It should also be noted (though this could be a stretch) that Uta’s conveniently asking Shirazu about any girls, and Shizaru the “do no evil” monkey is often seen crossing his arms or covering his genitals.
The “evolution” of the title is probably a reference to Yomo’s line:
For the whole battle there has been a discrepancy in prospectives: Uta and Itori are trying to recreate the old days they spent with their friend, while Yomo refuses to go back to that dynamic. Uta wants to fight Yomo and tries to force him to take their confrontation seriously, while Itori is their witness and comments their dynamic with jokes and treating them like naughty children.The end of the chapter is Yomo basically telling them to stop with their pranks. As many people have noticed the last scene with Uta falling brings to mind the Tower which has come out multiple times in the narrative.
The Tower represents a sudden loss, the sudden and dramatic change of a situation and has meant on a meta level the abrupt end of many character arcs which couldn’t reach their natural conclusion. So what has been lost in this chapter? What has been destroyed?
The answer lies probably once again in Yomo’s choice to grow up. With this choice Yomo is telling Uta and Itori that they can’t stay trapped in their old days forever and that they all need to evolve. This is probably where the second part of the title comes up: The Star.
The Star is the card which comes after the Tower in the Fool journey and symbolizes a new inspiration people need to work on after their world has been put into disorder by the Tower. @hamliet and one of her anons had a conversation about it and how the chapter being the number 170 seems to support this idea.
The star is a new dream and has the power to inspire people, but at the same time it must be seen as nothing more and the following step consists in trying to adapt the ideal of the Star to the reality of the world. This is what I am expecting from Yomo, Uta and Itori. After all Uta (and probably Itori as well) has seen his ideal, his attempt of connection negated and deemed as impractical. At the same time Yomo is fighting for something new which is probably faceless and difficult to grasp like the friend he is fighting. It’s not by chance we are having these two battles happening at the same time. They are linked to the two complementery themes of understanding others and understanding one-self:
1) Yomo’s challenge consists in being able to see the face of the faceless, so in understanding what seems ununderstandable.
2) Amon’s challenge consists in realizing he is a sinner like the person he hates.
Obviously these two challenges are nothing more than two faces of the same coin: if Yomo gets to finally understand Uta he will understand himself better and if Amon accepts himself he will also accept who Donato is.
All of this to say that I doubt Uta is gonna die. If anything this chapter made even clearer that Yomo and Uta have a problem of communication. After all Yomo is almost devoured by a giant mouth and Uta has become the giant mouth. And who else almost always gets devoured because he can’t communicate?
Yomo, like Urie, has always been terrible at expressing his feelings and is famous for being a quiet person. Uta on the other hand has always been the most talkative of the two. He was the one who started talking to Renji in the 4th ward, he was the one who told Kaneki Yomo’s backstory, he is shown to like chatting with his clients. Despite this, he can’t express himself better than Yomo and this is because he often makes things about others. He talks with others and figures them out and even makes new faces for them. However, he doesn’t explain himself and so reamains faceless because nobody bothers to give him a face he may like.
This is also interesting given @sentrakk‘s theory that we might get more Urie and Mutsuki development quite soon… we shall see.
i love how Itori is watching Uta and Yomo fight like [x]
hey guys, on the subject of “Yomo won against Uta???”, I know the chapter isn’t out yet, but I just want to say that it makes sense considering the recurring themes of TG + the fact that Ishida ironically debunked the power ranking
shonen
trope a while ago.
Keep in mind, this is why Yomo fights…
vs this is the reason for the Clowns (and thus Uta)
so this is yet one more reminder that hope & love >> despair & loneliness in TG.
I strongly doubt that in terms of raw strength Yomo is stronger than Uta (not that I think there is that much of a gap between them, but all in all Uta is probably physically stronger). However Yomo’s reasons for fighting (and wanting to win against Uta) in this precise moment make him stronger than Uta who feels mostly loneliness if he’s not playing around.
It’s Mutsuki winning over Seidou during the Rushima arc all over again, it’s not about raw strength but about what makes you strong enough to win.
I mean it’s funny you bring that up, because Yomo’s last fight against Mutsuki lampshaded that exact same thing.
Also, in Takizawa’s own fight against Mutsuki I wouldn’t call what Mutsuki fought against Seidou with was emotion, or even a superior reason for winning. Mutsuki won that one with the power of mental breakdown.
You could say that the smile Mutsuki cracks when he says he’s going to buy time at the mention of Urie coming soon is Mutsuki deciding to fight for the rest of the Q’s, and to reunite with them again but he spends the rest of the fight clearly lashing out and using Seidou as a transferable target to receive that punishment. Seidou is both a ghoul and a man, both of which have hurt Mutsuki in the past, though Seidou specifically never hurt Mutsuki at all. Yet, we can see in the specific way he takes Seidou down he’s not really fighting for a superior purpose just venting his frustration.
