#but at least i don't think that the solution is to stop committing genocide against one side and start committing it against the other

[cakemagemaeve]

I'm just. So tired. I can't be the only gentile who thinks that wishing violent death on anyone who thinks the geopolitics of the I/P conflict aren't as black and white as "Israel bad, Palestine good!" or "Palestine bad, Israel good!" is, y'know. Bad?

Like, you get these kids (as well as people who are old enough to know better) who want to prove they're More Leftist than Thou who will shout about how much they hate Nazis and fascism, and then turn around and say that the Israelis should be cleansed from Palestine, often while spouting straight-up word-for-word Nazi propaganda.

It's really been jarring seeing so many people whom I had previously admired and respected for their leftist views and takes not only start falling for and parroting virulently antisemitic propaganda, but outright stating that anyone who thinks Israel has a right to exist at all should be murdered horribly. They're going on and on about all of the Islamophobic attacks happening around the world right now (of which there are a lot, no denying), and yet they're dead fucking silent about all of the antisemitic hate crimes happening at the same time.

Again, it's possible to want a free Palestine and a free Israel at the same time. It's possible to believe that both Palestinian children and Israeli children deserve to grow up without having to worry about bombings and terrorist attacks. It's possible to want peace and freedom for one without wishing terror, genocide or subjugation on the other. It's not a zero-sum game, for fuck's sake.

Also, it still galls me how many white Americans I see rabidly calling out for the blood of the "colonizing Jews" while they themselves live in a country which was founded by European invaders who committed wide-scale genocide against the native populations and whose government has been gleefully committing all manner of war crimes and atrocities across the world ever since. If Israeli civilians deserve to die for their government's crimes, then what do we deserve?

[gabrielsbubblegumbitch]

Charlie's corruption arc ✨😈

aka Broken Crown AU inspired by this post because I’ve been thinking about it intensively. So, I believe Charlie's villain arc would start with a great feeling of relief. Imagine: it's been a week since the final battle; it's been a week when Charlie hasn't been able to sleep at night. Others think she's still grieving, but the truth is different. Every night, Charlie cannot fall asleep because she's trying to cope with the relief she felt the second Adam died. She was the one who at first stopped Lucifer from finishing him, just because killing Adam didn't seem right. But when Niffty actually did it, despite everything, it felt right. It felt good.

After weeks (months?) of looking for a way to stop Adam from committing genocide against her people, after being bullied and humiliated by him, after witnessing how an unjust system enabled his despicable actions while ruthlessly punishing others for far lesser crimes, she finally, for the first time, felt like she had any agency. Just like that, her loved ones were finally safe. They could all breathe again, and all it took was a small act of violence against the person who fully deserved it. This realization changes her. While she doesn't intend to do such things in the future, she can no longer deny that exercising brutal power can be the best solution when dealing with certain kinds of people. This is the very first thing she hides from Vaggie. Not because she's scared of her judgment but because these ideas are so against her own moral values it is simply scary to put them into words.

Maybe I would be capable of killing someone in cold blood. Maybe I'll have to do it one day.

But Adam's dead, so they are safe, right? And she won't ever have to make a choice like that again. That's some reassurance.

And then, Niffty is killed by Lute. Just like that—Lute teleports to Hell by night and slaughters her in revenge because why wouldn't she? Who would have stopped her?

It obviously hits everyone hard—they just lost another friend. But Alastor? Alastor loses his fucking mind. He goes completely feral, yelling at Charlie and blaming her for everything.

What kind of incompetent fool shows their enemy mercy and lets them live long enough to get vengeance? I cannot believe I thought you could be a competent leader. You are just a fucking child. You are all a bunch of idiots.

