“They Were Just There Wherever I Looked From The Day I Was Born. Those Miserable Walls.”

“This traitor to our peace is called… Eren Yaeger.”

Do you believe the full rumbling goes against the theme of “getting kids out of the forest?”

No, because Armin & Co. represent that side of the argument.

Mr Braus says two things: 1) He laments the continuation of the cycle of violence, and 2) He argues that the most important thing is to keep children out of it. Eren acts in reaction to 1), and the 104th act in reaction to 2).

Rather than just having the main character straightforwardly represent the moral message of the series, it’s more interesting to explore the unresolvable contradictions within that moral message - that’s what would have been the case if Eren and the 104th had truly been opposed. Eren would have fought to end the cycle at the cost of children’s lives, and the 104th would have fought to preserve children’s lives even if meant that the cycle will continue.

Of course, Eren’s capability of truly ending the cycle is often brought into question - but this only adds further nuance to the series.

a sweet scene (ॢ˘⌣˘ ॢ)

“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

[“One of the very hardest things about preventing and ending violence is that most of our work isn’t really about getting someone to stop being violent. Most of the time, that’s not the heart of the thing. The even-more-rigorous struggle is to cultivate all of the awareness and skills that would have been necessary for the violence not to have happened in the first place.

Which is why, when we talk about violence, we always end up talking about everything: slavery, binary gender, the original disconnection of humans from the rest of life on this planet, and so on. Solving violence is rarely as much about the moment at hand as it is about everything else that preceded it.

Which is where shame comes in.

As a therapist who has spent the last decade working with movement folks who are survivors of intimate violence—as well as with many people who have caused harm—I see shame as one of the most pervasive, painful, and insidious barriers to our efforts to fulfill the aspirations of transformative justice.

In order to develop real responses to the myriad harms in our lives—or even the capacity to develop real responses—we need to understand shame and develop tools for working with it, individually and collectively.

(…) Shame is different than guilt. While guilt focuses on our behavior (“I did something bad”), shame creates an identity: “I am bad.” Shame keeps us stuck, isolated, and hiding. With no way to escape from the totality of our belief (“I just am wrong”), we may do some of the following:

hide what we feel is bad about ourselves and try hard to pass as “good.”

overcompensate in other parts of life through overwork, caretaking, or perfectionism to make up for whatever is “wrong” about us.

defend ourselves from any insinuation that we might have done wrong, attempt to rationalize, or justify our actions.

blame someone else, try to divert responsibility, or shift the focus onto another.

attack anyone who draws attention toward the source of our shame, try to have power by dominating or shaming others.

numb through self-harming use of alcohol, substances, food, sex, technology, and so on.

Most of us use all of these strategies in different moments. Overaccountability and underaccountability are two sides of the same coin: “I can’t stand how bad I feel and can’t imagine making it right (overaccountability) so I’m going to hide that it (whatever it is) even happened, or lie about it or blame someone else (underaccountability).”]

Nathan Shara, Facing Shame: From Saying Sorry to Doing Sorry, from Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From The Transformative Justice Movement

I found a few interesting parallels and repeated motifs with Eren.

In both cases Armin asks why Eren would want to do such a thing, and he responds in very different ways, yet the reason is still grounded in the same fact. Eren's birth into this world.

It should be noted that when Armin asks this the first time, Eren is confused and even angry at the fact that Armin would ask such a question. He takes this as a given but he can't articulate any clear reason, and in anger he proclaims it's because he was born into this world. This time, Eren no longer feels justified or entitled, but sad and grave, and he can't even confidently say it's because he was born into this world(though the implication is clear in the flashbacks), yet he can't deny the strength of that desire, he had to do it no matter the cost.

Another callback has to do with the hope beyond the hell.

