#he's not perfect nor is he helpless and a tragic backstory does not a character make

[codycodybobody]

late night/early morning thought is that there are many things i dislike about fanon obi wan, but the biggest thing people seem to miss is that uh. he's a kind of a jerk.

[jeanandthedreamofhorses]

It was already heavily implied that humanity wasn't extinct as soon as we knew the titan trio came from outside the walls. Ymir's story being moved in the anime made it hit a lot harder emotionally. In the manga its placement came years after we'd last seen her, and knowing she was probably dead by then made it feel flatter. And Marco's death coming up when Reiner was having an identity crisis made more sense of how the stuff going on in his works. And it's important for Annie, too.

Sorry for the late response; I’ll answer point by point.

1) Not necessarily, because remember, at around the same time we knew that they came from outside of the walls (Reiner and Bertholdt’s reveal) we also learnt that all titans were once humans. I don’t know what general fandom consensus was, but I at least assumed humanity was still extinct but there were a select number of titans who had managed to shift back into humans. Alternatively, there could have been a small human community that survived the apocalypse and existed rudimentarily beyond the walls. There was nothing to strongly suggest that the apocalypse never happened at all. 

The early inclusion of Ymir’s flashback revealed explicitly that the cause of the titans was humans creating them, knowledge which skips a massive part of SNK’s thematic journey from monster to human - the whole purpose of the Uprising Arc is to introduce the idea that the Titan threat is really a human one. Revealing this now undoes a large part of what makes it so great and essential in SNK’s unwinding narrative. But, it shouldn’t be all that surprising given that this journey has been undermined before by the removal of Eren’s sympathy for Annie, which was its first major step. As is sadly so often the case with producers of adaptations, they clearly haven’t looked for anything below the surface. 

Additionally, Ymir’s backstory is far more enjoyable to watch with the knowledge of who the real Ymir actually is, and the presentation of it as a series of images flashing besides the letter’s quiet melancholy to a loved one shortly before death was, to me, much more moving than the anime’s basic flashback technique, entirely within the mind of a character and at a random time for the sole purpose of filling up the episode quota of the season; which is also dumb, because since Clash is quite a short arc and Uprising was quite a long one, why oh why didn’t they just combine the two into a 25-episode run like last time and allow adequate time for both? I mourn for the inevitable compression of Season 3. No matter what anyone else says (even Yams himself!), I really liked how the manga paced it.

But most importantly, Ymir’s letter fits with thematic perfection at the end of an arc about the uncovering of mysteries and delusions and dealing with the emptiness that exists beyond them.

Return to Shiganshina was the arc of Pyrrhic victories, the arc that really tested whether the lives lost in this grand pursuit were really worth it after the human and morally ambiguous elements were emphasised in Uprising. Erwin never got to see the basement, and though Eren did he found that the thing meant to bring an end to the war only revealed it to be far larger than he thought. Grisha’s revolutionary dreams are destroyed after being betrayed by his own son and realising the monster he’s become. Mikasa finds out the person she’s been fighting to protect will inevitably die in a few years. Armin who had longed for acceptance finds the man he had looked up to has died because of him and now is the figure of widespread distrust. Levi has to make the choice to let the man he lives to serve die, and fails to avenge him. Hange loses both people closest to them as well as their eye. Jean is unable to completely conquer his humanity for the sake of the mission (his constant struggle from the start, now being tested again in the latest chapter - I think he’ll try and shoot anyway but Magath will jump on him and sacrifice himself to save them), Connie is unable to avenge his family, Sasha is flat-out knocked unconscious in an explicit deprivation of ability. Marlowe loses hold of his grand ideals at the end. Reiner’s attempt to be a hero fails in just about every way possible, Bertholdt’s attempt to take responsibility ends with his death and the loss of the Colossal Titan power, and Zeke’s arrogance is humiliated by his ignoble defeat by Levi. 

The revelation of Ymir’s death fed into that greater theme as, to Historia, just as to the reader, her mystery and her absence kept us hoping - but now that hope is dashed against the wall as it is revealed that she was not a god like her name suggested, but a human, and one had already died long ago. And so Eren can take no pleasure in seeing the sea, because the dream associated with it is dead. It’s this nihilistic pit that allows the SC, and especially Eren, to commit the atrocities they are now - hopefully the final Arc will eventually help the, rediscover the passion, hope and soul they have lost after too much time spent with monsters.

So, if it’s disappointing to hear Ymir’s backstory knowing she’s likely dead…that’s the point.

2) I don’t see how it helps to have a flashback of Reiner’s split personality to explain his split personality. That’s not explanation, just…repetition. The reason Reiner’s role in the death scene is so effective in the manga is that Reiner’s reaction is the crown on top of the helplessness of the situation of the Warriors (and all sides) - Reiner had acted as the monster figure but it’s just part of his inability to process his grief, superbly perfecting the tragic pathos for the Warriors throughout the scene even while doing something so terrible. Three flashed images cannot compare to the drawn-out desperation of the situation that gradually generates the pathos culminating in Reiner’s reaction, nor does it explain (in the season itself) why they do it in the first place. And once again, thematic timing! Bertholdt’s death so clearly parallels Marco’s that if they don’t include this scene in Season 4 I’m gonna get mad - and just with Bertholdt’s death that gave no-one any satisfaction, so it was with Marco - another example of the Pyrrhic victory that belongs to the RTS Arc.

3) While I agree wholeheartedly that Annie deserves the best treatment, they had the good sense of including her training Eren to build sympathy for her (although still no “Maybe I could teach you” ARGH), and the Lost Girls light novel made Annie sympathetic before the Marco scene was even written. Including it before its time in both the season and the OVA was unnecessary and thematically harmful padding.

The SNK anime has been unsalvageable since Episode 25′s Rage-Monster Eren; even their attempts to fix their mistakes just disturb other careful formations. Its value lies solely in its music, voice acting, and function as a gateway to the manga. 

TLDR, the SNK anime is to the manga what this cake is to The Simpsons: