The Quinxes, Kaneki, & the Need for Reconciliation
Why hello, it’s time for me to blab about the Quinxes again because I love them.
Every single original Quinx also struggles with a flaw that Kaneki is trying to overcome. The predictions offered by Ishida way back in volume 2 of :re about what the Quinx will do next pretty much lists them:
Urie: will keep his mouth shut again
Shirazu: will carry the burden again
Like Mutsuki, Kaneki’s not really honest with himself, or with other people. Hide notices that he has a habit of holding his chin when he’s lying, and we see this as Haise when he claims to be happy...
...and when he’s struggling with becoming a king who’s supposed to lead ghouls.
Mutsuki likewise has seldom been honest with himself, and his dissociative issues have only compounded this. He didn't remember killing his family, or the cats. He's telling himself he loves Sasaki and can only be happy if their entire family is back living together (which also parallels Kaneki's desire to keep those he loves close to him) even though he knows it's not going to happen.
Both Kaneki (as Haise) and Mutsuki (as a CCG investigator) have accepted roles that were forced on them when they were in vulnerable states. Kaneki, too, had the One Eyed King role essentially forced on him by Eto and Arima, and he didn't seem to really want the responsibilities, as Ayato calls him out on.
However, I do think Kaneki's making progress in recent chapters towards accepting his role of King, as imperfect as he might be, thanks in part to his relationship with Touka.
Like Urie, Kaneki has been known to keep his mouth shut–and in particular, it tends to be detrimental to his relationships with those he cares about. It’s one of the main causes behind Kaneki’s frequent miscommunications with Touka, as seen most recently in how he doesn’t tell Touka about Yoriko’s arrest and pending execution but rather leaves the papers around for her to find.
And we also see this again in how Kaneki has presumably not told Touka that he's aging rapidly and his prognosis looks grim. Instead, his reaction is to cling to the happiness he does have and marry Touka, which I won't lie made me extremely happy as a Touken shipper, but while I think their wedding was beautiful and fundamentally a positive development for both of them, he really needs to tell her; if he doesn't tell her soon, it's only going to hurt her when she does find out.
Urie, likewise, is unable to do what he needs to do. We see Urie being unable to make a proper decision when he's just discovered Mutsuki's fixation on Touka and by extension Yoriko.
The next chapter, Urie thinks about wanting to talk to Juuzou, Mutsuki's mentor, quite possibly about Mutsuki or maybe just about the direction of the CCG, but either way in the end Urie chooses to say nothing.
After Yoriko's arrest, he should have confronted Mutsuki about his actions–it actually would have made way more sense to talk to Mutsuki about Yoriko rather than storming Furuta’s office, but he didn't. And going even further back, if Urie really meant it about getting Shirazu’s body back, he should have prioritized that, but he didn't. To be frank, he should also just tell Mutsuki about his feelings for him–even if Mutsuki doesn’t reciprocate, I doubt that, given the level of trust Mutsuki has in Urie, it wouldn’t benefit Mutsuki to know he’s loved. He keeps silent, and it has the same consequences it has for Kaneki: hurting everyone he loves and hurting him as well. (It’s also interesting to note that Mutsuki and Urie’s situations are inverses of each other: Mutsuki chooses to actively pursue a lie, whereas Urie knows the truth, but chooses to passively not speak up about it.)
Like Shirazu, Kaneki constantly tries to carry the burden alone. He thinks it’s his duty to protect the people close to him, but he’s actually motivated by his own selfish desire to keep them close to him. It’s a very human desire and it’s one I confess I relate to a lot personally, but within Tokyo Ghoul and :re Kaneki’s constant trying to carry the burden for others has only led to disastrous results.
Shirazu also literally took the burden by charging at Noro to save everyone else, and he died, as Kaneki almost did at Anteiku. (This isn’t to demean Shirazu’s sacrifice by the way, but rather it's to point out the ways in which they are alike.) Even when he was alive, he focused on trying to force others to be responsible (like Saiko), which is not necessarily a negative thing for Shirazu, but for Kaneki it often becomes about control, which Touka called him out on in 120 of the original TG. Again, he's only recently starting to take some steps to move past this.
