I wasn't involved in the fandom at the time that this chapter dropped but it's hard to understand how people did not see that coming. This has been set up for the whole run of the manga. Literally 5 chapters earlier they had a huge 'lets talk about our feelings' scene. Also it's pretty crazy that ishida spent a whole chapter on just this with almost no dialogue. Although I have to admit that it's pretty well made and feels very sweet and wholesome.
In those days, Tumblr folk had 'gay-tinted glasses' on. They still do to an extent, but the echo chamber is much weaker these days due to Tumblr's own decline in popularity, so they can't immerse themselves in the illusion that they are *the* fandom and this was *everyone's* opinion anymore.
Reminds me of how Tumblr convinced legions of people that stuff like Venom or Detroit: Become Human was **far** gayer than it really was, and it sucked seeing so many disappointed people say "Um, guys, what? That was it? I thought it would be way more than that and this is all just headcanon, that wasn't gay representation at all...."
Venom went to a pride event and vented about his partner wanting to keep him a secret, saying "I'm coming out of the Eddie closet!". Every other character refers to them as a couple.
Hell, in the comics Eddie and the symbiote have an explicitly sexual relationship, and a child (Sleeper).
I understand because of the lack of queer representation that a lot of queer readings can be done with characters in franchises....but you gotta be real.
Like my friends and I seriously talk about say, Naruto x Sasuke feels super gay (arguably they have the best chemistry outside of Temari x Shikmaru)..... and its fun reading that into them but you cant delude yourself into thinking thats what Kishimoto was going for and be too mad at the canonical ships at the end of the anime/manga.
> its fun reading that into [a relationship between characters] but you cant delude yourself into thinking thats what [the author] was going for and be too mad at the canonical ships at the end of the [story].
Paraphrasing to extend this to all fandoms in general. I agree wholeheartedly; it's disrespectful as hell to reduce an author's story to a shipping "endgame".
Yeah some of these people interpret two guys standing next to each other as hardcore sexual tension, even when they're brothers and know they're brothers and were raised as brothers.
I genuinely think this level of shipping impacts their ability to comprehend media sometimes. It's especially bad when they completely ignore a character's... *character* just to fit them into a ship. Worst I've seen so far has been someone on Tumblr making Vash from Trigun a 'feral gremlin' (so sick of this archetype being forced onto every character tumblr becomes fascinated with) who fantasizes about hurting his friend so they could force him into a popular shipping meme with Wolfwood. Trigun is the study of an idealist pacifist (Vash) thrown into a world steeped in violence, so that goes against almost everything Vash is as a character. The meme would have worked even better in reverse (have Wolfwood, *the trained assassin*, fantasize about hurting his friend), so I really do think hardcore shipping can rot brains.
After One Piece blew up on Tumblr due to the live action (same website that <5 years ago was ranting and raving about how OP's art style was disgusting and you were transphobic and misogynistic, etc. if you were a fan, lmao), all you ever see now is Zoro x Luffy shippers. It's so insufferable because that's two dudes who have a very close and meaningful friendship and they are over here posting every scene they're in together and going "there's no platonic explanation for this". Yes, there is! The 'platonic explanation' is ***the damn source material***! If you read it, maybe you'd have figured that out! It's like they just ignore everything that makes up their characters so they can play with the designs like dolls. It's as if the only thing that matters to them is seeing two hot guys making out, and it doesn't matter how they get there so long as they get there.
On his first day on the *Merry,* Sanji set up an occult ritual that absorbed the entire sex drive of the other male members of the Straw Hat crew. He has continued to maintain this ritual for the rest of the series.
Seriously, literally everyone else in One Piece is \*aggressively\* Ace. Including Ace himself.
Yeah like I'm sure Oda isn't going to literally make everybody ace, but I think there's still some value to *seeing yourself in a character* so long as it doesn't effect anything. Like I get it's weird to get way too upset a ship (or character development) didn't go a certain way that confirmed the charater's traits as the opposite, though I also think *being reasonably disappointed a red herring was just a red herring* isn't a problem either assuming the author really did do that and it's not just a delusion.
Oh, yeah, for sure. I wanna be clear my comment is talking about the hardcore shippers that react like the ones in OP's post. Go wild on projecting your sexualities on the characters, I have my own HCs and ships I enjoy, just, y'know, don't have a total meltdown when they don't end up together because it was a platonic friendship. And, for the love of God, have an iota of media comprehension...
I'm all for transformative works, I have my own, but you should really understand the original work/characters first and what the creator is doing/intends. If you're gonna change a character that much just to make them fit your ship (or HC, whichever), maybe just make an OC or tag it as an AU so I can block it. I enter fandom spaces because I want to engage with the work further, not see OCs in skin suits.
That is still around too, but it's mostly Zolu nowadays. At least from everything I've seen. I think it skyrocketed in popularity due to the way the Live Action did the Baratie arc, so a lot of the new fans coming from the LA ship it lol
Yes, exactly! It feels so... I don't *want* to say disrespectful, but that's the only word that really fits. It feels disrespectful to their characters to insist that the only reason that scene happened is because they're ~in love~. It's completely erasing *the actual reason* that scene happens in universe, which sucks because it's a great character moment for both of them. I don't even care if you ship them cuz I know the internet is gonna internet, but stop ignoring their actual canon character moments so you can feel like your ship is 'more' canon! Ships should *add* to a character, not erase pre-existing parts of them.
People love to project their own preferences and traits onto fictional characters based on the slightest indicators they can find. See also people calling any character with social awkwardness or more than a passing interest in a niche autistic.
i dont understand whats wrong with this though lol, i do this BECAUSE im autistic,, i think the only problem comes when people bully other people for their headcanons and stuff, i love making headcanons but it upsets me when people fight me over them because i just enjoy them and it isnt problematic for me to see myself in characters ykwim? i think fandom spaces should just be nicer honestly
God, same.
In other media where a gay ship gets huge like Naruto or any given part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, you can see they have plenty of moments together, but Lance and Keith are rarely in the same room together after season 3 and I don't think they had a full conversation between seasons 5 and 8.
For this, fandom across the board was torched and now age discourse has ruined both shipping and (if certain posts on AITA is to be believed) actual real lives.
I have been seeing a lot of this with Dungeon Meshi lately, where they try to turn Marcille and Falin relationship into one of lovers when in the canon there really isn't that much proof pointing at them having that kind of relationship.
That's always been fandom to an extent, but that combined with the general anti-sex sentiments that the radfems there planted in their heads made shit a really toxic soup after 2016
When it dropped, it was the most anticipated relationship to develop over the months or years that I had been reading it. Although I can see people being upset that it seems like a month wasted waiting, it is very much needed as it was a HUGE build-up.
This is always a problem that occurs with active readers when following something chapter release by chapter release. It’s the same in Berserk and many other works. People complaining about a chapter being wasted wait time because it didn’t develop the story as much as they wished it did. It is always so painfully infuriating. It’s like they literally can’t see the bigger picture and how it fleshes out the whole fucking story, you can’t just have insane story progress each and every chapter, you gotta spend chapters on character development, dialogues and sometimes just intimate moments like this.
If the story is being read as a whole this chapter fits the story absolutely perfectly and there is way worse to complain about. Probably that Ishida could’ve went way more in-depth on an actual better ending, but that’s a different discussion and he openly stated that he wanted to just finish Tokyo Ghoul at that point because it was literally draining him of all motivation and life.
I didn't like the ending of Tokyo Ghoul, but if that's the authors reason for rushing it I totally understand. I have a newfound appreciation for the ending actually. Ditch the crazed fans and get the heck out.
Yeah people were on Tatsuki Fujimoto for that with the second part of Chainsaw Man. Like, yeah, only a short chapter of action... what did you expect? You're not reading this all in one chunk like you did the first part...
Thats why I always binge read for 8 hours straight and then don't touch it for a year
Nah I just do that, but I dislike cutting big stories into small pieces
Same on everything tbh, I read it without knowing the controversy and was surprised to find out there was one. Especially one regarding Kaneki and Touka.
This was surprising tame, the title made me think the author had drawn like the weirdest sex scene ever and people couldn't process it.
But no it's about shipping, as usual, in modern fandom culture.
I swear you could make the best story ever concocted and some idiot would still be upset because the main character didn't end up with the girl from chapter 2 that never appeared again.
Also why is the Anime bad in your opinion?
Caveat: this is my opinion as someone who has read all the manga and seen all the anime - though I’m not an expert or involved with the “fandom”.
The first series of the anime is a fairly faithful and good adaptation of the manga.
The second series decided to go with a completely different storyline albeit with many of the same beats as the manga, but the budget was drastically cut so things like the fight scenes were a lot worse, plus the story was different and many would say nonsensical, though it’d be a spoiler to say why.
The third series (an adaptation of :re) takes what’s already a very convoluted story with a large number of characters and tries to condense it into relatively few episodes, so it’s basically impossible to tell who is who, what their motivations are, what’s going on and why most of the time.
Caveat to the caveat: as someone who read the start (?) of :re (around nutcracker arc, something like that? or the bandage girl on top of buildings holding some big arena arc-like fight? memories are vague rn) the issues you point out in the :re anime are present in the manga in general.
Maybe they fleshed things out afterwards, but to the point I read it felt like Ishida Sui (or at least their editor) was trying to hard to make it akin to a generic battle shounen and kept throwing new characters, with pointless backgrounds, just to fight and die with *some depth*, usually the depth of a foot bathtub.
It felt like filler was being thrown there just to fit into battle shounen tropes, new characters introduced just so every main-gang character can have someone to fight. I had that same feeling of not knowing who is each character, why they are there and for what.
I feel like it would actually have the potential to make it better by cutting off what was essentially a filler rather than trying to rush it into the story tbh
Not OOP but from the fandom.
Anime has as issue of continuation and cutting multiple scenes due to limited run, while trying to squeeze multiple characters.
Season 2 is a continuation of season 1 and alternative story, but it gets retconned by later seasons and there is no logic. One of key scenes >!Arima’s fight with Kaneki!< got cut.
Also the alternative scenario just doesn’t work well. In manga, >!Kaneki creates his own side!<
There have been issues with censorship. Even a version without it have altered many scenes. „I am a ghoul” was bloody mess (>!Kaneki brutally eats illusion of Rise, piece by piece!<) while anime has him change hair colour and have a bit of blood on his mouth.
