Talk:Touka Kirishima/@comment-108.28.7.188-20150706133940/@comment-10733658-20150715120241

Actually, yes. Regret does mean a lot, and the reason is because it means Touka recognizes her mistakes. She didn't need people to berate or call her out, because she acknowledged on her own that she messed up and was doing plenty to beat herself up over it.

In contrast, Kaneki did not acknowledge his mistakes and kept making excuses until Touka confronted him about it. Obviously, her methods were flawed but.....come on. Touka was at the time an emotionally-scarred teenaged girl, even with an idle upbringing, the average teenager has a temper and makes stupid mistakes. I love that Ishida lets his characters be realistically flawed, as appropriate for their age and life experience. Touka grew up in a violent world, and her entire narrative in the original series was having to learn the futility of that violence and anger.

Honestly, Touka has already paid the price for her mistakes. She lost everything -- her second home, her second family, her father figure, the life she'd worked so hard to build, the future she'd started to finally consider and dream about, her best friend, and the guy she cared about. Her world was literally in ruins.

Sure, she wasn't hunted down and killed by Investigators for what she did. But she surely paid the price for her mistakes.

As for Kaneki, while he was correct about Aogiri being a threat.....I think the fandom has a tendency to ignore that his actions were wrong. If you pay attention, multiple parties express misgivings about his actions but fail to act. Banjou was worried for him, Hinami was worried for him, even Tsukiyama worried for him. Everyone worried, but they allowed him to keep recklessly seeking power and crossing more and more lines in his quest for revenge. Kaneki's downfall was ultimately because he -- as Yoshimura explicitly states -- threw away his humanity. He lost his way, and pretty much destroyed himself in the process.

Touka was the only one willing to confront him. Remember, he touched his chin while saying it was fine. And in his final "dream", he admits that it was never about anyone but himself. Touka was right, even if her delivery wasn't exactly perfect. But too many fans only see "she was mean to him", rather than what actually happened -- that Touka saw him walking down the same destructive path she and her brother went down, and she STOPPED HIM. She made him take a step back, and re-evaluate his choices.