Charlie goes through a complete meltdown because she knows he's right. If she had the guts to finish Lute or at least asked Vaggie or Lucifer to do so, Niffty would be alive. She's crying, choking on tears; she feels like a hopeless failure, but Alastor does not give her a break. He seems so infuriated she thinks he would kill her. Fortunately, Lucifer and Vaggie intervene. Lucifer puts Alastor back in his place by essentially beating the shit out of him. Vaggie takes Charlie out to calm her down. She insists that if it's anyone's fault, it's hers because she was the one who spared Lute, but Charlie knows that it's a lie. Vaggie would have killed Lute if not for Charlie's convictions. She fails, and she fails all over again, and it seems like she can't escape the evil. It's her responsibility to face it on equal terms. Otherwise, she won't be able to protect her loved ones.

After this incident, both Lucifer and Vaggie insist on kicking Alastor out of the hotel. He's too dangerous, too unpredictable. We can't allow him to treat you like this. We don't even need him anymore; there's nothing an Overlord can do that the King of Hell can't.

But that's not the truth. There's something Alastor can do that Lucifer can't: play the game. And now, grieving another of her friends, Charlie realizes she needs a teacher if she wants to stop pieces.

I have like 0 time to write the proper fic but I had to get these out of my system because holy shit I love coming up with elaborate plots I'm not able to execute. Maybe talking about it will somehow scratch the itch.

Also tagging @purrpleowl because she expresses her interest in this idea.

[lord-squiggletits]

Actually re: the last post about IDW Optimus and politics and moral grayness, if anyone here has read The Wheel of Time series, I actually compare IDW OP to Rand al'Thor in my head a lot. They have sort of the same background of "normal guy gets singled out by a person of Great Authority and put on a path to saving people" followed by a path to leadership hinging on "I became the Chosen One so even though I just wanted to save people, now I have to get involved in these bullshit politics where people are more concerned about securing their own power or spiting their enemies instead of uniting against evil."

Then there's a part of WOT where Rand becomes way darker and edgier, where basically as a result of a severe incident of betrayal and trauma, he goes "You know what, fuck you people, I tried to be nice and you just stabbed me in the back and tried to literally use me as a tool for your own ends" and he basically became a major hardass. To the point where I think there was at least one point (if not multiple) where after Rand extended some sort of diplomatic solution and got rejected, he was basically like "fuck you," fought an entire city on his own and won, then made himself the ruler and went "your armies belong to me and you're going to prepare to fight the Dark One like you SHOULD BE DOING." That phase is sort of comparable to Orion working under Zeta (OP flashbacks, Autocracy trilogy), in which OP's ideals are buried under disappointment and he's seeing these complicated, shitty political realities playing out where it seems like nothing is getting better and his attempts to work with the Decepticons only end in (from his perspective) being blatantly lied to and having his goodwill taken advantage of.

That's really what my ideal phase 2/3 story for Optimus would've been lmao. Still with the same idea of "gee you ARE fighting for the greater good but aren't you going a little far," but balanced out with a rightful dose of "I tried to be diplomatic and nice but no one listened, what else can I do but use force/politics/manipulation to make people see reason if they won't stop backstabbing and betraying each other in time to fight the Actual Evil Force who's going to kill us all."

WOT Rand even had a part of his character arc where he went so far into "humanity sucks, they would literally rather get slaughtered by the ultimate evil than set aside their petty bullshit long enough to work together" where he almost committed murder-suicide in a fit of despair that maybe humanity wasn't even worth saving at all. Only for him to be saved from the edge of despair by realizing "Wait, the world SHOULD be saved, because even though humanity sucks and so many people are evil, good still exists in the world and we can still fight to make the world a better place than it is."

LIKE IN A WAY RAND AL THOR IS BASICALLY IDW OPTIMUS in terms of the general shape of his character arc. Just the difference is that Rand got written as just a character with flaws and virtues coping the best he can under immense pressure and trauma. Whereas IDW OP got written more as "God the world fucking sucks and Cybertronians might just deserve to die bc we colonized people" and also everyone is constantly calling him a fascist and even the titles of his story are comparing him to an actual genocidal tyrant who killed 100 billion+ people. No joy or humanity just a scapegoat for evil living in a shitty world where everyone is miserable and "maybe our entire race IS doomed and we DO deserve to die" is like, a repeated motif of the entire story all the way to Unicron. As opposed to being treated as an obviously shitty worldview that the characters grapple with and go "no actually the world can be a good place and our society can recover from war and we don't deserve oblivion because of the cycle of violence we're trying to escape."

