Ah, Tokyo Ghoul. Where did it all go so wrong?
Season one was a really enjoyable and surprisingly refreshing take on a lot of the exhausted old vampire clichés. The escalation of a thirst for blood into a hunger for human flesh made all the ‘woe is me/what have I become/we are not like you humans’ thing a whole lot more convincing than it in your standard vampire tale. I felt sorry for the protagonist the whole way through, and he really came across perfectly as a genuinely nice and pleasant guy who really did not deserve all of the horrible things that happened to him. A rare example of a mild-mannered everyman who actually seemed like a person with interests and feelings rather than a robotic audience surrogate. The first season had horror, heart and humour (the gourmet was fantastic, but then Mamoru Miyano is great in everything) in well-balanced proportions, and I thought the torture sequence in the final episode was one of the most horrifyingly gripping things I’ve ever seen in an anime.
Season two was a bitter goddamned disappointment to say the least. Wasted potential is a real pet peeve of mine and this ended up being a prime example. I was totally willing to buy into Kaneki moving out of the main character slot into a questionable anti-hero/anti-villain/villain role after the end of the first season, and I was really looking forward to exploring the reasons for him making that choice. …but we didn’t get to explore anything. From a relatively tight focus on Kaneki and the coffee shop in S1, we get an incredibly fractured narrative that constantly asks new questions and provides nothing in the way of answers.
The primary focus (such as it is) becomes the Ghoul Investigators; a really interesting move if it had been done well, but it’s all built around characters reacting to and dealing with the death of Mado in S1. I can see what they were going for there, but even taking somewhat justified fantasy racism into account, that character’s last on-screen act was taking sadistic pleasure in tormenting a little girl with the weaponised corpses of her mother and father whom he had previously executed.
I mean come on. I don't care how many kittens he rescued while he was off-duty, you don't come back from that.
The constant harping on about how wonderful Mado was becomes a critical flaw that undermines almost everything that goes on at the Ghoul Investigator HQ. Add to that some very flimsy cahracterisation, and I just couldn’t work out why I was supposed to care about any of those people.
On the other hand, at least the Ghoul Investigator plot mostly made sense. We see the ghoul faction that Kaneki joined rescue a crazy ghoul from an armoured transport. This guy is important for... Something? Then they engage in a costly but determined battle at a high-security ghoul prison to rescue some guy from the basement. He’s very powerful, but that’s pretty much all we know about him - he escapes (I think?) and then we never see him again, and nobody mentions him afterwards either. …not that anyone in that faction really does much talking. A pair of twins that previously popped up in the background of certain key scenes get a lot of screen time during the same battle. They have powers that are in some way related to Kaneki and are part of a fourth independent faction? …I think? Honestly I have absolutely no idea, because that doesn’t have any sort of explanation either.
The action is also bizarrely bloodless. Two major battles take place involving at least a half dozen heroic sacrifices, but only one named character of relatively minor significance is actually confirmed as dead. This was particularly laughable after the final battle, when a load of people (even one who had the classic ‘reach out to the hand of your lost love descending from the heavens scene!) turn up clinging to life in the most bizarrely unceremonious ways possible.
I’m not a manga reader in this case, but I’m told that S2 claims to be telling a different story that’s distinct from the source material. Whatever the reality is there, the whole thing stinks of ‘dodgy adaptation from half-finished source material’. The series of miraculous survivals of main characters can only be bet-hedging over who is going to become important later in the Manga.
I guess some of the animation is quite nice though.
