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!
Thanks for opening up this thread!
Here’s my take:
I liked that the ending pulled many threads together and kept internal consistency in the story universe.
But I really disliked the change in thematic focus of the story.
To see why, it’s important to see where I’m coming from. I understand (and so does Robert McKee and other story masters) stories as essential versions of life. They’re not one-to-one mirrors. Rather, they establish a causality that can help us, as an audience, gain insight into the world. This doesn’t mean stories can’t explore harsh realities, like Stockholm’s syndrome, the motivations behind people who carry out genocide, or people whose situations force them to act against their will. But if those are the themes you’re going to explore, you must develop them properly. To see why I think they weren’t properly explored, let’s look at the themes.
The story starts out being about existential dangers, military and ethnic relations, nationalism, war, and freedom. Those are the themes that, at that point in the story, are properly explored. And, in particular, they set the stage for a story that will end saying something about those themes. Those could’ve been wonderfully touched upon if Isayama would’ve kept his original ‘everybody dies’ ending. Not only because it thematically makes sense, but because I personally agree with (and I think many perspectives of history agree with this point of view): nationalism and mindless motivations such as “‘freedom’ at any cost” are inherently destructive.
However, Isayama focused the ending on two main points: (1) Ymir was a slave because of love and (2) “to avoid the genocide you half-wholeheartedly and half-halfheartedly enabled, your expert soldier-friends have to stop you by killing you.” Notice that the themes here are self-destructive love, some sort of free-will/determinism discussion, and some sort of reliance on good friends who have to make hard choices?
The first and last theme (self-destructive love and self-destructive friendship), in my opinion, were not properly explored in the beginning of the manga. But the whole free-will/determinism is harder to pin down.
Eren bringing upon himself the death of all titans, which was part of his conception of freedom from the very beginning, is not only consistent, but I also really like it. But when you take agency out of Eren’s hands and you claim that it was his father, Grisha, who set him up for everything that’s to come, then it’s no longer Eren’s own making. His motivation and the causality that it followed lose meaning. It wasn’t a choice. And that’s why I don’t like the way that theme was explored. Sure, it’s tragic, but by reducing the weight of choice, it also loses meaning.
How to fix this? I suspect the story was, from the beginning, set up to properly deal with the original themes of the story. But Isayama changed his heart when Attack of Titan blew up. He was no longer going to kill everyone. And he did a lot of work to make his already-published story coherent with his new ending. However, in the process, he adopted themes that were not really resonating with the already-published story.
I say all of these things as if I didn’t like the ending, but that’s not entirely true. As I mentioned in the beginning, I liked that many threads were properly pulled together. Also, and perhaps more importantly, Isayama made sure to keep internal consistency in the story universe. Compare that to the debacle of GOT 🙄; AOT is a masterpiece in comparison.
Thank you for sharing your opinion!
I pretty much agree word for word with what you said, I’ll just add a small comment:
you claim that it was his father, Grisha, who set him up for everything that’s to come, then it’s no longer Eren’s own making
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.