[cosmicjoke]

hello, first I would like to thank you for your metas and answers regarding attack on titan because it helped understand the story even more and changes my perspective on it completely. I appreciated your content a lot because you are like one of the few people I managed to get across who actually understood the story unlike the majority of the fanbase. I often come back reading your old posts because people’s misunderstanding of the story genuinely makes feel stupid and it drives me insane. I can’t find an aot fan who makes better analysis than you do.

Second, do you think the scouts would have been able to find a solution to Paradis island if Eren placed more trust and confidence in them rather than running away committing a genocide?

I’m asking this because I was reading comments on a video of people saying that Eren didn’t trust them because the last time he did place his trust on people like Levi’s old squad, they got killed. People think the whole point of Levi telling Eren to choose what decision to make was to act independently so that people would not get killed. These people just can’t seem to get that everything Eren did is selfish

Hi there, and thank you so much for your kind words!

There's every possibility that the scouts would have found a solution to the problem facing them, if they'd simply been given more time. But Eren completely robbed them of that chance by doing what he did.

People that think that's what Levi was telling Eren are complete morons, I don't know how else to put it. Levi told Eren to make the choice he would least regret. The choice he could live with. The choice he felt, in his heart, was the right choice, even if it turned out to be wrong. Whether that was depending on his comrades, or on himself. Levi was essentially telling Eren, too, that not every situation is the same. Every situation calls for a different reaction. Sometimes you'll choose to depend on yourself, sometimes you'll choose to depend on your comrades. He wasn't ever telling Eren to "act independently to keep people from getting killed". How the hell do people even come up with that? He was telling him to do, at any given moment, what he felt was right, but also to understand that you can never know for certain what the right choice is. All you can do, as Levi said, was make the choice that sits well in your heart.

Eren did literally the opposite of that. He literally went against everything Levi tried to impart to him.

He made the choice he KNEW was wrong, and he did it for nothing but selfish gain. Eren was never laboring under any delusion that what he was doing was justified, or even necessary. He told people that it was, like Historia, but that was just a manipulation. And he told himself at points that's what he was doing, as a means of coping with his guilt, but we see he never truly believed that, through his confession to Ramzi, and through his confession to Armin at the end. He always knew, deep down, that what he was doing was for himself, and that it was completely wrong.

It wasn't that Eren didn't trust his comrades. It was that he knew if he confided in them about his actual plans, they would intervene and stop him from doing it. If Eren had ever done that, or tried to do that, then the future he saw never would have been shown to him, because it wouldn't have existed. It only existed because it's always what Eren was going to do, always the end he was going to pursue. He had to keep his comrades in the dark in order to enact the Rumbling the way he did. Eren didn't want to be stopped. He didn't want any other "solution". Because it was never a solution to begin with. It was Eren indulging his own, most base desire, reaching for what he perceived to be a personal sense of freedom, no matter the cost.

That people don't get this is honestly depressing. I honestly think it's just people's absolute refusal to accept that Eren was a bad person, and thus, trying to justify and explain away his actions through increasingly convoluted explanations, rather than just accepting reality.

