Omnomnom.
Bleach and Naruto’s newest sibling left a rather good taste in my mouth. Not…you know what I mean. We’ll be covering the first arc here (more appropriately: Whatever arc ends after episode 11 or so).
A lot of the premise relies on one thing: Your knowledge of the generic Vampire mythos. That’s basically what we’re getting here. Only instead of Vampires, even the cute cuddly ones who don’t HAVE to kill you to feed, we have the Ghouls, a race that lives in Humanity’s shadow and eats their flesh.
In this regard it’s kind of silly. Most vampire stories in the modern day have acknowledged that yes, animal blood should be a substitute for vampires even if they don’t prefer it. Because, logically (as logical as you can approach the topic), there’s little difference at the nutritional level. Tokyo Ghoul throws that out the window. Only Human flesh satisfies these creatures, and we know that because there is no attempt to whitewash their actions, and even those we see who are very keen on blending into society don’t use alternative food sources. As close as we can get with science, there should be little to no difference in pig flesh or Human flesh, or any kind of raw meat. And yet this is not an option. This even leaves aside the fact that the only reason creatures eat is to acquire carbon. The primary decider of your diet is your teeth and intestines, not the type of carbon in front of you, be that plant or animal form. Most creatures who can eat both, will eat both. And as the family dog shows, even if they shouldn’t, they’ll eat the “wrong” type all the time.
In short, I feel like we’re being led by the nose through the pretext of horror, when we all expect this to devolve into standard shonen beat-em-up style soon enough. So why go through the effort of forcing it? Maybe I’m just being overly picky here because there isn’t a lot of supernatural bent to this stuff yet, not really. The speculative element is the race of Ghouls, but aside of that? It doesn’t appear to have a lot of occult trimmings. Thus, it seems to be approaching from the more “scientific” angle, so I’m probably feeling harsher for that.
Getting to the episode proper, our teaser is brief, a female Ghoul feasting on someone she’s just killed. She’s approached by another Ghoul, who’s here to take her out. Well before the old guy can report back to the Camarilla about how awesome a job he did…she totally kicks his ass and escapes, saying she really doesn’t have time for these little games.
Well you’ve got my attention. Continue reading