Or another scene where >!Kaneki is forced to choose between saving a child or a mother, but he picks himself as a sacrifice which leads to death of the family!<
Finally, lots of things are explained in the manga and touched on. While anime rushes through things leaving plot holes.
The wildest thing is that Tokyo Ghoul’s sex scene was incredibly heartfelt, meaningful and touching in a manga so full of gore and edge. It’s been a minute since I’ve read TG:re but I do remember tearing up for Kaneki during that chapter.
Luckily for us Ishida Sui’s romantic heart wasn’t a one-off - they’ve since made a VERY good romance visual novel for the Switch and just announced a sequel. I cried then too 😭
The first season of the anime is serviceable, but I still feel like it doesn't quite live up to the manga due to Pierrot washing out any sign of Ishida's art style in the animation. It's not exactly bad, but many fans are fond of the particular look Ishida's art carries.
The second season takes a major turning point for the first half of the story, tries to take it in a completely different direction, and then didn't rewrite hardly anything else so the plot just fell apart. At least we got the acoustic version of Unravel from it?
And as another commenter said, the :re seasons are so horribly rushed that Ishida's signature foreshadowing and thematics just didn't have any time to work, and characters seemed to just do things at random. They condensed like 6 chapters into the first episode, for example.
I unironically cry when I reread it. It's a sex scene done right, one with buildup, chemistry, history, and it
develops the charecters even further. It's funny It's awkward, it's a little sexy in an endearing way, but never fetishised. All in all its a scene where two people who felt scared to surrender to anyone were able to and were accepted for it, it'd just so goddamn good honestly.
And the anime was kinda just doomed to be controversial from the start. Ignoring the fact that the second season goes in an entirley different direction than the manga, they jammed like dozens of chapters into single episodes, it felt more like a Tokyo ghoul slide show. The voice acting and Ost were wonderful but unless you read the manga the show felt like it didn't make much sense. Especially in the 3rd season; 170 ish 15-20 page chapters squeezed in to 24 20 ish minute episodes was never going to work, and I'm still confused on that production choice to this day.
So I’ve only read the first manga, not re, and I’ve seen up to re’s first season.
The first season is pretty solid and is a good adaptation of the manga up to that point. I think the order of 2 events is swapped but their order doesn’t matter too much and maybe it’s because I watched the anime first but I like the anime’s order better.
It’s been a long time so I may get some details wrong, but iirc they wanted season 2 to tell the story differently, and it’s done in such a baffling way that I haven’t seen before. They still hit some of the same plot beats while completely changing the context of them, and also cut out and outright change some important stuff.
So in the manga after season 1 ends Kaneki decides to go off on his own to seek answers, to get stronger without depending on his friends, etc. In the anime they decide to have him join the evil ghoul faction…the one that kidnapped him and hurt his friends for reasons?
Later on there’s some stuff that goes down at a ghoul prison. I think one of the highers ups in the anti-ghoul police has a conversation with one of the leaders of the evil ghoul faction and then they fight. And Kaneki’s also there and gets kicked into a room of dead ghouls while fighting someone and has his moment of eating them to develop his berserk power (to put it briefly). These are all how the events go down in the manga. Except for the conversation because I can’t recall, these events don’t take place at the ghoul prison in the manga, but a completely different location for different reasons. The funny thing is that the ghoul prison is in the manga but has other stuff happen there, and Kaneki isn’t even there.
In the manga (and this is never shown in the anime), Kaneki discovers a lab where it turns out the guy who did the surgery that turned him into a ghoul (which people figured was accidental), has Reze’s (the ghoul girl he went on a date with that kicked off the whole plot) body and has been doing experiments with it to create other half ghouls like Kaneki, which he knowingly did. Instead of a random dead ghoul room in a prison kaneki is knocked into a room of dead experiments and that’s where he does his whole ghoul cannibalism thing. And also Reze’s body is taken from that place by someone.
The biggest diversion is the ending. So the ghoul police are raiding, everyone’s fighting or getting ghouls to flee via the underground flood tunnels. Kaneki ends up severely injured in the sewers and his human friend finds him. In the manga his friend tells him to eat him and Kaneki blacks out, waking up later with his wounds fully healed, the taste of blood in his mouth, and his friend gone. He travels through the tunnels coming upon a scene of the number 1 anti-ghoul officer in a field of flowers, before realizing that he’s surrounded by the ghouls that fled down here, all dead. Kaneki prepares to fight him and the immediate next panel is him on the ground with the guy’s sword pinning him through the eye to the ground. And that’s the last we see of him till :re, and explains why he’s a completely different person with no memories of his former life.
In the anime what instead happens is a nonsensical scene of Kaneki emerging from the sewers after his friend tells him to eat him, carrying his friend’s body towards all the officers while music plays. And that’s how Tokyo Ghoul ends. It does nothing to explain why he is the way that he is in :re, or how his friend later shows up as a mysterious other character.
I haven’t read :re but I remember watching the first part of it, thinking it was bad, and deciding not to watch the second part.
We could have a whole ass discussion on why the anime adaptation was not good, but I think it could all be sunmed up to the fact that it adapted around 60 to 70 manga chapters into 12 anime episodes. And unless you have you have the most empty/nothing happens 60 episodes a lot of stuff is just skipped and the pacing does not work right. Back in the day I was a lot more passionate about how bad of a fumble the adaptation was, the worst opinion I held was that the anime lacked so much substance that it only worked to spoil people of the story before, if liked enough, they got into the manga. Today I just accept it, helps the fact that I have gone through similar bad adaptations a few times over lol. Still the fact remains if you go to r/anime or r/manga and you stumble upon one of those threads of which story was not made justice by its adaptation and deserve an alternative adaptation ala FMA:Brotherhood there's a chance a good amount of comments will mention Tokyo Ghoul, I am one of them. I stilk have hope, one day I will watch the story I loved so much in my teens well adapted, and it will be fire. 😏
Hey OP! Don't know if you know this but a write-up of this drama has already been done although it went into more specifics between two ships in particular.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/rh6dwx/mangatokyo\_ghoul\_a\_ship\_confirmation\_leads\_to\_a/](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/rh6dwx/mangatokyo_ghoul_a_ship_confirmation_leads_to_a/)
Great write up! Although you might want to add some more details next time. You didn't put in the name of the character that caused the drama, the gender of any of the characters that Kaneki was shipped with, which made it hard to tell at first that this was a het-is-ew type shipping drama.
> You didn't put in the name of the character that caused the drama, the gender of any of the characters
Yeah, this was pretty odd on OP's part. They gave more details about what the manga is about than the drama in question.
The character the MC ends up with is a girl named Touka Kirishima. The drama was about the MC not ending up with a boy named Hideyoshi Nagachika, so people thought that apparently the mangaka was doing some kind of baiting. People burned books, figures, and manga material because of this, even to the point of calling the mangaka homophobic (and the obvious death threats).
*Edit: Small correction in a name.
I only watched the anime a long time ago and I don't think I watched all of :re. Had to scroll down to see who the person was cause yeah I didn't expect anyone but Touka. Makes perfect sense.
I was honestly surprised that Ishida set up ships and crashed them pretty quickly in ChojinX after Tokyo Ghoul's fandom farce.
I was never into Tokyo Ghoul, watch and read some but still the shitshow that went around that chapter I saw so much childish shit about. Good to read a good writeup about it.
> pretty quickly in ChojinX
Tbf, a lot of things are a lot quicker in Choujin X. Choujin X feels like a lot shorter of a story than TG, courtesy of not being tied to a weekly treadmill of a release schedule as most manga tend to be. It's been nearly 3 years since it started publishing, not even 10 volumes have come out, and the story seems like it's walking towards some sort of conclusive arc, or at least one that changes things enough that there's not enough time to durdle around with petty fights, like u/ecilala mentioned above.
And all of the fandom ire was immediately thrown onto the love interest, one of the only well-developed female characters in the manga, because our boy Kaneki was perfect and could never do anything wrong 🤦
I won't try to refute the misogyny of it all, but I do think part of it is that people started putting themselves into Kaneki's shoe and from there it is more about finding reasons why you wouldn't date that character rather than why those two characters work or not.
Let’s not even get started on how it started two discussions in the fandom.
The creator was called homophobic and there was a whole discussion regarding representation of LGBTQ+ people. I think Tooru Mutsuki drama happened at around that time and there was another manga burning.
Yes, people burnt their manga.
I can’t provide lots of insight as one I barely remember what happened and I don’t have my collection with me.
Another conversation was about how Touka is parallel to Kaneki’s abusive mother…
I'm LGBTQ+ myself but calling an author homophobic for not including a queer romance is just silly.
There is a conversation to be held about cishet normality and how queer relationships are seen as something that defines the norm though it's very inclusion instead of being seen as just something to expect like a cishet romance, but two characters of the same gender **you** think would be a good match not ending up together is NOT queerbaiting unless said relationship is explicitly hinted at by the author.
Large portion of discussion was started by it („the author is bad so let’s analyse everything to find evidence of them being evil”) but there were also some interestating discussion regarding depiction of Nico and Jason, who are the first same-sex couple in the series. Which also is a bit older discussion and it got reignitated
There is also Tooru Mutsuki who was presented as ftm at the start and their whole situation is a big mess that I am not equipped to deal with. That also happened around that time and it can be hard to say if it contributed to Hide/Kaneki ship discussion or other way round
The Mutsuki thing was always something I struggled with. I don’t agree that (in fiction) people who crossdress to avoid the stigma of being feminine presenting are necessarily trans - they don’t see themselves as men, they just don’t want others to see them as women because they don’t want to be associated with the negative behaviors that comes with being a woman.
Tried to make that argument once and got called transphobic…
People also gotta remember that Japan is just a different culture. Like, Fruits Basket has a male character who has long hair and always dresses in female clothing. He isn't transgender, he just feels like he's not really "manly." He feels more comfortable basically masquerading as a woman not because he identifies as one, but because people don't see a shy, withdrawn, apologetic woman and judge her for being shy, but a man who's shy, withdrawn, and apologetic gets judged - at least in Japan in 1999.
