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So I only started reading the manga after this latest season blue-balled me with that cliffhanger, so I'm not up to date on how earlier chapters differ from the show, but what the gently caress was the point of Falco? The anime introduces him with him remembering swinging around killing titans, which had me convinced he was going to inherit the Armored Titan and get Reiner's memories, but then the manga said only the Attack Titan has non-linear memories, so I was sure he was going to get that Titan. But after all that he becomes a bird and ends the story getting supplexed? I had some real doubts watching season 4 when I noticed that Falco, Gabi, and Reiner seemed to become the main characters (I was cool with this) only to suddenly vanish for a large chunk of the later episodes. I was sure that Eren remembered meeting Falco and he was going to gift the Founding titan to him since the kid was full of empathy and might be able to bridge the gaps of understanding. And now I see that there really wasn't a point to Falco. I'm sure people have been posting their manga theories here for awhile, so sorry is this ground has already been trod. Like, I was also convinced that the whole series was a much later Attack Titan host recalling past lives as he or she contemplated a turbulent and important time in history and that the strange non-linear memories (Eren Kruger remembering Mikasa and Armin, Falco remembering being in 3D gear, Eren remembering the titan attacks the day they happen) were all an artifact of some future host not being able to fully pull apart all the lives they lived. But nope, it's just time travel and Krueger & Falco's stuff makes no sense. EDIT: I think I was really convinced that Falco was the protagonist of this later arc only for him to not really be relevant. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Apr 8, 2021 |
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Apr 8, 2021 17:06
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It's actually very hard to write a story with a protagonist that has future-vision and keep the story interesting for the reader. Frank Herbert is obviously the God of this type of writing and he managed to keep it going by putting some pretty strong conflicts in the way of the omniscient protagonist. Most people forget that the crux of Dune is that Paul is desperately trying to prevent The Jihad for most of the book, but at every point he has to pick between a path of extinction or taking another step towards Jihad. He keeps hoping for most of the novel that at a later point he can move things back off course, but at the very end he suddenly sees with clarity that even if he dies at that moment that the Jihad now cannot be prevented. End of story. Once things get set in stone there isn't more story to tell. The second Dune book is interesting because Paul does find an out from his terrible future, but that literally involves loving over his son with a worse one...which he willfully does because he chickens out and doesn't want to follow through with his atrocities. It's good storytelling because even with the power of prophecy, there is still a good conflict.
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Apr 8, 2021 17:37
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Nah, that was significantly better with the added pages. The overarching message of the story appears to be that the cycle of violence cannot really be broken, and all one can do is live their best life and not try to 11th dimensional chess plans on the effects of their actions lifetimes into the future. It doesn't matter if Eren kills only 80% or 99% of humanity because even if only the people of Paradis are left then they'll still find a way to fight and kill each other. This goes all the way back to Pixis on the wall early on, talking about how even trapped in the walls human have failed to put aside their differences. The Titans are just a metaphor for the basic human drives of violence and genocide, in that they are never truly wiped out and no amount of effort will ever completely remove that curse. Hence the tree growing back in the last panel, showing that as time passes the lessons of history will be forgotten and we'll continue the old cycles. I think people might not like the message being: "People are poo poo and cannot change." But he does appear to nail it with those last panels. EDIT: It also hammers home that Eren WAS wrong. What he did was monstrous and also pointless, because his actions did not cure humanity of the cycle of violence OR the titans in the end.
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May 18, 2021 21:50
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LordMune posted:Not that that is a point a work isn't allowed to make, but lol at claiming it's not handled poorly or doesn't represent a fundamentally fascist worldview Yeah, I'm not touching the Fascism argument with a 14-meter pole, because ultimately everyone arguing on either side is approaching it from a Western view while I get the sense AoT is very Japanese in its politics on race and government, which are very different than the Euro-American ideas of Fascism. That being said, I do think the people continually posting that "fascism bad!" meme are seeing a message where there isn't one. I honestly think the entire thing is a commentary on violence and tribalism generally rather than fascism or military-rule specifically.
