However, what, exactly, a ghoul is isn't explained very well. Are they like mutants, just an off-shoot branch of human evolution? I'd buy that, but then what is their gleam? The show has several gleams manifest throughout and they're all slightly different. They all originate from the back of the ghoul, and many appear to be tails of bright colors, but there are also wing-gleams or more blade-like gleams. Just what are these supposed to be? And there's the fact that they're apparently removable.
This hidden society is policed by the Doves - as they're nicknamed by the Ghouls - and the Doves use weapons called qinque. A qinque appears to be the gleam of a ghouls removed from their body. How this works without the body, I don't know. How the qinque, which often change shape or move according to natural instructions, function without their natural form, I don't know. It's never addressed in the body of the show.
The series itself features a number of ghouls and (largely) two Doves, but our star is a Normal, Quiet, Average Young Man named Kaneki. He's pretty boring and largely uninteresting until he has ghoul parts put into his body and thus, he becomes half-ghoul, and we follow him into this world.
I have to say, I didn't like Kaneki all the way through the show. He's too quiet and too withdrawn for a lead character. He falls into each situation, barely manages to make it out alive, and makes no decisions. Everything he has in the show is handed to him and that REALLY bothered me - until episode 12. I won't go into details, as the Guidelines say to avoid spoilers, but episode 12 explains Kaneki's motivations from the beginning. It also breaks those motivations and suddenly I'm much more interested in where he's going. It's actually a shame that the change in character happens only at the end because New Kaneki suddenly has a bite to him.
The show also throws in the "he's a half-breed, so he's more powerful!" trope, which only bothers me because the nature of what creates a ghoul is never explored in this. Given that Kaneki is the first human turned into a ghoul by science (it appears), that would make me think that he should be critical to the ghoul/human situation. Isn't there some kind of gene test to see if someone is a ghoul? I would think that if a body can only process human flesh, there HAS to be something going on with that. But again, we get no explanation, just that Kaneki tastes better than any other human and when another ghoul eats some of him they get super-charged and on and on.
There are a smattering of side-characters that are vaguely interesting. For me, Amon - who is one of the Doves - is the most interesting character in the show. He's a lawman, looking to bring the ghouls to heel, but the loss of someone close to him pushes him further. I don't quite buy the logic of this drive, as the character who dies is kind of insane and really unrelatable, but at least Amon makes decisions and CHOOSES to do something about it.
As I said at the start, the show really starts to push itself into darker themes - ghouls predation on humanity, how hunting ghouls affects the Doves, how ghouls interact with each other, and how both sides tend to view the other as something less than human. But then it also pulls back at nearly all of these story points. Amon's partner, Mado, comes off as a ghoul-hunting-psychotic, but we're never shown why, and it's hard to care for him when he laughs as he kills people that the show goes out of it's way to make you care for. The show seems to be presenting neither side as right, and positions Kaneki to be the bridge between the two, but he's so busy getting the crap beaten out of him and being indecisive that nothing ever comes from this.
The show LOOKS good for the most part. Character designs are clean and effective, no two characters look alike, and the fighting animation looks good. The visual effects for the gleams were really well done and often pretty neat looking.
Despite my overall complaints about the show, it's watchable, although I did have to kind of drag myself to the finish line once I got to the last three episodes. There are a lot of interesting concepts brought up in the show, but it fails to explore those satisfactorily. I'm hesitant to say that maybe if it ran for longer, it would have, but I kind of get the feeling that it wouldn't have. Thankfully for it's narrative, an interesting world and interesting side characters make the show entertaining enough to string the watcher along. I wouldn't ever put this on my Top Ten list, but it isn't horrible either.
