arlingtonpark

[arlingtonpark]

So.

This is going to be a different tack from my usual post. Some sentimental and personal stuff under the cut.

I always worry about coming off as unengaging. It's difficult to be for a number of reasons.

I suffer from really bad anxiety. One of my friends is badly anxious themselves and they've told me I'm even more anxious than them.

But recently I've started to realize a big reason for my lack of engagement with people is ADHD. I just don't have much wherewithal and it's been a very invidious issue for me.

I care so much about people and being able to have a bond with them. I want to hear what people have to say and be part of the conversation. I want to engage with and be engaged with.

Part of lacking wherewithal that comes with ADHD is not being able to have the foundation needed to engage with people. It's a two-fold problem: even when I have the wherewithal to engage with people, I almost never have anything to engage them with.

People usually bond over shared interests. But having ADHD makes it a struggle to have any depth of interest in any sort of media. It doubly sucks because I really admire people who can have Thoughts and Opinions about things.

The end result is that I'm in a place where I want to engage with people but I don't really have the background needed to really build rapport with anyone. And that makes building friendships through fandom almost impossible because only having shallow conversations with a fan goes against the whole point of fandom.

And of course struggling to familiarize myself with a story or media makes it difficult to have any enthusiasm that might make up for not being very conversational.

Another element is that having ADHD is like being a rock. Rocks are inert. But I find that having someone to bounce off of can get this rock moving.

That's more of a curse, though, because rocks don't always appear movable. I do try to signal to people I have an engaging side, but I've always struggled to do it.

The last piece of the puzzle is that before I started reaching out to people, which was in my late teens/early 20s, I didn't even really know I wanted to socialize.

Anxiety was definitely a big part of that, but having ADHD really made it worse.

The thing about people with ADHD is that we're inert. I could stare at the wall all day and occupy my mind with the same repetitive thoughts I always have, and I could stay in that holding pattern for what feels like forever.

So I spent the first 20 or so years of my life not having friends and not even really being conscious of how lonely I was. I had interests, growing up, but there was never a social component to those interests. In my teenage years I started lurking on a small number of message boards, but I never even considered being part of the conversation.

What this means is that a big obstacle to forming bonds with people is that I literally don't know how. People form their identity through social experiences, but I've been so asocial my whole life I don't feel like I've entirely found myself yet.

Like.

For example, I know people share image macros and memes in public, but it's recently occurred to me that people share them in private too. This is a real duh moment, but it's another example of being like an inert rock: I learn best by following other's example. It doesn't occur to me to do something until I see other people do it.

The usual pattern I've fallen into is seeing a friend do a social thing and then adding it to my social repertoire.

This has all been pretty angsty, but I promise the happy part comes now.

This week I was part of a group chat with a couple of friends I managed to make. We used it to talk while watching something together.

I've never actually done that before. I've chatted with people one on one, but never as part of a group.

The experience really meant a lot to me.

It was a real step forward for me. I love my friends.

And I learned stuff, too. When you're so socially inept you don't even know if you're doing this whole human interaction thing right, seeing how others do it is comforting, in a way.

I feel anxious about there being something missing from my interactions with people and it causes me to doubt if I'm really friends with them.

Seeing people I know are friends casually interacting with each other, and seeing it's not much different from what I've experienced, has been very reassuring.

All the same, I still don't have much experience engaging with people.

I've gotten a lot better these past few years, but I've only recently gotten past the point where my main tactic for starting and carrying a conversation is the most basic one possible: bluntly asking my friend a question.

Nothing wrong with asking questions, but the format gets tired after a while and I want to learn to engage with people with more variety.

For now, I choose to believe this comes from a place of self-discovery rather than self-loathing. I feel like more of a person when I engage with people in a way that has more personality.

[arlingtonpark]

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury - Prologue Review

To me, Gundam is just a show I watched as a kid because it was on. I only have some scattered memories of one of the shows, and, I think, a movie. I don’t even know their names.

This is all to say the newest Gundam wasn’t particularly on my radar. The title was the most enticing thing I saw about the series.

“The Witch from Mercury”.

It’s very reminiscent of the Red Baron. Very intriguing.

The fact it has a female main character, even more so.

And the fact the writer for this show is the mastermind behind Code Geass…also intriguing, but not in a good way.

It’s been two months since the premiere, and I’m completely engrossed in this series. The story being told is just so fascinating, I just had to write about it.

Where else to start but at zero?

…

…I am really worried about Eri.

No, not because her home was destroyed, and her family torn apart by armed conflict.

 And no, not because she’s seemingly being raised by a vaguely cultish research group.

I worried about the parallels that are drawn between Eri and the Gundam Lfrith.

In the very first scene we’re introduced to Elnora, Elnora’s surrogate mother, Dr. Cardo (-snickers-), and finally, Eri herself, Elnora’s toddler-aged daughter.

Except not finally, because there’s a second daughter we’re introduced to: the gundam. The Lfrith. The little sister to Eri’s big sister.

I get that the staff are just analogizing the gundam to an infant for Eri’s sake. They want to convey how they see the Lfrith to a toddler and teaching a baby to walk does a good job of that.

But that’s the thing. They’re making that analogy because they want to convey how they see the Lfrith. By comparing the Lfrith to an infant, they’re clearly indicating that they have a certain level of affection for it. Not exactly like what a mother would have to a daughter, but comparably so.

Which is concerning because this baby uses an experimental mind-machine interface that lets the pilot control the mobile suit with their mind.

Oh, and I probably should have mentioned this sooner, but the reason this tech is experimental is because it’s already proven to be deadly and they’re trying to develop a version that’s…actually useful.

“Useful” in the sense that it kills people while sparing the pilot.

Because the Lfrith, this thing they call their “baby”, is a war machine.

They are explicitly and knowingly trying to perfect a weapon of war under the delusion that it’ll pave the way for non-military applications. Apparently.

Yeah, I’m not pulling for the little guy here.

The tech the Lfrith uses is called the GUND format. It was developed mainly by the Vanadis Institute to compensate for the medical issues that come with extended time in space. But when Vanadis was bought out by another company called Ochs Earth, GUND was retooled as a weapons system.

The GUND format kills the pilot by overwhelming their neural capacity. Controlling cyborg prosthetics is doable, that’s what GUND was made for; controlling a giant robot suit is taxing to the point of death.

This is the machine the engineers at Ochs affectionately liken to an infant.

This is concerning, to say the least. The GUND format isn’t comparable to something like mustard gas, where unleashing it comes with the risk of backfiring on to you. Piloting with the GUND format will kill you.

Using the GUND format doesn’t even necessarily guarantee any gains on the battlefield. GUND format equipped mobile suits, called GUND-ARMs, are clearly superior to manually controlled mobile suits, but so what? Just using the GUND format kills you; all your enemy has to do is run out the clock. The enemy doesn’t even have to kill you. If they survive long enough, you’ll kill yourself eventually.

And literally dying is an onerous burden to bear in a fight. Imagine an army where every single soldier has to fight with an untreated broken rib. Now imagine if the soldiers are like this because the higher ups did it to them before the fight started.

The GUND format is more like a gun with a barrel that fires a bullet in opposite directions, one at your opponent, and maybe it hits them, and the other at you, and it definitely hits you.

The GUND format is like a crooked game of two-player Russian roulette. You pull the trigger, and your partner has an 83% chance of living, and you have a 100% chance of death.

The researchers at Ochs want to make the GUND format serviceable as a weapon, which…ok, humans gonna human, but it’s disturbing how much faith these people have that a weapon will be the foundation for a better future.

Humans, unfortunately, are often driven to make big innovations when under threat of war. But humans also don’t make big innovations in the art of killing outside of war. No normal person relishes war, and newer, better ways to kill people aren’t concocted for shits and giggles.

It’s crazy how enamored these scientists are with their robo-lovechild. What peaceful applications would a perfected Lfrith even have? The GUND format is already in wide usage in the medical field. Based on the prologue, it seems the GUND format only turns deadly when called upon to make intricate and fast movements. Simple, basic movements seem ok.

What peaceful purposes require you to maneuver a giant robot with the nimbleness of a ballerina?

Supposedly, a serviceable GUND-ARM will provide people with a more adaptable body. What use does an average person have for a 60 foot tall robot body?

This is the biggest question mark of the whole prologue: what exactly do the researchers at Ochs think they’re trying to accomplish?

Right now, my money’s on Eri’s parents and Ochs in general being a kooky club of transhumanist zealots. GUND-ARMS kill, but for the brief time before your mind implodes, you’re able to do things that aren’t possible with your biological body. It’s also something you can’t do with your mind either, see the mind implode-y part, but that’s apparently a minor detail.

I think that’s what Dr. Cardo is alluding to when she talks about the Lfrith giving people a more adaptable body. The GUND format already establishes a mind-machine connection, the only reason it’s deadly is because using it as a weapon calls for superhuman maneuverability.

The GUND format’s use is limited to prosthetics and lifesaving medical interventions, but when Dr. Cardo talks about the future a perfected GUND format will enable, she talks as though she envisions everyone using this new GUND format by default.

Why tho?

We see people living in space just fine; the GUND format is only needed to run the cybernetics necessary to treat freak accidents.

Dr. Cardo analogizes humanity to a baby and the earth to a cradle. Outer space is the world outside the cradle and the GUND format is the assorted accoutrement humans need to survive outside this cradle. This is nuts because the analogy contradicts itself. It treats the earth as both a cradle and a dangerous place requiring special protection from. But if the danger humans face in outer space is comparable to the dangers of everyday life, then why would the GUND format become ubiquitous?

So, looking at all the facts and circumstances, the implication is that the Lfrith is being developed to create what is basically a race of superhumans. Ochs is developing the GUND format for the superhuman abilities it could confer, not because it has any sort of practical application.

Perfected GUND-ARMs could serve as a vessel for the human mind, effectively granting the pilot the superhuman abilities that only a robot body could provide.

If Ochs’ ambitions are even remotely like this, then they’re all nuts and Delling wasn’t wrong to shitcan the whole project.

Ordering the assault team to shoot to kill from the start is questionable, but given how sus everything about Ochs Earth is, I’m half expecting a reveal that Delling had intel to the effect that Ochs would resort to violence to stop themselves from being shut down.

The Lfrith has no peacetime application outside of dazzling nighttime airshows, meanwhile the inevitable military deployment of serviceable GUND-ARMs is threatening to incite an arms race.

I cannot emphasize it enough. Whatever peacetime applications the technology could have, the Lfrith is a weapon of war. The GUND format will be used in combat. The scientists at Ochs are working on a military research project. And they know it. But in spite of it all, based on what we see, they are stunningly passe, even vindictive, about the broader societal implications of what they’re doing.

These people are convinced their project will revolutionize humanity for the better in the face of all evidence and logic. They’re delusional. at. best.

So yeah, not ruling out the possibility of Ochs being ready to use violence to protect their “child”.

Now for the truly disturbing part.

Eri is an innocent, helpless little girl.

Said girl is living with her parents in what appears to be a wacky shack of deluded, transhumanism-obsessed dreamers.

Said dreamers are attempting to pioneer a form of mind-machine interface that will allow people to perform superhuman feats of endurance, speed, agility, &c.

In the prologue, Eri expresses jealousy of how much attention her “little sister,” (the robot battle suit) gets at her own expense.

I’m sure every sibling knows how Eri feels.

Your parents gave you so much attention, but then your little sister entered the picture and now your parents are lavishing her with attention while ignoring you.

Didn’t you wish you were them?

That you could be your little sister?

And what’s more, didn’t you wish you could do something that would make your momma proud?

That would make them notice you?

The first we see of Elnora is her trying to force a breakthrough with the GUND format in a test. When getting a callback from layer 33 didn’t work, she tried to force it by upping the permet score even after the computer warned her not to. Elnora apparently doesn’t handle pressure very well. When faced with opposition, she tries to force her way through recklessly.

I don’t trust her to ultimately say no to Eri volunteering herself.  

I think she’d say no at first, but if it starts looking like using her own daughter as a guinea pig is the easiest way to make progress, I think she would do it.

And that’s horrifying to think about.

