#the anime scripwriter to Ishida: 'Mutsuki is my child now and you can't hurt him anymore'

[murasaki-murasame]

:re episode 16 continued to be Really Really Good [tm] so here I am, still talking about this anime, lmao :)

At this point I’m also basically using these posts as a way to talk about my feelings toward the manga, so, well, keep that in mind while reading.

Thoughts under the cut, and spoiler warning for the entire :re manga.

Hoo boy there sure is a lot to talk about in this episode! I wasn’t entirely sure how they were going to manage to adapt up to the end of this arc in one episode, but they managed to do it, and I think they did it incredibly well. There were some very obvious cuts, but I think they were mostly for the better.

It probably pissed some people off, but I honestly liked how they only really showed bits and pieces of how Touka’s crew got out of Cochlea. The anime really wasn’t missing out on much there, aside from more fight scenes. And I think the slideshow-y way they presented it actually managed to keep the comedic timing of Hirako’s resignation better than if they handled the scene more normally, so that was nice. Overall it just wasn’t a very important scene and I’m glad that the anime has it’s priorities straight.

I think I mentioned this in my last post but I wasn’t sure about it at the time, but at this point it definitely looks like the anime is completely cutting out the plot point of Koma and Irimi coming back into the story because uuuuuh apparently they didn’t actually die at the end of the first series? I guess??? I’m really relieved the anime cut that whole thing out, since it was so, so pointless in the manga. It only really served as shallow fanservice to people who wanted the Anteiku gang to get back together. For years now people have complained about how much Ishida likes ‘bringing characters back to life’, and those two were one of the most bizarre examples of that. And given that those two did literally nothing of value in the manga even after coming back, we’re really not going to notice their absence at all in the anime. [Maybe this will also mean we won’t get that incredibly awkward last-minute bit of exposition about the concept of zombie quinques]

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the way that Eto died without having one last chat to Kaneki, but to be honest in the manga it always felt a bit awkward that he just sorta willingly left her to die.

I’m also really not sure yet how I feel about the way they handled the scene of Marude assassinating Yoshitoki. I wish they could have included the bits of dialogue that explain how Marude received info from Hide that lead him to finally believing that the Washuu clan are ghouls, but oh well. It doesn’t really change things too much, especially since we know Hide’s still alive in the anime, and we even saw him getting onto the boat Marude was on at the start of the last episode.

And then of course we get to the biggest cut this episode made, and probably the one that’ll be most controversial to people. The way they they cut out about 95% of the stuff that went down between Mutsuki and Torso. I think it’s really gonna piss a lot of people off, but you know what? I loved it. I feel like the anime scriptwriter actually gives a shit about Mutsuki as a character and is handling him with infinitely more respect and subtlety than Ishida ever did in the manga. We’ll have to see how the anime handles him over the next few episodes to definitively see once and for all if they’re going to avoid the worst of what the manga does with him, but I’m pretty confident at this point that they’re completely changing course.

For the sake of any anime-only people who might for whatever be reading this, and also just to remind people that read the manga of what exactly went down and why I never liked it, I’m just gonna recap what happened with them in the manga a bit, so I can talk in more depth about it.

The stuff the anime showed with Torso abducting Mutsuki and taking him off to a cave on Rushima was fairly 1:1 with the manga, but after that, we got some scenes sprinkled throughout the arc where we saw what happened with them after that, which mostly involved Torso cutting off Mutsuki’s arms and legs, sticking him in a dress, and in general obsessively treating him as a replacement for a girl that Torso apparently knew as a kid that he had a crush on. The manga had a whole chapter-long flashback showing his childhood, and how he lived in poverty with an abusive father, but there was a girl he liked, who one day got killed by his father, which just worsened Torso’s existing mental issues and lead to him eventually becoming a serial killer, starting with killing his father. And after that he’s been obsessed with chasing after specific kinds of women to try and basically fill the void left by his childhood crush, but his lack of empathy and general contempt for his victims in practice lead to him developing a habit of dismembering them until they’re just a torso that won’t ever leave him. There’s a bonus page in the manga, I think in volume four of :re, which is some kind of a journal entry written by him where he spells out his various mental issues and why he’s obsessed with torsos and whatnot.

