#my tg manga caps

[kyanitedragon]

Okay so I've shared this page before, saying how Kaneki comes off really Asexual when he says this, since he's prioritizing other features of her besides physical. But I'm realizing now, just how passive he says this too. Like not only is her beauty not the only reason, but its far from the top reason, maybe even irrelevant to his interest in her.

[ID: Manga panels from Chapter 1 that show: Kaneki sits in anteiku and says in his thoughts as he peeks over his book at Rize "Her appearance is beautiful, of course... But there's another reason I'm attracted to her. She's reading the work of one of my most beloved authors, Takatsuki Sen. And by chance, she happens to be reading the same title as I am. The Black Goat's Egg." The other panels show Rize reading this book. End ID]

And then, this read I'm realizing that he also comes off as really Aromantic.

Like, his idea of a date... It sounds more like he just wants a book club buddy to hang out with.

[ID: Sitting with Hide, Kaneki says "Yeah, her name is Kamishiro Rize. This time, we're going to give each other novel recommendations!!" The next panel shows a dream-like scene of Kaneki happily running while dragging Rize along, running across floating books through various bookshelves. Kaneki says "It's my first outing ever with a girl, but its a dream bookstore date!" Kaneki ducks his head and shakes in excitement as he adds "Hide... my heart has been deeply touched!" Hide gives an awkward thumbs-up as he replies "I don't really understand the appeal of a date in a bookstore but... whatever, go and have fun!" End ID]

Like, "give each other novel recommendations"? That's extremely basic. Not even "discuss the deep reasons why we connect to these particular books to learn more about each other"?

Poor guy just wants some book nerd friends.

Even the image in his head looks like he's out book shopping with Rize, no hint of anything specifically romantic in sight.

And yet he's so genuinely emotional over this. Even using phrasing that you would think he's talking about a more stereotypically romantic date.

And this is exactly what they do on the real date, too! Give each other book reccomendations and chat about Takatsuki's various works!

[ID: Sitting at dinner together, Rize asks "So Kaneki-san, what is your number one recommendation?" Kaneki twirls and eats pasta as he says "Hmm.... Takatsuki-san's debut work, maybe?" Rize responds "Oh, Dear Kafka! That trick with the letter really got me." End ID]

[cutecapybarapics]

[captain-astors]

Hi, can you do 003 for Arima Kishou please?

I ABSOLUTELY CAN! Fun fact this is about the length of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Telltale Heart. God I was hoping someone would ask for him yet, despite my excitement I feel like I'm going to disappoint the Arima likers and dislikers twain, but no matter. 

Mood for this entire thing: Screaming.

Behold the most horrendous thing I’ve ever written. 

How I feel about this character: all caps warning for about a paragraph bellow the first sentence.

Places him in a shoebox with no notable amount of affection nor violence, simply acceptance that this is where he belongs. 

THIS IS A MAN THAT SLEEPS WITH BLANK, WHITE SOCKS ON IN THE MOST NEUTRAL, BORING NIGHTCLOTHES YOU’VE EVER SEEN. AS A CHILD ANY POTENTIAL EXTRAVAGANT FASHION TASTES WERE FORCEFULLY SUCKED OUT AND ABSORBED BY SOUTA LIKE A BLACK HOLE OF REPRESSED HOMOSEXUALITY AND TOXIC MASCULINITY, AND THE SCRAPS OF ANYTHING BARELY NOTICEABLE LEFT BEHIND WERE TAKEN BY RIZE TO MAKE THAT LOVELY DRESS. HIS UNIQUE HAIR COLORS ARE A GIFT OF PITY FROM GOD BECAUSE OTHERWISE HE WOULD BE SO TERRIBLY NON-DESCRIPT THAT ABSOLUTELY NO ONE COULD RECOGNIZE HIM, EVEN IF THEY’D KNOWN HIM FOR YEARS. HIS FACE AND CLOTHING ARE TOO NEUTRAL TO BE IDENTIFIED BY THE MOST ADVANCED AI. GOODNIGHT. Okay. Now that I’ve cleared up the feral screaming, funny story. I don’t know if I’ve ever detailed my terrible facial blindness here (probably not, it’s not a crucial detail about myself) but that applies to fictional characters as well. Things like moles, hairstyles, clothing, and speaking mannerisms are lifesavers. I do genuinely believe him to be a very neutral looking character, but half the reason for my rant above was the fact that I kept wondering “Why is Kaneki fighting himself” for 2 pages of the end of the first manga, and did not recognize him as the same guy for a truly unfortunate number of chapters in the second despite moving on to :re very quickly after finishing the first tg. Then I thought he and tatara were the same person for a while. It was bad. And I don’t know why the glasses didn’t mark out SOMETHING for me, I think I’m just too used to seeing them on and off faces at different times that it just… didn’t register? But I really don’t have any good justification for it. 