[arlingtonpark]

Well, this was a crazy week for me.

👷‍♂️ Interviewed for some jobs.

🦴 Joined a TLT discord server (which, incidentally, @ghostmartyr is also in; not sure if they've noticed lmao). Also this server has a two week engagement trial period. For someone as anxious as me that's practically hazing! T_T

🏥 My chronic insomnia caught up with me (again) and I had to go to the emergency room for a severe migraine. Which faded while I was stuck in the waiting room. Got a good night's sleep last night and better now.

📉 The guy in charge of payroll at the company I do contract work for got sick, so my payment's have been delayed. 🙃

💩 Today's Friday the thirteenth.

That's one more week in the books. I'm really looking forward to what's in store for next week.

🎆🎆🎆🎆

[arlingtonpark]

So.

For those just waking up, last night an initial draft of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the latest abortion case leaked, and not only does it overturn Roe v Wade, but it seems to flat out abolish the right to an abortion completely.

I’ll try to write a more detailed post by tomorrow, hopefully when more details will be known.

[arlingtonpark]

Higurashi Meguri Chapter 5 Review

Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Gay.

Satoko is gonna Satoko amirite?

Everyone’s favorite gremlin has always been a flawed person. I know some fans find Satoko grating. Her pompous laugh is a love it or hate it kind of thing. And the way she’s always trying to play it cool even when people are just trying to look after her can be eye roll inducing. Her clinginess in the anime version of this story made sense, but also made people hate her more.

What I love about this chapter, and I liked Satoko before this, to be clear, is that Satoko is a witch now, all of her worst traits shine so bright it’s blinding, and…it’s actually incredibly fun.

Just look at her face at the start of the chapter. She’s high as a kite.

Satoko’s always been the smug type, but what’s especially fun here is that she’s not her usual, overcompensating style of smug. Whenever she’d make her pompous laugh, for example, I always got the sense that she was compensating for something. She would have this obnoxious, forced high class demeanor because she has a very lowly home life.

As a witch though, Satoko is smugger than ever, but, like, because she’s actually confident in herself. She’s not wrong to be brimming with confidence!

I don’t know if the manga will keep this aspect of the anime, but one thing that really stuck out to me when watching it is that no matter how powered up Rika became, it was always obvious she just wasn’t as good as Satoko.

Rika can buckle down and persevere, but Satoko is apparently so gifted that her inability to buckle down isn’t a problem for her.

If nothing else, her love for trapmaking shows she’s cunning and resourceful. Sure there’s cartoony shenanigans at play, but the underlying point is that she’s clever.

That’s more than you can say about Rika, who spent most of the OG series being a doormat for fate!

Rika’s…lack of creativity, shall we say, has become a running gag in the fandom, and deservedly so, seeing as she looped tens of thousands of times before positive action began to figure into her planning.

Satoko, on the other hand, is the hare to Rika’s tortoise: she can run laps around Rika so much, the race is her’s to lose. The tortoise only won because they were able to sneak up on their cocky opponent, and that’s pretty much the only way Rika’s ever going to win.

So the blonde gremlin is high on herself and she’s not wrong, exactly, and this is all such a joy to watch.

The way she scoffs at the idea of needing to be bailed out. The way she proposes to make her mission harder because that's more interesting. It’s a very rare level of arrogance, but she has the talent to back it up, and at least she’s not acting like a hyped up child anymore.

But despite this overconfidence, it’s pretty clear that Satoko has a death wish.

Satoko feels forsaken. Rika was her closest friend.

*ahem*

Friend.

Satoko and Rika shared a home with each other. And it was Rika’s home. Rika took her in and gave her a home and family. She did it because Satoko’s brother disappeared, and her abusive uncle fucking abandoned her.

Their bond is deep. But when they went to St. Lucia together, their love for each other was just as strong, but things became jumbled, to put it one way.

Rika got swept off her feet (not romantically, but she might as well have, as far as Satoko cared), Satoko failed out of school, Rika was her normal non-proactive self, and Satoko was her normal, emotionally volatile self. It was ugly. Neither of them were their best selves.

In short: Rika gonna Rika.

Satoko gonna Satoko.

Higurashi gonna Higurashi.

Then the Kyuubey of this story shows up, and basically sells her the Brooklyn Bridge. A fresh start! A chance to repeat what happened and build a better life for herself!

Except this new timeline ends with Rika dead.

And everything else Satoko cares about is dead.

Satoko can have the life of her dreams, but she has to repeat the timeline until things fall into place. So she does. On and on for who knows how long.

Now we come to this chapter.

Satoko is not in a good place.

She imagines a scenario where Rika is forced to kill her. The thought makes her happy!

Because in that scenario, Rika is finally paying attention to her. And even in death, Satoko will always be with Rika in her thoughts. Haunting her.

Altogether, it’s not far from reality. Lots of suicidal people entertain the thought. People may not seem to care about them, but if they were dead, then maybe, at least, they would be missed.

Higurashi was a notoriously brutal series. Now Satoko plans to force Rika to live through it again forever because even though it’s fucking Higurashi, at least they had each other.

Spoiler alert: Satoko had an abusive homelife in Higurashi!

She’ll probably weasel her way out of that scenario, but it’ll be real to Rika. Who does, in fact, still care about her.

To Satoko, it has to be the time of the OG series that she goes back to because it was after the OG series that St. Lucia entered into her life.

Gangs? Home wreckers? Mad scientists? Plagues? Child abuse? It doesn’t matter. Neither sleet, not snow nor rain nor hail will keep Satoko from enjoying her time with Rika.

If Satoko gets her way, she’ll loop through Higurashi with Rika until the end of time.

If not, then at least in death she’ll live on in Rika’s thoughts. #thepoweroftrauma

If she doesn’t want to die, she at least doesn’t care if she does.

Her life has been ruined across multiple timelines. She has nothing. She can’t hope for a better future. All she can do is wallow in the past.

All she can do is live out the little time she had with Rika before it all went to shit. Forever.

What’s great about Higurashi is how Real it is. There’s curses and spirits, time travel, and government conspiracies, but there’s always room for the more down to earth kinds of horrors.

An abusive uncle. Social ostracism. Your parents falling in with a bad crowd. Petty local politics.

There may be a mad scientist lurking about, but it’s always the everyday horrors that cause our main characters to spiral. The mundane gets its due.

There may be a Kyuubey lurking about, but it’s the existential terror of having to rebuild her life from scratch that causes Satoko to spiral.

It’s like staring into the abyss. Your whole life falling apart isn’t literally death, but to many people it’s tantamount. It’s traumatic.

She can’t handle it. She can’t accept it. So she’s retreating to her happy place where she can just be with the person she loves carefree. She’s running away.

Satoko can’t face the reality of being without her friends and family, and all her attempts to avoid that fate have failed.

What stings most is that it’s partly her own fault. Satoko…is very prideful. She doesn’t do vulnerability. This goes back to the fake high class demeanor I mentioned earlier. People tend to act the way they wish they were. Satoko wants to command people’s respect.

Rika, to her credit, actually did offer once to help tutor Satoko. But Rika’s new friends were within earshot. She couldn’t bring herself to admit she needed the help.

Now she’ll either retreat to her happy place or die.

I also suspect that playing this game of “trapping” Rika is itself a coping mechanism. Trapmaking is Satoko’s comfort zone. It’s how she expresses herself. That implies that she feels most like herself when she’s doing it.

Playing this inhumane game is how Satoko feels human. It’s something she knows she’s good at. Something she’s at home with. The act of trapmaking itself probably makes her feel better about herself.

At St. Lucia, Satoko was a loser, and Rika was practically a princess. Even though Rika flat out admits that Satoko is more clever, creative, resourceful, etc.

St. Lucia seems like a borderline boot camp style school. Rika can excel in that environment because she can listen to a lecture, digest the material, and pass a test. For all her resourcefulness, Satoko can’t. That’s why she floundered.

Trapping Rika shifts the field to an area where Satoko can excel. After her time at St. Lucia, it’s probably a welcome change.

So, yeah. That’s Satoko.

Now about Eua, the Kyuubey of our story. This is obvious, but really shouldn’t be left unsaid: she’s despicable.

Eua is worse than Kyuubey. Kyuubey had a mission and goal and didn’t care what was needed to achieve it.

Eua is just doing this for kicks.

She doesn’t want to be bored. That’s it.

She exploits Satoko’s weaknesses, lies by omission, leads her to the most “entertaining” conclusions, performatively gives her a shoulder to cry on. She pushes Satoko over the edge and happily indulges her worst traits.

Kyuubey just lies by omission. The misery that the magical girls go through is incidental to the system Kyuubey administers. To the extent that Kyuubey can be blamed for it, it’s because they simply don’t care.

Eua is Kyuubey if Kyuubey decided to speed up the process of falling into despair. And not because it’s to save the universe.

Because they think it’s hilarious. She earnestly collaborates with Satoko to get the game set up just so she can lounge on her godly couch and watch.

Sadly, the only one who cares less about Satoko than Eua is Satoko. Satoko is fully aware that Eua only sees her as a monkey to dance for entertainment, and she does not care. So long as Satoko can get what she wants, Eua can fuck around to her heart’s content.

Satoko is technically acting voluntarily. Indeed, she’s gleeful to be a part of this. Really, though, she’s been groomed and manipulated by Eua to follow this path.

She thinks she and Eua are partners in crime, but she’s just the lackey. In any good con, the victim thinks they’re the conman’s partner. By the time they realize they’re the chump, it’s too late. Eua is the conman, Satoko is the chump.

When Satoko gets to spend time with her old club, it’s like old times, but it doesn’t have to be just old times.

Her friends are still with her. Rika is still with her. She could open up about her problems, and with her friend’s help she can turn her life around.

Especially with Rika by her side. For all its brutality, Higurashi is about the power of love, and not in a cheesy kind of way! Friendship and teamwork are the key.

You can tell Rika and Satoko still love each other. They reconnect in this chapter. They talk and laugh and hug. They acknowledge how they each saved each other. In the OG series, Rika would find strength in Satoko’s smile.

The happy ending version of this moment would have them strip each other down and fuck. There was tension in that scene!

After banging, they can start working on fixing Satoko’s life.

She didn’t have to dance for Eua. She could have worked her way out of the hole she’s in. Somewhere along the way, Satoko was given a shovel and gleefully thought digging to China was the ideal solution.

That’s why she’s the chump: she’s making her life worse, and she doesn’t even realize it.

Satoko hasn’t completely lost her humanity. Yeah, she’s choking out her girlfriend, but she’s not cold about it. She’s pushing through tears. Sweat is running down her face. This is distressing for her!

When it’s over, she has a moment, just a moment, where she’s horrified at what she did. She’s trembling after the fact.

She’s making her life worse and on some level she knows it. But she’s so lost that she ignores every fiber of her being screaming at her “THIS IS WRONG!!!”

Satoko is lost, broken, and suicidal. There’s still some humanity left in her. Things are ugly now, but it can still be fixed.

I want her to get better.

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 139 Review Part II: On Attack on Titan and Nihilism

When reading SNK, it’s easy to think this story has a very uplifting message. 

The survey corps fights the titans and takes heavy losses. Every expedition is a blood bath. Numerous unnamed NPCs face gruesome deaths. The OG Levi Squad dies, Commander Erwin dies, Sasha dies. It’s a horrible toll. But if anything, their deaths are a source of strength rather than discouragement. To give up is to let them die in vain. To make their deaths meaningless. 

The efforts of our heroes is a collective one. No matter who may die, so long as there are others to continue the fight, it’s not pointless. When Erwin leads the charge against the Beast Titan, he surrenders himself to the needs of his men. His men need a leader who can execute a plan that will give humanity the best chance for success. Erwin takes that role at the cost of his life and dreams. He does it because it’s the right thing to do. 

For most of its run, SNK is replete with moments of people working together to achieve long odds, and even moments of stunning selflessness in pursuit of those achievements. 

That’s very uplifting. Even someone who can turn into a titan can’t carry everyone to victory. It has to be a team effort. When it matters, people can work together and when they work together, they can achieve great things. People will even sacrifice for that effort. They may not get to enjoy the fruits of their efforts, but at least their children will. 