As a fun fact: that’s also the only time thus far that the official translation of the series has ever used she/her pronouns toward Mutsuki. In the journal entry written by a dude who also waxes philosophically about his own lack of empathy and how he only views people as their physical bodies and nothing else. And while I’m at it, even after Urie finds out about Mutsuki’s biological sex in the auction arc, he still keeps referring to him with he/him pronouns, even in his internal thoughts, and Mutsuki’s character description at the start of nearly every volume of the official release of :re includes the sentence ‘Assigned female at birth, he decided to transition after undergoing the Quinx procedure’. Just in case anyone needed a reminder that Mutsuki is indeed trans.

Anyway, back to what I was saying, we also got some scenes in the Rushima arc in the manga with Mutsuki becoming increasingly resigned and despondent about his situation, and we eventually get some flashbacks to his childhood, where we find out that he also had an abusive family that he also ended up murdering at one point. Then he told the CCG that a ghoul killed them all, and that’s how he joined the CCG.

To be blunt, I think the way Ishida originally handled all of this in the manga was pretty awful, especially now that we know exactly where it was all heading. He tried way too hard to try and make Torso look sympathetic with his sob-story flashback, and on the flip side, he really tried way too hard to make it into one big contrived twist about Mutsuki ‘secretly being a huge murderous psycho this whole time’ or whatever. I think at the same time there was also a flashback to the auction arc that, for the first time in the manga, made it clear that he ate some dead investigators to heal his wounds [which the anime made immediately clear as soon as it happened], and I think Ishida tried to spin that as part of the twist of him having been a psycho the whole time, or something like that. It was dumb. Oh, and also, there was some pretty graphic descriptions of how Mutsuki mutilated Torso’s corpse, involving some genital mutilation, which apparently Ishida decided to just make into a running thing with him, since in the manga Mutsuki was the one that fought Takizawa and injured Akira and whatnot before the other Qs arrived on the scene, and he also decided to just randomly mutilate Takizawa’s genitals during their fight. Somehow this isn’t even the end of the list of things I’m mad about with how the manga handled Mutsuki :) This is pretty much just the START of the bullshit :) I cannot reiterate enough how happy I am that the anime seems to be nipping this all in the bud and avoiding the gross [and frankly transphobic] shit entirely.

That’s pretty much the gist of it, but it’s also worth noting that the note things end on with Mutsuki in this arc is very distinctly different between the manga and the anime. In the manga, the Qs don’t find out about what happened between him and Torso at all, and they don’t realize that there’s anything wrong until the next arc. But in the anime, Urie finds Mutsuki in the cave, surrounded by Torso’s various body parts. I really really like this change, and the fact that the anime decided to end this part of this arc with Urie comforting him is really what cements my hope that they’re going to entirely avoid the really awful stuff that goes on in the next arc, which only really happened because Mutsuki’s mental health and overall stability just went careening off a cliff because none of the Qs knew there was anything up with him. So I hope the fact that we’re already seeing Urie comforting Mutsuki over this makes me hope that won’t be how it plays out here. It actually reminds me a fair bit of the really clumsy way the manga tried to have Mutsuki reconcile with the Qs in the final arc. It works WAY better here.

I really think the way they handled Urie finding Mutsuki was really beautiful and touching, especially after the earlier stuff with Urie frantically trying to figure out what had happened to him, and talking about wanting to go home with him. It was just a really nice, sweet way to handle it, and I think it gives Mutsuki far more respect and dignity than the manga did. Similarly to how the anime portrayed him eating some dead investigators as something sad but necessary without trying to cast any moral blame on him for it, that’s how this episode felt too, with how they framed Mutsuki killing Torso. Instead of it being an overblown ‘oooh he’s actually EVIL and PSYCHOTIC and MURDEROUS oooh how spoopy’, we just see the aftermath of it, and Mutsuki is just portrayed as the sad, abused victim he truly is, who just deserves sympathy and comfort for what he’s had to go through. I also got a real sense of smug vindication about how the anime didn’t even bother doing anything with Torso, and they didn’t even come close to trying to give him a tragic backstory to make us feel bad for him. They just killed him off-screen. I really love that. Sure it’d probably seem anti-climactic, especially to anime-only people, but it’s so much better than what the alternative would have been. Torso deserves to go out like the shitty nobody he is.

