Twilight-paradise88 - Airëa

This is all really cool and incredibly insightful. The coolest detail to me was probably Eren tying up his hair at the beginning as if he's trying to "keep it all together" at first, but the journey culminates in Eren's distressed and frustrated scream as his bun is undone. It gives a sense of him being overwhelmed and and a revelation of powerlessness.

Thoughts about the AoT Final season Op “The Rumbling”

Just wanted to ramble about some cool details found in the new opening “The Rumbling”. The opening begins by showing Eren, Mikasa and Armin. The trio is showcased in separate shots, reflecting on their separation during the recent events that have transpired in the story. As this first sequence draws to a close we see Eren taking a step, which then quickly transitions into a footstep of an Colossus Titan. I like this moment because the motion makes it seem like Eren is crushing that city. It is a cool and terrifying visual imagery but also foreshadows things that will happen in the future, since Eren will literally trample on the lives of others, as he activates the Rumbling. 

Overall as the name of the song indicates, much of the song is focused on the Rumbling advancing on the main land. 

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Ymir’s joint interview with Historia is out “Together with Krista, I’m willing to come”

具体的に告白などされた事はあるのかって質問あったは ユミ「私を通じて手紙を渡そうとしてた連中なら、その場で破り捨ててやった」 クリ「えぇ！？そんな可哀想なこと…」 ユミル「自分から話しかける勇気もないようなハンパな野郎にゃ、私のクリスタは渡さねえよ」 When asked if they have got confessed to before Ymir: If you’re talking about those guys trying to pass her a love letter via me, I tore them up, and threw them away on the spot. Krista: Eh?! Those poor thing… Ymir: I’m not gonna hand my Krista over to spineless losers who lack the courage to even speak to her.

ユミ 私を好きになる物好きはいないと思う 『男の方に興味があるようには見えない』なんて言われてた

Ymir: I don’t think there’s anyone who’d like me. Someone even told me “You don’t seem like a person who’d be interested in guys”

Consistent themes and elments in Attack on Titan

During these few weeks I have been re-reading past SNK volumes, and I have noticed how coherent and overlaying some of the elements and themes of the series are. The ideas and problems presented in the beginning, connect and resonate to the post-basement reveal world. In this post I`d like to talk about some of these consistent things.

As a side note, I have read up till volume 26/chapter 106, so I will construct this post within that context. In here I ramble about the elements that I noticed during the re-reading of past volumes, so it is likely that I have missed some. The structure of this post will be the following one: 

-  Images of monsters 

-  Good or evil - How people are viewed? 

 - David versus Goliath 

- The prevailing current and going against it 

Images of monsters 

In the beginning of the series, one of the things that makes the Titan so scary and such a hard threat to deal with, is the massive gap of knowledge about their true nature. Humanity, or the people of Paradis, have very little knowledge about the origin of the Titans, or what kind of creatures they are. This unknown nature is a perfect breeding ground for fear. Since humanity does not know about the true nature of the Titans, and for a long while did not really possess means or tools to find out, all they had as source material, was the knowledge that Titans are the natural enemy of humanity. 

This is something similar what happens in the outside world, when it comes to the people of Ymir living in Paradis. Since they live in a island, far away from the mainland, no one living in Marley has not really seen any residents of Paradis, and does not really know what they are like. This transforms yet again into something unknown, something that is filled with Marleyan propaganda. When you do not have the means to find out what the supposed “demons of Paradis” are actually like, and you`r head has been filled with enemy propaganda since the day you were born, it is no wonder enemy images manifest themselves.

Both the Titans from Paradis perspective, and the people of Paradis from the perspective of Marley, act as examples of an wonderfully constructed, external enemy, that thrives from unknown factors and propaganda.

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What do you think of Eren killing his Mother? I think that's the only major part of the chapter you haven't talked about.

At first I thought it was just thrown in for the sake of shock value, but looking back at Chapter 96, it was indeed foreshadowed.