And though most people would rather live a peaceful life, they will choose to take action when they see they’ve been collectively tricked or wronged. 

In sum, people are good. Humanity rises above their masters and makes a better world for themselves. Pretty uplifting, ngl.

For me, though, I think this is only half the story for SNK. 

All throughout the series, there’s a strong emphasis placed on not only needing to work together, not only needing to sacrifice, but needing to kill to win. 

SNK places a heavy emphasis on needing to kill. The slavers need to die, the people fighting for the government need to die, 80% of humanity needs to die. 

If I want to live, then other people need to die. It’s rough but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make. 

Obviously, except for Eren’s genocide, killing people has been justified in this series. Slavers were threatening your life; government soldiers were fighting for an evil government. Using deadly force is not wrong in those situations. 

The problem is that SNK is a story. The narrative is constructed by the author to convey an idea or to make a point. 

Not only are characters constantly called upon to kill their enemies, they are punished for hesitating. 

Eren’s hesitance to fight Annie forces the survey corps to fight her alone and they suffer heavy casualties. 

The 104th’s hesitance to kill Reiner in Shighanshina gives him enough time to signal the Beast Titan to throw the Bert Bomb. 

Every attempt by Armin to seek dialogue with his enemies fails. This trend reaches its absurd climax in the final chapter where, after Armin saying he was going to try to talk no jutsu Eren, it’s Eren who talk no jutsus Armin! 

And in the end, Marleyans and Eldians never were able to make peace. 

So the original assessment of the “uplifting” message of the story needs to be qualified: people will work together and even make sacrifices, but only if it’s for their tribe. 

I do not deny that sometimes there can be no peace. Sometimes circumstances are such that violence cannot be avoided. I don’t even deny that sometimes resorting to violence can be the right thing to do. I do not endorse passiveness. 

But in trying to expound his ideas on the nature of things, the author presents us with a funhouse mirror version of reality. 

People are not as tribalistic as the author presents. People can rise above their prejudices and see the humanity in their enemies. Empathy is what comes naturally to people; violence is purely situational. 

Not only is this just basic human nature, it’s just basic logic. Of course people are better off working together and supporting each other. If they weren’t then why would tribes like Eldians and Marleyans even exist at all? 

Why don’t we live in a world where it’s every man for himself? 

It’s because people realize, on some level, that however happy they may be going it alone, they can be even happier, even more prosperous with others. 

What SNK (and, frankly, a lot of people) miss is that the logic of this fact can be extended to all of humanity. If people are better off as a tribe, then why can’t all of humanity be a tribe? 

There’s no reason why it can’t, but the author seems intent on presenting a narrative where the stars align to preclude a peaceful outcome…in a way that implies that peace is ultimately impossible. 

“The world is cruel, but also beautiful.”

Not even that! The world isn’t cruel! The world has its cruelties, but fundamentally, we live in a good world. But Attack on Titan harps on this nihilistic message so much, it’s bizarre. 

The state of the world today is one of unprecedented international cooperation. Armed conflict today is limited to skirmishes and civil wars. To the extent that countries war with each other anymore, the scope of the conflict is not as destructive. 

Situations requiring deadly force do still arise, but they are far from the norm. Today’s world is safer than ever. 

If the story had remained fully divorced from our world, then I could have accepted its bleak message as a cautionary tale about needing to work together for the greater good. 

But after the battle of Shighanshina arc, the show started talking explicitly about racism and international relations, which of course requires the story to make certain presumptions about what our world is like. 

It’s too bad, then, that SNK’s presumptions about the world are fundamentally broken. 

You DON’T need to be strong to survive in our world. You need to be resilient, but strong? Powerful? No, you don’t need that. 

SNK harps on needing to be powerful to protect what you love the exact same way the NRA harps on needing ten different kinds of guns under your bed. 

Gotta have at least ten AK-47s locked and loaded under the bed with 5,000 rounds of ammo. You can never be too sure. You never know what’s lurking around the corner. 

Unfortunately, in the world of SNK, this deranged mantra is actually reasonable. Everyone in the SNK world is tribalistically unhinged, save for a select few like Hange and Armin. 

And the series may depict the tribalistic masses as baser than them, but the fact that people like Armin are so outnumbered in this world just proves my point that the story’s understanding of human nature is wrongheaded. 

Speaking of worldviews and SNK: in hindsight, Eren is a lot like an incel, isn’t he?

I’m only partially saying that to troll people. 

After the final chapter came out, lots of people were saying Eren had been reduced to an incel. Eren isn’t literally an incel, but I think those people are on to something. 

Incels and people who subscribe to that whole alpha male/beta male hierarchy tend to hate happy couples because it’s what they want but don’t. So they lash out. They see a happy couple and splash water on them before running away. 

Eren’s mindset, at least for the first couple of chapters, could have been read in a similar light. 

Eren’s obsession with freedom was him splashing water on people. Eren didn’t seem to have a fun childhood. He was an outcast and bullied often. We don’t see anyone else having to put up with that. 

So when he yells at people that they’re not free because the titans exist, what he’s actually doing is venting his resentment that most people don’t have to live in fear of bigger people stealing their lunch money like he does. 

That’s all just Eren trying to inflate the threat the titans posed, so far as anyone knew at the time, even him. Strange as it may sound, at the time, the bullies were a bigger threat to Eren than the titans were to humanity, since there wasn’t a massive wall shielding Eren from his tormentors. 

The Colossal Titan’s appearance was what they call a black swan event. It was unforeseeable. And the walls had stood for 100 years prior without worry. So in spite of the titan’s existence, the walldians’ presumed safety was not only reasonable, it was arguably a matter of fact. 

This reading would also indicate that Eren’s belief in a cruel world didn’t start with his mom, it started with the people who bullied him. 

This is only the first chapter I’m talking about here, though. The titans did breach the walls, the world really is cruel, and Eren fights for freedom because he was born that way, whatever that means. 

I only bring this up because that would have been far more interesting than the path the story took. 

Eren fights for freedom because that’s just how he is by nature. Reiner broke the wall because that’s just how he is by nature. People suck because that’s just how they are by nature.

When Eren was willing to give Reiner a pass for what he did on grounds of environment and history, Reiner counters that, really, he’s just a shitty person. It is from this that Eren finds commonality with him. 

SNK is a very deterministic series. Not only are people puppets on the strings of fate, who they are as people is immutable from birth. Mikasa may not be a slave to her “programming,” but that’s only because in a very real way, everyone is. 

I was convinced, in the first half of the series, that Eren was so obsessed with freedom that I thought the punchline would be that Eren was just coping with some insecurity. And…there was no punchline. Eren suffers insecurity as the series goes on, but his mindset and worldview doesn’t stem from anything. 

Eren doesn’t cry about how unfree he is because he’s an incel-esque brat who’s jealous that other people live happier lives than him, he’s just born that way. 

Eren isn’t incel-like because unlike an incel, Eren’s ideas about how the world works is actually correct. 

…

In hindsight, SNK is like an incel’s revenge fantasy that tried to explore what drives popular resentment, but just didn’t have the insight to pull it off. 

People don’t resent others because they were harmed by that someone. Not necessarily. And people don’t act because they were born a certain way. 

The concept of people defying what’s instinctive to them is at least acknowledged by the series, but I don’t think it ever actually happens, aside from situations where someone has to murder someone else against their own visceral disgust. When it’s necessary for the series to push the message that the world is cruel. 

I don’t even think Mikasa killing Eren counts. Mikasa loves Eren, and the point of that moment was that Mikasa was able to kill Eren without disavowing her love for him. 

People who go on murderous rampages because think the world is fundamentally cruel and they very reluctantly must kill their enemies to protect themselves are, very obviously, cranks. 

It’s like saying the earth is flat. It’s nonsense. Gibberish. 

I think this is why people were put off by the final chapter. The mass murderer’s worldview, which should have been depicted as nonsensical, instead, was more or less affirmed. 

The world is cruel, the enemies were real, and the murderer got away with it. 

Until the new ending came out. Let’s talk about that.

My take is that Isayama’s editors read him the riot act about letting Paradis survive and thereby giving Eren what he wanted, and about being too soft on Eren in general, so they forced him to change the ending. 

If that read is correct, then it didn’t work. The ending still sucks.

The ending strictly speaking isn’t bad because Eren got what he wanted or not. I’ve written for a long time that denying Eren his preferred outcome should happen, but that’s only because it would establish that what Eren represented was incorrect. That peace was, in fact, possible. 

The ending sucks because the morals and message of the story align with Eren’s and events are structured accordingly. Eren “loses” but not in a way that’s worse than what he was already going to suffer through, and his friends loved him in the end. 

A few pages tacked on to the end showing a ruined Paradis decades in the future doesn’t change that. It doesn’t deny him the moral victory. 

So now we come to the end: how to sum up Attack on Titan?

Attack on Titan is a story about nothing. It’s about a world where everyone is a slave, fate is the master, and people have to subject themselves to the most gruesome circumstances imaginable because fate commanded it. 

In this world, doing right by yourself and others leads to death and destruction, instead of to peace and prosperity like it does in our world. 

Responding to persecution with (prophylactic!) genocide is not obviously ridiculous. 

Attack on Titan is nihilism. 

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 139 Review Part I: On Eren Jeager and Genocide

Why?

Why is this happening?

Folks, I’m going to be honest here: there are no words for this. The main thrust of this chapter is completely inexplicable. It’s stupid. It’s ill conceived. FML.

Just…just the term itself is laughable.

Eren redemption arc.

Sksksksksksksksksksksk

After everything he’s done, everyone he’s killed, you’re going to try redeeming Eren in the final chapter?

Eren didn’t need to be redeemed. He was a bullheaded kid who didn’t let anyone stop him from doing what he thought needed to be done. He sees the titans outside the walls as enemies to be exterminated. When he learns that his real enemies are other humans, who have a right to freedom as much as he does, he can’t accept it and decides to just exterminate them too. That mindset led him down a tragic path of genocide.

That’s not a bad character arc!

In fact, I’d say it’s very compelling. Nonconformity and obstinance are often presented as virtues; flipping that paradigm on its head and showing the vices of those virtues was legitimately smart and provocative.

Making people rethink what traits are virtues and vices is a great moral to the story, and it paired well with the other moral of cooperation and loving your fellow people.

Then this chapter came out, and they threw all that away.

Eren’s arc once made me think of Aristotle, who argued that true virtue lied between extremes: neither too submissive nor too rebellious.

Now Eren’s arc makes me think of pseudointellectual 4chan philosophy, and dumb teenagers: “He’s not a bad guy, he’s just human!!!”

Eren’s motivations are a mess now. He had no free will, but he also had a plan, but deep down he wanted to do the rumbling no matter what, but actually he really wanted to be with Mikasa.

Oh, and B T dubs, he killed his mom too.

You can tell Isayama is desperate to make Eren as sympathetic as possible to justify making him the anti-hero because he’s throwing everything he can pull out of his ass at Eren.

Really, though, all he ended up doing was smearing shit on the character.

Eren’s plan was to kill a significant part of the human population so the world wouldn’t be as overwhelming a threat as before. Simultaneously, he planned (“planned”) for the alliance to become vaunted heroes to the world when they killed him, thus paving the way to peace.

This…makes no sense?

There is no reason Eren should have believed this would work. During the battle of Trost, Pixis asked him if humanity could unite if threatened by a common enemy. Eren said no.

Eren is a pessimist about people. He sees how much the walldians fought with each other and concluded that people would always be at odds.

And the Tybur family helped defeat the Eldian Empire, but only the Tyburs were seen as heroes by the Marleyans. That good will was not imputed from the Tyburs to the other Eldians on the continent. There’s no reason to think that would happen here when it didn’t back then.

I’m assuming, anyway, that the alliance becoming heroes is supposed to lead to a world where Paradis is safe since that’s supposed to be Eren’s goal.

I’m willing to grant that maybe this part of Eren’s plan was more of a hope on his part. Peace would come only after his death, so he can’t truly “plan” for anything afterwards.

