Tokyo ghoul meta: the personhood of ghouls and the CCG
The central conflict of Tokyo ghoul is simple: ghouls eat people and people kill them so they don’t get eaten. It starts simply enough, but gets more complicated as we learn more about individual ghouls and the way the ccg functions.
Firstly, we have the ghouls. In the first episode it’s made clear that humans simply do not understand them, and almost none make the effort too. Saying things like “if they have to kill why don’t they kill criminals or something” and “why can’t they all die already?” They’re regarded as a group of people who choose to be evil at best, or as monsters that need to be killed at worst. For humans it’s easy to put so little thought into it because for them it’s cut and dry: “they kill us, which is bad, so being a ghoul is evil.”
Then we see Kaneki becoming a ghoul, the way he sees himself as he transforms. His terror is undercut with the self loathing of feeling the need to eat people. He thinks it’s because he’s human, he doesn’t understand yet that all ghouls go through this. It takes until he first meets other ghouls to start understanding that they aren’t an inherent malicious force, that they’re people who are trying to live their lives, albeit in a very different way.
What I want to emphasize is something I don’t see anyone talking about. Kaneki’s first interaction with a ghoul post-surgery is not Nishio, it’s not Touka, its Kazuo. He only shows up for a moment before dying, and in that moment he is nothing like what Kaneki had been taught about ghouls. Ken is breaking down at the horror of being lured to the alley by the smell of a corpse, and the first thing this ghoul does, is ask if he’s okay. Kazuo offers him an arm from the corpse, even though he’s never met him and is starving, he’s willing to make that sacrifice because it’s just the right thing to do. I wish kazuo didn’t die, I think he was a good example of the inherent good in ghouls
When Ken goes on to meet Touka and join anteiku, he’s introduced to more about ghoul culture. That they aren’t monsters. He sees how they protect their human loved ones, how they do everything they can to provide safety, and how ghouls are the ones suffering more than anyone else. The violence humans think ghouls display because of what they are is the result of desperation, trauma, and investigators, and this is the first time he’s learning this
Next we have humans and the CCG. Now it’s understandable that they hate ghouls, every community has people they’ve lost to hunting and that will effect how they view the creatures who ate them. It’s such a difficult thing to grasp how a person could eat another person, so the obvious result is that they don’t see them as people. Like any threat, humans seek to destroy it, overlooking the impact that would have. Plenty of species have gone extinct because they threatened humans, many are now endangered because humans had no problem killing them “because it’s them or us.”
And thus the CCG is formed
It becomes built into the law and foundations of society that ghouls must be killed on sight. They have no rights. They have no voice. They are not people. No one can change that, ghouls can not protest it peacefully because simply admitting they exist is a death sentence for them and their family. Their ruthlessness caused by desperation forced on them is held up as proof that they need to be exterminated, and the CCG is excused for their own ruthlessness because it’s seen as a necessary evil. It’s them or us right?
But violence is cyclical, and grows as it revolves. Many investigators join because a ghoul killed their family, so they kill ghouls, and those ghoul’s loved ones retaliate. The conflict goes beyond the need to eat and the need to defend and becomes more fueled by revenge. Aogiri kills more than they need too, the doves kill more than they need too, and the way they’re perceived depends on what species the onlooker is. It’s difficult to escape the cycle, but very easy to get dragged in. Even for those with no personal vendetta against ghouls, it’s easy to kill them because everyone is feeding into the belief that they aren’t people. It’s easy to commit genocide when you renounce the victim’s personhood
That’s why when Amon fights Kaneki for the first time, it’s such a shock. Amon goes in completely certain that ghouls exist to kill, and Kaneki, previously human, refuses. Ken doesn’t have the same intergenerational trauma as other ghouls, and is inclined to spare his opponent. When he shows Amon this mercy, it haunts him. He can not comprehend why he was let go by a creature that exists to kill
Same with Shirazu and Nutcracker. She doesn’t show him any mercy, but when she dies, she says that she just wanted to be pretty. Ginshi shuts down, because that’s exactly what his little sister wants. It haunts him, he’s realizing that what they’re killing are complex people with feelings and dreams just like theirs. He even struggles to use the quinque made of her because he lets it sink in that it’s made of her. He understands that the CCG uses the corpses of ghouls, and is that so different from how ghouls use the corpses of humans?
Killing Shirazu and having Amon get captured were coward moves, because there was so much to work with. They were the only ones who were starting to understand that everyone involved in this war is a person with the capacity for joy and suffering. The story would have been so much better if they were both alive and with the ccg, because it could shift the narrative from “humans vs ghouls” to “why are we doing this? Why are we still fighting without even trying to find other options?”
It could have ended without a war with the collective effort to find a peaceful option and address the death and trauma humans and ghouls subject eachother too, that’s what the story was always about. Simply recognizing the personhood of ghouls would make the CCG obsolete, and force them to recognize the horrors they’ve committed, and that was the problem. It’s just so much easier, and so much more profitable for those in charge, to keep the conflict going
