11 replies to this topic

[truepurple]

There is a pessimistic genre that says "most people suck" aside from MC, his love interest etc, everyone else (with rare exceptions, and rarely background characters) is super selfish, prejudicial, sadistic etc. Now this comic borders on falling into this genre, but for the most part has avoided such.

 

But this is classic "people suck" genre. And it clearly doesn't make a lick of sense in the story line.

 

http://vatoto.com/read/_/223830/tokyo-ghoul_v4_ch38_by_twisted-hel-scans/8

 

Setup, MC and random woman are locked in a arena like area where this giant guy with a saw is going to cut them up and turn them into food.

MC says "Come next to me and I will protect you as best I can" Woman rushes over to him, only to literally kick his butt and knock him down. 

 

Even if this woman was the most selfish person in the world, absolutely only caring about her self, this is a insanely dumb move from a person the story is suggesting is somewhat smart.

 

Lets say the brute with the saw does go after the MC first, thanks to her pushing him down. Then what? She's still trapped with nowhere to run to.  

 

And how does pushing down MC make him more of a target? If anything it gets him out of the way so that she can be targeted.  Where as with him standing in front of her, guarding her, he's certain to be the first person to be attacked. Don't alienate for no reason the one ray of hope you have of getting out alive. She already heard he was a ghoul and knows they are extra strong from news etc since in this world, the monsters are known.

 

With a slight but radical twist this action of hers would make alot more sense. Say she wanted to save him, so she knocked him down in order for her to be attacked, to give MC more time to attack while the butcher hulk guys busy with her. Too bad her selflessness was wasted, MC just stood around during that time.  Wait, her words don't fit this. Ok  she knocked him down and said that in order that the MC doesn't feel guilty when she dies, so that he can devote all his attention to protecting himself and not her. Wow, so selfless of her.

 

Actually, I know the reasons she did this, and why the other guy was so stupid coming to the conclusion it was all a act. They both had to die because of the tragic genre, and for the people suck genre, and because it would not do for two random humans to come out of this alive knowing the MC was a ghoul, it would be like the super hero revealing secret identity to random civilians, or so the thinking goes, I think.  But the MC is kind and brave, and of course couldn't be shown standing around while two people are killed in front of him. So we get random self destructive stupid selfishness. 

 

Oh and other bad parts of chapter.

Why poison the women? She can't escape anyway. Plus if you want to knock her out, drug her with something that makes her sleepy, not poison. Well maybe that's a translation thing. Also, no point in pumping her stomach because of the poison, since if it's effecting her, it's already in her blood stream, and too late to remove except by letting it pass or giving her a antidote.(or mixing it in with her) Well they could have also said she was poisoned or drugged by something that effects humans, but not ghouls, but they didn't.

 

The gourmet guy believing it was all fake despite all he's seen.  Yes, I know, when your scared your brain goes out the window, especially for insignificant characters, but this is pretty extreme.

 

MC standing around waiting for all this, aside from calling her over and standing in front of her. I guess it all was suppose to happen too fast for him to process or something, which is sort of believable to a degree.

 

And why are they cooking her? Ghouls eat stuff raw. I'm sure the reason is for the horror aspect. Well for that matter if you can process/consume human meat, you should be able to process other animal meat.

 

Why did MC go at all? What could he possibly expect from a secret ghoul gourmet place other then that which he would want to stay well away from.

 

 

Oh, and another troop used here. Beautiful people are usually ugly inside, except for MC and MC love interests, or princesses, and a few exceptions. And ugly people on the outside are ugly inside with exceptions. Basically, you can judge a person by how they look, and you want average looking for the most part, then, they won't be ugly on the inside unless in a mob, but vaccent instead. This is especially true of fat people, I wonder if many  foreign asians view fat people as greedy.

Edited by truepurple, 17 February 2014 - 08:12 PM.

[Traumatic Tomato]

[truepurple]

Sorry your struggling with having read this, Tomato, this is hardly the most shocking of them though.

[Jassim Al-Madeh]

I thought in the early chapters that the main character is really plain? I wonder what you'll say in the 60s chapters...

I see that the main character didn't get all the lights from the other characters.

 

Who cares about pig-chan and how she think? What plan can she find in such a situation anyway?

 

About cooking her: All the Ghoul Restaurant's members are weird for ghouls as how Rize commented.