I think it’s safe to say that killing the world’s population was the main part of his plan, since that’s the part he had the most control over.

To the extent he had any control over his actions, which brings me to the next point.

So, turns out Eren had no free will.

Can you not feel Isayama’s desperation?

After all the awful things Eren’s done, Isayama’s brilliant idea to make him sympathetic is to strip him of all agency.

This is done by two routes throughout the chapter.

The first is by building him up as a victim. Eren’s mind is fucked; he can’t really control himself. Any decent person would feel pity for him, which is reinforced by the sorrow Armin visibly feels for him.

Then, like a shotgun blast to the face, we are told that Eren killed his mother in a moment that is clearly supposed to endear us to him.

This is such a transparent appeal for our sympathy. Isayama’s desperation leaps off the page and mugs us of it.

The only thing that this revelation adds to the story is that it gives Armin a reason to take up Eren’s hand, and show him support. You can see Armin’s heart breaking for Eren in that moment.

That’s mostly why this is here: to give the mass murderer a hard luck story so our hearts melt for him.

The second route is that depriving Eren of agency absolves him of blame for what he did.

Eren beat Armin bloody, but you can’t really blame him for it. He was drugged out on the Founding Titan and didn’t want to do it. He was acting on impulse, just going with the flow, so he deserves, at the very least, some leniency.

Eren both having a plan and not having much in the way of free will is contradictory. Everyone still talks about Eren as if he’s someone who is doing stuff even though we’re told he’s not really capable of rational decision making.

I’m going to be nice and assume Isayama’s intent is that when you parse this all out, you end up in a place where Eren is not truly responsible for what he did, and in any event this all ended with the titan curse broken and the world at peace, sooooo break out the champagne everyone, we achieved world peace!

…

Yeah, bub, I’m not partying right now.

Isayama’s ploy to absolve Eren of blame didn’t work. Eren is still responsible for the people he killed and his Founding Titan lobotomy counts for shit. Turns out it helps to know how free will works when you’re writing about free will.

Free will is the quality of being in control of your actions, at least to the extent necessary to be held responsible for them.

Eren was just going with the flow (wonder what Annie thought of that…), acting on impulse, and getting dragged along by fate, but that’s not actually important.

It’s been known for centuries that current events are caused by previous events and that the current events will bring about future events in a never ending chain of cause and effect. One domino causes another to fall causes another to fall and on and on. This is called determinism.

And that’s ok because we free will exists. It exists even if we can’t do anything other than what we are going to do. It exists in spite of, or even arises out of, determinism.

This premise, that free will and determinism are not mutually exclusive, is the foundation for a family of theories about free will called compatibilism.

Compatibilist free will is the most popular theory of free will. There are a couple of variations on the basic idea, but the gist is that free will exists when your actions can be linked to an aspect of yourself that you identify with.

For example, if you had no choice but to do something, but you’re ok with that because it’s what you wanted anyway, then you have free will.

Even if I didn’t know you’d stop me in the end, I think I still would have flattened this world. 

-Eren Jeager

That’s all I needed to hear.

EREN, FUCK YOU!!!!

Eren had free will, at least as much as necessary to blame him for his genocide.

Isayama threw this curveball at us and all it did was ruin Eren as a character while leaving him just as repugnant as before. Incredible. It’s the worst of both worlds.

Before this chapter Eren was a guy who believed in something and followed that belief no matter who got in his way. That was great! It was tragic and sad, but great storytelling.

Where does this chapter leave us?

What we learn in this chapter is that Eren didn’t really believe in anything. He may have free will enough to be a shithead for what he did, but that doesn’t mean he has free will enough to be an interesting character.

Eren coming to grips with him not being free, in an absolute sense, would have been so much more interesting than what we got. Eren started the series comparing humanity to cattle in a pen. He ends the series being literally sheparded by fate to his death like cattle to a slaughterhouse.

And yet we get no exploration of that at all.

It’s lame. Everything about this is lame. From a storytelling perspective, Eren was just along for the ride. Who would want to reread this series now? A story about a boy who’s quest for freedom neither ends tragically nor happily, but is just forgotten about by the end. What’s the point?

There is none.

Eren’s journey ends up lost in the author’s own ignorance of the very thing this is supposed to be about.

Unfortunately, SNK isn’t interested in 80% of the world being dead. If it were, Eren wouldn’t have gotten such a warm send off.

I was honestly shocked when I read this chapter.

I thought it had been made clear. SNK had come firmly down against genocide. I never imagined Isayama would try a 180 in the final chapter.

And, well, he did, and here we are.

SNK is pro-genocide.

To wit:

Once Eren’s abominable plan is explained to everyone, he is lavished with love and comfort by his friends.

Armin did punch Eren for being callous about Mikasa, but overall all Armin had nothing but sympathy and understanding for Eren. They held hands and hugged and gave Eren a tender farewell.

All they talk about is how great a sacrifice Eren is making.

Not the sacrifice of 80% of all people, but the sacrifice that Eren personally is making of himself.

I don’t know what deranged mindset Isayama has that made him think this was sensible, but no, Eren is not sacrificing anything. He was always going to die. We’ve known this for several dozen chapters. It’s not a sacrifice to befall the fate you were always going to suffer.

He lost nothing. If anything, he gained from this ending.

Eren died knowing he was loved and appreciated by his friends. What more could a dying man ask for?

Eren is rewarded by the story for killing 80% of humanity.

His ultimate fate was no worse than was expected even before he committed the genocide, and he went out in the knowledge that his friends loved him for it.

It doesn’t even make logical sense that his friends would be so receptive to what he did.

There is no difference between Eren’s plan and what we thought Eren’s plan was before this chapter came out.

Armin thought Eren’s plan was to murder humanity to ensure his safety, and Armin was appalled. Armin was willing to sacrifice his life to ensure Eren failed. He was truly acting for the greater good of humanity.

In this chapter, Armin learns that Eren’s plan is actually to murder most of humanity to ensure his safety, and Armin loves him.

Again, hand holding, hugging, “thank you.” No mention of the unfathomable harm caused. The 80% killed are not even a footnote in this chapter.

Even after the fact, Eren’s friends showed no qualms with Eren essentially winning and procuring their safety through genocide.

When previously the mere thought of that was what motivated them to lay down their lives to stop him.

I don’t think Isayama believes this genocide is supposed to bear on how we think of Eren. I say, having just read the chapter that’s all about Eren, in which his genocide doesn’t bear on how his friends think of him. At all.

Was that too great a leap in logic? I apologize if my rationality offends you.

Eren may have died, but he won in the end.

His friends are safe and the world looks set to conclude a peace treaty with Paradis.

I don’t buy for a second that the world is a threat to Paradis anymore, and I don’t buy for a second that there won’t be a peace shortly after the end of the story.

It’s very telling, to me, that it’s the world that’s come to grovel at Paradis’ feet, begging for peace, when previously it was the other way around.

The contours of this “peace,” if you can call it that, were made pretty clear in the epilogue. The world is in ruins while Paradis is stronger than ever, so the world sues for peace for fear of Paradis attacking further. 

This is the moral of the story. Frankly, it’s been staring at us in the face the whole time.

How do you end the cycle of violence?

The answer is to win. To be stronger. More determined.

The only peace is enforced peace through domination.

Peace through the barrel of a gun.

To be continued in part II (and possibly part III)

[arlingtonpark]

Hello, are you still willing to do review of chapter 139? Really interested to hear your thoughts about it.

Hey there!

Yeah, I definitely plan to write about the final chapter, and the series as a whole. It may take a bit, since I’ve always had motivation issues.

But it means a lot to know there are people who care to read my opinion, so thanks so much!

[arlingtonpark]

I always had a feeling Attack on Titan was right-wing nationalist claptrap.

Unfortunately, I was right.

Like, I always suspected as much, but I figured Isayama would always have plausible deniability; that the writing would remain just ambiguous enough to allow for doubt.

I didn’t think he’d drop all pretense!

[arlingtonpark]

Hey! I'm not sure if you respond to this kind of asks, but... What is your opinion on the "Hisu is bi" argument? Like... Even if she's bi, Erehisu (and this whole pregnancy plot in general) urks me because... They just killed off her gf to then have her get pregnant by the guy that not only is destroying the world but is also responsible for her family's massacre. Even if EH isnt a thing, the way her character is almost defined by her pregnancy now just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Hey!

No, it’s cool, I’m willing to say at least a few words on this.

I’m straight and cis, so I want to be careful with how I answer as many of the people making this argument are themselves bisexual, but truthfully, I think they are completely wrong.

IF EH is canon, then what would have happened to Historia is that she was in a gay relationship with Ymir, whose character Isayama cordially shat out of the narrative and flushed down the toilet. 

Then he set her girlfriend up with a dude.

This narrative arc has been used to denigrate gay love for decades. It is very well documented. Claiming that Historia is #actuallybi is an excuse at best. 

Historia may well be bisexual, but that doesn’t make her depiction any less degrading for lesbians and queer people. In the case of an SNK with a canon EH, that bisexuality is clearly being weaponized by the author to denigrate same-sex love. 

The point is that her depiction is an attack on queer people, regardless of whether she is bi or not. 

Personally, I keep going back and forth on how likely a last minute EH reveal is in the final chapter. Sometimes it seems like it’s being obviously telegraphed, and other times it feels like it could never happen. 

I doubt Historia would want a kid with Eren after he revealed his plan...but then the obvious retort is that Historia could’ve already been pregnant when Eren told her because they’d been seeing each other for some time beforehand. 

My thoughts on this are heavily influenced by my overall feelings on the series. 

I think SNK is a diatribe about how shitty the world is and everyone needs to do their best to slog through it. 

With that in mind...today’s best guess is that Historia calculated she couldn’t stop Eren and chose to focus on her own life. 

Does that suck? Hell yes, but it’s the most straightforward explanation given what we know. 

I hate that Historia is a bystander. I hate that in a story that claims women shouldn’t be reduced to baby making machines, a woman character is reduced to a baby making machine by the author for the sake of a moral about how virtuous childrearing is. 

So, yeah, I have that taste in my mouth, too, anon. :(

Thanks for the ask!

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 138 Review

The moral of this chapter is that the rumbling is all Mikasa’s fault. #truth. 

Mikasa loves Eren. She loves, loves, loves him.

Eren’s family brought her into their home and they became her new family. Eren wrapped a scarf around her, and she never forgot that. Mikasa wanted to live a quiet, peaceful life with Eren, and nothing would stop that from coming true.

No matter how many times that suicidal blockhead got into trouble, she’d bail him out. Bullies, titans, warriors. On the street or on the battlefield.

She’s indulged Eren’s pursuit of freedom, but she’s always kept her eyes on what was always on the horizon: a mountain cottage with just her and Eren. Basically her old life but with her new family this time.

It’s what she’s always wanted. It was her wish.

But she failed.

This time, Eren went too far. In multiple meanings of that phrase.

Eren is easily the worse thing to ever happen to humanity. Like, maybe a giant asteroid hitting the planet would be worse, but idk. We saw there were many survivors, but it’s genuinely a question if human civilization can bounce back from this.

The human death toll is only the tip of the iceberg. Food and shelter will be hard to come by. Vital infrastructure is destroyed, so shipping emergency supplies into damaged areas will be impossible. Not just food, but medicine and materials to rebuild. The rumbling also probably ruined a lot of farmland, so there won’t be any food for a long time no matter what. Now consider the environment Eren caused. Many habitats were probably crushed, which means there is a mass dying off of animal life to come. And on and on, deeper and deeper into the abyss.

The whole planet is screwed.

Oh, yeah, and he killed most of his friends.

Not even Mikasa can save Eren from all this.

Mikasa has always clung to the hope of a simple life with Eren, but what she realizes in that vision she has is that there is no hope. Her dreams are dead.

I’ve been very critical of Mikasa for being slow to realize that. She just wasn’t making any progress with accepting Eren needed to die. Every single time it was brought up that they had to kill Eren, Mikasa would react like it’s the first time she’s heard it. Every discussion of that need seemed to bounce right off her.