It works so far as the revelation about the Reiss massacre works, in showing that Eren is free beyond even cause-and-effect - that he in himself is the Prime Mover, in Aristotle's terms, and in that regard godlike.

Buuut this ending seems to suggest that wasn't the kind of freedom Eren was angling for in the first place. Even if it were, an argument could be made that the Reiss massacre revelation was enough to prove that.

Regardless of this twist's inherent worth, its execution was bad. It felt very crammed in amongst all the other revelations the final chapter gives us; and what's more, you could cut it out of the final chapter and change nothing fundamental about the story. It doesn't even have much of an effect on the course of Eren and Armin's conversation.

But it does provide a conclusion to this piece of foreshadowing, at least.

I think he sacrificed both in some way. He was able to experience the sight of freedom at the expense of most of humanity, a grave act of injustice, but in the end he also gave up his liberty and his life to rid the world of Titans and open an avenue for peace with the remaining civilisation, an act of justice in keeping with his desire to be judged referenced in chapter 99.

Eren and his Id: Some Further Observations

Since publishing my meta on the idea of the ‘id’ in SNK, I’ve noticed some more examples of it manifesting throughout the series.

Mikasa

What Eren attributes to Ackerman mind control is really just the nature of Mikasa’s id. She acts without seeming to realise she does so, with vacant eyes in the first panel and confusion in the last. This is just like Eren’s experience in defending Ramzi: not being mentally present in the moment, his id takes over his body like an alien and controlling force.

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I think this is all quite valid, but I'm quite sure Isayama intended to portray Eren as something "inhuman."

There's the scene in Marley were he speculates that he was born like this.

There's the scene in 121 where he also claims to have been like this since birth.

There's the constant narrative of this being set in stone(Eren's birth is even juxtaposed with "it doesn't matter where" and his child self with "maybe all of this was set in stone from the start"), and even when Eren reflects on why he wanted to do this in 139 there's a shot of him just being born.

There's also the fact that Yams has explicitly addressed the theme of the "innate perpetrator" in two of his interviews as essential to the ending. One in 2017 where he says this:

Ultimately, I don’t think the series passes judgment on what is “right” or “wrong.” For example, when I read Furuya Minoru’s “Himeanole,” I knew society would consider the serial killer in the story unforgivable under social norms. But when I took into account his life and background I still wondered, “If this was his nature, then who is to blame…?” I even thought, “Is it merely coincidence that I wasn’t born as a murderer?” We justify what we absolutely cannot accomplish as “a flaw due to lack of effort,” and there is bitterness within that. On the other hand, for a perpetrator, having the mindset of “It’s not because I lack effort that I became like this” is a form of solace. We cannot deny that under such circumstances, the victims’ feelings are very important. But considering the root of the issue, rather than evaluating “what is right”…to be influenced by various other works and their philosophies, and to truthfully illustrate my exact feelings during those moments - I think that’s what Shingeki no Kyojin’s ending will resemble.

And the other with Arakawa where he draws a connection between his self expression through destruction/"turning things upside down" with the ending and the work of Minoru Furuya(the artist from whom he got the "innate aggressor" theme).

Do you think Eren was forced to do the rumbling because he felt he had no choice? A lot of people are saying that Eren felt compelled to do the rumbling because it was the only way to save paradis. And that sounds wrong to me. He started the war and people don't care about that. A lot of people are mad when we criticise the rumbling or Eren's actions or if we even dare to imply that he did it for selfish purposes. They say that there was no chance for diplomacy at all. What do you think of this?

Hi!

I think that Eren did the rumbling because this was the conclusion that he wanted: to put an end to the Titan curse. I believe that there would have been other ways to save Paradis if that was what Eren wanted, however, those conclusions would not have led to the eradication of the Titans.