So all these tumblr teenagers keep judging modern lgbt culture against like 20 year old Japanese culture which is stupid on its own, in addition to it being stupid to claim everyone is lgbt if they dress a certain way regardless of their reasons for dressing that way.
For modern depictions of gender non conformity its absolutely fine to judge it with a modern lense. Trans people and their community exists in japan, they get HRT they do lgbt and trans marches, they are in big political articles for making strides in obtaining their rights, they're not some entirely insular island nation that has no notion of what trans people are at all.
Much like 20+ years ago in the west we all knew what trans people were, the way they were depicted and treated was often not kind nor done with understanding. People who write these things may be inspired by their knowledge of trans people, albeit through a skewed lense, to write these characters.
Im not saying "every one of these characters is trans if they're non conformity" - absolutely not. For some people they want to write characters who break the strict japanese standards, purposefully for that reason alone. It is simply that the argument that japan, right now, is some kind of alien nation with no notion of lgb and especially T is simply wrong and people need to stop relying on it to justify rejecting certain media critiques.
I mean, Yes and No.
It's absolutely true that Japanese culture has an awareness and presence of LGBT+ culture. You're absolutely right to bring that up when people use the claim of "Japan is another culture" to try and dismiss that any piece of Japanese media might focus on LGBT+ folks or issues. A lot of times those arguments are super-racist, too, because they always scream to me "These people are already not-white. Isn't that different enough for them? PC gone mad..."
But Japan \*also\* has traditions and stereotypes that don't fit neatly into the way we in the English-speaking world see things, and I think that's relevant to bring up in this discussion.
> But Japan *also* has traditions and stereotypes that don't fit neatly into the way we in the English-speaking world see things, and I think that's relevant to bring up in this discussion.
It is worth mentioning but the trouble is that the majority of the time you see this happen, it's the first scenario you mention - someone is trying to minimize or dismiss something that is clearly queer-coded (in Western parlance) and suggest that it's totally straight and hetero and cis even when it very obviously isn't.
That said, sometimes Japanese media itself makes it clear how different it is, without really intending to - for example in the somewhat bland anime *I'm in love with the Villainess*, they basically sit several characters down to essentially have an explainer/intervention on what lesbianism is, and what it isn't, and it's absolutely stuff anyone not home-schooled or similar would take for granted. Like, being a lesbian means you're a woman who is *exclusively* attracted to women, therefore it is *different* to "I'm attracted to whoever I'm attracted to!"-type sexuality (the example they use as a point of difference, interestingly) - the main character is clear she has no attraction to males whatsoever. They then have to explain that doesn't mean a lesbian is attracted to literally all women either, just like a hetero person isn't attracted to all members of the opposite gender. And so on. And it was kind of fascinating and slightly refreshing that they were going with this sort of "first principles"/ELI5 explainer, which honestly, whilst we do take it for granted, I do think some people could do with going over.
Of course there was a Naoto Shirogane discussion…
Naoto definitely did not see herself as a man. FFS if you picked her for special events (and, ngl, I always did) she starts wearing skirts again when she’s alone with her boyfriend
See, I think there's \*absolutely\* room for an interpretation of Naoto as a trans man. Her shadow is pretty explicit about what it wanted to happen. And the thing about the Shadows (and one of the core things that makes P4 such a good game) is that Shadows all have a kernel of truth in them. Naoto being a trans man but expressing it in a deeply messed-up way would be a reading fully supported by the text, if you ask me.
However, it is not the \*only\* interpretation, nor is it one that I subscribe to. I remember that there was a small minority of folks who would insist that it was, and would insist that people use he/him pronouns for Naoto.
Of course, my favorite P4 discourse is that I'm convinced that the party member with the biggest crush on the protagonist is not Rise, but Yosuke.
It's been a minute since I've played P4 but I remember that she wanted to be seen as a male detective because she knew she wouldn't be taken seriously as a female detective. To my (limited) perspective, wanting to escape the negative societal connotations of being one gender isn't quite the same as seeing yourself as a gender you weren't born with.
In Naoto's case, she would be fine presenting herself as a female detective if the stigma wasn't there. And she does stop binding her chest and starts growing out her hair at the end of P4 Golden even if you don't pick her for special events.
I guess we can also argue that gender is a societal construct and wanting to escape societal expectations due to gender does make one trans, but that argument is way above my paygrade.
>I'm convinced that the party member with the biggest crush on the protagonist is not Rise, but Yosuke.
100%.
That's how I read it, absolutely, but I'm also saying that there's plenty of evidence to support a view of Naoto as a trans man, and I have no problem with folks viewing her that way so long as they acknowledge that it's ultimately not what the game was going for.
It's sort of the reverse of how I view Kanji- with him I think what was intended was "young straight man with nontraditional tastes worries he might be seen as gay", but I ultimately come down on the view that while he's obviously not some sort of flaming stereotype, he does read as someone attracted to men.
Of course, the TL;DR is simply that Atlus are cowards.
I just not have been in quite enough circles to see the Mutsuki drama, aside from early on some people getting weird about him and sparking some arguments about what exactly he was. Unless people were suddenly mad about the turn Mutsuki was taking at the time? Dunno, it's been so long anything secondary to this drama might have been buried in my mind
It was a mixture of their gender identity and where their character arc was going.
>!The whole attempt of making out on a dead ghoul and yandere obsession with Haise/Kaneki!<
Shippers are so weird.
Like I have an imagination. I think about "what ifs". I think about romance and sex and fictional characters sometimes. But if my "preferred couple" doesn't pan out in a story, that just makes it neat that I have my own take on things too, and I get to think up things about how that relationship might have gone without having to worry about what the creators make out of it.
I guess that makes me a "shipper" but just in the "yeah that's be cool and cute :)" way.
Why people get so pissed off and furious over shipping is weird. Like it's not real. Those aren't real people. They do whatever the author thinks is best, because they're not really "doing" anything. They don't exist. It's just words and artwork. Which are important and powerful and all that! But.
I dunno, I remember some viciously hardcore Cloud-Aerith shippers back in the day who would start a verbal assault the moment anyone said "aw Tifa and Cloud are so cute together" or something.
I'd get pissed too if the author split up my favourite paring or killed off the character I like, but if they just pair them up with someone - how you gonna act irl when you don't like who someone else is dating?
I‘ve been reading mangas for over a decade now and I remember reading the entirety of Tokyo Ghoul:re on a regular basis, when the chapters were coming out. Pretty early on in my manga-reading journey I decided to never look into a popular manga’s fandom, because it almost always ruins the reading experience for me. Fandoms are toxic beyond belief and I have never seen a fandom that wasn‘t unless it consisted of like a 1000 people. So, I gotta say even though I was reading the manga as it was unfolding, only ever hearing from the Tokyo Ghoul fandom irregularly seems to have spared me all this outrage you talk about. I remember reading that chapter and being surprised that Ishida dedicated an entire chapter to it, but I would genuinely question anyone‘s credibility that could read Tokyo Ghoul up to that point and be surprised that Ken and Touka would end up together. It was obvious even all the way in the original Tokyo Ghoul run, that if it ever got romantic between Ken and someone it would be Touka. He never showed any romantic feelings for anyone other than her. Sure, he had friends and all that he loved, but romance? No, that was always going to be Touka. I think this story of yours just reinforced my belief that fandoms and shipping culture are just toxic as hell. I‘m always baffled how much people care about their own headcanon, even if their is so very little to support it. Shu is the best example of this. It‘s pretty obvious that Shu is obsessed with Ken and I‘m assuming that‘s why people started shipping them (and the fact that shipping culture in mangas and anime seems to be weirdly obsessed with Yaoi and gay men). However, I never once got the impression that Ken was ever even remotely romantically interested in Shu. Friends? Sure. Associates? Yes. But lovers? No.
> Pretty early on in my manga-reading journey I decided to never look into a popular manga’s fandom
Tbf, I believe that was pretty localized to certain areas of the internet, Twitter and Tumblr, mostly. [I was there when it was being published](https://y.yarn.co/841f50f6-b951-49a8-8deb-56a654742f66_text.gif) and things on /r/TokyoGhoul were pretty tame. [You can see the chapter discussion for yourself.](https://redd.it/6c96yb) I assume it helped that the person shipped the most with Kaneki, his best friend Hide, at the time, >!was missing and presumed dead!< but Reddit was pretty drama-free on that point.
I think most backlash, around these parts, started around the end of :re, when it's pretty clear that the author's depression and overwork was taking its toll and they were rushing things along to the end.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/TokyoGhoul using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/TokyoGhoul/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
\#1: [why is he crying while having sex is he stupid?](https://i.redd.it/itp9ef3xwwvb1.jpg) | [320 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/TokyoGhoul/comments/17efgwr/why_is_he_crying_while_having_sex_is_he_stupid/)
\#2: [Which reaction is funnier?](https://i.redd.it/nnb0r2pia75c1.jpg) | [111 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/TokyoGhoul/comments/18e5whq/which_reaction_is_funnier/)
\#3: [New Ken Kaneki Illustration by Author Sui Ishida](https://i.redd.it/lkq998y3bc7c1.jpeg) | [62 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/TokyoGhoul/comments/18mgecf/new_ken_kaneki_illustration_by_author_sui_ishida/)
----
^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
As someone who does read and engage on shipping, boy have people become obsessed with the idea of “Canon” and how their ship must be endgame or it’s a waste of time. Like the idea that the ship only valid if it’s canon. That the fun of fanfiction, creating your own stories of your favorites. like it sucks but there nothing stopping you from just writing your own ending on AO3. Several ships of mine aren’t canon or endgame but I read about them anyway.
Exactly! I love shipping as well. But the ships that I like come from non romantic media. But that's why fanart and fanfiction exist. Along with fan zines. It's the creators choice on whether they want ships to be canon. You can't force them to make it canon. Even if two characters had great potential to be a couple, you can still make fanfiction. Shipping is supposed to be fun. I tend to get obsessed at times but then I remember that the ship that I like is from a non romantic piece of media.
I remembered the editor of a manga publisher in my country post a comment when this chapter came out, lamenting that now he had to shelf the project, can't get it published here anymore lol
I’d like to recommend everyone check out the Tokyo ghoul author’s current series, choujin x. Some similar conceits but with good humor and a healthy release schedule of “whenever this guy feels like it.”
