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bigowlenergy · 5 years

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Notes on Eto

Seems like tossing thoughts into the tumblr void helps, so here’s a corkboard for Eto. Nice and tidy under a read more bc I hate long posts:

I don’t think I have to actively convey that Eto is an unreliable narrator (come on - Tokyo Ghoul is right there), but I’m not entirely sure how to show it without resorting to other POV? And I’m not sure how good I did presenting Eto’s POV, anyway. It doesn’t feel like theres as much internally happening as there is externally, which is the polar opposite of Sugar, and it feels unbalanced. Maybe if I remixed it I would feel better and be able to work with it more easily.

Internal things I want to work with, an incomplete list:

1 Eto essentially didn’t have a childhood. From one extreme to the other in terms of survival, and the loss of her only guardian in Noroi so early really removed her any understanding of ‘good’ parental love. The closest she’s ever come to being cared for was with Shiono, when she already felt like an adult in ghoul terms and had been living on the streets like so many other ghouls had to. Yes, he cared about her and delivered snacks to her apartment and helped her succeed as an author, but it would have been brotherly at best. (It was exasperated at most lol)

2 Eto knows her parents. Both of them. She obviously knew who and where Yoshimura was - was HOW she knew ever addressed? Did Noroi tell her? Was it a description of Antiek that let her know? Scent memory?? - and she had the journals her mother left her. She had both parents, just not physically. Not in a way that counted.

There’s a lot of resentment there, especially for her father, who was alive and doing just fine after abandoning her, and I feel like she views her mother as the parent who told her the truth due to the journals. Even if she learned about V and how Yoshimura honestly thought he had no other choice, if Eto grew up believing that her ghoul father killed her human mother, that would do so much to shape her perception. Of both of them. She doesn’t seem to view her lost mother as some sort of romantic martyr, and describes reading the journals with an objective understanding and acceptance. i would peg Eto as being greatful that her mother gave birth to her, and views her as an unnecessary casulty, but also fully believes she would have abandoned Eto also if it came down to a choice between Eto and her mission/objectives.

“I am the surplus of that relationship” perfectly captures how she has her mother’s social context and her father’s silence to paint her views on herself, leaving her to feel like an unsuccessful science experiment on ghoul/human relations.

She probably loved reading Frankenstein.

3 She doesn’t hate Yoshimura. She can’t, by the point most of the series takes place. Hatred implies actively keeping feelings about a person, keeping them in your thoughts, and not moving away from them. Hatred becomes stagnation easily, and Eto protests this as a character. She gave up all her feelings about her father years ago, letting him go as easily as he let her go, and I don’t believe she’s ever once taken his personal philosophy or interests into account in her life. Eto’s smart; she can contextualize how he viewed peace as a thing freely given from aggressors to the oppressed by virtue of Good Behavior on ghoul’s part from Antiek’s function in the ward without ever having to meet him.

It wouldn’t have been much longer than figuring him out that she came to the conclusion that he was wrong about the world and only drifting by easily on the path of least resistance, especially with the human POV her mother left in her journals. A human woman died so a ghoul could live more easily, that isn’t special. It’s daily. Eto would not be impressed by her father, or see him as anything other than a coward. He’s not someone to be inspired by, or for her to fear coming after her to finish the job, or even someone who would ever offer her a true, heartfelt apology.

Yoshimura is a nonentity that happens to share some of her genetics, which means he’s useful in the biological sense, since she doesn’t want to experiment on herself. Full stop.

4 Eto has a very intense mind/body connection. When she tortures, she combines physical pain with emotional pain in symbolic ways - forcing female nudity on Kanae while also sewing their eyes shut against it, for example - so it seems like her understanding of herself as a hybrid is very solid. I don’t think she sees herself as a ‘ghoul’ trapped in the body of a half-human with poor genetics; Eto is fully a hybrid, raised by ghouls and living as a human, with two identities that she wields social power with in each half.The merging of the two halves of Eto when she outs herself feels very cathartic - and for her, nothing changes. She doesn’t demand to be called Eto instead of Takatsuki, she doesn’t change her basic behavior, everything keeps marching to the social roles she created for herself as a figure of power in each world.

5 Eto saw destruction of the entire system as the only way to cure the systematic ills plaguing the world, and she was right. Look at the ending achieved by an unfinished destruction: the CCG is different, yes, but a new organization sprang up to take it’s place; it’s implied that ghouls are still in hiding, and the hybrid children of the garden are still being used by those organizations. The ultimate end to crush those deeply rooted inequalities wasn’t able to occur, and so a lukewarm compromise made by mostly humans is installed instead, with the easy potential to reverse with only another social turnover against ghouls.

It’s an uneasy peace, at best.

6 Eto is willing to use anyone to achiever her goals, in which ever way is best to sway that person. She convinced Arima with words alone, tortured when she needed someone to -

actually, is Kanae the only one she actively is shown torturing? Does she convince all the male characters with words and promises of power and it just magically happened to be the one trans/ character that gets a page of violence? Hmm. Hmm. hmmmmm

Gonna look into that.