[truepurple]

Plain? Lights? I don't know what you're saying/talking about

 

Of course it matters how characters, even secondary ones, act. It adds to or detracts from the story accordingly.

[Coralira]

I assumed it was a drug rather than poison the moment they said it. The mc went because he wanted the info from that girl Itori(that her name?)

[Morbid_Charade]

I'll explain a bit in case my translation was confusing in some ways. ^ ^  There are spoilers in my explanation up to chapter 38 everyone. Please don't read if you don't want to be spoiled.

Firstly, I think it was, as you said, mostly the horror factor that resulted in Ami-chan (the human woman) doing what she did. I think your idea that some people are portrayed as "bad" just to make the MC look good is probably correct. Though this is the case with most stories.

 

I think there are lots of other neat side characters which are not selfish (overly so at least) in this series. I believe Ishida-sensei is trying to show many different types of humans and ghouls, instead of just showing shitty characters which will make Kaneki look like a kind MC.

 

As for why she was poisoned, everyone who drinks the coffee served is poisoned. It's so they can't fight against the Scrapper; which is also a human. The gourmet guy, Kobachi, was also presumably poisoned, but he died before his poison set it.  As for the "stomach pumping". They weren't going to pump her stomach, they were going to clean it. Literally clean it. Because she refused to take a shower, thus she would be oily.  The ghouls at the Ghoul Restaurant are all picky eaters, they didn't want to eat the excess oil. 

 

As for why they would cook them... do you cook your food?  Humans don't necessarily need to cook things like fruit and vegetables but we still do. It's the same for ghouls. It's been shown that many ghouls cook their food. I suspect this changes the flavor. I imagine eating the same thing every week gets boring. Hinami even had a "human soup" at one point while she was staying at Anteiku.

 

As for Kobachi's disbelief; as he mentioned in the chapter, there are some high class restaurants that have "scare events".  I think this sort of novelty would be very popular among Japanese people (at least the idea of it), though perhaps Westerns are not so familiar with this type of event restaurant. It's the same as going into a haunted house and getting chased by a guy with a chainsaw (sans chain). You know it's not real but still do so.

 

I think it's also important to note that most people actually don't know that much about ghouls. You can recall the first chapter when Kaneki and Hide are thinking "what if ghouls looked just like humans and pretended to be humans?"... well, they were saying that because they don't KNOW that's the truth. Another instance is when Ryouko-san dies and the witnesses were sharing their thoughts as "they just looked like normal people" and "I've never seen a ghoul before".  There's lots of misinformation about ghouls. Ami-chan very well could have not known ghouls are supposedly remarkably strong or whatever. Kaneki certainly doesn't look strong. And not all ghouls are actually strong.

Edited by Morbid_Charade, 17 February 2014 - 09:28 PM.

[Nyuu3]

It was never particularly suggested the woman is smart. Hell, one of the few things we knew about her is that she got duped. I also don't think ignoring the fallen Kaneki was an obvious thing for the scrapper to do. Normally he would've just gone for the easier target first.

She might have expected him to run away and not even buy her the few seconds it'd take him to get ripped apart. Or perhaps it's because she considered him a threat too. Mainly, I think she wanted to do something to put herself in control. Yes, it was a dick move and it wasn't very smart and you're quite right about why the author did this, but it's not that unreasonable.

Nice observation about physical appearances, though.

Edited by NyuuuuSaaaan, 17 February 2014 - 08:18 PM.

[truepurple]

Pumped or cleaned, it's still in the blood stream and muscles if it is effecting them, and too late to remove. And what human would stand a chance against that brute anyway, especially a fat lady and a professional gourmet.

 

And not all ghouls are actually strong.

 

 

from what I have read, that is wrong, all ghouls have strength and durability well beyond average human standards, as well as their special ghoul attack parts. Where have you read up to 38? Or have you read the raws/read japanese?

 

As for why they would cook them... do you cook your food?  Humans don't necessarily need to cook things like fruit and vegetables but we still do. It's the same for ghouls. It's been shown that many ghouls cook their food. I suspect this changes the flavor.

 

 

Cooking significantly changes the chemical composition of many things and tends to make them more similar to each other. With wild carnivore, can make it harder for them to digest.  As omnivores this is not a issue for us humans. But as ghouls, cooking their very very specific diet should change it so much that they can not digest it or at least find it hard to digest.