There was no progress, and as a reader, that was so frustrating. She couldn’t accept it right until the last second. I was so sure Isayama was setting up a scenario where Mikasa failed to let Eren go at the moment of truth, and then she would be the one to get killed.

(Dark? Yeah, but the Earth is ruined, so why the fuck not?)

How Mikasa comes to let go of Eren and her dreams was so beautifully done that I honestly think it makes up for all the thick-headedness we got from her up until now.

The takeaway from Mikasa’s vision is that it’s not real. It’s not her reality. She could have told Eren how she really felt back then, but she didn’t and it’s too late to take it back.

Arguably, it was too late even before they joined the military. Eren’s death was guaranteed when he gained the Attack Titan. Living alone with Eren was always going to last a handful of years.

I think that’s what Mikasa realizes in this sequence. This world where she essentially gets what she wants is not her world. It’s not even a memory she can cherish. It’s what she wants, but cannot have now.

It’s a long dream.

(As far as Mikasa is concerned)

I don’t actually know what this vision is supposed to be exactly. Maybe it’s an alternate reality or a previous reality (ie a timeloop). Maybe Mikasa is seeing this because of Eren or maybe it’s her ackerblood. That can be explained later, but for now, it doesn’t matter.

The point is that Mikasa’s life is cruel, and she needs to focus on what little, minor, insignificant parts of it are beautiful.

It would have been easy to kill Eren in righteous fury. He harmed and killed so many people. I for one am glad he’s dead, and I hope he burns in hell. And I don’t think anyone would’ve been surprised if Mikasa killed him with horrified tears in her eyes. But that’s not what happened.

She killed him with a smile on her face. She killed him as an act of love. I think a big part of why Eren made so many people suffer is that he himself was suffering. The way he saw it, so long as people existed outside the walls, he couldn’t be free, and so long as he wasn’t free, he would struggle endlessly until the day he died. He would never know peace.

That doesn’t make him worthy of anyone’s sympathy, but it does make Mikasa’s slaying of him an act of kindness.

In hindsight, Mikasa was always going to be the one to kill him. She was the only one who’s killing of Eren could be reasonably presented as an act of love.

At last Mikasa has returned Eren’s favor: she wrapped the scarf around him. Just as Eren ended her suffering by taking her in, Mikasa has ended Eren’s suffering by taking his life.

Instead of thinking of all the harm Eren’s caused, Mikasa chose to think of the good he did.

Eren did wrap the scarf around her. What he’s done since does not diminish that kindness. In the time they knew each other, they were in it together, against the titans, and both enemies in the walls and outside it. And they cared about each other.

Is that petty compared to all the people Eren’s killed?

Yes, it is.

If you didn’t know him personally, that is. I’m willing to grant that Mikasa’s relationship with Eren makes her justified in having a unique perspective on him and his actions.

If this vision means anything, it means Eren loved her. What’s sad is that the closest Mikasa will ever get to experiencing that love is kissing his corpse.

But Mikasa isn’t abandoning Eren either. Like in Trost, she accepts that she cannot live with him, but pledges to live on regardless.  Eren tells Mikasa to forget about him because apparently he thinks that to move on from him, she has to reject him completely. She has to reject even the memories she has of him.

Mikasa refuses. She even puts the scarf on as she’s preparing to kill him. Like in Trost, she promises to remember Eren even as she moves on from him.

What makes this moment so much more powerful than the one in Trost is that this time Mikasa is the one killing Eren.

I think this chapter cements Mikasa as a person of profound emotional strength. Who among us could kill their loved one as an act of mercy and smile the whole way through?

Mikasa killed Eren out of love rather than vengefulness, and in doing so, she has broken the cycle of violence.

Hallelujah!

I guess.

Eren is dead, the rumbling is over, and most of the cast is dead too. Soooooooo…, where do we go from here?

The sequence with Mikasa was great, but taking a wider view of the story, I’m left wondering how Isayama is going to play the aftermath of this disaster.

Attack on Titan is not as hopeful a story as people think it is. “The world is cruel, but also beautiful.” I think people pay too much attention to the latter half of that quote. Yes, hope glimmers through the darkness, but that’s all it does. It glimmers. The light is still enveloped in darkness.

Just ask yourself: what are we supposed to make of all this?

The climax is over, but it’s basically a wash for everyone involved. Humanity survived, but will have to deal with famine and ruination for decades to come. Eren succeeded in crippling humanity, but failed to fully wipe them out. The Alliance saved humanity, but at the cost of not only their lives, but the lives of their loved ones, too.

There is nothing beautiful about this.

In the real world, violence and cruelty are not as common as Attack on Titan would have you believe. I think the series is smart on how it’s described people overcoming their animosity: everyone has a monster inside them and everyone needs to work hard to keep that monster in check. Unfortunately, the series vastly overestimates how powerful that monster is.

“I got the idea for Attack on Titan from a computer game. The whole universe was under attack from aliens. I thought if those monsters ate humans, that would be pretty interesting. The cruelty of man-eating titans. I think it came from my experience of growing up in a farm. As a child, I remember thinking ‘all living creatures must get nutrition from other living creatures to survive.’ We might call it cruel, but it is actually the norm.”

-Isayama, on his inspirations for Attack on Titan

Humans are not like animals. Human beings have created a complex web of sociopolitical and economic relationships called “society” which other animals do not have. Yes, humans commit violence because of a need they must have satisfied, similar to how an animal hunts for nutrition, but human needs are strongly affected by society.

What this means is that it is always possible to modify society so those needs can be met through less violent means.

Humans have a strong need for community. But nationalism isn’t the only way to express or satisfy that need. There are other outlets like sports or religion that can do the job. I’m not saying that Floch would’ve turned out alright if he’d gotten a hobby he could pal around with everyone with…well, actually, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

Extremism is always a choice. It is never inevitable.

Attack on Titan acknowledges that people can do better individually, but I don’t think it’s ever acknowledged that herd mentality doesn’t always hold.

And no, I’m not counting the Marleyans at Ft. Salta as an example of that. They made peace with the Eldians en masse, but then Isayama, almost as if to mock the very idea of making amends, has the Eldians turn into titans and destroy the fort.

An ending where Eren outright wins was never going to happen. The laws of good storytelling required that he get a comeuppance for resorting to the rumbling. That didn’t mean the Alliance had to win.

After reading the chapter, I was left with an overwhelming sense of emptiness. No one really got what they wanted even though they all basically lost everything. I’m glad there’ll be one final chapter to sort it all out because it can’t end like this.

Eren committed the most despicable act imaginable; the Alliance acted bravely to stop him. The story can’t end with the Alliance no better off than him.

He was going to die no matter what, so the simple fact that he’s dead and (some) of the Alliance are alive isn’t much of a consolation.  

Even humanity being alive doesn’t really mean Eren failed. Paradis is self-sufficient and mostly intact. They can ride out whatever environmental blowback the rumbling causes with little trouble. Any leg up Paradis gets because of what Eren did is a victory for him.

Something more needs to happen that really sticks it to Eren. I don’t know what that could be, but next chapter will hopefully be the Eren POV we’ve been waiting for, so my fingers are crossed that Isayama will have something up his sleeve.

Remaining question marks include the worm thing, Historia’s baby, and the fallout from this possible timeloop reveal. All three of these plot points could easily be fumbled in the final chapter in a way that ruins the ending.

If Historia’s child is really born with titan powers, then they’ll die by age 13. It’s like being born with a crippling birth defect. Hooray?

As for Historia herself, what role did she play in Eren’s plan, really? Everyone’s assumed the details of her pregnancy have been obscured because it’s relevant to the main action of the story. Somehow.

It’d be really lame if she was just a passive bystander. If the pregnancy was only tenuously relevant to the rumbling.

One idea I’ve toyed with is that the final chapter will actually be Historia’s POV and we’ll learn Eren’s POV through her.

We still don’t know what else was said between Eren and Historia when they discussed his plans. That conversation was a critical juncture for Eren: he confided his plans in a friend and they came out strongly against it. Returning to that moment is a good opportunity for us to see what Eren really thinks and what’s really driving him. And that can be done through Historia’s perspective.

Everything about the worm thing is a mess and I wish Isayama had kept it out of the story. Like, yes, this thing is “the source of all organic life” as Kruger put it. It is the first complex lifeform to evolve on Earth and all living species are descended from it.

Why does it have supernatural powers?

The worm thing’s motivation has been described as being to simply propagate, which is to say it’s more a force of nature than an intelligent being acting on a cognitive thought.

Its actions are purely conative. It acts purposefully, but not out of intelligent thought, like how a hyena acts to obtain food for itself. It has a goal it strives to achieve, but not in the same way as humans do.

(The greatest tragedy in Attack on Titan is that this distinction is apparently lost on Isayama)

I don’t know how the worm thing will be dealt with; I just think it’s weird to introduce this thing as a late stage antagonist when it’s just an animal doing its thing.

Speaking of questionable, late stage additions to the story: all this timeloop business.

We’re really doing this now? In the second to last chapter???

This is like if episode ten of Madoka Magica was the last episode. What can the existence of a timeloop add to this story-that’s-already-over.

How did it start? By what means? To what end? What does this add to the characters and themes of SNK?

Everything about is just… ??????

If nothing else, I expect the final chapter to at least try and resolve these plot points.

Next chapter is the last. Ladies and gentlemen, our final moments together are upon us. It has been a privilege playing with you tonight.

[arlingtonpark]

Harrow the Ninth Act I Thoughts

This is all your fault, @ghostmartyr. If you hadn’t reblogged what seemed like heavy metal boy band fanart, I wouldn’t be in this hole. And for that, I hate you.

So.

When I first encountered the Locked Tomb online, I couldn’t tell if it was a story about edgy, neogothic, teenaged angst, or something better than that.

Turns out, it’s both.

But in a good way.

I love it. It’s great.

It’s unabashed, it’s thoughtful, it’s entertaining, it’s suspenseful.

Gideon the Ninth is finished, and after starting Harrow the Ninth, I decided to blog about it as I go.

I’ll be doing one post for every act of the book. I hope.

Let’s start with our new main character, Harrow. Newly reborn as a god and one of the only survivors of the last book.

So….

Right now, Harrow’s…

Um.

She’s uh…

-gestures at everything-

She’s fucked.

Fucked, broken, in the shit, started godhood on the wrong side of the bed.

200 babies were killed in the name of birthing her. Her parents died in front of her because of what she did. Death has always seemed to follow her, and she carries the burden of all that death.

Harrow despises her existence and wishes she were dead because of the circumstances of her birth, and yet for that very reason she is committed to living, because if she dies, all those sacrifices would be null.

She takes up the duties of governing the Ninth, she applies herself rigorously to mastering necromancy, and when the opportunity arises to become a lyctor, she jumps at it.

Harrow does this because it’s why all those people had to die. She was birthed to carry the Ninth’s legacy; its traditions and obligations and to some extent its very existence.

The twisted nature of the Ninth and her parents is inseparable from that legacy, so in a sense it was that legacy that led to her infanticidal birth, but regardless, this legacy is all she has. It’s all she was ever meant to have. And so she devoted herself to it.  

Now that she’s a lyctor and her house’s future will be guaranteed, but to do it, she had to sacrifice Gideon, whom she loved.

It’s more of the same shit from her perspective: more people dying for her sake. 200 babies die to grant her obscene necromantic talent, her girlfriend dies so she can gain even more power. Harrow doesn’t mean to step on innocent people to get what she wants…but that’s always how it’s turned out for her.

But to add insult to injury, even after all she’s sacrificed, she still didn’t get exactly what she wanted.

Her house will have a future, but she can never return to it. She’s essentially divorced from the only thing that gave her life meaning.

She can never return to her old life; to the extent she saw that as desirable, she can’t have that. Her old life is gone forever.

Something also went wrong with her ascension to godhood. She’s violently sick, mentally unstable, and the powers she should have are…half baked, for lack of a better word.

Nobody said you could get hungover from ascending to godhood. Harrow should sue.

It’s like going in to surgery to remove a tumor and coming out lobotomized.

Is she even immortal?

It all stings of pointlessness. All that effort for nothing.