[erenspaths]

Appreciating a character as a whole is not a shame. Stop being ashamed of enjoying Eren. This guy is cool. Of course, no one in their right mind can buy something like genocide, but we're talking about fiction. Don't confuse everything. What allows you to insult us of pro-Nazi?! (like whatttt???!) or insult the author of this masterpiece of pro-genocidal dude? 3/4 of you don't even live in Europe, how can you talk about something like World War II and Nazism when you have briefly gone through it at school? I assure you that AOT has nothing to do, and has nothing to do with Nazi propaganda. Eren is not a fascist, quite the opposite. Get your heads out of your asses and educate yourself. I'm going to stick you with the definition of the word "fascism" for the most uncultured among you. "The fascist regime intends to make the nation a single community united behind one man (cult of personality and importance of hierarchy), with one individual who must step aside in front of the state. Rejecting human rights, it is accompanied by a strong and secure police state." Does Eren expect to rule the world and for everyone to obey him? No. Is Eren against human rights? He is fundamentally in favor of freedom for each and every Eldian, who at the base have been imprisoned and despised for a century now. Did Eren talk about establishing a totalitarian state led by a militia? No. To make a long story short, how can one call Eren a fascist when, instead of despising and carrying out a totalitarian policy on his people, Eren just wants to offer them the one thing that he considers to be a right for all: Freedom as a human being, as a representative of the Eldian people.

I think that everybody confuses fascism and genocide. It's not necessarily linked, even though very often in a fascist political system there are genocides.

I don't consider Eren to be a racist either. His line "When I knew there was humanity behind the walls, I was disappointed" was really misinterpreted. I just consider Eren as someone who lacks the words to express himself properly. Let me explain, what Eren wanted us to understand here is not a repulsion of other people from other countries, other cultures, or whatever, but rather it is when getting the memories of Grisha, Eren understood how much the rest of the world despised and treated them. He was just disappointed to see how stupid and mean humanity can be, what had they done to deserve this inhuman treatment? He learned about Ymir Fritz, about what the Eldian people have done to others, but wasn't cutting them off on a small island surrounded by titans who are, in the end, fellow countrymen turned into monsters, eating human beings, a punishment worthy of the task? I remind you that the Eldian people are parked like cattle in concentration camps, a kind of ghetto, pushing them back to the entrenchments so as not to mix them with pure-blooded Marleyeans (perhaps one of the only comparisons to be made with Nazism and the Holocaust) and this concerns Marley, I read somewhere that in other countries, when you are Eldian, you die, you shouldn't even exist. Eren, finally understanding, that the only mistake he made, he like all the inhabitants of the island and Eldians living in other countries like Ymir (not Fritz) Reiner, Annie, Berthold, Marcel,Gaby, Falco, Porco, Pieck... even Zeke, is to be born of Eldian blood, to belong to this people, and for some of them to be subjects of Ymir. 

This is exactly what they are accused of. They are being made to pay for what the people may have committed as an atrocity centuries before, with punishments such as confinement, bashing their own existence as a person, transformation into a horrible beast, even death penalty. 

The Eldians are considered impure human beings, the demons of this world, horrible people, kind of atrocities, they deserve to die: this is the way the rest of humanity thinks about Eren and his people. 

Then Eren must be the one who needs to be questioned? Eren is the madman, ready to commit genocide because he is going through his little adolescent existential crisis? Well, even if that was one of the reasons, I remind you that Eren is not an average boy, besides having suffered a strong trauma, he is the bearer of a heavy burden, and he has to do it by himself.

Do you think it's normal that a kid like Gaby is part of the Marleyeans soldiers, when she's, like, what, 11/12 years old? This kid should be in school. No, she's much better as bait for the enemy of Marley's state, since she's a little Eldian bitch, and the worst thing is that this kid is so propagandised that she considers her own origins as vermin to be exterminated since they are the demons of this earth and the reason for her confinement and mistreatment in Marley. In the end, I understand this kid, who wouldn't? Already, she had an uncontrolled hatred of the island's Eldians, now Eren comes undercover to attack Marley, she lost her friends (Sofia and Udo) in the process, so it's normal that in the end, nothing scares her anymore, and Sasha ended up with a bullet. Eleven-year-old Gaby lost her innocence a long time ago, just like her cousin Reiner. It’s sad.. really sad, and Eren was the first person to get it. He truly forgave the man who “killed’ his mother, because he knows that Reiner, like Berthold, like Annie, didn’t have any choice. They has been raised this way. Like Mikasa loves to say “This is world is cruel but beautiful”.