 

With a ghouls very specific limited diet (that really doesn't make sense from a scientific point of view) the difference between say raw cow flesh and human flesh is small enough as it is. But I would bet that the base composition difference between cooked meat of any mammal is nearly indistinguishable (hence the old chestnut, how any meat tastes like chicken) I don't see how ghouls can eat cooked human flesh, but not be able to eat cooked cow flesh. (a side note, cannibalism is dangerous because of how many bacteria and viruses in the flesh are compatible with infecting us in the cannibalistic flesh)

Edited by truepurple, 17 February 2014 - 10:05 PM.

[truepurple]

The mc went because he wanted the info from that girl Itori(that her name?)

 

Yeah, some girl he doesn't know wanted info. That's reason enough to find out the location and report back, not enough reason to actually go in.

 

Obviously it's going to be a place where they eat humans, so he should absolutely not want to go, for love or money, much less as a favor from someone he doesn't know. And she didn't even ask him to actually go in. Still I think she set him up.

Edited by truepurple, 18 February 2014 - 03:17 AM.

[Morbid_Charade]

Pumped or cleaned, it's still in the blood stream and muscles if it is effecting them, and too late to remove. And what human would stand a chance against that brute anyway, especially a fat lady and a professional gourmet.

 

 

You are misinterpreting "cleaning" to mean "of the blood". They are meaning literally cleaning off her body, because of the excessive skin oils. There's never any mention of them feeling any concern over the poison. Likely the poison has no effect on ghouls. The poison and the cleaning are not in any way connected.

 

 

from what I have read, that is wrong, all ghouls have strength and durability well beyond average human standards, as well as their special ghoul attack parts. Where have you read up to 38? Or have you read the raws/read japanese?

 

 

 

Yes, they do indeed have more durability than humans. And strength as well, in theory, but there are ghouls (like Ryouko-san) who do not ever use their ghoul powers (Ryouko-san, for example, could not even properly use her Kagune, as stated by Mado.) Whether all ghouls are strong or not doesn't change the fact it's possible Ami-chan is unaware of that information anyhow.

 

As for what I have read... I'm the translator at THS, so I have read all the chapters available. In fact, I have read up to chapter 47 in Japanese (that's the chapter I'm currently translating).  I'm not saying any weak ghouls appear (other than Ryouko-san, obviously).

 

Cooking significantly changes the chemical composition of many things and tends to make them more similar to each other. With wild carnivore, can make it harder for them to digest.  As omnivores this is not a issue for us humans. But as ghouls, cooking their very very specific diet should change it so much that they can not digest it or at least find it hard to digest.

 

With a ghouls very specific limited diet (that really doesn't make sense from a scientific point of view) the difference between say raw cow flesh and human flesh is small enough as it is. But I would bet that the base composition difference between cooked meat of any mammal is nearly indistinguishable (hence the old chestnut, how any meat tastes like chicken) I don't see how ghouls can eat cooked human flesh, but not be able to eat cooked cow flesh. (a side note, cannibalism is dangerous because of how many bacteria and viruses in the flesh are compatible with infecting us in the cannibalistic flesh)

 

I agree with your scientific point. However, Ishida-sensei often uses pseudo-scientific explanations for how ghouls function. We have seen several times in the past that ghouls cook their food. Whether that would work in real life doesn't apply to the Tokyo Ghoul universe where that is definitely something which can occur and often does. Now, if your point is that the manga isn't scientific or logical well... I would say "The existence of ghouls in their current form in itself is illogical and unscientific."  (at least based on Ishida-sensei's explanation.)

 

 

Also, Kaneki was finding out information about the Ghoul Restaurant for Itori because she has information on who killed Kamishiro Rize. It's not a favor; it's an exchange. Finding out why Rize was killed would be very important to Kaneki since her death resulted in him becoming a ghoul. I don't think it was particularly smart for him to go inside the restaurant but he certainly had a good reason to at least seek out the motivation (as well as follow Tsukiyama there).

Edited by Morbid_Charade, 18 February 2014 - 08:17 AM.

[DudHunter]

thanks for TLing this by the way. interesting and enjoyable horror in a nice sort of shounen/seinen mix.