As for the aforementioned fight scene with the Qs against Takizawa, I really liked how that was done. A lot of it was definitely because, in the manga, this was really one of the starting points of us seeing where Ishida was taking Mutsuki, and how he was trying really really hard to frame him as being antagonistic. Urie accidentally hurting Akira, and Akira herself talking about how she’s aware that trying to protect a ghoul is a serious crime, works a lot better than Mutsuki being the one to attack her, and him telling Akira about what the crime she’s committing is, and making it clear that he’d act against her if she becomes a ghoul sympathizer.

They also handled the stuff with Amon pretty nicely. I still feel like his entire role in :re has always been one big question mark for me and basically everyone else in the fandom, but I’ve at least always liked his line from this scene about the importance of always thinking about whether or not you’re doing the right thing.

I’m also really warming up to how the anime is just showing the new three Qs members in action before any proper, dedicated introductions. It works pretty nicely, in my mind.

I still wish they could have actually been a bit less faithful with how they adapted the stuff with Kanou, and added some stuff to it, but oh well. I at least got a bit of a kick out of the stuff with Roma.

As I mentioned, they really cut down on the remaining stuff they had with the Cochlea arc, but I quite liked how they handled everything with Arima’s death. For one thing, it was nice to see them make the Garden feel a bit more tangible and ‘real’, in a sense, than the manga did. I always had a tough time visualizing it in my head while reading the manga since we only saw bits and pieces of it. I also liked how they associated the field of white flowers with it, but I can’t remember if that was already in the manga. It might have just been more clear in the anime since it’s in colour.

I imagine some people are gonna be REAL mad that they cut out the whole dramatic arc-ending scene of Kaneki killing some CCG people while monologuing about how he’s now the new One-Eyed King, but I liked it. I like how the anime really committed to ending this episode on a bittersweet note. I’ve also always thought that the whole ‘re’ pun with that scene in the manga was always a bit more dumb than other people think it was.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about how the anime didn’t outright show the flashbacks to Arima meeting Eto and deciding to start working with her, but they at least make it clear enough that that’s what happened. At the very least, adding in some bombshells like that probably would have made the pacing of this episode feel a lot more wonky.

And with that, we’re now going to get into the Goat arc! This is gonna be where things get interesting. I think it’s probably going to be about five episodes long, but it’s also four volumes long in the manga, so we’ll see how it goes. The main thing is that there’s a WHOLE lot of stuff in this arc that can easily be cut to save time. 

It’s honestly hard to tell for the most part how exactly they’re gonna handle this arc, but at the very least, as I’ve said, it’s very clear that they’re going to remove or at least heavily change/condense the stuff that goes down with Mutsuki, which would save a fair bit of time. This would also presumably affect the final arc, and remove a good few chapters of content from that as well.

My memory on the exact details of this arc are kinda fuzzy since I haven’t gone back to read it ever since I first read it as it came out, but going by the preview stuff for the next episode, it also looks like they might be cutting out the really awkward mini-arc from the manga where Kaneki and co had to go raid one of Kanou’s labs to get medicine for Akira and then they find Amon there and fight him and then take him back to their base. I honestly still have NO goddamn clue what the fuck Amon was doing there. It looks like in the anime he’s just going to casually show up and be part of Goat almost immediately, which feels much more natural.

It also looks like we’re getting the whole sequence where Touka gets Akira and Hinami to reconcile their differences and make amends with each other. I’ve always thought that scene was a bit awkward, but I get what Ishida was going for with it, and I respect it. So I’m happy with the anime keeping it. At the very least, I think it does a nice job of fleshing out Touka a little bit more, which is always nice, and it’s a very necessary part of Akira’s development.

I wonder if the next episode will also include her and Amon hooking up, or if that’ll happen later in the arc. I honestly don’t remember when exactly in the manga it happened, so I’m just guessing.

I was kinda hoping that they’d at least slightly change up the formation of Goat, since the way Ishida portrayed Kaneki at the start of this arc was really weird, and didn’t last long. Hopefully it’ll feel a bit less awkward in the anime.

Since we’re getting closer and closer to the moment of truth on this one, I suppose I should reiterate at least some of my feelings about Touka and Kaneki’s relationship, and how it might be handled in the anime. I have a LOT of feelings about it, but I’ll save some of it for later. [fake edit: ok I ended up talking more about this than I intended, but whatever, lol]

Just to get right to the point, I still think it’s entirely possible that they just won’t get together at all in the anime. I’m not exactly betting on it, but still. It still just sticks out to me a lot that they’ve made a lot of subtle changes to their scenes together in the anime thus far that build up to paint a very different image of their relationship.

