Talk:Ken Kaneki/@comment-50.99.140.71-20151101223518/@comment-25047329-20151102011914

To be fair, I think :re can get kind of boring too, but I think Kaneki is a bit "overrated" in the equation. There are several things that I think make it feel long though, like:

-Lack of a deuteragonist. -Many characters that don't get addressed very often. -Arcs that are dedicated to long buildup or long fights.

The original series jumped between Kaneki (the ghoul world) and Amon (the human world/CCG) as two major points of view and kept things from getting stagnant. I don't have a problem with the CCG, but I get what others mean when they say that the story is "too focused on CCG". Occasionally, well see what Aogiri or :re is doing, but the story has been firmly focused on the CCG. Up till now, we haven't had a real secondary PoV character (but many smaller PoVs), so we haven't really see multiple politics at work like we did before. I'm hoping that once "The Robbed Giant" is revealed, he'll take his place back as deuteragonist.

TG has an awful lot of characters and the story is sputtering a bit to give them all attention. There's both an old and new cast and the development and focus has felt...dry? I think the characters who've gotten the most development thus far are Sasaki, Shuu, and Kanae with Urie, Mutsuki, and Shirazu collectively coming in second (with maybe a few others here and there that I can't remember off the top of my head). Sasaki and Shuu are part of the old cast though and of Kanae and the mentioned Qs, dramatically, Kanae has had the most interesting development. Most other characters have been kind of...there? Not counting the characters who've had development during the time skip, like Touka and Seidou, but the ones we've seen unfold as the story progresses. There are so many characters that the story jumps around often to try and give each one adequate focus, but it feels sporadic, especially as more and more characters are introduced. I still know nothing about Saiko aside from what little we've learned about her till ch.13, I'm still waiting for Mutsuki's and Urie's relationship to be touched on other than "they're cool with each other", most re introduced characters from the old cast have only been gingerly touched on, etc. I mean, it's not like we get nothing at all, but it feel very spread thin.

Arcs take a long time to build up and are then followed up by action operations that feel tiring by the end. The Rose Arc feels especially long. Almost the entirety of volume 4 was build up and volume 5 was action. The first half is a ton of exposition and the second half is chain after chain of fighting while trying to pepper stuff in to make things interesting or more tragic. It's been a little formulaic in this regard. Although, I think think the story will continue to develop this way for long.

Like the first series, I expect the first half of :re to be mostly buildup with a bunch of stuff that'll be more interesting on the second read. Bbbbbuuuuutttt...it still doesn't make it interesting for everyone. I feel that :re can be boring at times and for me, these are the main reasons why it can feel a little frustrating. Kaneki is actually the least of my concerns because the story has a lot going for it and shouldn't rely on being carried on his shoulders all the time.

/2 cents