Hairu and Furuta
It’s especially poignant that Ishida chose to draw Furuta and Hairu together, the day that Hairu’s death airs in the anime and the week of Furuta’s death. As these two characters are meant to reflect extremely divergent choices a garden child could have made.
I’m seeing a lot of if only Furuta decided to pursue a normal life like he wanted to, or if only Furuta had moved on and found somebody else to love and while yes a tragedy is supposed to make you think that way, I want to illustrate in the following post that it’s not really that black and white. As the story has already given us an example of somebody who tried to just live for love within the system and do their best to live for their simple desire to be loved and loved in return in their short lifespan.
Unlike Furuta who is nihilistic, and only laughing in a sardonic sense at the tragedy of his life, Hairu is genuinely cheerful, kind to others and even forms bonds with people outside of the garden. She’s on friendly terms with Fura, and has a strong bond with Ui. She even was close to Okahira to an extent.
Unlike Furuta also, Hairu is incredibly clear about what her desire is. She’s straightforward and lives her life for that simple desire. To be validated by Arima’s praise because he was the only person who showed her kindness in her childhood.
Hairu in every sense of the word, was trying to live the best out of what a garden child was given in life. She was a Furuta who understood that she was going to die soon, and instead of rebelling against the world instead to choose to live for her own small personal happiness and live out the best of a bad situation.
“Isn’t this great? We have tons of things to do. It really does fit us better to be holding quinques instead of pencils and scissors, don’t you think? But if you don’t wanna, I’ll just go by myself,” Hairu said and headed toward the venue’s exit.
I have to hurry.
So she could be praised by Arima.
Because we don’t live long.
Whatever reason they had been created for, why they had such a fate imposed on them, none of it mattered. As long as she could get that hand to gently stroke her head again, just like when she was little.
Ui let out a loud sigh behind Hairu, but he quickly raised his head and passed by her.
Translation by @kenkamishiro [x]
Even following that path, and living for that simple happiness though Hairu still killed a ton of ghouls. She still had no scruples at all about using torture to produce results when it came to killing ghouls.
She still delighted in doing it, and learned to enjoy it to an extent. Treating her fight with Matsumae like a game when Matsumae was only fighting to protect her younger brother figure and family, and making this face at the opportunity to kill more ghouls.
And still in choosing to acknowledge and live for that simple desire, Hairu’s path led her to die one of the most brutal death’s possible in the series.
I’m not saying Hairu is a bad person for making these choices though, but rather what makes Hairu fascinating as a character is the choices she made, and the results we see from them. There was no perfect way to handle the garden even for a bubbly bright person like Hairu.
So, for all the people trying to read Furuta in the most reductive way possible and suggest there was some kind of healthy way for him to deal with the fact that he was born to die in a pointless war against ghouls conducted to keep the head of his family fed, and that even being born and raised as a child soldier he was going to die young in that war regardless even if he was the strongest of all the child soldeier’s, I would like to point out that Hairu already exists in the story as an alternative path that Furuta could have taken.
So yes, Furuta did not need to destroy everything, but neither did Eto, neither did Arima. Their characters are compelling to us because of the choices we see them make in a limited situation. To understand Arima is to understand that as common sense as saying “Arima should have just stood up to V instead of pretending to be on V’s side, killing a bunch of ghouls and make his final act being a martyr since he was so powerful and all” is, there are just as many reasons why it couldn’t be that simple for Arima. Why he couldn’t just stand up and go on the right side of the war, because he saw all killing as bad and wanted to make something with his final action. It’s compelling to see the choice he made, when his choices were extremely narrowed by circumstances.
I bring up Arima and Hairu because I don’t see this kind of criticism for these characters. “Arima should have just done x, the reason he did y is just because he’s a terrible and petty person.” or “Hairu should have just done x, the fact that she just kept projecting her desires onto Arima makes her a bad person.” Yes, I realize that Furuta is more tied to ideas of toxic masculinity than either of those characters and it’s more blatant in him, but also that same idea of wanting to destroy everything to spite the world you were born into is represented in both Arima and Eto, and that same idea of projecting a desire of the love you were denied in childhood onto somebody who doesn’t return it is represented in characters like Hairu and Karren.
Those characters are allowed to have nuance, whereas Furuta tends to be read reductively even though way more screentime and range is shown with Furuta as he is the final and ultimate antagonist of the series. So, let me once again show you that there is more than one way to read a scene with Furuta’s final death flashback.
In order, we receive a flashback about how Furuta realized he was going to die young.
Then, later on Furuta refreshes us on this flashback confirming what many read as this being the moment Furuta decided on his path.
The flashbacks we are shown all affirm the point that Furuta was very much aware his whole life that his choices were limited, he had a limited timeframe, and a limited place of belonging because no matter what he did he would still be born at the bottom of the Washuu totem pole.
So, Furuta’s final death flashback. A lot of people have been interpreting this as him still clinging to his childhood dream of marrying Rize, and his fatal flaw. If he had just found somebody who returned his love like Kaneki, then somehow that would have fixed everything. However once again this reading is missing out on the nuance. I myself read this flashback as taking place before this scene specifically, before he started training hard with the Washuu.
He seemed like a timid sort of boy that kind that’d play with flowers with the daughters.
We’re given a hint that Furuta at one point just played around with the daughters, and specifically with Rize all day. Then he became much more focused on learning to fight and get stronger. Much earlier we’re also shown a flashback where Furuta asks Rize if she was bred.
We’re told this story out of order so this is my best attempt to cobble this order together. First, Furuta and Rize are childhood friends living in blissful ignorance of the garden.
Then, Furuta finds out that he’s bred and asks Rize if she’s the same. Then at some point he invesetigates on his own the family tree of the Washuu and realizes they are going to die young, probably earlier then he was meant to learn that news.
Then in that moment decides to destroy the Washuu that created him, and the world that created him. Why I clarified this order is because in the final flashback Furuta says this.
A lot of people have chosen to read this scene in the sense of “We’ll get married and have grandchildren.” However, the language Furuta uses is Oba-can and Oba-san, which just means old man and old lady. You can call a random old lady on the street who has no grandchildren “Oba-chan” it doens’t necessarily carry that connotation.
That, and the fact that everything up until this point has specifically been about the fact that garden children literally cannot age that long, that Furuta was never going to become an old man seems to support the interpretation that this playing around took place before Furuta hit that realization. That at one point before Furuta was told that he was going to die ¼ of the age of a normal human, he really was just a normal kid who was playing around in the garden with Rize and commented that he hopes even when they grow up that they’ll still get to play around like this.
And Rize’s response is “I don’t want to get old” in the sense of “I don’t want to grow up. Then, what Furuta reassures her with is “It’ll still be fun, even when we grow up.”
That’s the tragedy of this flashback specifically. It shows that at some point Furuta was not the twisted manchild we know him to be today. That at some point he really was just a kid that wanted to grow up, and was even looking forward to it. Before he was told that was literally not an option, that he was just going to die before ever getting the chance to grow up.
Furuta thought he left that kid behind. That he was no longer that kid. That he divorced from that part of himself, and that those desires meant nothing in the end because he was going to die regardless.
In his final moments though he comes to peace with that kid. He accepts that there was a point where he too wanted to be happy, where he too wanted to grow up. He sees himself as a human being finally, and not a nihilistic agent of destruction who only existed to be the reckoning of the Washuu.
In other words he steps out of the role as villain he painted himself in the whole series and accepts his own humanity, in a final moment of comfort before death.