They pushed Eldians to think about them and consider themselves like trashes. It made Zeke thought that the best plan to help Eldians was their euthanasia. Can you imagine?!

They finally acted the way they did in order to save their loved-ones.

- Grisha did it because of his sister who has been slaughtered by some Marleyean officiers, then for his first wife Dina, then for Carla and his sons.

- Reiner did it because of his mother, to finally make his marleyean father be proud of him so, him and his mother could finally live together.

- Berthold, I guess, did it for his family, to obtain the certification to live as Marleyean random person, and stop being considered as a trash because of his eldian blood.

- Annie did it because of her father, because she wants to return to him. She even stated that even she knows that what she did to Paradis’ inhabitants was really awful, she would do it again because of her father.

- Gaby did it because of her propagandised mind and in purpose to honor her family like Reiner did before her, at least, it’s what she thinks.

They deserve to be forgiven, they deserve to be at peace, even if they’re Eldians. They deserve freedom. Freedom in a way to be freed from what people think they are, to be freed from what Eldia did centuries before, it never has been freedom like no political rules, like hippies, no way, it’s more deeper than that.

We still don’t know Eren’s ORIGINAL PURPOSES to start the rumbling. Why is he actually acting this way?

 Is that for freedom? Yes, I think.

 Is that for all the people he lost and all the people he loves and still alive? Yes, I think. 

Is that for a selfish purpose? I don’t think so.

Is Eren enough psychopath to want the rest of the humanity dying? No, I don’t think so.

Can someone bring him another solution - not including Islanders’ euthanasia, or genocide? Unfortunately, no.

I’m no smarter than anyone here, but I really think the moral of this story here is all about changing things, breaking the infernal cycle of things, and forgiving others, getting back on a healthy footing.

Eren is actually changing things, he is breaking the infernal cycle of things, he forgave the ones who spoiled his childhood, he is now waiting to be understood, and being forgiven. He is doing this for his people, like the others did.

[aspoonofsugar]

I don't understand why everyone is shitting on Eren , Okay his plan is definitely crazy but i really feel like there is more to it than meets the eye ,And even if his plan does kill innocent people I don't think it's that bad, Those people would've lived their entire lives as slaves and in injustice So killing them in a way is freeing them , Also Eren doesn't seem like he expects to live after all the cruelty he s going to commit. What do you think ?

Hello anon!

I do not hate Eren and I am actually full of feelings for him after this chapter, but I do think that he is wrong and that the manga is making it very clear in how it frames the whole situation.

First of all, there is the very basic argument that you can not really justify genocide and that defending a character who is basically going to commit one can be very triggering to people as @hamliet explains here (the post also has a link to another post by @momtaku which can be useful).

Secondly, I think that the way the story is currently being told really frames Eren as an antagonist.

Let’s begin with the fact that he has stopped being a POV character hence we are given very little access to his interiority, while we are given a lot of insights in how other characters feel about him and the whole situation. We know how Mikasa, Armin, Jean, Connie, Hange, Levi and Zeke feel and we also know how Reiner, Gabi and Falco feel and why they are doing what they are doing. In short, both sides are given a lot of space, but Eren’s interiority is not explored at all. He has been the character moving the plot the most recently, but his POV has yet to be seen. This in itself makes him a less sympathetic character, not because it is inherently impossible to sympathize with him (by the way sympathizing or feeling for a character is different from excusing or justifying his actions), but simply because the narration doesn’t give us the chance to do so. We as readers are meant to empathize with the other characters and to wonder together with them what happened to Eren and why he is doing what he is doing.

In a sense, the way Eren is currently framed in relation to others reminds me of how Johan is framed in Monster. Both Monster and Snk are stories which explore the idea of what is a monster and why monsters are born. The point of Johan is to be for the other characters a mystery they have to solve and in order to solve it their empathy is challenged because every easy answer is promptly discarded. When it comes to why Johan became who he is there are not reassuring answers and explanations people can use. I think that Isayama is doing something similar with Eren with the twist that Johan is presented as a negative character since the beginning, while Eren is introduced as the protagonist and so seeing him turned into one of the monsters he despised in the beginning is even more heartbreaking.