The weird complicated part and what I think Isayama was going for, is the kind of time travel that I believe he enacted [wiki]:

The Novikov self-consistency principle, named after Igor Dmitrievich Novikov, states that any actions taken by a time traveler or by an object that travels back in time were part of history all along, and therefore it is impossible for the time traveler to "change" history in any way. The time traveler's actions may be the cause of events in their own past though, which leads to the potential for circular causation, sometimes called a predestination paradox,[81] ontological paradox,[82] or bootstrap paradox.[82][83]

and the so-called time loop is a causal loop [wiki]:

A causal loop is a theoretical proposition in which, by means of either retrocausality or time travel, a sequence of events (actions, information, objects, people)[1][2] is among the causes of another event, which is in turn among the causes of the first-mentioned event.[3][4] Such causally looped events then exist in spacetime, but their origin cannot be determined.

Which means events became fixed and he didn't have a choice because of the decision that he at some point had made. But we are given a glimpse that even if he didn't have a choice, it was still as what he wanted, as per his thoughts in chapter 130.

I'm sorry it is very confusing XS

Was it for selfish purposes? I think that it was a mixture of both, selfish in the sense that he wanted to achieve his own personal aim, but he did still want to achieve freedom for Paradis, by destroying all of their enemies. As with the whole story, it's complicated and not so easy to paint a singular "good/bad" stripe on anything, let alone Eren, which I also believe is the whole point. Plus the fact that I'd said that he believed that he had made the wrong decision in relying on his comrades during the first mission to capture the Female Titan which I believe also led to him choosing to go it alone, which does seem to vaguely imply that there might have been a chance for a different solution if he had brought his friends on board.

I'm going to bring back my thoughts at the ending, because I don't feel like there's been any change in my thinking since then.

I’m going to admit that the reason the ending worked for me is precisely because Eren was shown to have only 2 braincells and failed to use them. He claimed that he loved his friends, but failed to bring them into his decision making and decided to go gungho and do it all by himself. He claimed that they were free to act but his decision in fact took away that freedom from them and forced them down the path he set out for them. He did it this way because he was bull-headed Eren always charging ahead leaving his friends behind. The power of friendship didn’t fix anything either. I feel a sense that there might actually have been a better way, if he wasn’t the way he is. It is a tragedy.

So I do believe that rather than that there was no chance for diplomacy, that diplomacy wasn't given a chance at all, at least not until Eren had achieved his main aim, leaving his friends to clean up the mess.

Thank you for your ask! :)

SNK 137: To see the world in a grain of sand

A story that traverses 2000 years of history, across the vast expanse of time and space, war and empire, great despair and fragmented hope, legends of gods and devils.

SNK features immense scales that can evoke sheer awe, from its temporal and thematic scope to its pure visual spectacle, all the way to the world’s destruction.

And yet in the midst of the breathtaking, terrifying magnitude of the end of the world, it has culminated here, in the memory contained within a single leaf minuscule as a grain of sand against the death marching across seas and continents.

A leaf that contains a childhood memory utterly insignificant, utterly meaningless in the futile battle against geopolitical conflict, human nature, the curse of Ymir that becomes fate itself.

Yet it is also a memory that means everything. 

The fate of the entire world, contained within a single leaf half-buried in the eternal sands transcending time and death.

“The reason I was born…” was not to save the world, or to be a hero; the reason was to simply exist in these moments when one can feels distinctly, ‘I’m here, and I’m glad to be alive.’ Approaching the end of this two thousand year story, Armin’s quiet affirmation captures fundamentally what freedom is, and what it is to want to live in the world.

Arguably without exception, everyone experiences at least once in their life such moments. Even when in the depths of despair, depression, or apathy, still suddenly, if only for one fleeting instant, we feel intensely that maybe it’s okay to be alive when experiencing such trivial things as the sunlight through the trees, a glimpse of the achingly blue sky, or the certainty that we have made a connection with someone through a word, a touch, or a smile. These distinct moments are interspersed as small, flickering lights strung together through the darkness of life’s struggles.

