Comic Thoughts: Tokyo Ghoul
With a little too much time on my hands I decided to finally give Tokyo Ghoul (main series plus :re) a read. I remembered enjoying the first season of anime 1000 years ago, but recall that the second season didn't hold my attention at all -- but as they always say: "the manga was better".
-Here the manga definitely was better, but I don't know that I'd classify this one as something worth reading if you're not already into manga stuff. It's fairly trope-heavy and gets bogged down in it's own unnecessary complexity. There's also a good deal of action-heavy chapters where it's just flailing death noodles and not much more.
I did enjoy the characters portrayed within -- both sides were filled with heroes, villains, and a lot of psychological damage on both ends of those spectra.
Admittedly I never really reconciled the bad stuff the ghoul characters did in the first series. All well and good that they're chummy heroes by the end, turned over some new leaves and whatnot, but several of the "good guys" were legit just killing random humans they co-existed with. Nishiki and Shu, especially, were really awful characters that later became the good guys -- but what they were doing previously was unacceptable.
I mean would it be that hard to have come up with a couple of sympathetic ghouls that only ate horrible human criminals or something? Murder's murder, but I feel like it's easier to reconcile "oh this guy was nuts but only ate serial killers and billionaires" over "he ate womens' eyeballs as a delicacy". I know they were shooting for a redemption thing but the characters' original behaviour still makes them irredeemable IMO.
I mean it would play so easily into the potential early-on corruption of the CCG as well!
(Note, there are characters who only hunt investigators, so the author did do this to a degree)
Next gripe: there are way too many characters in the second half of the series. I completely lost track of who was who at times, as they didn't get nearly creative enough with the distinguishing markers on some of the lesser human characters.
The story went on a little long, too. When it was good it was good, but some of the side stories offered little-to-no value or were way out of line -- for example, the Torso side-story went too far even for the series' mature tone.
The overall the manga-cliche message was consistent, the vision was clearly executed. I think anybody who already enjoys a good fightin' manga would enjoy the series. As a standalone work of art I don't think it holds up, but it definitely shines within its own genre.
(Also it had me tearing up at the end, a mandatory requirement for any half-decent series)