This will be a discussion thread for Chapter 139 of the manga. Spoilers are allowed, as usual, up to the end of the story.
I especially urge you to keep things civil. I know how divisive this ending has been and I understand your feelings, but we must respect the will of the author who provided us with his life’s work. Criticism is obviously warranted and accepted, but express it in a polite and reasonable fashion.
Dedicate your hearts!
Thank you for sharing your opinion!
I pretty much agree word for word with what you said, I’ll just add a small comment:
Wasn’t it the opposite, though? Eren used Attack Titan time travel shenanigans to force Grisha’s hand and kickstart the whole quest. He also made Dina ignore Bertolt at the wall because he needed him alive for later (probably so Armin would eventually become the Colossal).
Another small criticism I have with the ending is that, in true japanese storymaking fashion, a lot of important motivations and plot details are left unexplained, as you said. So ok, Eren goes Lelouch and genocides 80% of humanity to make it so the survivors had to work together against him, uniting them in the process. Ok, sure. But then he just gets stopped and is like, “alright, good luck with the world now, I did my part”? He doesn’t properly explain his motivations to Armin and the others, I feel, in an adequate manner to help them cope with what happen and deal with what’s to come. The final chapter was very much, as you put it, focused on the emotions of the moment and not so much on the implications and consequences.
Additionally, I feel like Isayama wasted a perfect opportunity for an aesop about racial relationships. Not that that would make the story bad, stories don’t need an aesop to be good (although it helps, as you said, if they relate to some fundamental aspect of real life and can serve as a teachable experience), and certainly not one about such a contentious subject nowadays that could land him in trouble if done the wrong way, but I feel like the obvious plot point was kind of missed here. So, Eren dies and all titans cease to exist. Great! Muller is still suspicious of the Eldians he was just pointing guns at not long ago, as expected, and Armin talks him down by saying that Eldians no longer have the power of the titans. This is great, people are getting along, although I feel like it’s a bit of a cop out. So Eldians are accepted in society now… because they’re the same as everyone else?
I feel like a much better ending would have been if the power of the titans hadn’t disappeared and, still, Eldians were accepted despite of who they are, because of what they did to stop the end of known civilization. I feel like the Armin vs Muller scene was even set up beautifully to be a parallel to that time when Armin argued against the paranoid Garrison captain whose name I don’t remember, back in Trost, when Eren had to partially transform to shield him and Mikasa from the cannon. In that case, despite Eren being a titan, Armin managed to use his superior intellect to convince the rest of “humanity” that they could be a benefit, and not a detriment, to them.
Oh. You’re pointing out something I kinda missed: that Eren did have a lot more incidence in the world than I previously thought! So that brings meaning back into the center stage, and it’s a self-induced tragedy! Cool! I like that!
But, as you rightly point out, the story still has the issue of ‘having my friends stop me from committing genocide’ on one hand, and on the other. And, beyond that, you went into something I thought about but didn’t go into in my original post: what is the story saying about ethnic relations and how this particular problem got solved? Like, yeah, a lot of people died and Eren dies, but the very last scenes of the story, Eren’s grave aside, are not so ambivalent; they are positive! What am I supposed to take from that? This doesn’t mean that stories have to be happy children’s stories, but the problem of “Eldians being accepted despite of who they are” is thrown to the trash when Isayama destroyed titans.
I agree with you on that.