It's been three years since Tokyo Ghoul's divisive second season aired, so it's understandable to need a refresher before diving into Tokyo Ghoul:re. Here's everything you need to know about the hit horror anime series.
Tokyo Ghoul is the story of Ken Kaneki, a bibliophile college student who finds himself lucky enough to score a date with a hot girl. Unfortunately, that girl turns out to be a flesh-eating monster, and the date ends with her harvesting him for his meat. As a wimpy teen trapped in an alley with a deadly predator, Kaneki is categorically screwed, only managing to survive when a freak construction accident knocks out both of them. The girl dies, and a mysterious doctor ends up transplanting her organs into Kaneki to save his life. Recovery proceeds as normal for a while, until Kaneki realizes that regular food has begun to disgust him, and he's strangely tantalized by the scent of human flesh instead.
Tokyo Ghoul has a pretty basic “normal guy gets turned into a monster in human skin” setup, but instead of the usual vampires or werewolves, the beastie is something a little more uniquely brutal. The first season is pretty standard for the genre, as Kaneki goes through a tortured process of adjusting to his new identity. Fortunately for him, he's not alone in this situation – it turns out that Ghouls have their own complicated societal structure hidden right beneath the surface of Tokyo life, and Kaneki's lucky enough to stumble into one of their nicest factions right away. “Anteiku” is a group of pacifist Ghouls who try not to harm humans and survive off scavenged corpses instead. Its members teach Kaneki about his body's new functions, as well as the skills required to survive in society as part of a hunted minority. This part of the story can be divided into a few arcs, but the most important one concerns Kaneki's first encounter with the CCG, a government agency tasked with managing (i.e. exterminating) the Ghoul menace. While participating in a storm of vengeance-driven violence against the organization, Kaneki strikes up an odd acquaintance with one of their members, a man named Amon. While the two are nominally enemies, an act of mercy from Kaneki makes Amon question whether Ghouls are really just monsters after all. Since Amon only becomes more prominent in the series with time, Kaneki's kindness looks to have longstanding consequences.
However, things go from bad to worse when Kaneki gets captured and tortured by an especially nasty Ghoul named Jason. Kaneki had already been struggling to reconcile his morality with his new cannibalistic existence, but he goes a bit bonkers after this hellish experience, flipping to instinctive brutality as his way of navigating the world. At this point there's a deviation between the anime and the manga – in the anime, Kaneki takes Jason's place at the Terrorist Ghoul organization Aogiri Tree, while in the manga he forms his own vigilante task force. Either way, his motivation is the same: to protect Anteiku using the violent means that they repudiate.
All in all, this change doesn't end up making much difference, because the story's outcome is the same. Kaneki is routinely manipulated by more experienced players, and Anteiku is destroyed in a showdown with the CCG that's gradually arranged by Aogiri Tree as part of a bid for power. In the middle of this battle, Kaneki has another mental breakdown, as he realizes that cutting himself off from his new family to protect them by murdering all of their enemies was not the best way to handle things. In a moment of repentance for causing Anteiku's downfall and the death of his best (and only human) friend Hide, Kaneki allows himself to be struck down by the CCG's champion investigator, Arima. The season ends there, on a note of ambiguity regarding our hero's fate.
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