Tokyo Ghoul:re Chapter 64: A Devouring Gut

“There is one more RC cell reading that those machines will not detect.”

Impression

Rize is from V!

I’m so glad that Ishida hasn’t forgotten about Rize. If Rize is from V, then she is definitely endgame material – whether she’ll be Kaneki’s ally or not we don’t know, but at the very least she might be someone who’ll lead him to V and establish a connection between them and him. It brings up yet another huge plethora of questions. What is Rize? An experiment? Is that why Kaiko referred to her as a ‘thing’? Does her regenerating kakuhou have something to do with that? I can see her as having been a test subject of some sort, who then escaped while she was a child (loli Rize is just too cute, by the way). I entertained thoughts of her binge eating having some relation to it all, but she probably just really likes eating humans. The fact that Rize was from V, and fled from V, also now completely changes the context of her ‘accident’. Souta might not have just had a grudge, or wanted to mess around with her as a member of the Clowns. Souta may have been acting on the orders of V to dispose of Rize as punishment for her defection. This becomes even more likely if Souta really is Furuta.

Linking into the Rize revelation is the truth behind the RC gates and the very possible theory of Eto’s that the Washuu clan is cooperating with ghouls. I have to say, I didn’t see the RC gates thing coming at all – I think we all just assumed that Kaneki and Eto could pass through it without setting it off because they were half-ghouls. But it makes sense! The RC gates are supposed to detect RC cell readings, and if half-ghouls have kakuhous and can use a kagune then there shouldn’t be any reason why they wouldn’t trigger the alarm too. At the same time, it’s also all slightly ambiguous – when Eto says the Washuu clan (and by extension, the CCG) are cooperating with the ghouls, doesn’t she actually mean that the Washuu clan are cooperating with V? Washuu Yoshitoki wants to destroy Aogiri after all. If the RC gates are designed to ignore readings from V members, then surely that’s who Washuu are cooperating with.

Which then begs the question – what exactly is V? Is it an organization comprised of ghouls, or both ghouls and humans? It would mean that Furuta could very well be a ghoul, because all along everyone has assumed he had to be human because he could pass the RC gates. Either that, or that he’s a one-eyed ghoul. But if the CCG took steps to waive any V member from being subject to the RC gates, then anyone could be a ghoul so long as they’re a V member. Arima could be a ghoul. Or at the very least, not entirely human. You tend to have two types of high-ranking CCG members: Special-Classes like Kuroiwa, Ui, Marude or Juuzou aren’t really hiding anything or suspicious. They’re very much employees of the CCG, and that’s it. Then you have the Washuu family, Arima and the Sunlit Garden members, who are all a little weird, eccentric and have multiple hidden agendas. Well, except for Hairu. Not that she matters though, right Ishida? Because she’s dead. Deep sobbing.

It’s interesting that the public are evenly split over Takatsuki Sen. They’ve been conditioned to think of ghouls as mindless, flesh-eating monsters – I wouldn’t be surprised if the standard human thought of ghouls in the same way that Mado treated Hinami’s mother. But now that a high-profile figure has revealed herself to be a ghoul, and dedicated her final book towards her fellow ghouls, the general population are perhaps beginning to realize that there’s not so much difference between them and the ghouls after all. It feels like Eto’s trying to rally the ghoul population completely behind her and Aogiri in an attempt to go all-out against the CCG and V – or rather, behind the One-Eyed King. In her book, it’s the OEK who leads his fellow ghouls in a rebellion. It’s like she’s trying to encourage every ghoul to unite beneath a king and fight to put an end to that oppression, and it’s all leading up to the idea that if she’s not the king herself the next best thing she can do is to assign someone as the king. Like Kaneki. Are they friends now, by the way? It seems like the wrong word to use, but they’re talking casually all the time now. It’s completely different to back when they fought at Lunatic Eclipse. They share information, he compliments her haircut, she asks him for favours – it sometimes feels like she’s leading him on, but at other times she’s genuinely teaching him things like the existence of V. It’s a really nice dynamic, I get all warm inside when he tells her “I read it” and she simply replies “I appreciate it”.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention Torso. He needs to die a horrible death. Thank god Ayumu made it back, but Mutsuki looks set to go through some physical torture of his own. Come to think of it, if the last chapter was the parallel for ‘I am a ghoul’, then the Yamori torture happened at about this time in the original manga, didn’t it? And Mutsuki is supposed to represent pre-Aogiri Kaneki after all. In retrospect, since Torso’s fetish is to cut off the limbs of his victim and leave them as just a torso, everything surrounding his obsession over Mutsuki was pretty much leading up to this moment (though Kaneki had all his fingers and toes cut off instead). Will Mutsuki escape on his own? Will he be saved by Urie? Will Shachi manage to run away from Arima? Will Hinami ever smile again?