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Every fan of TG would know her as psychopathic, manipulative, eccentric, ruthless and just fucked-up crazy, but don’t forget she is broken inside too and was forced to grow up fast with little or no childhood. Yes, she’s cruel for all the torture she had inflicted on others, but at the same time, she was trying to build a better world for ghouls, who she felt had been wrongfully oppressed by their human counterparts. In a way she cares but also she doesn’t, lingering in this morally “grey” area. Not to mention, she’s also a brilliant writer whose stories (i will definitely read!) are soooo riveting yet morbid at the same time, they encapsulate a lot of meaning and are paramount in shaping the tokyo ghoul world.

To me, her complexity and depth in character makes her so much more authentic and interesting than Touka or anybody else (except for Kaneki, who I felt was wonderfully written). Such a waste that Ishida didn’t feature her more in the main plot as she had the potential to develop into a compelling and insightful character who might make Tokyo Ghoul stand out from the rest.

God darn it, ishida, bring eto backkkkkk! The manga feels empty without her :(

Hello! WOW this is a loaded question haha. I’ve been thinking about it for a few hours and came up with two answers for you.

Short answer: we all have personal reasons why our favorite characters’ personalities and histories resonate with us. It usually involves a bit of self-reflection, or that the character provides a source of creative inspiration, or both. Arima just happens to be the one for me. 

Long answer: I’ve always been attracted to antagonists, especially those who’re difficult to understand. I liked Arima from the get-go, when we barely knew anything about him. He was just this aloof, mysterious, deadly force (who was lowkey a pretty nice guy and sometimes dropped hints that he didn’t like anyone dying). 

Keeping in mind that people generally don’t behave “that way” unless something awful happened to them, Ishida delivered hard with his backstory, and he instantly became my favorite while reading Jack. 

It begins the way you’d assume Arima was as a child: fairly quiet, very blunt, extremely intelligent, and naively seemed to actually enjoy fighting. But over the course of Jack, you see him quietly begin to struggle with wanting to keep both Fura and Minami safe, knowing full-well that it could never be. 

In the end, Minami’s words about wishing to be a normal kid resonate with him, as did Fura’s outburst about the “inhumanity” of killing. Arima had to bite his tongue, being both human and ghoul, unable to live a normal life, and hearing from his first two friends in the outside world scream over his head about how his entire existence is wrong. 

Minami and Fura were directing their hatred at each other, but Arima could only hear that they both hated everything he was– a ghoul, a human; a disruptor of peace and a killer. None of which he chose for himself.

On top of that, he’s being told to shut up left and right, is accidentally reminded by Marude that he’ll “just die someday”, and the CCG immediately pulls him away from the 13th ward the second they realize he’s making friends (”compromising the situation”).

I mean, he was literally a child being forced into a life of blood and death and horribleness. And the whole “Unfairness of God” thing? THE IRONY ;^;

Anyway, going back and seeing the look on his face when he approached the Kirishima’s… it’s clear that he was miserable with the knowledge that he was about to tear a happy family apart. 

** It’s also why I’m interpreting his fight with Kuzen as angry, because Yoshimura was a ghoul that was given a choice to fight for V and took it. I doubt there was a fiber in his body that liked Kuzen, especially if Eto told him about how she was abandoned.

So, with all that in mind, Arima’s story becomes exponentially more meaningful because of who he became despite all of that. Of course he’s enormously fucked up and flawed in many different ways, but I loved the revelation that his whole being secretly revolved around changing the future for people like himself and Fura and Minami. In his perfect world, the three of them should have been able to grow up together, rather than be born to destroy one-another. 

You would think that with all the self-loathing and lack of freedom, Arima would have given up a long time ago. But somehow he held on, if nothing but for the hope that the person who kills him might bring hope to others. 

Beyond that, I adore the literary references Ishida gave to him. The Little Prince is one of my favorite books of all time (I burst into tears at sight of the first page), and the Ringing Bell was the perfect way to frame exactly what Arima was trying to do.

“I won’t lose. I’ll become stronger than the wolves.” - kinda makes me wonder if his first idea was to be strong enough to kill his father/V himself… until he started running out of time. 

I love the little parts of his personality that only shows when he’s around people he’s closer to, like wanting to play games and vying for Haise’s attention. I love that he went out of his way to bring 240 blankets and stacks of books. I loved that he snapped out of autopilot because he heard a beautiful poem. 

Arima’s a big softie at his core, but, of course, despite what a bug-saving space cadet he actually is, I love that he’s a terrifyingly powerful force of fucking nature– one that doesn’t need sight to turn an army into a mountain of corpses.

People don’t have to like him, but there should be some credit due to what a fantastically complex character (and protagonist!) he turned out to be, even with little more than the surface scratched. I understand that not everyone is interested in “figuring a character out”, but I personally really enjoyed things like how much meaning was behind even the slightest change in his expression (he’s so fucking stoic, even the slightest frown was like HOLY SHIT). 

MOB PSYCHO 100 · モブサイコ100 ( 2016 )