Gin Goto is the overreaching antagonist of the 2023 Netflix Japanese horror drama series Gannibal. She is a power-hungry and manipulative matriarch of the Goto clan who is also the mother of the mutated cannibal Shiragone.
She is responsible for the barbaric practice of cannibalism in the Goto Clan and the village of Kuge.
She is portrayed by veteran actress Mitsuko Baisho and Yuri Tsunematsu portrays her younger self.
Background[]
Gin was born from a prostitute in Kuge village and followed her mother's footstep in seducing men. Her mother was sacrificed by the village in the annual sacrificial ritual to appease the mountain God for a bountiful harvest due to her being deemed sinful because of her profession. From that on, Gin resented the village deeply for the death of her mother.
After the village head Ryuji had eyes on her, he took her as adopted sister but Gin was horrifically abused by Ryuji who treated her as slave and livestock. Eventually, she fell in love with the son of the priest, Musamane and pregnant with his child. The village discovered this and Ryuji decided to sacrifice her to the Mountain God while Musamane helplessly watched.
Unknown to everyone, Gin had secretly made a pact with the exiled cannibalistic Kashihabe tribe to overthrow the Goto rule over Kuge. After giving birth, Gin trained her son, Shirogane to be her execution and tools for her rise for power and revenge. Eventually, she and the Kashihabe overthrew the Goto clan with her personally killed Ryuji in revenge for her abuses. She then became head of the Goto clan and tricked the villagers to worship a new mountain god and continue the sacrificial practice of the village. Unknown to them, the new mountain god was actually Shirogane who was eventually succumbed to the mutated form of Kuru.
In the next decades, she worked as both clan leader and midwife to abduct newborns from the village to be raised as livestock to feed her son in sacrificial ritual, she perpetuated for decades in Kuge. Her daughter-in-law Ai discovered that her son was sacrificed so she betrayed the clan and escaped with one random child who was also sacrificed. Many younger generation of the village opposed the practice but they are shut down by the powerful clansmen of the Goto as well as their conservation parents and grandparents. A man got so fed up at the loss of his son and the destruction of his marriage following the death of his child that he killed his parents out of rage.
Eventually, the modern and younger generation of the villagers had enough of Gin's oppression and her heinous actions in sacrificing their children and siblings to Shirogane so they secretly planned to get rid of her without the knowledge of the large and well-armed Goto clansmen. They chased her out of the edge of the village and speared her to death. Shirogane discovered his mother body and devoured it. After Keisuke as the new clan leader rejected her barbaric ways and sought to guide the clan to a better future without her corrupted influence and insanity, her dark legacy finally came to an end.
In the end, Gin died as she had lived, a scornfully barbaric woman consumed by blind hatred. Her death is very poetic since she sought to get revenge on the villagers only for her to be consumed by the other hatred.
Trivia[]
- Gin manipulated the villagers to turn on Ryuji and the Goto clan but in the end she just followed Ryuji's footsteps in oppressing the villagers out of spite. Eventually, she was killed the same way by very same villagers she manipulated in disposing Ryujia and the original Goto clan. This just proves that Gin learns absolutely nothing from her past actions and paves her own downfall similar to how she paves Ryuji and the Goto clan downfall.