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May 18, 2021 22:42
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So I'm assuming you guys already read the interview where Isayama mentions he added in Eren's, "No! I don't want her moving on past me!" at the last moment and never originally planned to have Eren acknowledge Mikasa.
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Jun 7, 2021 22:35
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The story was very cool and I enjoyed most of the ride, but to say he wrote a perfect narrative and intentionally hosed it up is to be blind to all the little plot holes and rear end pulls throughout the series. In his defense, most these only appear in hindsight, but they're still there. I think I mentioned these in the anime thread ages ago, and was told that I should just be patient by manga readers because all would be explained (it wasn't! ). The biggest issue starts after the basement and time skip, but that's not the only places where he wrote himself into corners or didn't think things through. The entire back half of season 3 with Bert/Reiner/Zeke vs the Scouts is some of the most exciting poo poo in the story and it also makes no sense at all when you know WHO the enemy really is. As soon as the warriors located the host for the Coordinate the need to be stealthy was over. Marley had no reason to keep dressing up their dudes in medieval outfits and slap goddamn wooden crates onto the Cart. We literally saw Marley troops dressed in full chemical weapon gear as far inland as Connie's village. We know that Marley could get their human troops that far in. We know that Marley knew Eren was coming to seal the gates. They could have slapped a goddamn panzer unit on the Cart, dropped gas bombs on the whole city and wiped out the Scouts with machine guns, and captured Eren without needing to gently caress around with a silly game of Titan chess. I mean, it was fun as gently caress to watch, but it doesn't really make sense. That's just one of many things that stand out (Bert's nuke, Ymir being unnecessarily coy) as not making sense if you actually know the big secret.
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Jun 8, 2021 22:03
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We could probably argue back and forth about the tactical realism of catching Eren, but my overall point was that a large nation state with early 20th century weaponry, which considered capturing the Coordinate as its foremost military objective could probably have figured out some way to capture Eren that didn't depend on Zeke throwing boulders. They had a fair amount of time between the end of season 2 and the back half of season 3 to set a trap, but the plot required that we have no clue this was a 20th century world so we ended up with Zeke using a very primitive trap (which was cool as gently caress) because the audience needed to be fooled (but there was no reason for Zeke to actually want to hide technology from the Scouts). EDIT: The whole point of bring stealthy was because they didn't know where The King was, and they wanted to surprise him. Once they knew the Coordinate was in the hands of a clueless child AND he was coming right to them, stealth wasn't really a concern anymore. I'm not even saying that they need to bring an army, but the loving Cart could carry a tank on its back for crying out loud. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Jun 9, 2021 |
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Jun 9, 2021 00:03
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EDIT: Oh my God, what a terrible page snipe. I feel like I've posted this somewhere before, but I guess it wasn't in this thread, so here I go again. The entire fascist/anti-fascist argument is fun and all, but both sides are basically reading their Western views of certain imagery into a very Japanese piece of fiction. The fact is, the average Japanese person (including manga authors) does not have a very firm cultural connection to the European theater in WW2, in the same way that most Westerners don't have a good connection to the crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army during the same war. To give an example on both sides of the coin... - French Canadian UFC fighter George St-Pierre came out for years wearing a karate gi with the Japanese Imperial War Flag on the back. This went on until a Korean MMA fighter finally penned him an open letter describing the things the Japanese did to Korea and explained that in Asia that flag is seen as offensive as the Swastika might be seen by Westerners. George St-Pierre immediately stopped wearing that gi after that. - Meanwhile in Asia (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdKXiYnFbw) My point here is that some Japanese artists like the German aesthetic, and culturally they don't always recognize the deeper subtext of that aesthetic. I could write 1,000 words for Full Metal Alchemist here, but I think you get the point. The use of the armbands, etc. might have just come off as cool symbolism to use, while the connections to Jewish people and things like Blood Libel, etc, likely didn't really cross his mind in the same way as it would for someone who grew up reading a Western-centric version of WW2 history, and who is more aware of the anti-Semitic bullshit. I think Isayama wanted to kind of write a long-form essay on how he should feel as a modern Japanese citizen about the crimes committed by Japan against mainland Asia (Korea especially) during WW2. Does a person born after these crimes are committed owe something to the victims? Are the people who were harmed right to hate the descendants of the people that harmed them? Do the descendants of the people that were harmed have a right of grievance against people who never committed the crimes themselves? Does being ignorant of these crimes absolve a population of the crimes? He put a distance between himself and the subject matter by making the nations involved very foreign, and he used German/middle Europe themed aesthetics because that's kind of the thing it seems manga writers default to when they want to write about something that's maybe a little too close to home in the psyche of the author/readers. In the end Isayama kind of throws up his hands and says "I don't loving know, humans are messy and hosed up." So really, he doesn't give any kind of final lesson, and just seems to have wanted to get questions down on paper. Okay, feel free to flame me now.