This is Armin’s answer to Zeke’s questions: “You know that to live… means to one day die, does it not?” Where is the freedom in the endless struggle to avoid the punishment of fear and suffering we confront when life’s empty, frantic quest to multiply is threatened? What is the purpose of perpetuating one’s days of suffering without ever knowing if it means anything at all?

Armin’s answer is not convincing or changing Zeke’s mind as such, rather he is merely reminding Zeke of what he has already experienced, of what he already knows, unconsciously: that somehow, there is meaning in feeling the wind against your skin, in the repetition of throwing and catching a baseball back and forth with someone you call family.

Or to be more precise, perhaps there is no logical meaning in these moments at all, but that doesn’t stop these moments from being meaningful. 

“in our bewilderment we see no rule by which to guide our steps day by day; and yet every day we must step somewhere.”

It’s not a perfect answer; perhaps it’s not an answer at all. Yet it is enough to convince us to take another step forward, because unlike logical reasoning or Zeke’s scientific rationalizations, the feeling of life in such trivial moments carries an irrefutable personal certainty of gratitude for being alive.

SNK generally prioritizes the grand over the trivial or strictly ‘relatable’, but we get here something so purely and immediately human, grounded in an intimate, even mundane way that is interwoven with the cosmic realm in which they are having this conversation.

It feels indeed that put upon a simple leaf, of a baseball, is a uniquely cosmic weight, as the weight of everything, all this history and eternity, is resting on this quiet reflection.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour

- William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

TG:re Volume 5 Extra Translation

※

Like mortar in a mixer Three heads, melted thickly

Miracles have been used up long ago and lie cold on the concrete

Killed I killed Have I killed?

I was losing my grasp on reality, when the eyes of the heads opened wetly like genitals, to say hello

The heads whispered in Mother’s voice

“you” “you” “you”

“you” “how did you fool yourself into thinking you would be loved” “when you’re so ugly”

“uoh……..”

Gentle abuse, repeated over and over in “that box” The sky flickers, like traffic lights

Before I knew it, nine thorns sprang out from the chest cavity The diaphragm shivered, as if about to cry

(my body!)

I finally lost my grasp on reality, and I started climbing the steel tower The handrails I touched all turned black and rusted.

(I knew I was made of poison!) (No, it was that woman who was poison itself)

(climb, climb)

(not enough to die) (to a higher place, higher place, climb!)

※

The intestines of the dead, reaches out to the heavens from the tip of the steel tower.

The intestines were knotted together like rope. I desperately pulled the rope in.

squelch, squelch, squelch

The knot had grown long enough to reach the sun.

Tower of beloved corpses. With each pull I reach the peak, and the height increases. I cannot see the ground anymore.

The tower starts to shake widely, whispering in Mother’s voice.

“automatic failure at happiness, shapeless spawn”

(ahh)

“My dear lost one”

“Your parents failed in raising you”

And I died.

Image Source: Baidu

Major thanks to @makyun for helping me translate!

This is an aspect of the Marley arc that I really loved. Throughout the arc there was a constant opposition between fighting to defeat the enemy or for some grand goal and fighting for the sake of protecting what you already have. I first noticed it with Reiner, his aspirations and the mentality of constantly moving forward with a single minded focus, land him in a depressed and suicidal state upon finally fulfilling it. He moved forward expecting to find a "hope beyond the hell" and what awaited him was yet another hell.

Eren has been through something similar, but unlike Reiner who has given up on that mentality and is now moving forward for the sake of his loved ones, Eren continues to advance for the sake of freedom and destroying the enemy, because that's all he has. He's no longer sure of the worth of the advance but the only way he knows how to bring about a change is through this attitude. There's even his talk with his grandfather where Dr Jäger says, "If you are of good heart and mind, return to your family, you don't want to be left full of regrets." Eren hears this and he's aware of the possible fruitlessness of his endeavour but he continues to press on. I wish the aspect of Eren finally getting beyond the hell and the mental gravity of what he had achieved was more focused upon. Did he regret it? How does he feel? Was it inevitable? I wish these questions were explored more in the finale.