Like Saiko, sometimes Kaneki would rather sleep (i.e. ignore/postpone what he should do). Saiko, of course, had no agency when her mom signed her up for Quinx surgery, and since then has handed that agency off to others--namely, Sasaki, Shirazu, and now Urie. While she initially wondered whether it might not be right to kill ghouls, she didn't follow up on that, and only recently have we begun to see Saiko express her own desires and the determination to follow through with them, and only after her friends’ lives are in danger: first Urie when he frames out, and then when Yoriko is sentenced to death.
However, despite Saiko's vow to talk to "Mucchy," (a nickname I am so going to use, thank you Saiko) she apparently did not before Mutsuki left for the 24th ward. Saiko has also noticed before anyone else even did that something is wrong with Mutsuki and asked him about smelling human blood, but chose not to follow it up just like she chose not to follow-up with Urie after his frame-out, presumably because those would be uncomfortable actions to take, actions that would threaten the family she loves dearly.
Again, Saiko essentially passed the burden onto Urie here. Now, with everything that's happened to Shirazu, Yoriko, and now Urie and Mutsuki, Saiko's paying the price for her inaction. (Like Mutsuki and Urie’s situation, Saiko and Shirazu’s are inverses of each other: Saiko willingly hands over her responsibilities to others to handle, and Shirazu takes up those burdens.)
Kaneki, too, struggles with inaction. In the first TG, before his ghoulification, he essentially clung to Hide the way Saiko attaches herself to Sasaki, Shirazu, and Urie. (I love Hide and Kaneki's friendship and think it has lots of positive traits, but it also has some codependent ones as well.) And as has been demonstrated in the original TG and very recently in :re, Kaneki cannot make (admittedly horrifically hard) decisions because he doesn't want anyone's deaths on his conscience.
But of course, that only leads to two deaths on his conscience in TG. And while he’s supposed to be leading ghouls, he’s been letting them starve because he doesn’t want to have to do what he needs to do. However, recently in :re, he finally made a choice when he chose to marry Touka and go out to procure food for the ghouls he's leading, so there’s some progress.
Basically all the living Quinx are currently, like Kaneki in the end of the original TG, losing everyone and everything they care about as a result of their flaws (I covered the irony of both Mutsuki's and Urie's situations previously). But I don't think they're all necessarily doomed to tragedy. Everything seems to be hinting that Shirazu is likely to be revived, too, though in what state we don't know, and I don't think the story is going to end with Kaneki losing all of his Quinx children to their flaws--rather, I think Kaneki will overcome his flaws, and therefore it’s likely the Quinx will too. While the original Qs all parallel Kaneki, they are not Kaneki: they are fully rounded characters with their own arcs (well, Saiko doesn't have an arc yet, but I think she will, and she's still multi-dimensional)--as opposed to, say, the second-generation Quinx who are not going to have their own arcs and seem to represent something that the three living Quinx need to grow away from (Aura is essentially the personification of Mutsuki's dark side, sadistic and seeking revenge for petty reasons and as far as we know sans the brutal past and dissociative mental illness afflicting Mutsuki; Higemaru, like Urie, focuses on success, and Hsiao, like Saiko, chooses to do nothing about Important Things she knows about--namely, the Sunlit Garden). I don't have a lot of hope for most of the second-generation Quinx (maybe some for Hsiao), but who knows. The original Quinx, on the other hand--I think there is plenty of reason to hope for them.
Due to their development and due to Kaneki's arc as well (which is about reconciling his two natures and with it the world) I think Kaneki needs to reconcile with all of original Quinx--if it's possible, maybe even with a revived Shirazu before he inevitably gets to finally rest in peace--to really grow, and I think all of the Quinx need that too. He doesn't need to lose the ‘children’ he has who share his flaws: what Kaneki needs is to face them honestly, admit he has these flaws and that he does love the Quinx and knows he hurt them by leaving (instead of pretending his flaws/the Quinx don’t exist like he’s done in the past), and hopefully make peace with the three/four of them.
Which doesn't necessarily mean that I think they'll all survive, but I don't see any of them, including Mutsuki, being relegated to pure villain-who-needs-to-be-put-down status (we already have a Kaneki "what he could have become” foil who will be die as a villain in Furuta), or dying before they have the chance to reconcile with Kaneki (which is why I’m still confident Urie’s going to survive this encounter with Furuta, Roma, and Rio).