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Nov 18, 2021 09:25
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They're not going to change a thing. The ending went over fine in Japan and this manga/anime was made entirely for a Japanese audience. The fact it's so popular worldwide is a testament to its quality but will have zero effect on how it ends.
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Jan 12, 2022 18:23
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chiasaur11 posted:Yeah, that was my default assumption, which is why the interview having a bit of talk about how there's definitely not going to be anything new in the anime ending, don't think about it, moving on was an eyebrow raiser. I consider the extra epilogue pages to be the original ending that Isayama had in mind, and I cannot fully explain why they were not included in the original final issue. The epilogue pages actually thematically fit the rest of the story and completely changed my opinion of the ending. I never disliked the events in the original ending (but I was also never invested in the fascist/antifascist debated), but I did feel like it was missing a final piece. The epilogue pages were very clearly that piece. Isayama wanted to write a story about the responsibility each generation has in atoning for the sins of their ancestors, while also writing a rather cynical take on human nature. He basically says his peace in three places: 1) when Pyxis mentions that even within the walls humans still fight, 2) when Erwin tells Pyxis that humans will stop fighting each other when there is one or less remaining, 3) when Sasha's father says that its up to adults to keep the children out of the forest lest they wander in it and die (while forgiving his daughter's murderer) only for a young girl to try and kill Gabi anyway. The ending of the manga completely matches these themes. EDIT: That theme being that there is no long-term solution to human violence, that titan will always come back, but we can work with those around us to try and keep a short peace and hope that our children will learn the lesson (but they likely won't).
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Jan 13, 2022 08:43
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The recap at the start of this episode was weird as poo poo because it wasn't abbreviated at all. Just the exact same scene word for word. Very bizarre editing choice.
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Jan 16, 2022 23:04
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chiasaur11 posted:...I'm curious what different thing the anime is planning to do... They're not changing anything. The negative reaction to the ending is purely among Western audiences. No one involved with the manga/anime has any reason to want to change it.