I don’t understand why some people hate him so violently but at the same time his adult version falls into the “a guy” category for me. Had his moments, but I definitely could’ve found more constructed sympathy for his plight had the story not been so afraid of allowing the reader to be bored by focusing on someone else that it wasn’t constantly bashing me over the head with “but don’t you care about how KANEKI is affected by this?!?” No actually I don’t, because I understand him well enough from the last hundred-something chapters that have revolved around this guy to have a good idea of what’s going on inside his head. Arima remains a mystery, his choice to put the responsibility of the fate of this all on Kaneki instead of someone else when he passes or trying to tough out his inevitable fate up to interpretation, and I think that’s a portion of the reason he’s passionately disliked by a large portion of the fandom. This is all speculations of a madman, but from my point of view his mistreatment of Haise/Kaneki/Whatever, while ultimately motivated by the desire to exploit, wasn’t the byproduct of explicit malevolence, but rather in that aching pattern of every garden child, say it with me folks, being afraid to/not knowing how to healthily love, or even care about a person in a genuine way that doesn’t end up hurting both people involved. He did care about Kaneki, but first and foremost he felt a responsibility to use him. Tangent to more general and less Arima-focused thoughts, this isn’t to say that writing a character in a way that leaves things up to imagination is a bad thing in writing. In fact, I really enjoy taking the broken pieces of a puzzle and attaching them together into an image of my own liking after being left with little to work with (Hi Shikorae), but the thing about Tokyo Ghoul is that this is the case for a lot of characters. It’s the inverse of the Arcane (the show not the game) problem, instead of every side character being so deeply fleshed out when they don’t always need to be, the vast majority of side characters are left to interpretation though some of them logically shouldn’t, we could’ve been given a little more to work with… maybe. I’ll never know if this is just my sadness over the lack of content for my own favorites when I speak like this but still, I feel like every character I’m attached to is left in this awkward “almost works perfectly but not quite” area as a byproduct of lack of attention, whereas Kaneki does the same but as a byproduct of too much (Juuzou lives in the middle ground good for him). I am filled with righteous fury that is only quelled by unending love for this story, somebody sedate me. 

Not the worst option for “One-Eyed King” placeholder but I’m not even going to pretend I understand the why of it enough to criticize or praise. I don’t think it was necessary if the One-Eyed King was more of a symbolic concept of revolution than a person to begin with but honestly I could just be missing content. Such a cool name for something that seems ultimately underutilized, but I do like the note of Arima being unknown as the One-Eyed King when, similarly, unlike his brother’s, his revolution is a quiet, bitter and clever thing that takes years instead of equally clever but flashy, impossible to ignore. I could ramble for hours on the dichotomy of their plans to take down the circumstances and system of the origin, the merit of taking things down from the inside out and planning for the generation to come, vs. screaming the injustices of the world in everyone’s face, making a mockery of it all until you can’t look away because it’s always been everywhere but now you can see it too. How unfortunate the conclusion of their plans both ended up in the hands of Kaneki to execute, by design or otherwise.

Oh hey back to my issues with the lack of focus, those were almost completely gone with Jack! I love Jack-Arima and half of the reason for it is his dynamic with Fura. I live for the extremely controlled, calm, quiet, powerful and intelligent yet isolated Arima being temporarily pulled out of his almost machine-like world by the aimless yet fun-loving Taishi, who in turn learns what it means to be striving to protect something, and what it means to take a life. My qualm with it? I wish it was longer. It would’ve hurt even more to know he had to live the rest of his short life pressed back into a stifling role if he actually got to learn, even briefly, what it means to live normally. But, something something in order to know how to love you must be loved, the world didn’t raise him right and even that small period of time would have thrown a ripple in the chain of events that led to his choices and bad father figure role. Even so I like to imagine he looks back on those few weeks where he got to try to “live normally” (even if it trailed right back to ghoul extermination) with fondness.

Anyways to summarize Arima is another one of those characters I am choosing to be oh so normal about. I say choosing but I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. Just a guy, but in a way that makes me want to pelt him with beanbags affectionately. It’s funny how little and how much I care about him simultaneously. The disjunction of man, am I right? 