Even with Gabi and Falco we see this attitude. Gabi is driven by revenge and the need to be accepted, she's going down the destructive path Eren and Reiner took before, but what saves her is Falco, who moves forward for the sake of protecting her.

As you said these opposing qualities are also embodied in Zeke vs Levi, but I'm happy Zeke was finally able to overcome it and act for the sake of Humanity in his final moments. Zeke is a lot like Reiner in this aspect, he relentlessly moves forward to achieve a goal, the goal collapses, he becomes depressed and questions the worth of striving in the first place, then he finally learns the worth and beauty to be protected in the lives other than himself.

The change in attitude is reflected in Isayama as well, in an interview when questioned about Reiner he talks about how he used to think that as long as he drew SnK he wouldn't have to worry about perfecting other aspects of his life such as social skills, but upon getting married he had to take responsibility for his family, chores and other things. He had to broaden his horizon and that change in perspective is very evident in the Marley arc, that's why it's one of my favourites.

Edit: Actually Eren was fighting for Historia's sake as well, so can we really say Eren was in the wrong? Maybe Eren is just peculiar in that manner. Even if he's fighting for someone, his super destructive side will manifest, it probably even manifests before his desire to protect. It's quite telling that he was prepared to do a full Rumbling even before Historia's life was at stake. But it's also interesting that he almost gave up that desire because it could put Historia's life in danger. He only picks it up again when it not only stops Historia from broodmaring, but is the only way he sees of protecting her at all.

I really love how the last two pages of chapter 102 of SnK really sets up how diametrically opposed Levi is to Zeke, not juts in the context of them apparently going to battle with one another, but philosophically in terms of how the characters view what’s going on around them.

We see each of them facing off, surrounded by their comrades, and while Zeke tells his fellow soldiers “Don’t let them escape.  Wipe them out.”, Levi tells his fellows soldiers “Don’t you die.  You have to survive.”  

This really sums up in the most eloquent, economical way just what makes these two characters so vastly different from one another.  

Zeke, as we know, is in truth, in this moment, betraying his own comrades, and is himself largely responsible for the current situation, having planned all of it out with Eren, and because of that, is the direct cause of so many of his fellow comrades and Eldian’s being killed.  He shows no concern for Pieck’s or Porco’s well being here, only tasks them with killing the enemy, all while secretly planning on letting himself be captured.  We have to remember that Zeke is seen as the leader of the Warrior Unit.  He’s their captain, someone they rely on to guide them and have their backs.

On the other side, we have Levi, who’s been dragged into this fight, along with every other member of the SC, against their express will, by Eren’s independent actions, forcing them into this position of having to invade Marley in order to regain their one and only real defense against invasion.  And Levi’s instructions to his squad here are the exact opposite of Zeke’s.  He tells them, above all, and more important than anything, to stay alive.  His number one priority is keeping his comrades safe.  He orders them to survive, just like he did back in Shinganshina.  

I think this is such a brilliant moment that really encapsulates why these two character’s are so powerfully opposed to one another within the narrative.

Zeke doesn’t really care about his comrades, not enough to prioritize their safety over his goals, and not enough to be honest with or trust them.  He sees them as tools.  They trust him implicitly, and he uses that trust to manipulate them into achieving his ultimate ends, not caring who among them pays for that with their lives.

Levi is the exact opposite, prioritizing the lives of his soldiers above wiping out the enemy, instructing them to survive, no matter what, telling them they HAVE to survive.  More than anything, he wants them all to get out of there alive.  His soldiers also trust him implicitly, and Levi does anything but betray that, instead going out of his way to remind them that their lives matter, and being himself with them 100% of the way, putting trust in them, and showing they can trust him in turn.

It’s a really great and important moment, I think, really defining the opposition of these two characters.