🫐𝒄𝒍𝒂𝒓𝒂❀𝒎𝒂𝒚🔮

…is a concept that would throw Kaneki under the bus.

Please let this sink in:

If

Mutsuki + Violent Behaviour = Irredeemable Sense of Self

then

Kaneki + Giant Centipede = Irrevocable Personal Destruction

It’s math! Not really, but it’s a stylistic way of presenting a story and Ishida’s Readers walk into the same worldview that most of our characters currently hold close to them. That’s deliberate.

The narrative paints Kaneki and the characters that are dear to him as the ones that we should feel sympathy for and we do. It comes with the package of being a main character.

Likewise it is entirely non-surprising that when we see Mutsuki lash out at Touka we feel an inherent need to protect Touka, not Mutsuki. This is a character that our protagonist loves and we have had an entire Manga more to develope a connection to her. It is no wonder that Readers pick Touka’s side because the story is set up in a way that stacks everything against Mutsuki. We are supposed to feel antipathy for them because if we don’t this entire confrontation crumbles. We aren’t supposed to fight over who’s side to take.

And the genius of that is that it puts us, the Readers, into the same place that our Save Kaneki Squad is in: It is a place that one should never pick, because it may be spoken from the heart but it hinders growth. Because neither Hide nor Tsukiyama nor Touka are trying to get Kaneki out of his terrible monstrous self to hold him accountable for his actions, they are doing so because they miss him.

Touka is a person who has the audacity to hold Mutsuki to a standard of responsibility that she doesn’t even hold herself to. She’s telling them to not get in the way, to not do anything, to stay out of it - while she, herself, is deliberately putting herself in danger even though she is pregnant. (Linkspooky has written a great post about this chapter, please check it out.)

Touka forgets that her dear husband is a giant Godzilla wannabe who ate child orphans and then wreaked havoc on Tokyo. All the innocent dead bystanders? Unimportant because she didn’t know them. Maybe one of them was a regular at the :re cafe! Perhaps some of those dead civilians used to watch high class entertainment like theatre with Tsukiyama. Maybe some of those trampled and ripped apart people were Hide’s classmates in university. Who knows? Our characters certainly don’t bother to check out the emotional damage that has been caused by Kaneki for themselves. They’d rather grab metal detectors and dig him out like some pirate treasure.

Touka is only in a position where she can look down on Mutsuki because she is the thing that Kaneki wanted to protect; she is the reason why he lashed out. And Mutsuki also lashes out because they want to protect and because they want to make their feelings not heard but felt in a “you made me suffer” way, but they have been abandoned by Ken in favour of other people and have no one to fall back to because the rest of the Quinx do fuck all to keep Mutsuki from going bonkers. Urie is great at not keeping promises whatsoever (just look at how Shirazu’s dead body is doing) and Saiko would prefer to sleep through the day than to actually do something about Mutsuki falling into a downward spiral.

What’s the difference between lashing out because you have been abused and abandoned and having suffered abandonment and abuse and lashing out due to it? That’s what both of them do, constantly.

The difference is that Kaneki has someone who he can call his and who he can protect (which is something Kaneki will always fall back to do and if he doesn’t have such a person he becomes suicidal, just ask him about Hide) while Mutsuki has been abandoned by the person who they put all of their faith in living in. Mutsuki doesn’t turn suicidal, they turn violent, but the inner resentment of them is so crystal clear that they confused Readers for ages about their gender. You have to hate yourself to a desperately high degree to resort to changing everything about you just so you aren’t reminded of the bad people in your life.

What Mutsuki lacks is what kept Kaneki stable for a while. Which is, for Tooru, a perfect father figure that they can rely on. Which is something that Haise did for a while, only to then abandon Tooru outright without looking back. Mutsuki isn’t wrong when they accuse him of not caring.

Kaneki and Mutsuki have so many similarities between them. You can’t condone one behaviour and accept the other, no matter the circumstances for lashing out.

And the moment that Touka was threatened to be taken from Ken? That’s when he threw all of his morals out the window and resorted to eating children. People with no agency. People like him. Not only that but he became what he hates and it’s so incredibly dumbfounding to see all of these characters treat his destruction like an illusion that you can ignore.

They handle Kaneki’s misdeeds as a Fata Morgana and that is incredibly selfish and shows just how little they actually care about the world around them. Getting Kaneki back isn’t a plan to bring peace to the world, it is a plan to get a friend back. A friend who just killed a major portion of Tokyo and destroyed important infrastructure.

From a narrative standpoint we still stand with them, not with Mutsuki. But these are people who cannot fathom to throw an ounce of sympathy towards Tooru, even though they have suffered terrible losses. They saw almost their entire family get slaughtered, they got their face ripped apart, they witnessed their husband kill children when they themselves were desperately trying to protect children. And. It’s. Kaneki’s. Fault. Still the Kaneki Rescue Squad ignores all of these terrible events in favour of Ken - and that isn’t healthy. Which leads us to a crossroad. These characters have suffered enough for it to last for a lifetime. These are the people that should care - the people who hold Kaneki up on a throne despite his misdeeds, and they show no concern for Mutsuki, a character who acts like Kaneki in more ways than one and acts as a foil to him.

If we assume that they are right in their way of viewing the world around them and Mutsuki especially, then we have to agree that yes, Mutsuki is irredeemable. And that means yes, Kaneki is also irredeemable. But we don’t want that, do we?

We can also look at it this way: These characters are wrong for turning a blind eye on Ken and extremely limited in their worldview which leads to carefully picked out morals that hold up to no standard. And the implications if this is true are terrible. If characters like Touka fail to see sympathy and feel empathy for Mutsuki, then how do they expect the entirety of Tokyo to throw even a shred of acceptance Kaneki’s way?

The people of Tokyo won’t care for Kaneki just like the Kaneki Rescue Squad doesn’t care for them. Murder is murder, as Mutsuki said ages ago. We should want to see an honest wish to do good from our characters, but we don’t get that because none of these people are trying to see past their own horizon.

And you're not my waiting room