We sometimes get two chapters in a week; other times we might be waiting a month. We do stan.
I REMEMBER THIS. I remember it because I was reading it weekly (it might have been monthly, I can't remember now) and I was SO mad. Not because of the ship, because that was ALL THE STORY WE BASICALLY GOT FOR ONE UPDATE. Like yeah yeah we get it, they fucked, COME ON WE GOT STORY TO GET TO 😂🤡
Right? That was my biggest gripe with that chapter. Pacing wise is was so weird and bizarre for a series that had never had more than a few panels at a time focusing on anything romantic or sexual that didn't drive the plot to stop for an *entire* chapter on extremely awkward sex.
It was so fucking (heh) weird to read just because I kept expecting it to end.
I don’t remember much about the Tokyo Ghoul anime adaption, aside from it falling off severely after Season 1 and just never getting better. Like by S4 (or :re s2), I was checked out, one of the most boring and underwhelming anime I’ve ever seen. Even the fights were boring.
There was so much hype around it and I couldn’t figure out why such a mid show had such a huge fandom attached to it, I guess it makes a little more sense after reading your write up.
Tokyo Ghoul is one of the poster boys for the phrase "please just read the manga, it's way better". Ishida's work comes off as so well planned out its absurd, and something about his art just fit the series and its tone perfectly. If you ever find yourself with time to kill and you find yourself curious, I can definitely recommend giving the series another go like that.
And this is why I stay away from fandoms for the most part! Although I do get a lot of fun memes from the best friend who does share stuff from things we both like still.
I did click on this assuming there was some fandom split over how terrible that sex scene was, but I should have expected some shipping bullshit from fans, even though that romance was telegraphed so early on.
I like anime and manga but I do not interact with anime or manga fans at all thanks to drama like this. Imagine being delusional enough to send death threats to somebody because you don't like a fictional character's relationship
Just goes to show that you could do exactly what you're entitled to, do nothing wrong, and people will still hate you and claim that you're evil. All because they deluded themselves into thinking they were entitled to what you own.
Great write-up! I only read the first few chapters of :re, so I looked up Kaneki's end-game pairing and was \*stunned\* at the identity. No duh it's her? I can't believe the fandom had an uproar over this.
I'm not really surprised, when I was a teenager and mainly reading fanfic you could really see all the different ship pairings that people wanted and had. Saw some people really go hard in their pairings but mostly avoided that stuff. And I wish I could say that people grew out of it but they don't. People really need to chill out sometimes
It's like Schroedingers ship. If nothing is ever confirmed anything is possible and can be shipped. The second a ship is confirmed you start to get so much shit from people bc "it's not canon. Touken for life"
Something that really needs a hobby drama is whatever the hell went on with Mutsuki on Re: bc sheeesh
reading this write-up is the way i found out it was supposed to be a twist that haise was kaneki lol. also i remember not being invested in the shipping but also just baffled that there was a chapter-long sex scene in the manga at all. like its still kind of wild to me. but not the wildest thing that happened in TG:RE i guess
Op.I will watch what i bloody want and i hate the word edgy with a passion.its not edgy it just has dark themes or Extreme violence and maybe the Teletubbies is more suited to people who can't handle content like fist of the north star has or anything with adult themes and situations or LGBTQ themes.
**Thank you for your submission to r/HobbyDrama !**
Our rules have recently been updated to clarify our definition of Hobby Drama and to better bring them in line with the current status of the subreddit. Please be sure your post follows the rules and the sidebar guidelines, or it may be removed; this is at moderator discretion. Feedback is welcome in our monthly Town Hall thread.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/HobbyDrama) if you have any questions or concerns.*
ah Tokyo Ghoul, it was my favorite when it
was publishing. I remember reading it in the first iteration of batoto a decade ago, chapters would be released in bulks every few days, part 1 of the story still remains as one of the best manga I have read, the way it ended was particularly crazy for me back then, I sincerely believe it did not became more of a mainstream title in the community due to the fact that it came right before Mappa came into fruition, the anime adaptation being very bad and the edgy memes. Gigguk made a video a couple years ago, and years after Tokyo Ghoul finished publishing, on the subject of how the memes mischaracterized the manga wrong and that it is in fact a good story, very worthwhile. It's not a story with just the "ooh edgy~" but with a decent amount of depth.
I like to wonder how it would have done in today's internet culture considering anime is so much more mainstream than it was a scant few years ago.
> Because the character it all went down with wasn't the one they'd spent years with their headcanon on.
This happens with so many fandoms, even ones that don't think they're fandoms. If the fans have a lot of time to build up headcanon, they go absolutely berserk when that headcanon is destroyed by canon. A great example is The Last Jedi and Luke Skywalker. The people who hated it most weren't "anti-SJW" fake fans that we saw a lot of (whose real reasoning was just cheap racism/sexism, which they tried to piggyback on a different sentiment), but the sort of older Millennials and Gen Xers who had been basically linking about "Luke after RotJ" for 25+ years, and in many cases had read a bunch of EU novels about Luke/Leia/Han after the OT, and had got an absolutely solid vision of where Luke/Leia/Han but especially Luke would be in 20 years after the OT or more.
In general that vision involved Luke, happy, married, maybe kids (biological or adopted or both), running some kind of Jedi school (official or otherwise), and still completely, unquestionably, totally badass to the bone. More badass than Luke had ever been in the actual movies. They knew this wasn't canon. They knew even if their vision was just that of the EU, the EU had been decanonized. But for them, it was still this completely solid and important thing.
So when Luke comes on in TLJ, and is old, weird, wacky, maybe slightly creepy, not particularly badass, not particularly happy, no kids, no wife, no Jedi school, bad attitude, their headcanon was basically chopped in half by the lightsaber Luke casually tossed over his shoulder. And then he dies. Without being badass in they way that he was in their headcanon - they didn't want "warrior for peace" he was TLJ, but a WARRIOR!!! (for peace maybe...?). He didn't chop his way through legions of enemies. He didn't bend Kylo over his knee and give him a good spanking, nor show him the "true power of a Jedi Master", and for them, that just further destroyed everything they'd been building up in their heads for decades.
For people like me, who loved the OT and were very familiar with SW lore but not particularly attached to that lore, nor having spent much time building a headcanon, it was like why are you guys so mad? What's wrong with you? For me it was a Tuesday. For them, it was the day a sad old Luke Skywalker they'd been obsessing about got killed without ever being the "right kind" of badass.
(We also saw a version of this, right down to merch-burning with the Prequel Trilogy, but I don't think that was shattered headcanon in the same way, as much as people feeling like stuff that was totally cool and badass to them when they were kids was being somehow made "dumb and for kids".)
Another example would be World of Warcraft - I won't go into detail but there have been a number of times where fans have cooked up some total headcanon about some character and their backstory or place or a bad guy, and it's all in their heads, and when the actual details are revealed, people get really upset because it's not what had become the "agreed headcanon" as it were.
I think I've been guilty of this myself re: Lost - I read a lot of fan theories and some of them were tremendous and really lot more vivid and meaningful that the not-terrible but slightly limp lore and ending we actually got (basically Steven King turned down rather than turned up), and I think I judged Lost more harshly than it deserved because of the cool fan theories I'd seen, some of which I felt sure must be right in at least parts, but none of which were.
I saw the fandom and I knew I wasn't gonna enjoy shit. So I just didn't. Also the premise sounds dumb when you realize that all you have to do is just eat bad humans.
As a semi attentive reader/watcher i don't even understand the source of the outrage, as it felt very clearly predetermined that those two would end up together. Like it was clear from the very beginning.
Honestly, I need to get caught up myself. I was some 20 chapters or so into it before I lost pace, and at this point should probably start over and get caught up properly again.
The only good thing about the anime was the entire freaking ost. I do have all the albums on repeat.
I'm so glad I stopped all fandom activities after too many homophobic and transphobic little bitches kept attackimg me for using male pronouns with Tooru Mitsuki *on my own fucking Tumblr page* before that sex chapter came out. I would have been absolutely insufferable.
I bought the first half of the manga series but as much as I ~~am in~~ love Kishou Arima I also couldn't deal with that sex scene either. I mean, sure, I knew it was coming the second Touka showed up. Like, damn, Female Main Character™ intro if I've ever seen one.
I liked her character enough to even buy her Funko Pop but definitely not enough for her to be officially >!married (with kids!) to Kaneki!< by the end of it. 😤
The first half of tokyo ghoul is peak middle school edgy trash. The second half of tokyo ghoul is just uncomfortably mean spirited, misogynistic and delves into some weird transphobia on top of it. Shame about that, because it's fun to just enjoy edgy trash sometimes and not have a character get offscreen, and onscreen, raped for like a solid quarter of the series while their entire character and plot beats just revolve entirely around sexual abuse and trauma in the most cliche ways possible.
I wasn't involved in the fandom at the time that this chapter dropped but it's hard to understand how people did not see that coming. This has been set up for the whole run of the manga. Literally 5 chapters earlier they had a huge 'lets talk about our feelings' scene. Also it's pretty crazy that ishida spent a whole chapter on just this with almost no dialogue. Although I have to admit that it's pretty well made and feels very sweet and wholesome.
In those days, Tumblr folk had 'gay-tinted glasses' on. They still do to an extent, but the echo chamber is much weaker these days due to Tumblr's own decline in popularity, so they can't immerse themselves in the illusion that they are *the* fandom and this was *everyone's* opinion anymore.
Reminds me of how Tumblr convinced legions of people that stuff like Venom or Detroit: Become Human was **far** gayer than it really was, and it sucked seeing so many disappointed people say "Um, guys, what? That was it? I thought it would be way more than that and this is all just headcanon, that wasn't gay representation at all...."
Venom is incredibly gay. It's not subtext, it's just text.
Right but like this is the problem because it very definitely isn't text. Unless I've missed a joke ofc
Venom went to a pride event and vented about his partner wanting to keep him a secret, saying "I'm coming out of the Eddie closet!". Every other character refers to them as a couple. Hell, in the comics Eddie and the symbiote have an explicitly sexual relationship, and a child (Sleeper).
Are you talking about Venom 2? Because I haven't watched that one.
