Why the Tokyo Ghoul Manga is better than the anime.

Hey guys what is up welcome back to my blog I’m so thankful that you guys took the time out of your day to read my blog post. Hope you all are safe from the COVID-19 and having a great day. Tokyo Ghoul, man I loved the anime, absolutely loved the action even though I didn’t understand much of the story. Recently as I got into manga I decided to find out the true story lying beneath it and man I believe they stole a lot from us in the anime. Like the other ones this is going to be be FILLED WITH SPOILERS ANS GRAPHICAL CONTENT.

The story is pretty much the same for the first season with us finding out a lot of the mysteries that they couldn’t adapt into the anime like Rise and her being alive but the main thing that I liked about the manga was how graphic it was with each scene, it made you feel the weight of each and every dialogue and even if it wasn’t audible you could feel it. The story is so well fleshed out that we can actually make sense of it.

This scene below, the one where Kaneki accepts he is a Ghoul is the one where he is tortured by Jason, when you look closely you can see how much pain and suffering the scene shows as well as how the human eye is getting squeezed showing that he’s more Ghoul now and the human inside us getting driven away. This impact is what the anime is lacking, the action is great but I couldn’t really every connect with the characters.

Next, the story, a lot and I mean a lot of it was stolen from us in the second season, just as a quick rundown, Kaneki forms his own group of ghouls and looks for Doctor Kano as does the Aogiri Tree and so the directors probably thought it was a good move to just jam it showing him with the Aogiri Tree than showing the conflict and everything else that comes in that part of the story. But that does completely against Kaneki’s character as you can see from the scene below.

An entire arc of the story is missing with new characters that were introduced and a whole new story for the second season. I thoroughly enjoyed that new part much more than I did the second season of the anime. There was Kaneki negotiating and getting a presence in the Ghoul world as well as getting stronger by literally reading about martial arts and performing it. It stays true to his character which still has a tinge of innocence at that point.

The emotional impact that the entire story has on Kaneki along with the mistakes he makes and the lives he takes all are portrayed beautifully in the manga. Kaneki isn’t just some on edge MC, he’s shown to have feelings and emotions and the manga expresses them beautifully like in the scene below. The twisted words, what they say, the situation it all fits his character and story.

There’s also the part about Kaneki taking up his role the One Eyed King and leading the ghouls who follow him which was not put in the anime, instead we just saw it all crammed together in one scene of him getting married and the ghouls being there whereas in the manga it was all beautifully laid out and took its time to build up the characters and shows us their emotions as the story moved towards the final arc. We saw what Touka went through, Yomo went through, how Kaneki led with the shortage of food and everything else. The entire segment is important to the final arc. Even the scene with Kaneki and all his alter egos is different as he first debates what he should have done as he can’t save everyone and then his alter egos support him rather than him simply recieving their support. That just simply adds more to the character of Ken Kaneki.

I was pissed was when we learnt about Doctor Kano, the one who performed the surgery on Kaneki and turned him into a Ghoul, while in the anime we never get to see the end of that plotline the manga explains that he was simple an experiment, a prototype and Rise, well she has such a complex story of her own that I can’t even begin to describe it here, not to mention Washu, V and the entire Ghouls are running the CCG gig. It was all cut out and now that I read the manga I can say it was a beautifully crafted story.

The main theme of Tokyo Ghoul which is the gray justice, the decision about what is actually right and wrong just gets so much more meaning when we see the story of Kaneki and his tragedy as he just keeps trying to do the right thing even when it backfires and doesn’t work teaching us that things are rarely black and white and nothing in life is simple but we simply must push ahead as far as we can go.

All in all, the manga gives us better understanding of the characters, their motivations and tells us why the events actually happened in the first place rather than simply giving us a haphazard mix of action scenes with a depressed MC. It makes you emotionally connect with every character, their loss and their gains as we move through the story. The Tokyo Ghoul manga is a must read for everyone if you think that the story of the anime was weak and also just because it’s so great. Also recommend me some good manga.

So that is it for this post guys hope you got some value from this.  Thank you guys for reading to the end hit me up on Instagram and Twitter with your thoughts and if you have any ideas on what I should write about and some manga recommendations. Stay safe from the COVID-19. Thank you again and I’ll see you all next week.