Worse than that; She lost everything. Her home, her love, her pride and dignity.

Her only purpose in life now is to fight these hell beasts that she’s never heard of before. Happy days ahead, surely.

Oh, and one of the people she’ll have to work with is named Gideon.

Does God hate her?

And then there’s God.

This guy is sus as hell.

He’s gracious and humble. Perpetually calm and soft spoken. Empathetic and understanding. That’s what He’s like in person.

But He’s…maybe the villain? I guess.

God works in mysterious ways, and I have no damn clue what His are, but it’s probably ugly.

Yes, He’s a cordial Dude…but he’s still the God-emperor of a galactic undead empire.

Dude wears a crown made from the bones of dead babies FFS.

Not to be accusatory, but this guy definitely has skeletons in his closet.

-bu-dum-tish-

One of the things that really got my attention while reading this series is how the magic system in this world is depicted. Usually, in fantasy stories, the magic system is depicted as being morally neutral. Good guys use it, bad guys it, but the magic itself just is.

The Locked Tomb Trilogy isn’t like that.

Necromancy is bad. Perverse, even.

All the necromancers are frail and sickly. Practicing it is deleterious on the body. Doing too much too fast with it causes even more pronounced harm. As in, bleeding from your sweat glands.

Necromancy works by manipulating the life force of living beings and, primarily, the death force those being give off when they die.

The forces of nature that necromancy utilizes are (apparently) fundamental to the universe, akin to the laws of nature, but the use of those forces in this way are clearly a perversion.

It’s sort of like a bad tv show, like Sword Art Online. Sure, the things that went into making the show are natural parts of the world, but you just can’t put those things together like that.

John and his empire epitomize that.

All known beings in the universe are fundamentally thalergetic in nature. They are beings who radiate life energy. Except for the planets of the empire. Those planets and the star they orbit are thanergetic in nature.

They literally radiate death. And they are apparently one of a kind in that regard.

John is the first necromancer. John used his newly harnessed powers to “resurrect” multiple planets that had died.

Except he didn’t really resurrect anything, he turned them into an entirely new form of being using his entirely new form of science that uses some kind of mechanism that doesn’t occur naturally.

What I’m getting at here is that everything about John, his power, and his empire is artificial. Man-made. Perhaps even John-made.

We don’t actually know what happened during the Resurrection. What killed off the planets, how John attained his God-like powers, and what life John lived before it.

Oh, yeah, and every planet the empire conquers is systematically killed over generations to fuel their necromancer’s powers.

Every planet God touches literally dies.

One thing I appreciate about this series is how layered the story is.

The Locked Tomb series is a fun, irreverent romp. It’s about allowing the past to rest in peace. It’s also surprisingly political.

The metaphor is pretty blunt: it’s about capitalism. What’s more, the metaphor seems to be from a progressive or maybe even socialist perspective.

Ok, so hear me out on this. This is less fan theory than speculation about the author’s intentions.

The empire is a society built on a system that requires them to move from planet to planet, gradually killing those planets until they have to evacuate and move to a new one.

This process of gradual death takes generations to play out, so apparently they don’t even consider it to be an event that happens.

The heart of this system is necromancy, a perverse science that is ultimately derived from natural phenomena.

This system places the most powerful necromancer atop a literal throne and worships them as God.

God’s disciples are the lyctors, second only to Him in power. They attained that power by a very special process.

The lyctoral process is exploitative. It requires the necromancer to use their cavalier as a sacrifice and to turn their soul into a power source.

The lyctoral process is built around domination. The necromancer, in sacrificing their cavalier, subsumes the cavalier’s soul into their being to gain power.

The lyctoral process is dehumanizing. The cavalier is degraded from a person to a mere battery, but the necromancer is degraded in a way as well. The necromancer can never return to their house, or any of the other houses for that matter. Instead they must fight and die for God in his battle against the Revenant Beasts.

If you’re progressive, this may sound familiar to you.

Relationships of exploitation, domination, and dehumanization. A society built around perversions. That rewards people with talent in those perversions with idolatry. That cold-heartedly and shortsightedly extracts every drop of usable resources from a planet until it is dead, then moves on to the next one.

To a socialist, this may sound a lot like capitalism.

Saying that is already bold enough for me, so I won’t try to argue that it’s a one to one allegory. Necromancy equals the profit motive, lyctors represent the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (So I guess that means the non-lyctor necromancers are the petit bourgeoisie) and the empire is humanity.

You could make a case for it, but the hot takes in this post are already pretty spicy, so…

OMG Mercymorn. XD

Mercymorn is my favorite out of the new characters. She’s a bitch.

Snide, rude, assertive, bitchy, and standoffish. No, it’s not that I want her to step on me, I just can’t get enough of her interactions.

I guess in real life she wouldn’t be fun to be around, but as a character in a book, she steals every scene. Her arrogant and bitchy remarks always make me laugh.

My one wish heading in to Act II: that Mercymorn is in charge of Ianthe’s training.

Just so she can kick her ass for not measuring up to her standards.

[arlingtonpark]

I found these leaks on the baidu forum and am sharing them here. 

-Zeke is confused as he sinks into the sand in paths.

-Alliance searches Armin’s blast site for Eren vaporized body, but are shocked they can’t.

-They find a cable leading back towards paradis. It connects to Eren who is in fact alive on historia farm having sex with a waifu pillow with historia on it. (the cable tapers down to the size of a garden hose and connects to eren neck)

-Historia’s baby has been born. Her name is Darius. She has the beast titan within her. Eren is overjoyed at the sight of her.

-Eren gives the baby a raspberry, which reactivates the rumbling.

-When eren reenters paths world, reiner is there. It turns out that the worm thing ate him and now reiner is trapped in the paths world for all eternity.

-Reiner is happy though, because by sacrificing himself like this he has become helos. Exactly what he always wanted.

-Eren uses the founding titan limitless power to fuck over his friends physically and mentally and throughout time and space.

-Eren makes jean gay so he can fall in love with marco during trost and be extra devastated when he dies.

-Eren makes levi think zeke was Erwin, and makes connie think zeke was his mom. Connie attacks levi in anger, who lets him kill him.

-Eren turns pieck into a man.

-Eren erases all memories of reiner from everyone who ever encountered him, effectively erasing him from existence. Reiner is happy about this though because now he has become what he always wanted to be: helos, a fictional character who never existed.

-eren keeps Mikasa alive because he knows she’ll never kill him.

-Eren is ok doing this to his friends because what goes around comes around. They tried to take his freedom, so he took their’s.

-it is revealed what eren’s main motivation has been: historia’s body.  He wanted historia for himself, but she fell in love with the farmer and eren has been desperate to win her back ever since.

-eren destroys humanity and wins.

-historia tells eren she has the word queen tattooed on her ass and she’ll show him it if he gives her a few minutes to change clothes.

-while historia is out of the room, eren caresses the baby and says she is free. It is implied he means she is free from the farmer.

-Historia stabs eren from behind.

End of chapter 138.

[arlingtonpark]

I. HATE. EREHISU.

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SHIP HATE. 

EreHisu is canon. 

I’m almost certain it is, and I fucking hate it.

In a vacuum, Eren and Historia being an item would be fine. Their characters complement each other well, and they have good chemistry. 

Unfortunately, this is not happening in a vacuum. 

The newest episode of the SNK anime is out. It covers the chapters revealing Historia is pregnant and supposedly how that came to be.

In chapter 108, there is a meeting between Paradis and Hizuru. In that meeting, Miss Kiyomi unveils Zeke’s 200 IQ, 3 point plan to save Paradis: 

1. Use a partial rumbling to show the world you mean business.

2. Bulk up your military 

3. Rape your queen, then kill her, then kill one of her children ever 13 years for at least 50 years. 

And maybe rape one of her children too if you need more people to kill.  

Everyone is naturally horrified by this, but Historia seems willing to at least become a titan. 

What happens next is the reason I wrote this post.

Eren forcefully objects to Zeke’s plan and asks why they should accept it up front as the best option.

My interpretation of this moment was that Eren was addressing Historia directly.

In the panel where Eren begins his dialogue, there’s a word balloon indicating someone was saying Historia’s name. 

In the anime, it’s clear Mikasa says it, but because Eren was the main focus of the panel, I thought he was the one talking. 

Whoops, silly me, because that completely changes my reading of this scene and what it means for a possible canon EreHisu.

Specifically, it changes it to be terrible.

It’s one thing to get emotional when someone asks you directly if the obscene thing you believe you have to subject yourself to is really necessary. 

It’s totally different to get emotional when someone says, to no one in particular, that the plan to subject you to something obscene is bad and not necessary. 

In my original reading of this scene, Historia was committing herself to an awful end, but was called out on her rashness by Eren. When he asked her if they shouldn’t try every other option possible, she teared up. I thought that was because her facade was breaking.

She doesn’t actually want this. She doesn’t want to die. She wants to live for herself. But she’s the queen and she has an obligation to her people, so she throws herself under the bus against her own wishes. 

Her tearing up, I thought, was an expression of her true desires. 

I thought it was a great character moment for Historia. It was a powerful, telling moment that implied a lot about her thinking. 

But no, that’s not what happened at all.

Just.

Just look at this shit.

Eren isn’t talking to Historia directly or addressing her own reckless decision. Eren forcefully objects to Zeke’s plan and Historia gets visibly emotional at the sight. 

What Eren said could’ve been part of a private conversation that Historia happened to overhear, and the message would be the same. 

The message is this: Eren (and only Eren!) stood up for Historia’s freedom, so now, because of that, she wants his dick.

This moment epitomizes everything wrong with EreHisu, both in theory and in practice.

EreHisu is an insult to gay people.

Really, if you were expecting the usual homophobic storytelling from SNK, then Historia’s character arc shouldn’t be surprising.

Historia started gay. 

Her girlfriend was killed unceremoniously off screen.

Then a guy comes and shows her basic human decency and nothing more. 

And now Historia is straight.

It’s...it’s just shocking how shamelessly bigoted this is. 

How can any writer be this daft?

How can anyone be so blind to the blatant indecency of this?

It’s mindboggling that we are apparently supposed to take this seriously.

EreHisu doesn’t even work on its own terms.

Eren and Historia have always been close, but the thing that makes her fall head over heels for him is that he believes in freedom???

Not even her freedom specifically, just freedom in general. Remember, Eren objected to Zeke’s plan on general terms, not because it was Historia specifically who would suffer. 

Did Historia feel betrayed that no one else stood up for her?

Maybe, but that’s why you’re supposed to show how characters are reacting when their reactions are relevant. 

That’s what makes them characters!

This one moment, like everything about Eren and Historia’s relationship since Uprising, utterly debases Historia’s character so Eren can play the hero.

Everything about this is misogynistic. 

Historia cries when Eren defends her. 

It’s not enough for her to feel grateful towards him, no, she has to get emotional.  

Is this Historia’s character now?

A damsel in distress crying because her knight in shining armor has come to rescue her?

Historia is needy, but she’s not emotionally frail.

It’s ridiculous that her heart would melt so easily. 

Relatedly, it’s pretty dumb that Historia would be such a cheap date.

She was a cheap date before, it’s basically why she sided with her father in Uprising, but I thought the point of her character arc was that she had gotten over that.

She had supposedly learned to live for herself; part of that meant not being so needy.

Historia is apparently won over because Eren articulates the barest, blandest, most banal appeal to basic human decency imaginable (”Don’t dehumanize people”). 

Historia would definitely admire Eren for his commitment to freedom, which, in a way, is the same as her commitment to live for herself.

And she would definitely feel grateful to him for (implicitly) standing up for her.

But love?

Kids???

“Oh, Eren, you’re so strong you believe in freedom so much. I wish I was as strong as you believed as much as you do.”

People don’t fall in love over something as intellectual as philosophy. Love is an emotional experience, not an intellectual one.

Ymir introduced Historia to the notion of living for herself. When Eren tells her to do the same, he’s just reminding her of what Ymir said. 

The emotional impact is far lower, and I can’t understand how this is supposed to form the basis for an emotional connection. 

In reminding Historia to live for herself, Eren is definitely a good friend who has her back, but soulmates?

