghouls. He's too soft to be physically rough with Hide but they absolutely joke around and throw playful clearly-not-true insults at each other sometimes.
Personality, with strangers: He’s quiet but polite, and a bit socially awkward. He speaks rather formally, sometimes like a book, which might come off a bit odd. He can do eye contact, but doesn’t exactly like it, and will unconsciously gravitate towards looking at other things while speaking. He might look intimidating looking at him at rest from afar - between his build, height, and resting bitch face. He’s a bit stiff and guarded around people he knows are CCG, just barely not to a suspicious degree (He is just coasting-by not being discovered, i stg). He’s slightly looser around ghouls (telling apart by scent) because there’s no danger if his act slips. If threatened by a ghoul, he’ll slip into a mask of power and cockiness. If threatened by CCG, he’ll run, but fight if necessary. He’ll kill ghouls if needed, but refuses to kill humans and even doves, with few exceptions. He comes off as odd to humans and ghouls both, in different ways. While he can manage and function, neither his human or ghoul social skills are the best, and both sides can feel it, and as a result he's not really popular with either species.
He tends to like humans more than ghouls, yet feels safer around ghouls than humans. He’s a black sheep around his fellow ghouls, yet is a wolf in sheep’s clothing around humans. He’s forever caught in this weird mix of feeling like not quite a “real” ghoul, and yet certainly not a human. Another reason why he gravitates so hard towards Touka and Hide - who treat him as just him, where he can exist in a more neutral space, without either human or ghoul expectations.
Despite all his traumas, his life as a ghoul has been “lucky” in a few senses (his education, having blood family still alive even if they suck majorly), and he feels weird about it and tries hard to not come across as gloating or taking it for granted.
How To Get Him To Like You: Be nice and polite, and not pushy. Give him comfortable space to be quiet and awkward without judgement or expectations. Treat him like a person. For ghouls, don’t treat him like he’s a weirdo pacifist. For humans who find out about him, yeah sorry you’re really gonna have to beat him over the head with that “I accept you” stuff. For investigators: calling out a truce, stalemate, “I’m just here to talk!”, etc, will get him to back off and be curious enough for a conversation. If you want to go so far, outright saying you know the CCG has issues will floor him, intrigue him, and probably get him to lower his guard and start cautiously trusting you.
How To Get Him To Dislike You: He's generally pretty chill and has a long temper, so it's a bit difficult to get him to hate you. That said, ghouls cruel towards humans (he accepts ghouls hunting humans so long as you don’t gloat about it or hunt relentlessly), and investigators who torture or look down on ghouls. That also said, he's a big hypocrite. (Cough the clowns cough cough.)
Negative traits: Indecisive. Stubborn. Hypocritical. Willing to turn a blind eye. Unreliable narrator. Sees human lives as worth more than ghoul lives. Has so much self-loathing that he just buries deep inside, and sometimes it comes exploding out when pushed or triggered. He tends to dwell on his negative feelings, making himself feel worse as a punishment. Similarly, he’ll make things sound worse than they are to other people. Avoidance is a major coping mechanism. So is shutting down, going quiet, and pulling back, or straight up running away if bad enough.
Background: His dad died at four years old after being hunted down by the CCG. His mother got lucky in that she wasn’t able to be tracked down, and so she raised her son alone.
Kaneki’s earliest memories are of his mother teaching him how to be human, which wasn't exactly pleasant. He was told the truth about what he was and how the world sees ghouls, with nothing hidden from him.
When he was old enough, he was sent to human public school, starting right at Kindergarten (Year 1). He was quiet and friendless for his first year. Year 2 was when Hide moved there and befriended him. Kaneki tried to deny him, scared to get close to a human. But he still let Hide hang out with him, as a classmate only, because he was admittedly lonely. After a week of Hide’s companionship and feeling like his world lit up with someone else beside him, he declared them as friends. And they’ve been inseparable ever since.
Kaneki grew up incredibly isolated. While he was raised as a ghoul by his mother, he had no experience with greater ghoul culture, with his mother not ever having him meet or interact with fellow ghouls, aside from his aunt. (Read: A very dismissible “Hi, how are you?” when she came to get her allowance from his mom.)
When his mother died at 10, he was taken in by his aunt, and not long after began to be despised and neglected. This came to a head at age 15, where she cut him off food entirely, trying to force him to care for himself. With a guilty conscience and literally 0 experience in the real world, suffice to say this was not easy for Kaneki. While scavenging and being chased off by a territorial ghoul, he was saved by a newly-joined-Anteiku 14 year old Touka. She saw a ghoul her age in need, and brought him to Anteiku, which was her first official act as a member. Yoshimura offered him food and a job, and since then, he and Touka have been ride or die ghoul besties.
At age 18, halfway through his first year out of his aunt’s home, at college, finally on his own… Hide discovered he was a ghoul. And accepted him. And has made it clear since then that he accepts him entirely as he is, the good and bad of being a ghoul, and wants to learn everything. Kaneki’s anxiety and trauma of being abandoned makes this very difficult to truly believe, and difficult to open up, but Hide is patient, and they’re making do with the slow changes to their friendship, becoming closer than ever before.
DOs: OC interactions are more than okay! Given that he's from an AU, I would prefer interactions to be in this ambiguous "crossover" space. You could have him in the canon TG 'verse meeting your oc, or your oc somehow ending up in his 'verse and coming across him.
Interactions with canon are also fine, but similarly please do it in a “crossover” sort of way.
Fluff, hurt/comfort, whump, gore — it’s all good! Feel free to torture him if you want!
I’m a sucker for human/ghoul interactions, playing around with ghoul worldbuilding, and any and all displays of kagune and/or kakugan.
Feel free to queer his gender! Guy mode, girl mode, a mix of both, it’s all good! He would absolutely find it fun to explore fashion and gender expression! (He’d let well-meaning people dress him up for fun, so don’t even worry if it’s not “his style”!)
DON’Ts: Romantic or sexual content. Not because it would be OOC - it wouldn’t - but simply because it’s not MY preference.