If anything it’s karma for what Seidou did to the investigators during the Auction raid. None of them were specifically responsible for the torture that happened to him, even though the entirety of the CCG turned its back on him, but he used the to vent his frustration violently anyway. Now when Seidou’s not lashing out, but merely fighting for survival he’s being used the same way by Mutsuki.
Considering the specific way Mutsuki takes him down and what he does to Akira afterwards though, it’d be straight up reading the fight wrong to say Mutsuki has a superior reason for fighting then just “He’s a ghoul, it’s okay to kill ghouls, I want to vent my frustrations by being violent and killing things, but only things that are okay to kill because I’ve been told it’s okay to kill ghouls.”
So my underlying point with this explanation is that emotion alone really isn’t enough to gain a clean victory. Like, Yomo did indeed win that fight but it’s not the result he wanted, it’s a pyrrhic victory because he didn’t get through to his friend. Uta still feels lonely after going through all that trouble.
Honestly I doubt the fight is going to end there, because we’ve seen Uta throw pretty much every single fight he’s been in during Tokyo Ghoul.
Is this what Yomo really wants though? To grow up and rid himself of his childhood friends in Uta and Itori? I’ve always said though that the conflict between Uta and Yomo is a two way one, because Uta makes himself impossible to be understood, but at the same time Yomo doesn’t really push him at all or even try to understand him until his back is against a wall.
So like, all the things that Itori said Yomo fights for. Why does Yomo fight for them? Does he really believe that the future Ken will bring will be better for him? Does he feel content knowing he won’t lose anymore things if he puts his faith in Ken? Does he know that Ken doens’t really care about human and ghoul cohabitation but decides to fight for him anyway because he believes Ken’s good nature will triumph eventually? Does he trust that Ken is a strong person because he’s been observing him all this time and wants to support him when he’s finally standing on his own? Does he think this is the only choice after witnessing ghouls being driven to near extinction? Does he see the family that Touka will create as a second chance at his sister’s children reaching a happy ending and therefore his hope being realized?
We really don’t know why, because Yomo doesn’t think about why. He fights to protect without really thinking of the circumstances he’s fighting in and thus he gets dragged from fight to fight to fight.
This is pretty much directly what Uta accuses Yomo of doing in their brief confrontation, Uta says Yomo is merely fighting against the concept of loss.
That because of that, the cycle will repeat again and again. He’ll either lose himself, or he’ll lose someone important to him and learn a lesson from it, but the cycle will never end because Yomo only ever sees his life in terms of loss.
Remember his failure to assert himself is a character flaw of Yomo’s, he still hasn’t onscreen told Touka or Ayato that he’s their uncle because he’s terrified of trying to influence others due to his own lack of confidence.
So yes, Yomo does have a better reason for fighting Itori and Uta, but exactly why is it better? Even if you’re saying that Yomo’s fighting for his friends, he’s specifically fighting against two friends to fight for other friends newer friends he’s made. Except those two were the ones who saved his life. When Goat pretty much gave him up for dead and didn’t bother looking for him.
That’s not an aimed dig at goat per se, just asking questions that need to be asked. Of course they have a reason for fighting that’s better than just empty nihilism, but none of the characters really can understand their reason yet for fighting because they don’t really think about it.
Yomo even shouts it like seven times this whole fight “I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand.”
So yeah, Yomo said a cool one liner and scored a significant hit against Uta, but what good did it do him? It’s a victory earned without understanding. If he’s not careful than Uta will just become another one of Yomo’s losses and the cycle surrounding him will remain unbroken. And that’s not what Yomo wants, he wants the fighting to stop not to win the fight.
So in other words, a victory achieved through violence without understanding isn’t going to really help either Yomo or Uta develop at all.
Hey, so you guys remember the OEK from 100 years ago? We saw both the ghoul and his kakuja form thanks to Matsuri in ch151:
And thanks to Ayato, we also saw the results of the Nagaraj’s rampage in ch131, almost 100 years after the crisis happened:
However, I have to ask: what happened to its kakuja head (the thing in red)? If you look where the kakuja is climbing up in the backgroud, it’s almost as if it was beheaded somehow???
And now thanks to the latest chapters we’ve got this:
Uta’s kakuja doesn’t have a head/face either (it’s just a huge mouth?).
I mean, maybe it’s a coincidence (and Uta’s nickname only refers to the fact he can shape-shift), but anyone remembers what they did to the Nagaraj’s eyes?
midnight-in-town 