Eren may be rescuing Historia physically, but Ymir rescued Historia emotionally and completely turned her life around. 

Eren speaking up for Historia does not, or at least should not, mean much to her from an emotional perspective. 

Again, grateful, glad he said that, but that road doesn’t end with romance, which is probably why Historia’s reaction was so strong. 

I can not believe that Historia would feel so strongly for Eren. 

I hate this ship.

It’s very existence is repugnant and bigoted.

It’s executed with the grace of a teen romance novel.

It’s shit.

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 137 Review

I can't unsee it.

-rubs temples-

Ok, I know I’ve been absent the past two chapters. I’ll get to why and what I thought of 135 and 136 in this post, but for now…jeez, this chapter.

It was badass and dumb and sometimes both at the same time.

Where do I even start?

-sound of pages being leafed through-

Ok, then.

I actually really like Zeke’s character. He is unironically my second favorite out of the cast.

When we first see Zeke, he’s in his beast titan form. He’s lumbering, hulking, unsettling.

He’s a titan that can talk. He’s a titan that can control other titans!

And he wiped out humanity’s second strongest with ease. I forget his name. It was Mickey, right?

Worst than that, actually. He ordered his titans to kill Mickey with all the gravitas of ordering a side of fries at McDonald’s.

Iirc fans were wondering if this new character would be the main villain of the series.

He went on to wipe out the Survey Corps at Shighanshina, and after that we learned he singlehandedly foiled his parent’s right-wing conspiracy when he was a kid.

Zeke was a mastermind who shouldn’t be taken lightly…right?

Welp, the more we saw of Zeke, the more obvious it became that he wasn’t actually all the impressive.

He wasn’t very good at being a warrior. Honestly, it seems most of his high marks comes from his unique royal blood powers, and the good will be built with Marley when he turned in his parents. TFW cronyism.

He foiled the restorationists plot, but really he was just an abused kid who wanted to get away from his parents.

He killed Mickey, but Zeke was a King Kong sized titan and Mickey was caught off guard and unarmed, so…yeah, ofc he won that fight.  

Zeke has royal blood powers, but that doesn’t say anything about his intellectual prowess or anything.

The Survey Corps was wiped out at Shighanshina, but the circumstances of that fight strongly favored him. The Survey Corps were trapped in the city, so all Zeke had to do to win was sit on his ass and do nothing.

And he almost died anyway.

Levi got the drop on him because of his own incompetence. He let himself get distracted, which created the opening for Levi to strike.

Throw in his gullibleness towards Eren, his bumbling demeanor, and his totally emo philosophy, and the true nature of Zeke Jeager became undeniable: this guy is a fucking moron.

Like.

A real fucking moron.

And that’s why his character is unironically so great!

Zeke’s character is such a brilliant subversion of audience expectations.

We were all made to believe that this guy was a Big Fucking Deal through what turned out to mostly be circumstantial reasons.

In reality, he’s an idiot who’s been failing upwards his whole life.

Zeke got as far as he did because he’s really lucky. That’s all he has going for him.

I liked the more fleshed out version of his world view we got here. It is appropriately emo.

My read on Zeke has always been that if he existed in real life he’d be an extremely online philosophy bro, so seeing his outlook on life being effectively copy pasted from 4chan was just delightful.

Zeke is 2deep4(chan)u.

Life exists to multiply. All actions are explained by this singular drive. As such, life is hollow and we’re better off dead.

Imagine that is how you see the world.

Life sucks. It’s an existence of suffering driven by a desire to ensure more people are brought into this world so that they can toil away ensuring that yet more people are brought into this world to toil away ensuring people are brought into this world.

On and on and on and on.

To Zeke, this is the cycle of violence.

Not war which begets war which begets war, but rather life itself.

One suffering existence that begets another suffering existence that begets yet another suffering existence.

That is the context from which the euthanasia plan came from: it was an extension of this broader world view.

Everyone gets a dose of pain in this world, but Eldians especially get shafted. If anyone deserved release from this nihilistic existence that is “being alive,” it’s them.

Hence, Zeke’s plan to sterilize Eldians so they can die out peaceably.

…

It’s hilarious how easily Zeke is disabused of this notion.

I’m not sure if it works from a storytelling perspective, but it tracks perfectly with what usually happens when emo philosophy bros like Zeke have their beliefs challenged.

The emo bro will go on a self-absorbed rant about how nihilistic life is. For sake of example, let’s say the reason is because morality is just an opinion and nothing is objectively wrong.

The n the guy he’s ranting to will drop a critique on the bro so devastating that they’re left speechless:

“What about murder? Isn’t murder objectively wrong?”

Emo bro: -surprised pikachu face-

I swear to God this happens a lot. I don’t know if transplanting that into this pivotal storytelling moment works, but I sure as hell enjoyed it.

But, yeah, while we’re talking about philosophies, let’s look at some others.

Armin thinks there is beauty in pointless moments. Moments that are meaningful only for the people who partake in them. They’re an expression of the love they have for each other. Those moments are worth cherishing and protecting.

He’s right, but you know who also thinks that way?

Eren does.

Superficially, anyway.

When Eren starts rumbling the world, he thinks of his friends and the fun they’ve had together. He’s doing it for them.

Of course, he’s hurt them instead, but that’s still his logic, however deranged it may be.

What separates Armin from Eren is their sense of boundaries.

There are places that Eren is willing to push on towards that Armin is not.

For that, Eren thinks Armin is weak. All Eren had to say to him when they spoke at the restaurant was how useless Armin was.

Armin can’t go the distance. He can’t do what’s necessary. He takes options off the table too easily. He wanted to negotiate instead of seeing the truth that war was inevitable.

To Eren, that’s weakness.

In reality, it’s empathy.

Armin cares about people. Even people who hate him.

Eren doesn’t. If you’re his enemy, you’re dead to him, period.

Eren has no soul.

He may have slept under his enemy’s roof, ate his enemy’s food, and saw the good in them for himself, but he’s still killing them.

I don’t care if he’s crying on the inside. I don’t care how many times he said he’s sorry to Ramzi.

That actually makes it worse.

Eren made the calculation, the conscientious decision, that the lives of billions of people across multiple civilizations were worth less than that of his race.

Not even his whole race; just the subset of his race he was most familiar with!

Eren and Armin represent two widely similar, yet subtly different philosophies.

For Eren, the world is beautiful, but you have to do cruel things to protect that beauty.

The world is cruel because it is beautiful.

For Armin, the world is beautiful, but it is plagued by cruelty.

The world is cruel, but also beautiful.

SNK made the right choice. Armin was rightly depicted as the superior worldview.

(I have some gripes about how endemic the series seems to think cruelty is to the world, but we’re ignoring that now.)

Ymir is more of a wild card than I thought she’d be.

It seemed straightforward.

Ymir had been beaten and enslaved her whole life, so when Eren offered her freedom and treated her life a human, she sided with him.

That still looks to be what happened, but it seemed like Ymir also genuinely wanted to destroy the world with Eren.

The world treated her with cruelty, so of course she’d want to burn it all. Makes sense, right?

But Ymir, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than that.

She was beaten, enslaved, raped, hunted like an animal, and after all that, she still believed in this world.

She saw two lovers together, and that embodied what made the world worth getting attached to.

Those two lovers were her conquerors. Her oppressors.

She saw the love between two of her slavers, and instead of resentment or jealousy, she simply knew it was beautiful.

If people threaten his freedom, Eren wishes death upon them.

When Ymir is literally enslaved by them, she still acknowledges the beauty of their romance.

It’s a cool layer of complexity to add to their dynamic. They’ve been through similar shit, but they couldn’t be more dissimilar.

My guess is that Ymir is sympathetic to Armin and everyone came back to life through her help.

I know Armin Zeke the credit for that, but…that makes no sense?

Eren defeated Zeke when Ymir sided with him and he started the rumbling.

Eren, via Ymir, is in control, not Zeke, so it makes no sense for Zeke to be able to do any of this.

The only explanation is that Ymir broke from Eren and now Zeke is her new best friend.

…Yeah, this is the part where I talk about the bad stuff with this chapter.

The exact mechanics of how all of this went down is very underexplained.

Zeke being able to reveal himself like he did can be chalked up to Ymir’s power, but if it’s true this was purely Zeke’s doing, then…how?

How was Zee able to do that if Eren is in control? Why would Eren even put Zeke there instead of encasing him in crystal and keeping him physically close by?

This whole final battle has been very underwhelming for me, which is why I didn’t do a review for the last two chapters.

The premise is pretty bland.

The Alliance’s main opposition in this fight are mindless drones. The titans they’re fighting have no humans inside them, they’re just puppets. NPCs.

What drama there has been here has been the same fucking crap we’ve been dealing with for the past few volumes.

Yes, Mikasa, Eren has to die.

I know this is hard for her, but my patience has run out.

Eren told her to her face that they had to kill him if they wanted to win, and then when the Alliance is riding on Falco’s back, they make the final call to kill Eren and this is the face Mikasa makes.

Like this is the first time she’s heard it.

This is the face you’d expect from a child, not a grown ass adult. 

That was the moment I became convinced Mikasa would probably die in this fight.

Her head is too far up her ass as this point.

She is utterly incapable of processing the obvious fact that Eren hates her.

Yes, he’s theoretically destroying the world partly for her, but he’s also deranged and too self-absorbed to see that he’s hurt her. He has no real regard for her. 

It is beyond annoying that there has been almost zero progression for her character on this issue.

If by this point in the story, she had accepted that Eren had to die, but was still visibly coping with that, then all would be well.

What’s frustrating is that just when it seems like we’ve progressed past that stage, we learn we haven’t.

I also feel that a lot of the major beats of the fight were pointless.

A major point in the battle comes when Armin gets eaten by the Okapi titan, and Mikasa, Annie, and the rest have to rescue him. But Armin didn’t seem to be in any danger of dying, and him being sent to P A T H S was actually a good thing in the end because he was able to win over Zeke.

The whole deal with the explosives around Eren’s neck was also pretty badly handled.

You’d think the hard part would be getting the explosives to the neck and securing them to it, but nope. Pieck took care of that in a couple of panels, and the real meat of the fight is doing the very last thing they need to do to win.

It’s very tedious and contrived.

Instead of a fight that’s interesting because they have to wrestle their way through titans while carrying the bombs, we get a totally generic fight because the story breezed through the hard part and all they have to do now is push a single button to win.

But in the end that entire sequence was pointless because Armin decides to blow everything up anyway.

Jean’s shining moment?

A total waste.

Reiner’s shining moment...wrangling that worm thing?

Also a total waste.

Armin was going to blow it up anyway. There is no way you can say that Eren would have survived Armin’s explosion but for Reiner and Jean’s efforts.

It just defies all common sense.

So yeah, this whole battle was a pretty lackluster climax.

Looking to the future, I think this is it.

There’s only two chapters left, so we need to start wrapping up. My guess is Eren’s likely dead and next chapter starts the epilogue.

Tally-ho.

---

I made a post about all the character’s chances of living or dying by the end of the manga. I figured I’d update those death ratings here.

Eren: Likely Alive --> Lean Dead

Historia: Likely Dead --> Toss Up

Mikasa and Reiner: Lean Dead --> Lean Alive

Annie: Lean Alive --> Likely Alive

Jean and Connie: Likely Dead --> Lean Alive

Pieck: Toss Up --> Lean Alive

Zeke: Lean Alive --> Ded

You’ll notice I’m still rating most of the cast as having a significant chance of dying.

While I do feel that this is probably the end of the battle, I’m choosing to be cautious in my choice of ratings.

Mayhaps Eren will pull a come from behind victory.

Ya never know.

[arlingtonpark]

SNK Character Death Ratings

Hey, all!

Long time no see!

SNK’s end is nearing, so in this post I’m going to rate the chances of each character dying.

“Die” in this post means they are dead by the last page of the manga and are not indicated to die in the events immediately thereafter.

“Deaths”, for example, that are explained to happen after the events of the story are counted as surviving. As such, titan shifter death clocks do not count.