Previously Eren believed undoubtedly that hope lay beyond this hell, but after his disillusionment with the world beyond the walls, he now questions whether his struggles will lead to actual fruition or yet another hellish disappointment after so much sacrifice and strife. Eren has come to the conclusion that he'll never know unless he actually gets there. It's interesting how previously the ends were unquestionably good and so was the fight to attain them, yet when Eren says this it's in an arc that has been criticising the "keep moving forward" mentality and he's not even fully confident in the value of this end, what remains constant though-through the ambiguity, confusion and corpses-is the core drive within Eren.

I don’t think it’s fair to characterize Eren in such a way. It should be noted that Eren’s friends had also failed on multiple occasions to show him respect by ignoring blatantly obvious sides of him. At the ocean he questions omnicide and his friends simply ignore it, at the meeting about Zeke he brings up omnicide again and his friends just pretend it didn’t happen, then in Marley he’s obviously sad, scared and disassociating at times and once again they ignore his problems. His friends and the Survey Corps were also way too open to possibilities, it’s precisely because of their idealism that they’re in this situation in the first place. Eren has definitely made mistakes in relying too much on himself, but the SC is just as guilty in their openness to possibilities and their faith in peace, Isayama says so himself, “Peace cannot be achieved by ideals alone, how many sacrifices must be made to pave the path to peace?”. So it’s wrong to characterize them as being so respectful and loving to Eren when they deliberately ignored parts of him that they didn’t want to see.

 On top of this you say Eren overestimates his strength and abilities but with Reiner in the basement he tells Falco that he saved him by delivering  the letter, he genuinely acknowledges that the Raid was impossible without the help of the Survey Corps, and it should be noted in the way he looks at Mikasa that he’s very emotional inside about what he has brought them to do.

 And you’re disregarding the fact that he still had enough faith in his friends to entrust them with the task of stopping him, the destructive side of Eren is a side that can’t be tamed, so Eren antagonizes them later to create enough distance for them to be forced to acknowledge that side of Eren and make the decision to cut it down. He may not trust them as much as he did before, and he should have used a more tame and allied method of sublimating those desires, but at it’s core his faith in his friends still exists and Eren doesn’t overestimate himself so much as what he does is the only way he knows how to act.

Eren the Slave

There’s a common misconception in the fandom that Eren’s turn in the final arc from hero to antagonist is due to character development. This is from a belief that Eren as a character, believes in freedom and therefore has been carrying that idea on his shoulders the entire time. 

There’s a confusion between the narrative which Isayama sets up for Eren which is told from a third point of view and therefore is objective, and Eren’s own personal narrative which is composed of Eren’s own personal thoughts and feelings. Basically in any story these two things will coexist and push and pull against each other, narrative the way the world sees the character and reacts to them and personal narrative the way the character sees themselves. Eren’s conception of himself is a one man army fighting for the freedom, and willing to become the enemy of the whole world in order to do it but just because a character believes that about themselves does not necessarily mean that it is true. 

The following post is a discussion of Narrative Identity that is a theory that postulates individuals for an identiy by integrating their life experiences into an internalize,d evolving story of the self that provides the individual with a sense of unity and purpose in life. The narrative is a story, it has characters, episodes, imagery, a setting, plots and themes which means the events taking place in it have to have meaning. 

Eren is a slave of many things, including narrative, and because of his own personal narrative he cannot change. Eren isn’t a character who has changed, moreas he’s a character we’ve had our perspective of him change as the story progresses and widens it perspective which is still development. All character development requires some kind of change or movement on the character’s part, but it doesn’t mean their characters themselves have to change, because the reader’s perspective on them can be what develops instead. 

So underneath the cut: Eren’s current development is about his failure to change, which makes him the least free character in the manga. I suggest reading my Eren and Reiner meta as a precursor to this. 

Keep reading

Alright this is quite late, but I think the question was referring more to the nature of the freedom Eren seeks than the root of the desire. We know he wipes out the rest of the world for "freedom" but is it freedom in the sense that the world is hostile and he's trying to preserve himself through aggression or is it because the mere existence of humans "taints" the pure scenery he saw in Armin's book and imagined as freedom.

Of course, it could be more nuanced than that, but the words Eren says seem to give credence to the latter interpretation though it doesn't sit well with me.