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Jan 24, 2022 07:50
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serious gaylord posted:Even still, there were beats there where I thought it might be recoverable. I thought at one point that the giant Titan was going to have been an offshoot of the Warhammers power and Eren was back on Paradis about to enact his actual plan with Historia. I'm pretty sure there was even fake leaks that showed that and that might have saved the final chapter. Mind telling us what you thought Eren's "real plan" was? Or what the original ending was? Because if anyone here happens to have the answer to the question of how to end all human conflict, then please let the world know. Otherwise, understanding that there isn't a good answer to the question is the whole point of the story. But seriously, I really want to hear how people thought it should have ended. So far every fan idea for the end I've seen suggested on the internet has been shallow crap or people inserting their preferred ship (Eren/Historia). But I'd love to hear an ending that is superior to the one we got. Go ahead. EDIT: I should point out that I didn't follow this thread until the last chapter came out. So I never saw Historia as having any narrative purpose left, and was kind of surprised at how obsessed people here were with her. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Jan 24, 2022 |
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Jan 24, 2022 20:24
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Crespolini posted:People are for sure gonna tell you a whole lot of stuff when you're being so so fair minded and receptive. Absolutely. Listen. I keep hearing this refrain that Isayama either last minute changed the ending (either on his own or was forced to), or that a much better ending was possible and the one he wrote was somehow not consistent with the themes of the story. I'm genuinely open to hearing what people think it was originally going to be. The ending we got was unpleasant, cynical, and very dire, but also consistent with the themes of the story up to that point. Leading up to the end, I kept seeing people say that Isayama had decided to "soften" the ending a bit. I honestly don't think that happened, but I'd love to know what the "harder" ending was. hatty posted:I wanted less big worm, and thought that flattening 80% of the world but the entire cast(except Hange) surviving was lame. Eren pretty much won even though he lost, it all felt pointless maybe that’s the point I dunno There were always six characters that were the main cast of the story (Eren/Mikasa/Armin & Jean/Connie/Sasha), Isayama just did a really good job of hiding that they were the main cast early on by introducing really fleshed out side characters that then died quickly without warning. It works to make you think any of those second 3 could die at any point, but eventually you realize that they're the main characters and are plot immortal (until they're not!). As for Eren winning everything, here is my take. Right now I'm watching this show with people who have not read the manga. There are also lots of Youtube reactors watching this show. There is an overwhelming amount of "gently caress yeah!" at Eren being about to trigger the Rumbling. Everyone was pumped when it seemed like he had outsmarted Zeke and was going to release the Wall Titans. This may not be the sentiment amongst people posting in these threads, but out in the wild it hasn't clicked in everyone's brain that they've been tricked into cheering on a genocidal maniac. We are only a few episodes away from a scene where screaming civilians are trying to climb a cliffside, passing their children and babies up the mountain to save them from stampeding titans. Followed immediately by a slow zoom in as a titan crushes the head of a screaming child. Within the story Isayama is telling, Eren has to succeed, because he is trying to hammer it home that this is horrible and that you can't solve human conflict by just killing everyone on the other side.
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Jan 24, 2022 20:54
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There are still people clinging to the Eren train. I'm personally waiting to see who is still on it after they air the titan feet literally crushing babies and small children as they scream in terror and pain (if they even air it that way).
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Jan 31, 2022 07:42
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Kissing Historia's hand unlocked all of HIS future memories and showed him the path he was going to take. Making Zeke take him down memory lane was when he was able to start loving with all the previous Attack Titan hosts. Everything happens in an instant in The Paths, so he had unlimited time to work his way backwards and force his will onto all the previous Attack Titans. Eren is basically the King Fritz of the Attack Titan, forcing his philosophy onto all the other inheritors backwards through history. Even the "Keep moving forward" mantra is his own that he then forces on all the other hosts all in an instant in The Paths.
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Jan 31, 2022 22:38
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Perfect Potato posted:One reactor actually called the reference which is pretty impressive if he's not a stealth manga reader If you're talking about YaBoyRoshi those three are impressively observant in almost everything they watch. They watched the recent loving Dune movie completely blind and managed to follow the plot threads and themes despite never reading the book. It's actually pretty wild because they act so silly all the time, but they're pretty good and picking up details on the fly.