Chances of death will be rated on a sliding scale:

Safe Dead --> Likely Dead --> Lean Dead --> Toss Up --> Lean Alive --> Likely Alive --> Safe Alive

Let’s do it.

Eren Jeager: Likely Alive

Yeah, I think Eren will probably live.

In Attack on Titan, people only survive by making harsh sacrifices, and there is no way I’m taking time to establish that.

This has lead most of the fandom to believe the final sacrifice that will have to be made is killing Eren.

But, like, it’s really not much of a sacrifice?

Eren isn’t the guy who carried the boulder at Trost, anymore. Nor is he the guy who took down the Colossal Titan at Shighanshina.  

Eren is the guy who murdered humanity. “Warmongerer,” “murderer,” “traitor,” all these words describe him far better than “hero,” “friend,” or “Chad.”

So who cares if he dies?

Good riddance!

After everything that’s happened, I cannot see Eren’s death being realistically portrayed as a sacrifice. Frankly, the thought is laughable.

Eren is practically barking about how the enemies outside need to be crushed with extreme prejudice. He’s basically a Trumpist now.

All that said, it’s still believable that Eren will die before the end of the story.

Maybe Eren will die in the final battle, and SNK will just sputter to an end because the world is shit now, and any survivors will have to weather mass starvation, lack of shelter, no medicine, and who knows what else.

If the series tries to spin that as the beginning of a bright future full of hope, I’m going to laugh.

I also think it’s possible Eren kills his friends and lives. It has been foretold that Eren will win, whatever that means.

This “win” that Eren foresaw was probably incomplete, because that’s just how storytelling works, and we’ll learn that he actually “lost”. He doesn’t have to die, though, for that to happen.

We don’t actually know what Eren’s win condition is, other than that it entails Historia living (as in she’s still breathing when this is all over, her actual desire to live notwithstanding) and Eren’s enemies dying.

Eren’s enemies are dead or will die soon. Even if the Alliance kills him, they have nothing to return to. The world is dead. At this point, they’re fighting solely on principle.

Good storytelling usually emphasizes karma and just desserts.

…I think there’s a good chance Historia will die by the end, if only to ensure Eren doesn’t get away with what he’s done.

But Eren himself doesn’t have to die for this scenario to play out.

On balance, I think Eren living is slightly more likely than not.

Historia Reiss: Likely Dead

I’m really sorry to all the Historia stans reading this. Historia can’t catch a break, and I don’t think it’s going to get better.

Historia’s role as the damsel in distress so far has only made one thing clear: she doesn’t matter.

She’s a hot girl who exists to be placed in danger and spur everyone to action.

Historia has been nothing but fodder for Eren’s character development. I think it only makes sense for that trend to continue.

If Eren, the tragic villain, is favored to live, then storytelling logic dictates that Historia, the villain’s muse who inspires him to murder, must be favored to die.

If Isayama gave a damn about her character, it wouldn’t be like this, but this is the world we live in.

Cruel, yet oh, so beautiful.

Mikasa Ackerman: Lean Dead

If Eren is slightly favored to live, then Mikasa’s chances aren’t too great.

A tension is being built up between Eren and Mikasa: between Eren’s desire to wipe out his enemies, and Mikasa’s struggle to cope with that.

The reason Eren is likelier to live than Mikasa is because while Eren in eminently capable of throwing away everything precious to him, Mikasa…isn’t. Like, at all.

Mikasa has always been clingy towards Eren, but I will her credit: multiple times in this arc, people have openly talked about killing Eren, and Mikasa has not tried to murder them.

Mostly.

When Mikasa gets told to go somewhere else to contribute to the mission, it’s because they can’t trust her to come through for them if it falls to her to kill Eren.

Eren is prepared to kill Mikasa, but Mikasa still struggles with needing to let Eren go.

In this situation that is a critical advantage.

If Mikasa is supposed to fail to overcome her love for Eren, the series will almost certainly seek to highlight that by having her confront Eren directly and fail at the moment of truth.

If Mikasa is supposed to succeed in letting Eren go…well, Isayama may decide to kill her anyway.

The moment Mikasa resolves definitively to let Eren go, her character arc is complete.

After that, all bets are off.

Maybe she resolves to kill Eren, but fails anyway.

Maybe she kills Eren, and then dies. The world is cruel, and thanks to the Rumbling, it is also now ugly. Mikasa’s whole life has been crushed. Her dream was a simple rural life. That’s not possible anymore.

Like. In any form.

I think an ending where she dies after fulfilling her duty is not out of the question.

Armin Arlert: Lean Alive

If the Alliance has a good chance of failing, that means they all have a good chance of dying. I do, however, think he has a better chance than the others of living.

I think that with Paradis’ enemies wiped out, the Walldians will be in the mood for a more level-headed leader.

The thing about nationalists like Floch and Eren is that they’re only popular during times of desperation. After the people feel secure again (or the nationalists destroy everything and people realize how much they suck) they’ll usually gravitate towards a more traditional leader.

So I’m saying Armin could be the Joe Biden to Eren’s Donald Trump.

Basically, if Armin isn’t playing some leadership role post-Rumbling, he’s dead. That can happen even if Eren wins, though. That’s why I give him about even odds.

Now that Armin is in P A T H S, he’ll probably try to speak to Eren again. If SNK has any final reveals about Eren’s motivations, it’d happen here.

…I really don’t want the pregnancy to be real.

I really don’t want it to be Eren’s surprise motivation.

But if it’s coming, it’ll happen here.

I don’t know what Armin will do if Eren drops something like that on him.

Armin…isn’t as capable as people think he is.

His attempts to negotiate a peaceful resolution with the world were flailing and unsuccessful.

I don’t know how he’s going to negotiate with a dad who’s convinced that violence is the only viable option to protect his kid.

When Armin is the one who failed to broker a peaceful resolution to begin with.

When Armin tried to convince Connie to back down from violence, he was immediately shut down by Connie, and it was laughably easy!

Armin can’t even negotiate with CONNIE.

That’s the intellectual firepower humanity is relying on.

Don’t expect him to win.

(NOTE: Huh, you know, I never realized until now, but this series has totally ruined every major character. Armin is a useless idiot, Mikasa probably needs someone to hold her hand the rest of the finale, Historia’s been sidelined. What happened?)

Reiner Braun: Lean Dead

Ok, I know everyone thought Reiner would die last time around, but this time…

Eh, I think Reiner will die this time.

Reiner’s character arc is basically over. He’s found a new source of motivation in the form of Gabi and Falco, and he’s made peace with all the people he’s hurt.

There may be a scene coming where he reconciles with his mother. That would require him surviving the final battle, so I have him down as only leaning dead.

Annie Leonhardt: Lean Alive

Annie has a better chance at living than most everyone else, but that’s only because many scenarios where she lives or dies are easily foreseeable.

Maybe Annie is able to meet her father again.

Or maybe her father will die, and Annie decides to move on from her past and fully commits to Armin.

Annie’s character is in a different place compared to  the others. Most of the other characters’ arcs have been played out or will be by the time the series ends. Annie’s isn’t.

Annie has a burgeoning romance with Armin. And it’s a romance that could lead to children. We all know how much this series looooooves children.

I think Annie has a good chance of making it out alive, especially if Armin does too.

Jean Kirstein: Likely Dead

Sorry, but I think Jean is destined for the glue factory.

Jean had a chance to live a long, peaceful life when Floch offered it to him. He passed it up.

You might think Jean should be rewarded for his selflessness, but we all need to keep in mind that one of the themes of Attack on Titan is that if you end up sacrificing yourself for others….you end up sacrificing yourself.

Jean made his choice. He’s not coming back.

Connie Springer: Likely Dead

Connie is going to die for the same reason Jean is: it’s the path he chose.

He chose to make his mother proud by fighting for humanity, even if it’s a suicide mission.

It’s the path he chose, and that’s it.

Pieck Finger: Toss Up

Pieck is something of a wild card.

I list her as a toss up because she seems closest to Gabi, and I think Gabi has a good chance of living. If Gabi is going to survive, though, she’s going to need a new mother figure. Pieck would be great in that role.

At the same time, her character is not particularly important. I could easily see her dying just to give the final battle a higher death count.

Gabi Braun: Safe Alive

Gabi is one of the likeliest ones to live.

She’s not directly participating in the battle, she’s safe from the rumbling, she has a burgeoning romance, and she’s a kid.

Kids have died in Attack on Titan, but never one who’s a major character.

As a child, Gabi represents the next generation; the future of humanity. To fulfill that role, she needs to live to the end.

Falco Grice: Likely Alive

Falco is a kid, too, so ofc he’s bound to live.

Not only is he a kid like Gabi, he’s also in love with Gabi. I highly doubt this series would end with a burgeoning romance cut tragically short.

Individually, Falco and Gabi represent something important in Attack on Titan: the future. Future leaders, future workers, future caregivers. They are humanity’s future.

But as a couple, they represent something even more important than that: posterity. The promise of an ongoing future for humanity.

Falco and Gabi love each other. When they get older, they’ll marry, and they’ll probably have kids.

Attack on Titan always emphasizes needing to move forward. Falco+Gabi is how humanity moves forward from the Rumbling.

Levi Ackerman: Lean Alive

Yeah, really.

I think Levi is going to make it.

He’s a safe distance from the battle, he knows he can’t fight, and he knows that he’d fail to kill Zeke even if he tried.

What we saw in 136 was Levi starting to make peace with the fact he is not going to fulfill Erwin’s final order to him. He’s starting to see the big picture: his role was to create a better world for humanity’s posterity.

That’s why he chose Armin over Erwin. Erwin had played his part and earned his rest. Giving Armin the injection was a generational passing of the torch.

In light of that, Erwin’s final order doesn’t seem so important.

So if Levi stays rational, he likely won’t have to do anything that would risk his life.

He may well make it out of this.

Zeke Jeager: Lean Alive

Zeke is probably going to live just because he’s the one who’s been most obsessed with death. It’d be weird if Attack on Titan (which theoretically celebrates life) were to grant Zeke his death wish.

If Zeke has been imprisoned in some sense by Eren, then he’ll probably live on in some form, so he may not live in an “on earth” kind of way, but alive is alive, so I’m counting it that way.

Everyone on Fort Salta (inc. Onyankopon, Mr. Leonhardt, and Ms. Braun): Likely Dead

This one wasn’t hard to figure out.

Their lives are directly contingent on Eren losing, so if Eren is likely to win, that must mean they are likely to die.

It would be sad for Karina and Mr. Leonhardt to not reunite with their kids, but that’s not a major problem in the grand scheme of things.

Miss Kiyomi and Yelena: Likely Alive

They’re stranded in the middle of the ocean, but if Falco survives, he can come back and rescue them.

I think they’ll be alright.

Ymir Fritz: Safe Dead

She’s already dead, silly, so of course that’s her rating. :P

[arlingtonpark]

This was such an incredible episode. 

Suicide is often played for drama, and yes, the point of works of drama is to be dramatic, but what makes this stand out so much was how undramatic it was. 

This episode was -real-. 

That phrase is practically a cliche at this point. 

“This story is real.”

This is too real.”

This episode actually is real. 

Rika Furude wants to die. No drama. She holds the shard to her throat and is clearly fantasizing about ending her life. 

When she decides to kill herself, she gets away from her friends by telling them she wants to play hide-and-seek. Before running off, she tells them to not blame themselves if they never find her. 

When she’s preparing breakfast, she looks at her knife, and takes a moment to hold it to her neck. 

Rika is a Homura Akemi-type character. The looping time traveler who has to thread the needle and save her friends from a gruesome end. 

She DID save her friends. She broke the time loop and managed to save everyone. Now she’s been dragged back into a new loop by some unknown power for unknown reasons. 

Her spirit can’t bear it. She’d rather just die. 

What stops her is her friends.

Higurashi is best known for it’s brutality. And it is a brutal series (though this new series is overall tamer than the previous one) but it’s a story with heart. It’s a story about friends who come together and overcome the most ridiculously shitty situation ever conceived. 

I’m genuinely rooting for this series to keep up the writing quality. It almost never happens, but I want this show to succeed. 

So far, it’s earned it.