Talk:Eto Yoshimura/@comment-26544002-20161114143414/@comment-10733658-20161114174039

To be honest, I think the issue with Eto boils down to Ishida forgetting the importance of "Show, Don't Tell". We are repeatedly told about her strength and power, through both narration and what the characters themselves tell us. In-story, Eto is treated as a major power-house and an enormous threat to everyone.

However, when it came to actually utilizing her in the story, Ishida primarily used her to demonstrate the strength of other characters. This is such a common storytelling thing that TvTropes dubbed it [The Worf Effect]. Using a character's reputation as being strong to hype a threat or other character, but having the "tough" character get beaten.

Ishida established Eto as having a reputation for power, but then used her primarily to establish the strength of the other three big players in the story. Even in-story, she gets used by others as a method to measure strength. She fights Kaneki to see whether he's ready for the final challenge, Arima himself. And Furuta also uses fighting her as a measure of his own strength, telling her that now he's certain he can take on his bosses.

So, again, it comes down to a classic creative misstep -- telling us she is tough, but not effectively demonstrating it.