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Feb 14, 2022 09:15
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Dude, Mikasa literally aggros on any woman that gets too close to Eren because she is a creepy co-dependent person in a one-sided toxic relationship. She is aggroing on Annie in the first story arc, to the point that she is gleeful when she realizes that Annie is a titan and she can cut her up freely without consequence, and this is purely because Eren is becoming friends with Annie and learning judo/bjj from her. Eren is presented time and time again as being completely asexual. There is even a point when the other scouts are making fun of Marlo for ditching Hitch to join the Scouts, and Marlo talks about how Hitch tried to make him reconsider and he thought less of her for it, and the rest of the Scouts are like, "You loving MORON!" except for Eren who literally says that he doesn't understand why they're mad at Marlo. You're doing a weird thing where you are focusing really hard on tiny inconsequential details to reinforce a theory you already know is wrong because the literal end of manga clearly spelled out that it was wrong. Historia has literally had scenes cut from the back part of the anime that were present in the manga, her VO hasn't had a single line of dialogue, the show is continuing to focus on things like Eren lingering on the memory of young Mikasa receiving the scarf. The first two episodes of this part of the season ended and opened focused entirely on Mikasa and whether she still wanted to help Eren. The show is literally telegraphing the same end as the manga, and you are focusing on a minor animation difference and concocting an entire (already debunked) theory. EDIT: Actually, I should clarify. The manga didn't spell out that the Historia/Eren baby thing was untrue. Rather, it didn't even acknowledge it, because it was never even a thing that was remotely true and there was no actual evidence it was true and I doubt it was even a thing he was considering. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Feb 18, 2022 |
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Feb 18, 2022 08:34
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As has already been mentioned, one of the excellent things about the "mysteries" of this show is that the hints were all there in plain sight when you go back and re-watch it. The story usually flat-out tells you something, but you're not sure what the context is until seasons later when it finally clicks into place. We are shown Historia is pregnant. Almost immediately afterwards we are shown the Military Police discussing the specific circumstances of how she became pregnant, including who the father is. 95% of the people who saw that just took it in and moved on, but there is a subset of people who seem to think, "All of that is a lie." And then from there they decided not only was it a lie, but that Eren was secretly the father. But there was no evidence for even the first part of this assumption, much less the second one. Who fathered Historia's child never comes up again at any point. There is never any indication further in the narrative that the story we're told by the Military Police is untrue. In fact, there is almost no Historia at all as the story draws to a close. Almost every piece of evidence mentioned when people bring up this theory could be applied to any other character. Mikasa tries to get in the way of any friendship Eren has with other women. Jean, Connie, and Sasha are all shown working at the orphanage. Eren refers to all of the main six as being super important to him, and he never wants to sacrifice them. Historia is not as an important character past the time skip. She is a tertiary character, and not one of the main six (Eren, Armin, Mikasa, Jean, Connie, Sasha). Like most of the tertiary characters, she's interesting and has a cool narrative arc, and that's a credit to the writing of the story. But, like all the tertiary characters, once her narrative arc is over she doesn't really play much of a role in the story. Her narrative ends when she becomes queen. From there she is a background character. A lot of people here think that she was more important, but there was never any proof of this.
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Feb 18, 2022 17:52
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mightygerm posted:Eren puts all of them in the line of fire in Marley, and is at least partially responsible for Sasha's death. The characters even comment on this later! Not to mention he is cruel to Mikasa beats the poo poo of Armin. All of which, in the end was quite unnecessary to do. You're looking at it backwards, seeing what Eren achieves and thinking that's what Eren intended. Eren is a gently caress up. From childhood he pursued fights he couldn't win and dragged his two best friends into fights they didn't want. He was bailed out constantly by others around him, often causing harm to those people, and yet continued to act this way into young adulthood. Eren intended to protect his friends, but his actions actually harmed them in a variety of ways. Sasha gets killed (he never intended this and it actually surprised him). He attempts to help Armin and Mikasa by essentially emotionally and physically abusing them, thinking this will allow them to let him go, but just ends up really hurting them. He drags Connie and Jean to the edge of the world where they get turned into titans (I will concede that the original ending kept them as titans because it's thematically consistent with Eren loving all of his friends, but I think this ending was changed a long time ago and not the "last minute" change posters in this thread think happened). He thinks he is protecting Historia by having her get pregnant to avoid being turned into a titan, but the end result is her conceiving from a loveless union (look at her face when the flashback is shown of her approaching the farmer!), which ultimately is still hurting her in a big way. Asuron posted:Plus it wasn't a subset of people, it was the majority of readers. Ok, where? I've done a re-watch of this show with two groups of blind friends. The idea that he is the father has never come up. I've been watching reaction channels on YouTube, several with insightful watchers and also a few with manga readers sprinkled in or making up all the reactors. The idea has never been raised in any of these places. No one in the anime thread on this forum even brought it up until someone from this thread came over there and wrote: Pththya-lyi posted:Yeah, I definitely get the sense that she's pretending this guy is her baby daddy. And since Eren is the one guy we've seen her opening up to, it's got to be his. Then several more manga posters popped in there and pretended to speculate about it. I have only ever seen the idea in this thread, and since I read the manga until 138 without ever reading this thread, the idea never even occurred to me. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Feb 19, 2022 |
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Feb 19, 2022 02:08
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No Wave posted:There was a plan brewing at the time to have her eat the beast titan. This would have meant her early death as gaining titan powers means you die within 13 years. Eren gets Historia to come up with the idea of getting pregnant to avoid this fate as it would be dangerous for her to inherit titan powers if pregnant. Yeah, I was referring to the plan to make her the Beast Titan. I just summarized it poorly in a single sentence. Eren didn't want any of his friends to die in 13 years, so he needed a way to delay turning her into a titan.