One of the big things is how the insert song they made for the cafe scene in episode 2 of :re season 1 is pretty explicitly about Touka remembering her crush on Kaneki, and coming to terms with the need for her to let go of it and move on with her life. I mean, it literally ends with ‘Although I’ve found you, I know this meeting will not last. I have to let go. Continue finding your own way, though I will miss you. It’s time to wake from this dream’, after how the chorus and whatnot is her talking about how she’d dreamed that one day he’d be with her again like nothing ever happened and he never left her. The song is pretty clearly all about her accepting that things aren’t just going to magically go back to how they used to be between them, and that she needs to move on with her life, and let him move on with his. It’s not definitive proof of anything, but it’d make it pretty awkward all on it’s own if they do actually just, y’know, hook up in the anime as if he never left her in the first place. [Remember when I mentioned before how the manga brought Koma and Irimi back to really awkwardly force this feeling of the Anteiku gang getting back together like nothing ever happened? Yeah].

It’s also worth noting that even after that, the anime cut out and changed some minor things. For example, they removed a scene where Touka talks to Tsukiyama about the whole Kaneki situation, and she said that she thinks the :re cafe can be a place for him to return to if he gets his memories back. They also changed up the scene where Uta visited her cafe a bit by having Kaneki also visit at the same time. Which, ironically, means that the anime has him and Touka meeting face to face at least marginally more often than they did in the manga, but I think that scene actually served to further hammer in the idea that they’ve moved on from each other. Touka continued treating him like any other customer, and her line to Uta about how she’s ‘going to keep doing what she’s already decided on’ certainly gains a different sort of tone when taken along with the various things the anime has cut or added or changed, that I just talked about. It comes across more like a reminder to the audience that she’s committed to moving on from him.

And on the flip side, Kaneki didn’t really react to her at all in that scene, from what I remember, and in fact seemed to just be preoccupied with his lingering nostalgia about Anteiku in general, which was shown really nicely in the [also anime-original] scene of him having a bit of a flashback to Yoshimura and Anteiku itself. It’s also worth noting that because of this whole change, they removed the stuff with how, in the manga, Kaneki was at home while Uta visited Touka, and he was actually wondering to himself if Touka might be out on a date with someone. So it’s certainly interesting that they replaced one of the more blatant ‘he has a crush on her’ scenes with him outright visiting her cafe and not having any real reaction to seeing her again, and caring more about Anteiku in general.

It’s also worth pointing out that, even if they kept the little exchange between them earlier in the Cochlea arc 1:1 with the manga, it comes across even more as a sign of how awkward and stiff their relationship it than it already did in the manga. It’s always stood out to me a lot, even in the manga, that meeting Touka again face to face and her talking to him did absolutely nothing to sway him from his whole suicidal plan, whereas him just having a chat with a hallucination of Hide caused him to break down into tears and completely reevaluate how he values his own life. I just wanna point that out, lol.

So I’m honestly not sure how the anime will handle things with them. In general, I think the pacing of their relationship would be even more rushed than it was in the manga, at least if they keep all of their big moments. Having all of the stuff that happened with them in the manga take place over like one or two episodes of the anime would be, uh . . . really awkward, to say the least. But it’d also obviously disappoint everyone if they cut a lot of it out.

It’s also hard to tell exactly how they’d even execute some parts of it, particularly since the main reason they ended up having sex in the manga was because of the whole deal with Mutsuki attacking them and burning down the cafe, but since it looks like that sort of thing probably won’t happen in the anime at this point with how they’re handling him, I dunno how they’d set it up.

But to be completely honest, if they can at least keep handling Mutsuki well, I would actually be largely OK with the anime still having Kaneki and Touka hook up. I’ll probably talk in more depth about it later, but a big reason why I disliked it so much in the manga was just because it happened at the exact same time that Ishida decided to throw Mutsuki under a thousand buses in a row, and it was just miserable to sit through.

So yeah that’s around about it for this episode. I’m cautiously optimistic to see how they handle the rest of the season. At the very least, it looks like the next episode will be much more relaxed and slow and character-focused than the last few, so that’ll be nice.