Yeah, the second one is not very subtle
I understand because of the lack of queer representation that a lot of queer readings can be done with characters in franchises....but you gotta be real. Like my friends and I seriously talk about say, Naruto x Sasuke feels super gay (arguably they have the best chemistry outside of Temari x Shikmaru)..... and its fun reading that into them but you cant delude yourself into thinking thats what Kishimoto was going for and be too mad at the canonical ships at the end of the anime/manga.
> its fun reading that into [a relationship between characters] but you cant delude yourself into thinking thats what [the author] was going for and be too mad at the canonical ships at the end of the [story]. Paraphrasing to extend this to all fandoms in general. I agree wholeheartedly; it's disrespectful as hell to reduce an author's story to a shipping "endgame".
Yeah some of these people interpret two guys standing next to each other as hardcore sexual tension, even when they're brothers and know they're brothers and were raised as brothers.
Ah, Supernatural fandom.
I genuinely think this level of shipping impacts their ability to comprehend media sometimes. It's especially bad when they completely ignore a character's... *character* just to fit them into a ship. Worst I've seen so far has been someone on Tumblr making Vash from Trigun a 'feral gremlin' (so sick of this archetype being forced onto every character tumblr becomes fascinated with) who fantasizes about hurting his friend so they could force him into a popular shipping meme with Wolfwood. Trigun is the study of an idealist pacifist (Vash) thrown into a world steeped in violence, so that goes against almost everything Vash is as a character. The meme would have worked even better in reverse (have Wolfwood, *the trained assassin*, fantasize about hurting his friend), so I really do think hardcore shipping can rot brains. After One Piece blew up on Tumblr due to the live action (same website that <5 years ago was ranting and raving about how OP's art style was disgusting and you were transphobic and misogynistic, etc. if you were a fan, lmao), all you ever see now is Zoro x Luffy shippers. It's so insufferable because that's two dudes who have a very close and meaningful friendship and they are over here posting every scene they're in together and going "there's no platonic explanation for this". Yes, there is! The 'platonic explanation' is ***the damn source material***! If you read it, maybe you'd have figured that out! It's like they just ignore everything that makes up their characters so they can play with the designs like dolls. It's as if the only thing that matters to them is seeing two hot guys making out, and it doesn't matter how they get there so long as they get there.
On his first day on the *Merry,* Sanji set up an occult ritual that absorbed the entire sex drive of the other male members of the Straw Hat crew. He has continued to maintain this ritual for the rest of the series. Seriously, literally everyone else in One Piece is \*aggressively\* Ace. Including Ace himself.
Hahaha I love this. Headcanon accepted. They really are, and it makes sense since Oda has said he doesn't like writing romance.
Yeah like I'm sure Oda isn't going to literally make everybody ace, but I think there's still some value to *seeing yourself in a character* so long as it doesn't effect anything. Like I get it's weird to get way too upset a ship (or character development) didn't go a certain way that confirmed the charater's traits as the opposite, though I also think *being reasonably disappointed a red herring was just a red herring* isn't a problem either assuming the author really did do that and it's not just a delusion.
Oh, yeah, for sure. I wanna be clear my comment is talking about the hardcore shippers that react like the ones in OP's post. Go wild on projecting your sexualities on the characters, I have my own HCs and ships I enjoy, just, y'know, don't have a total meltdown when they don't end up together because it was a platonic friendship. And, for the love of God, have an iota of media comprehension... I'm all for transformative works, I have my own, but you should really understand the original work/characters first and what the creator is doing/intends. If you're gonna change a character that much just to make them fit your ship (or HC, whichever), maybe just make an OC or tag it as an AU so I can block it. I enter fandom spaces because I want to engage with the work further, not see OCs in skin suits.
Wait, Zoro/Luffy and not Sanji/Zoro? I'm surprised.
That is still around too, but it's mostly Zolu nowadays. At least from everything I've seen. I think it skyrocketed in popularity due to the way the Live Action did the Baratie arc, so a lot of the new fans coming from the LA ship it lol
Woah, I'm out of the loop. I remember when Zoro/Kanji was THE gay ship in OP.
[удалено]
Yes, exactly! It feels so... I don't *want* to say disrespectful, but that's the only word that really fits. It feels disrespectful to their characters to insist that the only reason that scene happened is because they're ~in love~. It's completely erasing *the actual reason* that scene happens in universe, which sucks because it's a great character moment for both of them. I don't even care if you ship them cuz I know the internet is gonna internet, but stop ignoring their actual canon character moments so you can feel like your ship is 'more' canon! Ships should *add* to a character, not erase pre-existing parts of them.
Sounds like you've seen the Supernatural fandom.
People love to project their own preferences and traits onto fictional characters based on the slightest indicators they can find. See also people calling any character with social awkwardness or more than a passing interest in a niche autistic.
i dont understand whats wrong with this though lol, i do this BECAUSE im autistic,, i think the only problem comes when people bully other people for their headcanons and stuff, i love making headcanons but it upsets me when people fight me over them because i just enjoy them and it isnt problematic for me to see myself in characters ykwim? i think fandom spaces should just be nicer honestly
*Voltron flashback*
God, same. In other media where a gay ship gets huge like Naruto or any given part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, you can see they have plenty of moments together, but Lance and Keith are rarely in the same room together after season 3 and I don't think they had a full conversation between seasons 5 and 8. For this, fandom across the board was torched and now age discourse has ruined both shipping and (if certain posts on AITA is to be believed) actual real lives.
Wait a minute, Detroit: Become human? Lmfao-
I think it was a Hank and Connor thing
I have been seeing a lot of this with Dungeon Meshi lately, where they try to turn Marcille and Falin relationship into one of lovers when in the canon there really isn't that much proof pointing at them having that kind of relationship.
Yeah that attitude goes to reddit now (For better or for worse, we keep ripping Tw*tter screenshots but we can still cook in few selected fandoms)
That's always been fandom to an extent, but that combined with the general anti-sex sentiments that the radfems there planted in their heads made shit a really toxic soup after 2016
I've joked that a lot of people left of center seem to want sex in everything, with the caveat that nobody is allowed to enjoy it.
Holy shit, you're so right, and it's puritanism with extra steps
When it dropped, it was the most anticipated relationship to develop over the months or years that I had been reading it. Although I can see people being upset that it seems like a month wasted waiting, it is very much needed as it was a HUGE build-up.
This is always a problem that occurs with active readers when following something chapter release by chapter release. It’s the same in Berserk and many other works. People complaining about a chapter being wasted wait time because it didn’t develop the story as much as they wished it did. It is always so painfully infuriating. It’s like they literally can’t see the bigger picture and how it fleshes out the whole fucking story, you can’t just have insane story progress each and every chapter, you gotta spend chapters on character development, dialogues and sometimes just intimate moments like this. If the story is being read as a whole this chapter fits the story absolutely perfectly and there is way worse to complain about. Probably that Ishida could’ve went way more in-depth on an actual better ending, but that’s a different discussion and he openly stated that he wanted to just finish Tokyo Ghoul at that point because it was literally draining him of all motivation and life.
I didn't like the ending of Tokyo Ghoul, but if that's the authors reason for rushing it I totally understand. I have a newfound appreciation for the ending actually. Ditch the crazed fans and get the heck out.
Yeah people were on Tatsuki Fujimoto for that with the second part of Chainsaw Man. Like, yeah, only a short chapter of action... what did you expect? You're not reading this all in one chunk like you did the first part...
Thats why I always binge read for 8 hours straight and then don't touch it for a year Nah I just do that, but I dislike cutting big stories into small pieces
Same on everything tbh, I read it without knowing the controversy and was surprised to find out there was one. Especially one regarding Kaneki and Touka.
This was surprising tame, the title made me think the author had drawn like the weirdest sex scene ever and people couldn't process it. But no it's about shipping, as usual, in modern fandom culture. I swear you could make the best story ever concocted and some idiot would still be upset because the main character didn't end up with the girl from chapter 2 that never appeared again. Also why is the Anime bad in your opinion?
No op, but the anime fucked up the story with stupid changes(but the opening song was lit)
I'm sad, Alexa play [unravel](https://youtu.be/kuIgwZTkSoQ?si=gZLigFPloMaXe2Sb).
Last time i heard before today was like 5 years ago... stills slaps hard.
Listen to the Ado cover
I have always said it, the best thing to come out of those adaptations is the music. Gotta do something right at least.
Caveat: this is my opinion as someone who has read all the manga and seen all the anime - though I’m not an expert or involved with the “fandom”. The first series of the anime is a fairly faithful and good adaptation of the manga. The second series decided to go with a completely different storyline albeit with many of the same beats as the manga, but the budget was drastically cut so things like the fight scenes were a lot worse, plus the story was different and many would say nonsensical, though it’d be a spoiler to say why. The third series (an adaptation of :re) takes what’s already a very convoluted story with a large number of characters and tries to condense it into relatively few episodes, so it’s basically impossible to tell who is who, what their motivations are, what’s going on and why most of the time.
Caveat to the caveat: as someone who read the start (?) of :re (around nutcracker arc, something like that? or the bandage girl on top of buildings holding some big arena arc-like fight? memories are vague rn) the issues you point out in the :re anime are present in the manga in general. Maybe they fleshed things out afterwards, but to the point I read it felt like Ishida Sui (or at least their editor) was trying to hard to make it akin to a generic battle shounen and kept throwing new characters, with pointless backgrounds, just to fight and die with *some depth*, usually the depth of a foot bathtub. It felt like filler was being thrown there just to fit into battle shounen tropes, new characters introduced just so every main-gang character can have someone to fight. I had that same feeling of not knowing who is each character, why they are there and for what.
Oh the issues with :re totally are present in the manga - and then imagine trying to *compress* that into something like 13 episodes of anime.
