Long live the king.
Impression
Is this real life? Is this actually happening?
I can’t get over how each chapter of :re manages to consistently surprise or subvert our expectations. It never manages to fall in line with the predictions of the fandom – and believe me, as insufferable as it can be at the worst of times, it is definitely imaginative. I think a lot of us were expecting Eto to mount a comeback somehow – it was already a huge surprise to learn that Kaneki could so easily outmanoeuvre and injure her like that last week. He’s now taken full advantage of his speed and precision to go as far as to defeat her outright – and to top it all off, he’s not even any more injured than he was before! Kaneki killed and ate Eto without his own kakuja and while he was one-armed! Of course, that assumes that a kakuja would be an overall benefit to his fighting ability, and that may not be the case given its latest appearance against Arima (cf. the fight against Shinohara). He’s eaten Eto though, so things may now be different – I don’t know how much the strength of the ghoul you cannibalize affects your own kakuja, but it must mean something. I wonder how she tastes? Sorry, mind in the gutter there. And I like Hinami, I’m not supposed to be betraying best girl for Eto.
But I do feel almost obliged to mention Kaneki x Eto – while we’re on the topic, that is. It’s… well, closer to existing than I was previously willing to recognize. I’ll admit that. And it all sounds very erotic, with all manner of lines from ‘I love you, Kaneki Ken!’ and ‘SOMETHING WONDERFUL IS POURING OUT… AAAAAAAAAAAAA’ to ‘I’ve really grown so fond of you! We’re totally the same!’ I stand by my views, though. For one, she’s supposedly dead – so for now, that’s the end of that. And for another, it takes two to tango, and Kaneki honestly looks like he doesn’t give a fuck that Takatsuki-sensei was confessing to him.
Is Eto really dead? If she is, it would have been nice if she’d gotten a longer backstory than just a single page showing Yoshimura giving his baby to Noro. But this series has never been one to anticipate character deaths with obviously placed flashbacks as death flags. If she has Noro or Kanae-level regeneration, it would make sense if she survived being bisected in half (she’s a true half-ghoul now, har har) and that’s a likely thing given that it was her kagune who granted them that power. Eto is rather detached from her kakuja as well, so it could very well be the case that Kaneki is just eating her kakuja shell and not her actual body. She ended up being awfully vulnerable once her kakuja was damaged though – once she got hurt, she went into full insanity mode. Was that just her reacting to the pain, or her kakuja going out of control?
Ui and Washuu have also now walked in on Kaneki eating the One-Eyed Owl. I think it’s just Ui actually, assuming Washuu is still on a lower floor – which means he’s even more fucked if Kaneki decides to stop playing Haise and attacks him. It’s an important turning point for this manga, because how he reacts to his former co-worker will indicate exactly what he’s planning to do in the future. It’s safe to say that if he’s on SSS-rank now as a ghoul, then Ui has little no chance of grazing him at all – more importantly, he’ll notice an unconscious Tsukiyama in the corner (yes, he’s still there) and Kaneki’s actions then will determine the future course of this manga. Is he going to lead Aogiri now, as the ‘Second King’? It would fulfil the foreshadowed parallel with the first Aogiri arc. Or will he go back to CCG, and we start a jailbreak arc? I mean, if Ui has caught him cannibalizing, he’s pretty clearly not Haise any more. If he can pull off some sort of elaborate lie, it might work. After all, just like his mentor he’ll need… a new quinque.
A~hhhhh
Ye~sss
I was waiting for this. This post. These delicious thoughts of yours.
How satisfying it is to feed on your apprehension towards Eto, Vantage… from your awe at the ship slowly creeping out from the fog, upon a sea once filled with love and hope, now awash with blood and the stench of heartbreak… to the very question, and in reality the undeniable truth, of whether Eto lives on.
I’ll stop being creepy on account of how much I was looking forward to this post deep breath
One must wonder what outright eating someone for the first time will do to Kaneki’s psychology, after all Eto’s lower half is still in there and I don’t believe he’s eaten anything but Kakuja off a body before, since he used to get packaged human meat from Anteiku. I mean, there’s still the possibility he ate Hide, I guess, but he wasn’t exactly conscious of it. Then again he may have eaten the meat straight from the bones of humans who committed suicide before.
More importantly, power ups aside, could Eto have anything planted in the Kakuja just for Kaneki to consume if he passed her test and won? That’s a dangerous possibility, I believe.
Actually, let me touch on the whole power up aspect quickly. Wouldn’t her kakuhou be need to make a new quinque, which is definitely still with her as Ukaku-type’s is by the shoulder area? That said I’m sure much could be done with her Kakuja in other ways.
As for Eto herself, I wonder if “I love you” was yet another form of attack. I actually don’t doubt that she’d mean it for real. BUT I also wouldn’t be surprised if she’s trying to play at his desire to be loved deeply. Granted, she wouldn’t know that’s a desire as a surefire fact, but she has been noted as being very perceptive of peoples’ desires and using those educated assumptions to her advantage.
Of course that line being a double-edge sword only matters if she lives. I’m sure she is both well and alive. OKAY. Even to her losing half of her true body is likely a big deal, but I wouldn’t put it past her to enjoy pain. I’m not confident about her getting away though. I know her smaller self moves so fast she seems to teleport and sure we could say she can move quite quickly with two hands (flash-back to Half-Life 2 legless Headcrab zombies)… but a lot of CCG are still down there, I’d think.
She’d make an attractive interrogation target for the CCG.
Or an atom bomb baby waiting to go off in Cochlea.
I didn’t think about the possibility that Eto planted something in her kakuja for him. If it was anyone else but Eto, I would have laughed it off, but… yeah, with her it’s a dangerous possibility as you say in light of what happend with Noro and Kanae. It would make sense if her kakuhou are near her shoulders, but from what I could see it looked like the top half of her body (down until her waist) was what fell off Lunatic Eclipse, and the big Owl ‘carcass’ was left on the roof. I… I guess I hope she’s both alive and well? It feels like Eto still has a part to play in the story, and having her killed off immediately after Kaneki awakens feels like a bit much even for Ishida.
If her bisected body can still produce a kagune, she can probably get away from whoever is downstairs. Ui and Washuu are nowhere near there, and everyone who matters is either dead (i.e. Hairu and Kijima) or grieving (Urie, Saiko, Takeomi?) so they won’t chase after her. If she wasn’t an ukaku, I would have imagined that she’d latch onto the side of the building and swing to safety like Haise did when he climbed the sides on his way up, but she’s an ukaku so that’s that.
Also I think the CCG would just kill her outright. They’ve lost too many men to Eto, and it’s probably not worth keeping her alive for intel she’s unlikely to give up easily. Imagine if she meets Hinami in Cochlea though!