#and whoever that other person is in the meme has final boss energy so also cool

[bisthefairy]

[abjectaspiringfailure]

theory: How Furuta wins

Alternative title: Furuta wins because his enemies don’t realize they’re really fighting until it’s too late

If I had to contrast Kaneki and Furuta when it comes to how they complete their objectives, I’d put it like this:

Kaneki is a strong guy who uses his intelligence to win fights after they've begun, even against opponents he could run roughshod over from the beginning. He's reactive, and good at that. Furuta, meanwhile, is a guy who uses his intelligence to win fights before they've begun, without his opponents realizing it. Furuta sorta has a meme about him as this invincible Gary Stu with memetic invincibility and omniscience who does things that no one else can, but he’s really not. Furuta's victories are far more reasonable when you realize he's literally succeeding at nothing new, and that, in fact, his success rate when he does something someone else hasn't done before him plummets to... almost 0?

Shall we go back to Ami in the Gourmet Arc? Specifically, when Kaneki tells her to hide behind him,  and so she kicks him into the oncoming enemy after looming ominously behind him. Sound familiar?

Furuta does this same thing in the Rose Arc. “Oh come on, are you saying Furuta couldn't figure that out on his own?” Well, no, but I think there's a reason that this was done in such a matter in such similar circumstances for something so basic. Furuta uses tactics that he sees others engage in successfully.

His ghoul surgery? Kaneki, Kurona, and Nashiro were his test subjects.

Matsumae? He took her by surprise, but he also gauged out her eyes in a similar manner that Tsukiyama is implied to have done to his victims. This tactic is also implied to have been how ghouls were defeated before the advent of quinques by Takeomi, and was something Kaneki attempted to use on Shachi.

Defeating Eto? He's copying Kaneki, but with more RC suppressants before the battle (this one’s more complicated, but this is Furuta’s meta and not Eto’s so we’ll leave it at that).

The Washuu clan purge? He's reenacting the Tsukiyama clan purge.

The Clown Siege? Reenacting the Clown Siege years prior, from both sides.

The initial battle with Goat, establishing them as the CCG's current arch nemesis, and running them underground? Using the plans the Washuus used 100 years ago against the original OEK.

The subjugation of the wards? The Washuus already had the plan in place.

His defeat of Kaneki? Reenacting the battle of Anteiku.

His Dragon? Reenacting the OEK from 100 years prior.

Furuta's incredibly intelligent and pragmatic in this regard. The thing about coming up with amazing new ideas and successful plans, of being a trailblazer like, say, Kaneki, Eto, and Arima with their plan? It's time consuming. It's highly liable to fail. Furuta never had time, his life span is incredibly short. When most people are still figuring things out, he'd be on the verge of death. He needed to get things done and he needed success. Using other people's proven plans is the most effective means in that regard.

This is sorta Furuta’s entire thing. Ui, Kijima, Kaneki - they all note that Furuta is excellent at analysis and reports. When we see him reading in childhood, the contrast with him and Kaneki is that while Kaneki reads fiction, Furuta reads non-fiction. He reads about his genetics, his lineage, things like that.

He even brings this up in his battle against Kaneki, where he tries (and fails, for obvious reasons) to reenact his strategy on Eto on Kaneki, just replacing his own kagune with triggering Rize’s Kagune.

People bring up his strength a lot and its relative vagueness, but I’d say that if someone gave him a guide on how to defeat another character, he would succeed at it. In a theoretical Arima vs Furuta battle, where Arima is in the state he’s in during the Coachlea raid, I’d say he’d win if he somehow knew how Kaneki defeated him. Which brings us to the next part.

What about his failures? There are three in particular, because those situations (probably) never came up before. The first one was the aforementioned incident where he turned Shiono into pate and gave him to Eto as an act of sadism. He was completely astonished she managed to get any energy from it, indicating he laced it with RC suppressants.  He managed to salvage the situation by falling back on another plan someone else had made, in this case Kaneki's, which was to run away from her until a good shot at her weakpoint presented itself after she let her guard down. He only just barely survived being killed by Eto, and being killed by V.

The other situation was when the CCG launched their integrity inquiry. There hadn't been a recorded CCG rebellion against the leadership, and so he was forced to wing it. He fails, and loses the CCG, but it doesn't matter because he's able to get his Dragon hours later anyway.

His fight against Kaneki post-Dragon is, well, a completely OOC situation for him. This is a new Kaneki with completely unknown abilities and strength. He doesn't have some highly exploitable weakness like the last Kaneki. This Kaneki hasn't been defeated before. And so of course, as soon as Kaneki takes Furuta seriously, even when Furuta has his kakuja, he loses. Kaneki takes a seemingly endless barrage from Furuta and in the end it does nothing, Kaneki defeating Furuta in a single hit. Which is… kinda Kaneki's pattern here, honestly. I know some people are trying to argue that Furuta only lost because he hesitated for a moment – but I don’t see it? That doesn't make sense at any level, thematic, logical, or narrative . What, Furuta could defeat the Dragon Rize Kaneki fought? Even his victory against Eto, who certainly isn't as strong as this current Kaneki, was implied to have been because of the RC suppressants he put in the pate and his mimicry of Kaneki's strategy. I think he actually starts to activate his kakuja when he’s fighting Marude, he just pulls back because fighting isn’t his objective. I mean, the kagune shown here is much closer to his kakuja then any other kagune he’s shown.

Furuta’s just really good at succeeding at things other people have done, in a manner which is highly impressive and, honestly, unbelievable in the sense of “woah, that’s impressive” and less the sense of “this isn’t even remotely possible”. Which brings me to the most major action Furuta took:

Helping Rize escape from the Sunlit Garden. There are countless possible explanations, but two explanations I think are likely. A) This is his trailblazing plan, and he managed to pull it off undetected because of his love for Rize. B) Rize was not the first person to escape the Garden, and he based this plan off of a past incident.

Given the pattern with Furuta, I'm going with B. The real question than becomes who and when? I actually think it might be whoever the “peace loving idiots” he refers to in regards to the creation of Dragon are. When Uta asks Furuta who Dragon was supposed to be a final boss for, Kaneki and Goat, or CCG and Furuta, Furuta dodges the question entirely and says that his “final boss” is an ally. V, Pierrot, Goat, CCG, none of these people could be described as pacifistic or peace loving idiots, I think.

So, I'm thinking the CCG and Goat might not be the real targets of him. When he thanked Eto for defeating the V Special classes with him, he said the top levels would wipe him out, despite having Kaiko and the Sunlit Garden on his side at the time:

It should be noted that V is constantly stated to control the world and not just Tokyo. The idea that this single faction of V alone could control the entire world is pretty... ludicrous? Furuta never says V is only Washuu blood, he says they’re “part of” V. Perhaps the translation is wrong (because Japanese to English is genuinely pretty hard when you’re interpreting other people’s words and trying to convey meaning to non-speakers), but it makes sense.

After all, according to Tsuneomi, the Washuus weren't always like the way they are now. Their position is an implied punishment for the One Eyed King, as the Furuta line of families pops up around the same time the OEK was implied to have started their rebellion. Could be related, I think.