Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-122.55.28.69-20140919023815/@comment-24494906-20150108100550

^^^ So much nonsense. If you thought about it for a second, you'd realize that there wouldn't be enough time for Ishida to write an original second cour if he only decided to make one after watching some episodes of the anime. Ishida isn't a magician, even he needs time to draft an alternate story.

And it's probably quite far from the truth.

I'll give you a short history lesson on the anime's production.

A Pierrot manager offered director Morita the direction of the Tokyo Ghoul anime towards the end of 2013. He accepted.

Then Ishida made his move in typical Ishida fashion. I think Morita met Ishida for the first time in early to mid November (derived from Morita's interview). And probably already during that meeting, Ishida proposed to adapt an alternate story. (Ishida himself called his proposal "unreasonable".)

Morita accepted that proposal. At this moment, the anime's pacing was fixed and the anime had to be split cour, because this additional time was needed for Ishida to work out the story. (Obviously, we don't know how the pacing would've looked like if Ishida didn't make his proposal. But it doesn't really matter, the pacing we got was demanded by Ishida's proposal.)

Ishida might have had a rough idea how this alternate story would play out with the major plot points, but I think that he hadn't really worked it out. So Ishida, Morita, and probably the scriptwriter, Mikasano, had to work out the second season's story together while production of the first season was already starting. They had to closely cooperate even for the first season, to make sure that they change the stuff they have to change and to keep the stuff they have to keep for Route A. Ishida probably even read the screenplays because the screenplays had to be completed months (!) before Ishida finished his drawn draft of Route A's plot (he finished the draft in mid-July), and this is imho the easiest way to make sure that they don't do something major wrong during the first season's adaptation. I really wonder how much this close cooperation also influenced the manga and the presentation of some events in the anime (the imagery of episode 12 and the Arima vs. Kaneki fight is too close to be coincidence). So I think Ishida had more influence on the production of the anime than most other mangakas.

I don't think this is the original plot outline of the manga. This interpretation is probably caused by a misunderstanding. They said that it's based on Ishida's "original draft", but the question is if it's an original draft of the manga or of the anime. I think it's the latter, since the deviation for this new route in the first season already seems to start during the Gourmet arc and becomes really noticeable during the first season's Aogiri arc, so I think it's highly unlikely this is Ishida's original plot outline of the manga.

I think the changes in the Aogiri arc - mainly the cutting of the escape - probably also had to be done for story reasons. When Banjou and Kaneki tried to escape from Aogiri's clutches, they became traitors from Aogiri's point of view. That makes it really hard for me to see a way for Kaneki to join Aogiri. If it turns out that Banjou stays a member of Aogiri even after the Aogiri arc, then there really would be no way to keep the escape, because while Aogiri might still accept Kaneki's membership under some circumstances, they'd never accept Banjou, because Banjou is a traitor (and the main instigator of the escape), he's also mostly useless from Aogiri's point of view. We'll probably find out if Banjou is still a member of Aogiri in the second episode.

tl;dr This is the adaptation Ishida wanted, so he is probably quite happy with the anime.