Leyla
Leyla is a ghoul that was taken in and raised by Mr. Yoshimura since she was a child.
He’d found her after she had run away from the only home she knew of at the time after killing the human couple that was “caring” for her since she was very young. They had somehow got it in their heads that you could just ween a ghoul off of human meat. After years of being slowly starved to death, she’d killed and eaten them out of desperation.
Personality-wise, Leyla is something of a wallflower at first. She’s overall kind-hearted and really believes in Yoshimura’s (or “Pops” to her) vision for living peacefully as ghouls among humans, but she tends to keep her head down more often than not and keep to herself or the OG Anteiku crew. One may say she is even just a little naive about the realities of ghoul life, especially since she’s nearly always lived in the bubble of 20th Ward under Yoshimura’s care and protection. She gets more of a clue as time goes on and becomes more outspoken rather than keeping her head down to not shake the boat as she did before. By :RE, she has a much rougher exterior and militant thought process regarding the CCG and gaining peace for ghouls, but under all the rough edges, at her core she still just wants to take care of and protect people that are important to her.
At Anteiku, she doesn’t really have the talent for coffee brewing or dealing with customers, so she does supply runs for the coffee shop as well as makes food deliveries to ghouls in the 20th Ward that are either unable or unwilling to make it to the shop in-person. She gets along well with the OG crew of Anteiku, seeing them as family, and is the one that initially brings Ken into the fold and tries her best to help him acclimate to his new life as a ghoul (though definitely tends to handle him with kid gloves more often than not, which Touka calls her out on).
After the destruction of Anteiku and the deaths of Ken and Yoshimura, Leyla falls pretty hard into a depressive hole and ends up breaking contact with Touka and the others from the shop to strike out on her own in the city. The loss of her home, the man that she saw as a father, and the guy she was falling in love with was a pretty hard hit for her that she didn’t handle well, and she ends up going on a steady killing spree throughout Tokyo, of which, even years later, she has very little memory of and has no idea just how many people (innocent or not) that she murdered in that time. Finding a group of orphaned ghoul children is what triggered her coming more back to herself, the final straw of focusing on keeping them safe being when the group got suddenly whittled down to 3 kids.
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Following that, she meets Capria after helping her fend off some Aogiri Tree members from attempting to recruit her and they team up together to not only watch after the kids, but to help out any other ghouls that haven’t already been absorbed into Aogiri Tree’s ranks or any other remaining gangs. Leyla ends up inadvertently amassing a sizeable group of ghouls that are loyal to her. To ensure her people are fed, she opts to have them specialize on stalking and hunting anyone that works for the CCG rather than hunting around for suicides or picking off regular people. In order to keep the investigators from tracking her people down, she has them split up in smaller groups and they have no base of operations, and instead keep on the move throughout the city of Tokyo. Leyla eventually receives the codename White Crow and the rest of her group become known simply as the Crows as they become a bigger and bigger pain in the CCG’s side.
Pestilence Doctor Mask by Francesco Sanseverino
Leyla’s kagune is a bikaku-type. The tail, during the first part of Tokyo Ghoul is very whip-like, but not particularly strong; it can certainly leave decent wounds in flesh, but against other kagune or quinques, it’s fairly useless. During :RE though, when Leyla is significantly stronger (and experienced in fighting), her tail doesn’t change much in looks, but it gets much harder and deadlier, enabling her to spear and slice through most quinques and kagunes. It also has the ability to split into three parts, though that makes each piece brittle and less effective in a fight; she main uses the split form to help her get around a battlefield quickly or catch enemies she’s up against by surprise.
Leyla's mask while White Crow is bird-like in appearance and looks akin to a degrading bird skull. The shape is similar to that of a plague doctor mask. Her original mask from before :RE was a much simpler and plain crow design that's often found among other ghouls.