Any/all the people I ship romantically with this character: And thus the disappointment of everyone commences. Congratulations on being the first person to pick a character I actually have opinions on. I see the arieto in your icon, you’re so right for that, but I flip between seeing eto as aro or shipping her with Itori, Rize, or both, and I want everyone to die alone unless it’s tragic, witnessed, unpreventable or caused by themselves, seeing their lover in their final moments is not a kindness to either but a cruelty. Hello, yes vashwood and lawlight did shape me fundamentally, and I am the world’s most spiteful creature, a russian nesting doll of mutually assured destruction. Anyways I especially want Arima to die alone, besides Kaneki, unloved with that as an exception and staring the one child who latched on to him and hoped for so much in the eyes with the guilt of knowing “I did this to him and because of me there’s a good chance he will get worse from here on out.” Arieto is a hilarious pairing conceptually and personality wise, and outside of a canon universe I can absolutely get on board, the hijinks would be legendary, but in-universe? Eto’s LEAGUES too good for you Arima. Love you, but you could stand to suffer some more. 

Oh also I’m not quite sure if I ship them but Arima and Fura kind of have the energy of guys who kissed once in highschool and have adapted the mentality of “if I don’t talk about it, it didn’t happen.” But they do think about it. So maybe I ship them in the Jack era for 5 minutes of poor judgement, teenage-ness, and the intrinsic desire to make that rivalry homoerotic, and then I’m just here for the bisexual denial. 

My favorite non-romantic relationship for this character: H a i s e that is his son and he does not know how to raise him and I can’t even say he’s really trying but he’s definitely there and just. Oh I wish he knew how to lead a normal life. Also Furuta, they never met in the parts of the story we’re shown, and they don’t particularly need to for me, but just conceptually they’re such fascinating foils. Living manifestations about everything I love and hate in the non-protagonists of Tokyo Ghoul, they should both burn. The most siblings to ever not sibling. 

My unpopular opinion about this character: I don’t care what power scaling this universe gives us and how far up on it they place him. I could beat up this old man in a fight. I COULD. I WILL. I’M GOING TO KICK HIM DOWN A FLIGHT OF STAIRS, WITNESS AND REVEL IN MY SPECTACLE. Also he has no charisma. None. He’s strong and intelligent, that is all he has going for him. And some nice hips but you didn’t hear that from me. 

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: The realization. Some kind of spinoff that further detailed the schemes and functions of his collaboration with Eto behind the scenes. Give me the forbidden one-eyed monarchs, not their narrative child. 

Favorite friendship for this character: Oh… the potential of Kureo being a healthy mentor figure (if you don’t elaborate enough on what happened with him teaching arima about quinques, I will assume the best for today), Akira (take notes on how to parent, Arima), Fura (but particularly the potential of them growing more distant and formal over the years as Arima is absorbed by his work and quiet aspirations.) 

My crossover ship: I don’t have one so I’ll just note that I listened to “The Way It Ends” from the Death Note musical for most of this and by god I have never felt so cringe.

Oh wait actually Elendira the Crimsonnail but just the Trimax version obviously. Trans queen.

[redbluenight]

[rizakamishiro]

Kaneki and Rize realising they are reading the same book ah!((･o･｡)

[pomegranateteeth]

[h41se]

Tokyo Ghoul Chapter 1: Tragedy (Remake)

[bubblytealatte]

Day 6: Donato Porpora

(source: Tokyo Ghoul Wiki)

[phosphophy11ite]

[urie-ma-boy21]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BEST BOY URIE😭💖💖💖💖💖💖

[toukatan]

the name of this beautiful poison hasn’t yet...

[kyanitedragon]

Ever since someone pointed it out, I can't help but think that Rize looks so much like Arima.

[ID: Two manga panels of Rize from chapter 1, who is drawn with a rather triangular jawline, similar to Arima. Panel 1 shows Rize smiling with shoujo bubbles around her as Kaneki's voiceover says "When she meets my eyes, she smiles a little..." Panel 2 shows Rize winking as she says "This is interesting, I was just reading this too." End ID]

I also find it interesting that Chapter 1 Rize had a little mole under her right eye. A feature that she shares with Furuta.

[ID: A close up of Rize's eye (your left, her right), with a small mole / beauty mark under it. End ID]

[cutecapybarapics]

[edwxrdkenway]

Kaneki Ken requested by anon

[steffyanie]

white & rabbit

[flower--boiii]