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Feb 19, 2022 03:32
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There's an entire chase sequence where Keith and Magrath blow up a boat and Floch is basically chasing them like Nemesis and absolutely refuses to die. I think he blows a hole in the plane's fuel tank before finally dying, which is where Falco bird comes in.
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Feb 22, 2022 17:10
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Beefstew posted:Something Awful is almost completely loving dead, and the half of what remained left when Lowtax got outed for being lovely. The series still trends with hundreds of thousands of English tweets every Sunday. It's this. Whenever you find the time, visit your favorite bookmarked thread and try and count the number of unique users who have posted in it in the last 6 months. I decided to be a data nerd and did that for this thread. Despite being what would be considered a very active thread (outside of GBS that is), this thread has only had 104 unique posters since mid-October. Of those, most of them were single posts back in November when this thread briefly spiked in posts and 69 (noice) of the 104 names were added during that spike. Since then, the majority of posts is only 14 posters (including me!) posting back and forth. 104 unique posters might seem large, but the subreddit for the university I work at has a thread where someone lost their earbuds in the library that has more unique posters than that, and that Reddit thread has been around for 3 days, not 6 months! Almost no one posts on SA anymore in any subject. The Twitter and Reddit areas for discussing this show (and any other thing that there is to discuss) are ridiculously active right now. I called this thread an echo-chamber a couple of times, but I seriously mean it. SA has very few posters presently compared to basically anywhere else on the internet. EDIT: It's telling that the most active threads on SA right now are basically every three posts someone linking a Twitter thread, or are people re-posting Reddit posts they think are funny (the r/relationships thread being a good example).
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Mar 14, 2022 09:10
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I mean, I know that Lowtax didn't consider Reddit to be forums, but they absolutely are, and they are very active. But yeah, if you don't have TikTok and at least one social account like Twitter or Insta, then you're basically missing out on 75% of the internet discourse that's occurring in the world.
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Mar 14, 2022 09:26
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EDIT: I was in a bad mood. Editing that out.
Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Mar 14, 2022 |
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Mar 14, 2022 21:31
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Theoretically the Beast titan did pass to Historia's kid as Zeke dies without passing it along through consumption, and the next Eldian child born is Historia's kid born moments later. But none of that matters because the story ends immediately afterward with Mikasa killing Eren. Also, lol that there is still a lone poster refusing to give up the Historia/Eren theory even though a 3rd (and much improved!) version of the ending still definitively shows no sign of that kid being Eren's.
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Nov 6, 2023 08:56
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MJeff posted:Wasn't an earlier draft of the ending Eren telling his kid "You are free." or something? No. There was a preview image of a baby with the text "You are free" overlayed on it, and people assumed it was Eren talking to his kid, when in fact it was Grisha talking to baby Eren. It was just a misinterpretation based on people seeing the Eren/Historia connection everywhere. The ending was changed, yes. Originally the ending was much darker, and then Isayama decided to lighten it up a bit. My personal belief is that the characters transformed by the worm in the end did not turn back, but all titans simply died without releasing the people inside. There's absolutely no indication there was ever a relationship between Eren and Historia. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Nov 7, 2023 |
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Nov 7, 2023 06:38
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