I’ve been reading this series since summer and I feel so empty now that it’s over… 

I love how well thought out and detailed the storyline is. There is so much dept into every panel, and so many tiny details in the first volumes that foreshadow events in the last volumes. The art style is absolutely incredible and it really captures the atmosphere of the story and the emotions of the characters. 

I think the ending was perfect and I would have been disappointed if it had ended in any other way, for example as a tragedy. It would have made Kaneki’s character growth seem almost pointless. A big theme in Tokyo Ghoul is morality and the question of whether life itself is wrong because everyone keeps taking from each other, ghouls and humans alike.  “The world isn’t wrong. It just is.” The worst things Kaneki went through also allowed him to find a place to belong and people who loved him. 

The world is a place of suffering, but also of love. It’s not meaningless to fight for your place in the world.

It felt almost cathartic to see Kaneki recognize his right to live, and to allow himself to lean on other people after his internal struggle with morality and his savior complex. Kaneki’s realization is such a juxtaposition to Furuta’s belief that everything is meaningless because everyone is one day going to disappear. A belief caused by his exposure to death as a young child when he found out he wasn’t going to grow old because of his Washu blood. And that’s why Furuta didn’t see any value in life and instead drifted around on the search for something to fulfill him and fix the state of the world, and in the end he  almost destroyed it instead.

A scene that stayed with me was the fight between Amon and Donato when he has to face that he still loves him as the father who raised him despite knowing the heinous acts he committed. “What’s wrong with a son loving his father?” Having been made into a half ghoul and recalling the conversation he had with Kaneki, he accepts that though there are ghouls who take satisfaction in hurting humans, he can’t place all ghouls in the same box. The same goes for humans because there are humans capable of comitting the most vile acts as well.  “To be convinced somebody is wrong without truly knowing them, I can’t imagine that being right.”

By being forced into fighting a common enemy together, ghouls and humans have to look past their history of taking from each other. This fight gives them the opportunity to understand each other, and so developed the beginning of coexistence.