#maman #tg #eto yoshimura #takatsuki sen #tokyo ghoul #analysis #tg:re

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cliveboney · 6 years

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i just want to give an update on that whole upsetting fic debacle since i kept posting abt it, for closure. feel free to skip this as it’s kind of heavy and very personal; i just want to let myself talk it out so i can let it go and move past it

((warning for depression & vague talk of my personal experience w/ it))

so!! i finished it, the whole thing, it was almost 130k words & it was excruciating & it made me completely miserable and i need to never ever do something like that to myself ever again!

i have a problem, a Thing I Do, where if i start watching/reading something, i want to finish it. i will rarely deliberately drop something altogether because no matter how much im not enjoying it i want to see it through, because theres always something i still do like about it, you know? thats why i finished the first season of k-on, even though i hated it (tho im loving s2 actually), and why i watched all 13 episodes of amagi brilliant park, including the special, even though i hated it, and why i stuck it through to the end with comic girls despite its very fucking best efforts to get me to stop watching, and same with darlifra and many other things because i just. wanted to finish the job. there’s a satisfaction in bringing something to a close, so you’re not leaving any loose ends behind. i may not have liked the story, but at least i finished it.

that’s kind of how it was with this fic. i started reading it because one of my coping mechanisms when im feeling really sad or having a bad depression night is to read angst fanfiction kind of as a cathartic release of those negative emotions, it feels good to embrace them and let them wash through me via the opportunity for projection that fanfiction provides. a lot of the times the content of the fics i read are extremely heavy because that’s just what works for me. so when i saw the content warnings on this particular fic, i wasn’t particularly fazed because it was just. stuff i was used to consuming- i mean honestly the content warnings are often the reason i picked the fic in the first place

this one though. uh. it was a lot heavier than im used to, which was becoming rapidly more apparent the further along i got. i mean, it was fine for a couple chapters because it was hitting very close to home in that satisfying kind of way that i needed that night, but after i got over that initial release of emotions it started going downhill, um, a Lot

two chapters was enough to get me invested, but this was a Depression Fic, about depression, with themes centering explicitly around how mental illness destroys lives and friendships, and its aim was to explore these themes in the most realistic way possible. thankfully, it was also about recovery and rekindling lost friendships, and it did ultimately end well, but it was a very long, painful journey. the author did an excellent job conveying these struggles.

it was a very, very hard story for me to read. i wanted to stop, many times, and i fucking should have. it was a very bad time for me to read a story like this- due to a recent surgery, my thyroid levels are very low, leaving me feeling more sluggish than usual and in effect worsening my depression. im taking medication for it, but the medication takes several weeks to kick in and i’ve only been on it for a little over a month now, so i’ve been feeling very low. i shouldn’t have read this fic. i should have stopped after i realized what kind of story it was going to tell, and how it would affect me, and i was only lucky that it ended as well as it did, because the trigger warnings listed above the very last chapter had me so upset that i didn’t know what to do with myself & it was only after i forced myself to read that chapter that i was able to feel better because it turned out that those warnings were extremely misleading out of context and there was a happy ending after all.

putting that much emotional dependence on a story is unhealthy. this fic made me feel like shit, and that’s unhealthy. it took me back and showed me a very dark place that i haven’t been to for years, reintroduced thought processes that i have moved past indulging in for a Good Reason, and made me feel hopeless and sad about my own future despite the recent positive feelings i’d been starting to have. i saw myself in the characters and their struggles. i saw both my past self and the ugly side of my recovering self at the same time. i related to these characters so deeply and integrally that i couldn’t handle the thought of anything but a happy ending, and i don’t know how i would be feeling right now had things gone wrong in the end. that’s unhealthy.

i’m proud of how far i’ve come. i have come a long way since my darkest days. i’ve learned a lot about self love and what it means to take care of yourself. what it means to find meaning in the little things and to keep pushing forward for them. to hold onto the happiness in my life and keep finding more things to be happy about.

this fic felt like a huge step backward, and i knew it was even as i continued to read it. i ignored every voice in my head telling me to stop, to just let this one go. i wanted to see how the story would end. i wanted the emotional satisfaction of seeing everything turn out okay, of conflict resolution and watching characters get back on their feet. it’s okay to want that, but when the journey to get there is so bogged down with these harmful paths, it’s better to just take a different route altogether and leave it behind. it’s a part of my life that i’ve worked so hard to leave behind me; dragging it back in was the wrong thing to do.

like i said, im lucky everything turned out okay in the end. but im still dealing with the emotional repercussions. it may have ended well, but all the rest of those 125k words of misery still happened. they still brought my mind back to those bad places. i’ll be able to move past this, i know i will, but i only just finished reading it yesterday, so it’s still pretty fresh in my mind. immediately after i finished the last chapter, i went looking for the happiest and most wholesome fics i could find in comparison. a part of what had upset me so much, besides everything else, was the fact that my favorite relationship from the show was broken almost beyond repair in this story, so i found fics with those characters that showed unconditional love and friendship instead, and that helped me feel a lot better immediately. this fic had been one of the first ones i read for this fandom, so i think it was kind of acting as the defining example of this fandom’s fic for me; repairing that mental connection is helping me move on from it, because there are so many other stories to be told and i’d much rather have those define my experience here instead.

so, ultimately, what did i learn?? listen to ur fucking logical brain when it tells u to stop forcing urself to do something that’s hurting you!!!!! sure i would have been worried over that fic for a while, wondering how it all ended, if everything worked out, but i would have gotten over it, replaced it with better things, and i wouldn’t have had to go through the intense emotional labor i did while reading it. if you’re not enjoying something, it’s okay to just drop it!! it’s not as big a deal as it feels like in the moment. remove toxic things from your life, the quicker you can the better. live to better yourself and keep working at your own improvement. forgive yourself for messing up, take a deep breath, and move on. it will pass, and you will have become stronger for it. hold onto that strength and use it to keep moving forward.

you can do it.

i am proud of you.

#text posting #vent post #negative /#depression /#i have not mentioned the title of the fic or linked to it for what i assume to be obvious reasons; i do not advise anyone to seek it out #i have nothing against the author; i'm glad they were able to complete such an ambitious project and i think it turned out wonderfully #it just wasn't something i personally should have involved myself with

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