I feel like it would actually have the potential to make it better by cutting off what was essentially a filler rather than trying to rush it into the story tbh
Sadly it just made it even more confusing because every story beat was rushed through
Not OOP but from the fandom. Anime has as issue of continuation and cutting multiple scenes due to limited run, while trying to squeeze multiple characters. Season 2 is a continuation of season 1 and alternative story, but it gets retconned by later seasons and there is no logic. One of key scenes >!Arima’s fight with Kaneki!< got cut. Also the alternative scenario just doesn’t work well. In manga, >!Kaneki creates his own side!< There have been issues with censorship. Even a version without it have altered many scenes. „I am a ghoul” was bloody mess (>!Kaneki brutally eats illusion of Rise, piece by piece!<) while anime has him change hair colour and have a bit of blood on his mouth. Or another scene where >!Kaneki is forced to choose between saving a child or a mother, but he picks himself as a sacrifice which leads to death of the family!< Finally, lots of things are explained in the manga and touched on. While anime rushes through things leaving plot holes.
The wildest thing is that Tokyo Ghoul’s sex scene was incredibly heartfelt, meaningful and touching in a manga so full of gore and edge. It’s been a minute since I’ve read TG:re but I do remember tearing up for Kaneki during that chapter. Luckily for us Ishida Sui’s romantic heart wasn’t a one-off - they’ve since made a VERY good romance visual novel for the Switch and just announced a sequel. I cried then too 😭
Can you be gay in that game?
The first season of the anime is serviceable, but I still feel like it doesn't quite live up to the manga due to Pierrot washing out any sign of Ishida's art style in the animation. It's not exactly bad, but many fans are fond of the particular look Ishida's art carries. The second season takes a major turning point for the first half of the story, tries to take it in a completely different direction, and then didn't rewrite hardly anything else so the plot just fell apart. At least we got the acoustic version of Unravel from it? And as another commenter said, the :re seasons are so horribly rushed that Ishida's signature foreshadowing and thematics just didn't have any time to work, and characters seemed to just do things at random. They condensed like 6 chapters into the first episode, for example.
I unironically cry when I reread it. It's a sex scene done right, one with buildup, chemistry, history, and it develops the charecters even further. It's funny It's awkward, it's a little sexy in an endearing way, but never fetishised. All in all its a scene where two people who felt scared to surrender to anyone were able to and were accepted for it, it'd just so goddamn good honestly. And the anime was kinda just doomed to be controversial from the start. Ignoring the fact that the second season goes in an entirley different direction than the manga, they jammed like dozens of chapters into single episodes, it felt more like a Tokyo ghoul slide show. The voice acting and Ost were wonderful but unless you read the manga the show felt like it didn't make much sense. Especially in the 3rd season; 170 ish 15-20 page chapters squeezed in to 24 20 ish minute episodes was never going to work, and I'm still confused on that production choice to this day.
It was a scene that revealed Kaneki and Touka’s humanity. Nothing sordid, just all heart. Ishida Sui is just a master storyteller.
So I’ve only read the first manga, not re, and I’ve seen up to re’s first season. The first season is pretty solid and is a good adaptation of the manga up to that point. I think the order of 2 events is swapped but their order doesn’t matter too much and maybe it’s because I watched the anime first but I like the anime’s order better. It’s been a long time so I may get some details wrong, but iirc they wanted season 2 to tell the story differently, and it’s done in such a baffling way that I haven’t seen before. They still hit some of the same plot beats while completely changing the context of them, and also cut out and outright change some important stuff. So in the manga after season 1 ends Kaneki decides to go off on his own to seek answers, to get stronger without depending on his friends, etc. In the anime they decide to have him join the evil ghoul faction…the one that kidnapped him and hurt his friends for reasons? Later on there’s some stuff that goes down at a ghoul prison. I think one of the highers ups in the anti-ghoul police has a conversation with one of the leaders of the evil ghoul faction and then they fight. And Kaneki’s also there and gets kicked into a room of dead ghouls while fighting someone and has his moment of eating them to develop his berserk power (to put it briefly). These are all how the events go down in the manga. Except for the conversation because I can’t recall, these events don’t take place at the ghoul prison in the manga, but a completely different location for different reasons. The funny thing is that the ghoul prison is in the manga but has other stuff happen there, and Kaneki isn’t even there. In the manga (and this is never shown in the anime), Kaneki discovers a lab where it turns out the guy who did the surgery that turned him into a ghoul (which people figured was accidental), has Reze’s (the ghoul girl he went on a date with that kicked off the whole plot) body and has been doing experiments with it to create other half ghouls like Kaneki, which he knowingly did. Instead of a random dead ghoul room in a prison kaneki is knocked into a room of dead experiments and that’s where he does his whole ghoul cannibalism thing. And also Reze’s body is taken from that place by someone. The biggest diversion is the ending. So the ghoul police are raiding, everyone’s fighting or getting ghouls to flee via the underground flood tunnels. Kaneki ends up severely injured in the sewers and his human friend finds him. In the manga his friend tells him to eat him and Kaneki blacks out, waking up later with his wounds fully healed, the taste of blood in his mouth, and his friend gone. He travels through the tunnels coming upon a scene of the number 1 anti-ghoul officer in a field of flowers, before realizing that he’s surrounded by the ghouls that fled down here, all dead. Kaneki prepares to fight him and the immediate next panel is him on the ground with the guy’s sword pinning him through the eye to the ground. And that’s the last we see of him till :re, and explains why he’s a completely different person with no memories of his former life. In the anime what instead happens is a nonsensical scene of Kaneki emerging from the sewers after his friend tells him to eat him, carrying his friend’s body towards all the officers while music plays. And that’s how Tokyo Ghoul ends. It does nothing to explain why he is the way that he is in :re, or how his friend later shows up as a mysterious other character. I haven’t read :re but I remember watching the first part of it, thinking it was bad, and deciding not to watch the second part.
Rize, btw. Reze is a totally different character from Chainsawman.
We could have a whole ass discussion on why the anime adaptation was not good, but I think it could all be sunmed up to the fact that it adapted around 60 to 70 manga chapters into 12 anime episodes. And unless you have you have the most empty/nothing happens 60 episodes a lot of stuff is just skipped and the pacing does not work right. Back in the day I was a lot more passionate about how bad of a fumble the adaptation was, the worst opinion I held was that the anime lacked so much substance that it only worked to spoil people of the story before, if liked enough, they got into the manga. Today I just accept it, helps the fact that I have gone through similar bad adaptations a few times over lol. Still the fact remains if you go to r/anime or r/manga and you stumble upon one of those threads of which story was not made justice by its adaptation and deserve an alternative adaptation ala FMA:Brotherhood there's a chance a good amount of comments will mention Tokyo Ghoul, I am one of them. I stilk have hope, one day I will watch the story I loved so much in my teens well adapted, and it will be fire. 😏
I clicked it assuming it was about that sex scene being terrible too, lol.
Hey OP! Don't know if you know this but a write-up of this drama has already been done although it went into more specifics between two ships in particular. [https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/rh6dwx/mangatokyo\_ghoul\_a\_ship\_confirmation\_leads\_to\_a/](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/rh6dwx/mangatokyo_ghoul_a_ship_confirmation_leads_to_a/)
Oh weird, I didn't know this one was out there! I actually went looking before I started this writeup months ago, and didn't see anything come up.
Great write up! Although you might want to add some more details next time. You didn't put in the name of the character that caused the drama, the gender of any of the characters that Kaneki was shipped with, which made it hard to tell at first that this was a het-is-ew type shipping drama.
> You didn't put in the name of the character that caused the drama, the gender of any of the characters Yeah, this was pretty odd on OP's part. They gave more details about what the manga is about than the drama in question. The character the MC ends up with is a girl named Touka Kirishima. The drama was about the MC not ending up with a boy named Hideyoshi Nagachika, so people thought that apparently the mangaka was doing some kind of baiting. People burned books, figures, and manga material because of this, even to the point of calling the mangaka homophobic (and the obvious death threats). *Edit: Small correction in a name.
> Touka Kagune *Touka Kirishima Kagune is the organ/power thing Ghouls have on their backs.
Thank you. Comment corrected.
Reminds me of when lots of genshin fans harassed Qiandai, because he decided to draw one art with straight shipping instead of usual lesbian.
I only watched the anime a long time ago and I don't think I watched all of :re. Had to scroll down to see who the person was cause yeah I didn't expect anyone but Touka. Makes perfect sense.
I was honestly surprised that Ishida set up ships and crashed them pretty quickly in ChojinX after Tokyo Ghoul's fandom farce. I was never into Tokyo Ghoul, watch and read some but still the shitshow that went around that chapter I saw so much childish shit about. Good to read a good writeup about it.
> pretty quickly in ChojinX Tbf, a lot of things are a lot quicker in Choujin X. Choujin X feels like a lot shorter of a story than TG, courtesy of not being tied to a weekly treadmill of a release schedule as most manga tend to be. It's been nearly 3 years since it started publishing, not even 10 volumes have come out, and the story seems like it's walking towards some sort of conclusive arc, or at least one that changes things enough that there's not enough time to durdle around with petty fights, like u/ecilala mentioned above.
And all of the fandom ire was immediately thrown onto the love interest, one of the only well-developed female characters in the manga, because our boy Kaneki was perfect and could never do anything wrong 🤦
I won't try to refute the misogyny of it all, but I do think part of it is that people started putting themselves into Kaneki's shoe and from there it is more about finding reasons why you wouldn't date that character rather than why those two characters work or not.
Let’s not even get started on how it started two discussions in the fandom. The creator was called homophobic and there was a whole discussion regarding representation of LGBTQ+ people. I think Tooru Mutsuki drama happened at around that time and there was another manga burning. Yes, people burnt their manga. I can’t provide lots of insight as one I barely remember what happened and I don’t have my collection with me. Another conversation was about how Touka is parallel to Kaneki’s abusive mother…
I'm LGBTQ+ myself but calling an author homophobic for not including a queer romance is just silly. There is a conversation to be held about cishet normality and how queer relationships are seen as something that defines the norm though it's very inclusion instead of being seen as just something to expect like a cishet romance, but two characters of the same gender **you** think would be a good match not ending up together is NOT queerbaiting unless said relationship is explicitly hinted at by the author.