Apart from this, the reason why I think Eren is the final antagonist is simply that by this point all the other characters having a conflict with him is what makes the most sense for the plot and which could make the whole cast shine. The SC have literally no one else left to fight because the way Eren currently is he can annihilate all the enemies of Paradis on his own. Why should we have a final conflict where we basically have the Warriors and Marley as the underdogs (and they are going to be the underdogs because they are going to be the major POV characters since we are not given Eren’s POV) while all the members of our original cast are simply there watching what happens? Sure, they can have some conflict with Zeke and Yelena, but let’s be real the stakes would be nothing compared to the Warriors fighting Eren to save the world and I do not even know why Yelena and Zeke should fight them by this point. In short, a final battle where the whole cast is involved and which has the final goal to stop Eren seems like the most plausible solution for me. As usual, I am ready to be surprised and I do think that some minor conflicts will arise (for example conflicts with the Jeagersists, Floch and Yelena), but I also think that everyone will take part in the major one involving Eren.

As far as your second point goes i.e. Eren’s plan being more than just the destruction of the world, I think that there are still two POVs which could give us additional information and they are Historia’s and Eren’s. Up until the moment we are given them, everyone can still be hopeful there is something we are ignoring. That said, the only revelation which could partially change things and which comes to my mind is that Eren is playing the part of the villain, so that everyone can unite to bring him down and that he is acting this way because he has seen Armin, Mikasa or someone else stopping him. This could also explain why he has been pushing Armin and Mikasa away. However, even if that were the case, I would say that, without anything more, Eren would have still gone at it in the worst way possible. Why couldn’t he simply be honest with at least his closer friends? If he is playing the villain, why couldn’t he let Armin and Mikasa know? In the best case scenario they might have been able to avert such a future and in the worst case scenario they could have still helped him in his plan in a more efficient way. A lot of victims could have been avoided if at least a small group of the SC had known of Eren’s plan. They could have let him and Zeke touch each other immediately for example and in this way Zeke would not have transformed all those people in titans and Levi would not have been wounded. Mikasa, Armin and the rest of the 104th would not have felt betrayed and they could have acted without having to process a lot of contradicting emotions.

Finally, I strongly disagree with your last point.

By your reasoning, then why shouldn’t they have gone with Zeke’s plan? Zeke’s plan would have ensured the deaths of all the Eldians and (if death=freedom) it would have freed all of them. What is more, this freedom would have come after easy and peaceful lives and not in a violent way like in Eren’s plan.

Or even better, why should Marley’s solution to kill all the Eldians be so wrong? Aren’t the Eldians living as slaves and in an unjust world? Then why should it be wrong to “free” them from this world?

The point is obviously that taking someone else’s life away against the person’s will is something which negates freedom. People are free because they are born into this world and they can make their own choices.

It is true that the manga has presented some characters’ deaths (Erwin’s and Kenny’s to be precise) as the characters finding freedom, but they are a minority. Most of the deaths we are shown are cruel and painful. Marlow regretted joining the SC just before dying, Sasha died wishing to eat her favourite food, Bertholdt screamed for help. What is more, we have characters like Mikasa or Historia whose arc is about living despite it all. They have both shone when they refused to give up on their lives.

Let me also highlight that Eren himself does not think of what he is about to do as he himself freeing the world. The last chapter makes it very clear:

He remembers that it was violence what took his freedom away to begin with and he is planning to use that same violence against people (like the kid and his family) whose freedom has already been compromised by another war.

Eren knows that what he is about to do is something terrible. He knows that he is no different from Marley or from Reiner, but he has still chosen to keep going.

These are my current thoughts on Eren. As usual, I am open to be surprised in a positive way and as stated above it is true that we are still missing some key POV, but as for now this is what I think.

Thank you for the ask!