What is your genuine interpretation of the type of freedom that Eren desires? Does he desire freedom because he was born into this world, or is it because of Armin’s book? 131 seems to establish that it was because of the book, but the paths chapters focus on Eren’s philosophy of “being born into this world.” Which do you believe he valued more?

Both. Eren is implied to have had a subconscious reaction to his father's sentiment at his birth, but it was only brought into consciousness when Armin showed him the book. That's why Eren was so listless beforehand: his primal life-urge was going unrecognised and unsatisfied.

There's also the factors of the Founding and Attack Titans working outside of time. Eren's future personality likely influenced his infant self, as well as the nature of the Attack Titan to always strive for freedom.

final draft of ending critique is halfway done. normally i’d be able to finish it this week, but a heatwave has hit the uk and is sapping all my energy. please bear with me a little longer 🙏

What's the theme of Choujin X?

So I've been wondering for a while, what idea does this story revolve around? What's the main conflict of the story? What concept should we pay attention to when reading this story? I can't claim to be 100% right or sure, but now that the story seems to have officially started, I'm going to try to articulate my ideas on this topic. By the way my ideas concerning the topic are heavily inspired by Jung.

Most fundamental to understanding the theme of this story is what exactly a choujin is. We've been given two main definitions, a person who becomes the form they desire, and a person who overcomes the limits of their humanity to use their ability. But why do such a minority of people have the capacity to become them?

The answer lies in the possession of a complex. A complex is a pattern of emotions, behaviours, thoughts and ideas which recur around a particular concept or theme. It's an unconscious way of seeing the world that influences how we act. But the issue is precisely that it's unconscious. The conscious self who wills events isn't aware of the complex that has formed within them, and that's usually the result of repressing a part of you that you don't like, so this complex tends to dominate and negatively affect the psychological well being of people.

Without such a complex one cannot become a choujin. When we combine what we know, we have a choujin as a person with a particular unconscious(at first) way of seeing the world and who tends to act accordingly with such a complex, and is fixated enough on such a theme and desire that they sacrifice their humanity for it. They are people who are governed by and hyperfixate on an idea so much that it is manifested through their capacities and harms their wholeness as a human being. In fact, I think that's what's expressed in the opening words of the story.

So there doesn't seem to be a moral status to being a choujin, but there's definitely something negative enough about it to warrant it being compared to a disease. And I think that's the status of it being a manifestation of a complex. A complex exists in the personal unconscious and exerts influence usually unwanted upon our actions. When one is brought into contact with what Jung calls the autonomous complex(the Shadow) it can possess us. When a complex possesses us we lose sight of who we are and unconscious impulses are brought to light. We lose control. The danger inherent in becoming a choujin is becoming consumed by our complex. When we are consumed by the shadow of this complex our humanity is shed for the continuous growth of the thing within us, and we become monsters. That's the affliction, the constant need to maintain control and humanity because of the tendency of the complex to take hold of us.(Note: Freud's name for the unconscious was the Id which is gotten from the German "It". There's something "other" about it and it fits quite well with the opening words in reference to becoming a choujin and it's relationship to complexes.)

Now I don't think Choujin are condemned or are essentially damned by their transformation, in a way, being a choujin can help one come in contact with their complex and start the journey Jung called individuation to integrate it. Through the dream at the heart of each person, the promptings of the ideal Jung referred to as the Self, people can be called back from despair to reconcile elements of themselves as we saw with Shiozaki. (Note: Chapter 1 of the series is called "Behold the Man" which could very well be a reference to Nietzsche's book of the same title with the subtitle: How one becomes what one is. This fits well with Jung's notion of the Circumbulation of the Self. We gradually become our true selves over time, as we strive to the ideal of the Self.)

So on a general level I believe the theme of the story will center around the integration of the shadow as it is manifested in our complexes. It's awakened, and it could be repressed or it could take over you, but the call of the story will be to overcome and integrate the shadow by finding your purpose in life.