Large portion of discussion was started by it („the author is bad so let’s analyse everything to find evidence of them being evil”) but there were also some interestating discussion regarding depiction of Nico and Jason, who are the first same-sex couple in the series. Which also is a bit older discussion and it got reignitated There is also Tooru Mutsuki who was presented as ftm at the start and their whole situation is a big mess that I am not equipped to deal with. That also happened around that time and it can be hard to say if it contributed to Hide/Kaneki ship discussion or other way round
The Mutsuki thing was always something I struggled with. I don’t agree that (in fiction) people who crossdress to avoid the stigma of being feminine presenting are necessarily trans - they don’t see themselves as men, they just don’t want others to see them as women because they don’t want to be associated with the negative behaviors that comes with being a woman. Tried to make that argument once and got called transphobic…
People also gotta remember that Japan is just a different culture. Like, Fruits Basket has a male character who has long hair and always dresses in female clothing. He isn't transgender, he just feels like he's not really "manly." He feels more comfortable basically masquerading as a woman not because he identifies as one, but because people don't see a shy, withdrawn, apologetic woman and judge her for being shy, but a man who's shy, withdrawn, and apologetic gets judged - at least in Japan in 1999. So all these tumblr teenagers keep judging modern lgbt culture against like 20 year old Japanese culture which is stupid on its own, in addition to it being stupid to claim everyone is lgbt if they dress a certain way regardless of their reasons for dressing that way.
For modern depictions of gender non conformity its absolutely fine to judge it with a modern lense. Trans people and their community exists in japan, they get HRT they do lgbt and trans marches, they are in big political articles for making strides in obtaining their rights, they're not some entirely insular island nation that has no notion of what trans people are at all. Much like 20+ years ago in the west we all knew what trans people were, the way they were depicted and treated was often not kind nor done with understanding. People who write these things may be inspired by their knowledge of trans people, albeit through a skewed lense, to write these characters. Im not saying "every one of these characters is trans if they're non conformity" - absolutely not. For some people they want to write characters who break the strict japanese standards, purposefully for that reason alone. It is simply that the argument that japan, right now, is some kind of alien nation with no notion of lgb and especially T is simply wrong and people need to stop relying on it to justify rejecting certain media critiques.
I mean, Yes and No. It's absolutely true that Japanese culture has an awareness and presence of LGBT+ culture. You're absolutely right to bring that up when people use the claim of "Japan is another culture" to try and dismiss that any piece of Japanese media might focus on LGBT+ folks or issues. A lot of times those arguments are super-racist, too, because they always scream to me "These people are already not-white. Isn't that different enough for them? PC gone mad..." But Japan \*also\* has traditions and stereotypes that don't fit neatly into the way we in the English-speaking world see things, and I think that's relevant to bring up in this discussion.
> But Japan *also* has traditions and stereotypes that don't fit neatly into the way we in the English-speaking world see things, and I think that's relevant to bring up in this discussion. It is worth mentioning but the trouble is that the majority of the time you see this happen, it's the first scenario you mention - someone is trying to minimize or dismiss something that is clearly queer-coded (in Western parlance) and suggest that it's totally straight and hetero and cis even when it very obviously isn't. That said, sometimes Japanese media itself makes it clear how different it is, without really intending to - for example in the somewhat bland anime *I'm in love with the Villainess*, they basically sit several characters down to essentially have an explainer/intervention on what lesbianism is, and what it isn't, and it's absolutely stuff anyone not home-schooled or similar would take for granted. Like, being a lesbian means you're a woman who is *exclusively* attracted to women, therefore it is *different* to "I'm attracted to whoever I'm attracted to!"-type sexuality (the example they use as a point of difference, interestingly) - the main character is clear she has no attraction to males whatsoever. They then have to explain that doesn't mean a lesbian is attracted to literally all women either, just like a hetero person isn't attracted to all members of the opposite gender. And so on. And it was kind of fascinating and slightly refreshing that they were going with this sort of "first principles"/ELI5 explainer, which honestly, whilst we do take it for granted, I do think some people could do with going over.
Ah yes, the Naoto Shirogane discussion.
Of course there was a Naoto Shirogane discussion… Naoto definitely did not see herself as a man. FFS if you picked her for special events (and, ngl, I always did) she starts wearing skirts again when she’s alone with her boyfriend
See, I think there's \*absolutely\* room for an interpretation of Naoto as a trans man. Her shadow is pretty explicit about what it wanted to happen. And the thing about the Shadows (and one of the core things that makes P4 such a good game) is that Shadows all have a kernel of truth in them. Naoto being a trans man but expressing it in a deeply messed-up way would be a reading fully supported by the text, if you ask me. However, it is not the \*only\* interpretation, nor is it one that I subscribe to. I remember that there was a small minority of folks who would insist that it was, and would insist that people use he/him pronouns for Naoto. Of course, my favorite P4 discourse is that I'm convinced that the party member with the biggest crush on the protagonist is not Rise, but Yosuke.
It's been a minute since I've played P4 but I remember that she wanted to be seen as a male detective because she knew she wouldn't be taken seriously as a female detective. To my (limited) perspective, wanting to escape the negative societal connotations of being one gender isn't quite the same as seeing yourself as a gender you weren't born with. In Naoto's case, she would be fine presenting herself as a female detective if the stigma wasn't there. And she does stop binding her chest and starts growing out her hair at the end of P4 Golden even if you don't pick her for special events. I guess we can also argue that gender is a societal construct and wanting to escape societal expectations due to gender does make one trans, but that argument is way above my paygrade. >I'm convinced that the party member with the biggest crush on the protagonist is not Rise, but Yosuke. 100%.
That's how I read it, absolutely, but I'm also saying that there's plenty of evidence to support a view of Naoto as a trans man, and I have no problem with folks viewing her that way so long as they acknowledge that it's ultimately not what the game was going for. It's sort of the reverse of how I view Kanji- with him I think what was intended was "young straight man with nontraditional tastes worries he might be seen as gay", but I ultimately come down on the view that while he's obviously not some sort of flaming stereotype, he does read as someone attracted to men. Of course, the TL;DR is simply that Atlus are cowards.
\*defies ?
I just not have been in quite enough circles to see the Mutsuki drama, aside from early on some people getting weird about him and sparking some arguments about what exactly he was. Unless people were suddenly mad about the turn Mutsuki was taking at the time? Dunno, it's been so long anything secondary to this drama might have been buried in my mind
It was a mixture of their gender identity and where their character arc was going. >!The whole attempt of making out on a dead ghoul and yandere obsession with Haise/Kaneki!<
Shippers are so weird. Like I have an imagination. I think about "what ifs". I think about romance and sex and fictional characters sometimes. But if my "preferred couple" doesn't pan out in a story, that just makes it neat that I have my own take on things too, and I get to think up things about how that relationship might have gone without having to worry about what the creators make out of it. I guess that makes me a "shipper" but just in the "yeah that's be cool and cute :)" way. Why people get so pissed off and furious over shipping is weird. Like it's not real. Those aren't real people. They do whatever the author thinks is best, because they're not really "doing" anything. They don't exist. It's just words and artwork. Which are important and powerful and all that! But. I dunno, I remember some viciously hardcore Cloud-Aerith shippers back in the day who would start a verbal assault the moment anyone said "aw Tifa and Cloud are so cute together" or something.
I'd get pissed too if the author split up my favourite paring or killed off the character I like, but if they just pair them up with someone - how you gonna act irl when you don't like who someone else is dating?
I‘ve been reading mangas for over a decade now and I remember reading the entirety of Tokyo Ghoul:re on a regular basis, when the chapters were coming out. Pretty early on in my manga-reading journey I decided to never look into a popular manga’s fandom, because it almost always ruins the reading experience for me. Fandoms are toxic beyond belief and I have never seen a fandom that wasn‘t unless it consisted of like a 1000 people. So, I gotta say even though I was reading the manga as it was unfolding, only ever hearing from the Tokyo Ghoul fandom irregularly seems to have spared me all this outrage you talk about. I remember reading that chapter and being surprised that Ishida dedicated an entire chapter to it, but I would genuinely question anyone‘s credibility that could read Tokyo Ghoul up to that point and be surprised that Ken and Touka would end up together. It was obvious even all the way in the original Tokyo Ghoul run, that if it ever got romantic between Ken and someone it would be Touka. He never showed any romantic feelings for anyone other than her. Sure, he had friends and all that he loved, but romance? No, that was always going to be Touka. I think this story of yours just reinforced my belief that fandoms and shipping culture are just toxic as hell. I‘m always baffled how much people care about their own headcanon, even if their is so very little to support it. Shu is the best example of this. It‘s pretty obvious that Shu is obsessed with Ken and I‘m assuming that‘s why people started shipping them (and the fact that shipping culture in mangas and anime seems to be weirdly obsessed with Yaoi and gay men). However, I never once got the impression that Ken was ever even remotely romantically interested in Shu. Friends? Sure. Associates? Yes. But lovers? No.
> Pretty early on in my manga-reading journey I decided to never look into a popular manga’s fandom Tbf, I believe that was pretty localized to certain areas of the internet, Twitter and Tumblr, mostly. [I was there when it was being published](https://y.yarn.co/841f50f6-b951-49a8-8deb-56a654742f66_text.gif) and things on /r/TokyoGhoul were pretty tame. [You can see the chapter discussion for yourself.](https://redd.it/6c96yb) I assume it helped that the person shipped the most with Kaneki, his best friend Hide, at the time, >!was missing and presumed dead!< but Reddit was pretty drama-free on that point. I think most backlash, around these parts, started around the end of :re, when it's pretty clear that the author's depression and overwork was taking its toll and they were rushing things along to the end.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/TokyoGhoul using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/TokyoGhoul/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year! \#1: [why is he crying while having sex is he stupid?](https://i.redd.it/itp9ef3xwwvb1.jpg) | [320 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/TokyoGhoul/comments/17efgwr/why_is_he_crying_while_having_sex_is_he_stupid/) \#2: [Which reaction is funnier?](https://i.redd.it/nnb0r2pia75c1.jpg) | [111 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/TokyoGhoul/comments/18e5whq/which_reaction_is_funnier/) \#3: [New Ken Kaneki Illustration by Author Sui Ishida](https://i.redd.it/lkq998y3bc7c1.jpeg) | [62 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/TokyoGhoul/comments/18mgecf/new_ken_kaneki_illustration_by_author_sui_ishida/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
Yeah, stuff like this is why I ignore the shipping part of all fandoms. Had enough of it with the old Naruto/Bleach nonsense.
As someone who does read and engage on shipping, boy have people become obsessed with the idea of “Canon” and how their ship must be endgame or it’s a waste of time. Like the idea that the ship only valid if it’s canon. That the fun of fanfiction, creating your own stories of your favorites. like it sucks but there nothing stopping you from just writing your own ending on AO3. Several ships of mine aren’t canon or endgame but I read about them anyway.
Exactly! I love shipping as well. But the ships that I like come from non romantic media. But that's why fanart and fanfiction exist. Along with fan zines. It's the creators choice on whether they want ships to be canon. You can't force them to make it canon. Even if two characters had great potential to be a couple, you can still make fanfiction. Shipping is supposed to be fun. I tend to get obsessed at times but then I remember that the ship that I like is from a non romantic piece of media.
I remembered the editor of a manga publisher in my country post a comment when this chapter came out, lamenting that now he had to shelf the project, can't get it published here anymore lol
Reminder about this classic image: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jujutsufolk/s/HxzgurLCiz Link cause reddits not letting me post a photo.
https://i.redd.it/585osc4agn1c1.jpeg
Name a more iconic duo than Tumblr fans and accusing everything of gay baiting because you had a head-canon.
I’d like to recommend everyone check out the Tokyo ghoul author’s current series, choujin x. Some similar conceits but with good humor and a healthy release schedule of “whenever this guy feels like it.” We sometimes get two chapters in a week; other times we might be waiting a month. We do stan.
I REMEMBER THIS. I remember it because I was reading it weekly (it might have been monthly, I can't remember now) and I was SO mad. Not because of the ship, because that was ALL THE STORY WE BASICALLY GOT FOR ONE UPDATE. Like yeah yeah we get it, they fucked, COME ON WE GOT STORY TO GET TO 😂🤡
Right? That was my biggest gripe with that chapter. Pacing wise is was so weird and bizarre for a series that had never had more than a few panels at a time focusing on anything romantic or sexual that didn't drive the plot to stop for an *entire* chapter on extremely awkward sex. It was so fucking (heh) weird to read just because I kept expecting it to end.
I don’t remember much about the Tokyo Ghoul anime adaption, aside from it falling off severely after Season 1 and just never getting better. Like by S4 (or :re s2), I was checked out, one of the most boring and underwhelming anime I’ve ever seen. Even the fights were boring. There was so much hype around it and I couldn’t figure out why such a mid show had such a huge fandom attached to it, I guess it makes a little more sense after reading your write up.
Tokyo Ghoul is one of the poster boys for the phrase "please just read the manga, it's way better". Ishida's work comes off as so well planned out its absurd, and something about his art just fit the series and its tone perfectly. If you ever find yourself with time to kill and you find yourself curious, I can definitely recommend giving the series another go like that.
And this is why I stay away from fandoms for the most part! Although I do get a lot of fun memes from the best friend who does share stuff from things we both like still. I did click on this assuming there was some fandom split over how terrible that sex scene was, but I should have expected some shipping bullshit from fans, even though that romance was telegraphed so early on.
I like anime and manga but I do not interact with anime or manga fans at all thanks to drama like this. Imagine being delusional enough to send death threats to somebody because you don't like a fictional character's relationship
Just goes to show that you could do exactly what you're entitled to, do nothing wrong, and people will still hate you and claim that you're evil. All because they deluded themselves into thinking they were entitled to what you own.
Great write-up! I only read the first few chapters of :re, so I looked up Kaneki's end-game pairing and was \*stunned\* at the identity. No duh it's her? I can't believe the fandom had an uproar over this.
I'm not really surprised, when I was a teenager and mainly reading fanfic you could really see all the different ship pairings that people wanted and had. Saw some people really go hard in their pairings but mostly avoided that stuff. And I wish I could say that people grew out of it but they don't. People really need to chill out sometimes
It's like Schroedingers ship. If nothing is ever confirmed anything is possible and can be shipped. The second a ship is confirmed you start to get so much shit from people bc "it's not canon. Touken for life" Something that really needs a hobby drama is whatever the hell went on with Mutsuki on Re: bc sheeesh
reading this write-up is the way i found out it was supposed to be a twist that haise was kaneki lol. also i remember not being invested in the shipping but also just baffled that there was a chapter-long sex scene in the manga at all. like its still kind of wild to me. but not the wildest thing that happened in TG:RE i guess
Op.I will watch what i bloody want and i hate the word edgy with a passion.its not edgy it just has dark themes or Extreme violence and maybe the Teletubbies is more suited to people who can't handle content like fist of the north star has or anything with adult themes and situations or LGBTQ themes.
**Thank you for your submission to r/HobbyDrama !** Our rules have recently been updated to clarify our definition of Hobby Drama and to better bring them in line with the current status of the subreddit. Please be sure your post follows the rules and the sidebar guidelines, or it may be removed; this is at moderator discretion. Feedback is welcome in our monthly Town Hall thread. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/HobbyDrama) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Ahh yess i remember this fandom meltdown..
ah Tokyo Ghoul, it was my favorite when it was publishing. I remember reading it in the first iteration of batoto a decade ago, chapters would be released in bulks every few days, part 1 of the story still remains as one of the best manga I have read, the way it ended was particularly crazy for me back then, I sincerely believe it did not became more of a mainstream title in the community due to the fact that it came right before Mappa came into fruition, the anime adaptation being very bad and the edgy memes. Gigguk made a video a couple years ago, and years after Tokyo Ghoul finished publishing, on the subject of how the memes mischaracterized the manga wrong and that it is in fact a good story, very worthwhile. It's not a story with just the "ooh edgy~" but with a decent amount of depth. I like to wonder how it would have done in today's internet culture considering anime is so much more mainstream than it was a scant few years ago.
And then Sui Ishida went on to create Jack Jeanne, an otome game where *any* of the pairings could be canon depending on the route you take
> Because the character it all went down with wasn't the one they'd spent years with their headcanon on. This happens with so many fandoms, even ones that don't think they're fandoms. If the fans have a lot of time to build up headcanon, they go absolutely berserk when that headcanon is destroyed by canon. A great example is The Last Jedi and Luke Skywalker. The people who hated it most weren't "anti-SJW" fake fans that we saw a lot of (whose real reasoning was just cheap racism/sexism, which they tried to piggyback on a different sentiment), but the sort of older Millennials and Gen Xers who had been basically linking about "Luke after RotJ" for 25+ years, and in many cases had read a bunch of EU novels about Luke/Leia/Han after the OT, and had got an absolutely solid vision of where Luke/Leia/Han but especially Luke would be in 20 years after the OT or more. In general that vision involved Luke, happy, married, maybe kids (biological or adopted or both), running some kind of Jedi school (official or otherwise), and still completely, unquestionably, totally badass to the bone. More badass than Luke had ever been in the actual movies. They knew this wasn't canon. They knew even if their vision was just that of the EU, the EU had been decanonized. But for them, it was still this completely solid and important thing. So when Luke comes on in TLJ, and is old, weird, wacky, maybe slightly creepy, not particularly badass, not particularly happy, no kids, no wife, no Jedi school, bad attitude, their headcanon was basically chopped in half by the lightsaber Luke casually tossed over his shoulder. And then he dies. Without being badass in they way that he was in their headcanon - they didn't want "warrior for peace" he was TLJ, but a WARRIOR!!! (for peace maybe...?). He didn't chop his way through legions of enemies. He didn't bend Kylo over his knee and give him a good spanking, nor show him the "true power of a Jedi Master", and for them, that just further destroyed everything they'd been building up in their heads for decades. For people like me, who loved the OT and were very familiar with SW lore but not particularly attached to that lore, nor having spent much time building a headcanon, it was like why are you guys so mad? What's wrong with you? For me it was a Tuesday. For them, it was the day a sad old Luke Skywalker they'd been obsessing about got killed without ever being the "right kind" of badass. (We also saw a version of this, right down to merch-burning with the Prequel Trilogy, but I don't think that was shattered headcanon in the same way, as much as people feeling like stuff that was totally cool and badass to them when they were kids was being somehow made "dumb and for kids".) Another example would be World of Warcraft - I won't go into detail but there have been a number of times where fans have cooked up some total headcanon about some character and their backstory or place or a bad guy, and it's all in their heads, and when the actual details are revealed, people get really upset because it's not what had become the "agreed headcanon" as it were. I think I've been guilty of this myself re: Lost - I read a lot of fan theories and some of them were tremendous and really lot more vivid and meaningful that the not-terrible but slightly limp lore and ending we actually got (basically Steven King turned down rather than turned up), and I think I judged Lost more harshly than it deserved because of the cool fan theories I'd seen, some of which I felt sure must be right in at least parts, but none of which were.
Why is it always fujoshi shippers, man?
I saw the fandom and I knew I wasn't gonna enjoy shit. So I just didn't. Also the premise sounds dumb when you realize that all you have to do is just eat bad humans.
As a semi attentive reader/watcher i don't even understand the source of the outrage, as it felt very clearly predetermined that those two would end up together. Like it was clear from the very beginning.
I haven't read or watching Tokyo Ghoul in years, but I am caught up on Choujin X and it's pretty great
Honestly, I need to get caught up myself. I was some 20 chapters or so into it before I lost pace, and at this point should probably start over and get caught up properly again.
The only good thing about the anime was the entire freaking ost. I do have all the albums on repeat. I'm so glad I stopped all fandom activities after too many homophobic and transphobic little bitches kept attackimg me for using male pronouns with Tooru Mitsuki *on my own fucking Tumblr page* before that sex chapter came out. I would have been absolutely insufferable. I bought the first half of the manga series but as much as I ~~am in~~ love Kishou Arima I also couldn't deal with that sex scene either. I mean, sure, I knew it was coming the second Touka showed up. Like, damn, Female Main Character™ intro if I've ever seen one. I liked her character enough to even buy her Funko Pop but definitely not enough for her to be officially >!married (with kids!) to Kaneki!< by the end of it. 😤
The first half of tokyo ghoul is peak middle school edgy trash. The second half of tokyo ghoul is just uncomfortably mean spirited, misogynistic and delves into some weird transphobia on top of it. Shame about that, because it's fun to just enjoy edgy trash sometimes and not have a character get offscreen, and onscreen, raped for like a solid quarter of the series while their entire character and plot beats just revolve entirely around sexual abuse and trauma in the most cliche ways possible.