#she's so sure her absent sense of self worth is actually a moral choice on her part and everyone should be like her

[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.

[veannaleethings-blog]

A Bunny and a dick.

We can talk about moral compass’s, right? We are adults.  Yesterday I had this long drawn out text message conversation with a girl I guess I would consider an acquaintance. Even though she is more like a fair-weather friend, but even then, only if the weather is fair for her; and even then, she is a little flighty.

Okay so we are texting, of course, not talking, not in real time. Not in any other context than, simply taking turns responding to one another, about a new endeavor she has embarked on, of achieving her bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. “What the fuck is that going to get you?” That was and is, really my response. It is the most superfluous degree one can sink into a pit of debt under. A piece of paper that really is only worth about 51k a year in New York 2015, as a graphic designer if you are a male. 51k a year might sound nice, but in New York, that’s beans!  So far, she is none of those things. Quite the contrary, she is a 36-year-old mother of two who is morbidly depressed and can’t live within the walls of society. This is partly the reason we gravitated toward one another in the first place. Turns out, even my outlook on life, is much more grim than hers, so she comes and goes in small doses. She has no plans of moving out of the city, in fact her only plan is to sell the house her and her husband recently bought, or leave it for the kids when they turn 18, and when she and her husband are older, they will buy and RV and live in that, on the road. Those are her goals. Sounds awesome, I can dig! Freedom to roam where ever, unrealistic as it is, because they can’t hardly save a dime to save themselves, still struggling even though her husband alone rakes in about 4 thousand a month. That’s just under 3 times as much the average Joe, not to mention that’s without any contribution from her, so if she did help they would be much more comfortable. Now, here she is, macabre and parading around as a self-proclaimed Satanist. Which is fine, except she isn’t, like, not at all. Only reason I say this is because after immersing into mystic, anti-theistic, Goetic conversations, I realized she had no knowledge of the basic principles of Satanism, King Solomon’s magic, the lesser key, of course, or any Rosicrucian shapeshifting alchemy. She basically just likes black clothes with pictures of Baphomet and various sigils and big numbers that read 666. I seem to have trailed off however, in the development of her hardly developed character. Anyway, as it is, she truly has no sense of her own identity and furthermore no real plans, just sort of passing time until she expires. Which is fine, I can jive with that. After all, that is exactly what everyone else is doing here on planet fuck. Just surviving, until we can’t any longer. I digress.  Back to the text conversation at hand. I questioned her reasoning, and financial output to eventual income, for this pursuit of a useless piece of paper, and implied that it would only be, even more wasted time. Her attempt at this, is not for financial gain or employability, her endeavor is for happiness and she hasn’t yet come to grips with that notion herself. She is bored. Bored and tired. She does not agree with the way the world works and refuses to give in to it, at least in her world views and morals, because absolutely has in every pliable sense of the term. She is married, (which is a civil union of patriarchal proprietorship) indebted to a mortgage, paying on a home loan, and now tied into school loans that are only producing profits for the very entities she despises. She has two children and somehow, finds a way to shop at high end food retailers to make sure her food is vegan. A real renegade, right?  We venture off course of her useless pursuit to procure and even more useless piece of paper and began talking about Nihilism, but not outright. Here is where I took the wheel to steer the ship. I had, and still have, no intent to steer it in any given direction, nor do I plan to sink it. I am just merely steering. After all, who am I to impose any influence, for I am no one. My opinions are trivial, and in this world, they absolutely, do not matter.  In fact, the only thing that matters, really, are the 4 forces that ground us here. Gravity, Electromagnetic and both the weak, and strong force of Nuclear force alone. Okay, I think I have made my point, nothing matters, nor will it when I end. It doesn’t exist outside of myself, only inside my mind and that is the point I am trying to make, because the same goes for her, and subsequently everyone else.  Not saying that I am right, just offering my opinion and, bleakly trying to end a conversation I didn’t give two shits about, because I genuinely do not care about her illogical ideas. They don’t affect me. So, I begin to explain the idea of Solipsism and relativity, which is hard for many to grasp, myself included, because if I do not matter, and I truly cease to exist when my existence is over, then why, am I equipped with any moral compass or range of emotion to begin with? What is their fucking purpose, if humans, as a specie, have no purpose at all? See how dark it is getting? It is a slippery slope this decline, down into this dark caverns of never ending Nihilism. I give her a few “for instances��� one, in regards, to an inanimate object that I can see, hear, and use in a tangible way, it, even though it is all those things, is also meaningless, and will no longer exist when I stop existing. Not because I am somehow righteous over it, it is an object made of plastic and metal, but because when my consciousness is over, it’s over! Everything I ever knew, and will come to know in my future, will be over. It is only perception, that leads us down our truly unique and individual paths regardless of a common consensus. The second “for instance” I offered her was a little more complex, it had to do with humans, emotions, the relativity of them in relation to us as individuals and furthermore the death penalty. Something, she, as a pseudo liberal is strongly against…unless of course something happened to her children, (but that is not up for debate) in which case all the aforementioned factors come into play. I explained it as follows. Let’s say, there is a man waiting, just waiting until the day he dies. Kinda like her, but with less creature comforts.  He is waiting for death as an eye for an eye punishment, on death row.  Seems fair, doesn’t it? She at this point in disagreement because she does not thing that killing someone is a good way to teach a lesson to another about killing someone. I wanted to explain that there was no lesson to be taught when deciding to kill a man, but I figured it was pointless. Back to the waiting part. Here is a person waiting for his punishment, not his lesson, not ANYONE’s lesson, just punishment. Okay this is where relative emotional spectrum comes in. She had asserted, that she herself could not fathom the emotional sufferings of her children after she dies, and therefore did not want to leave them the same legacy of suffering. I responded with the assertion that, that is complete nonsense! For a few reasons, firstly, her children’s sufferings are their own. There is no way for her, in her life on earth, even more so in her death, for her to know their individual sufferings, and consequently, that works just the same for her. She can try to empathize with them, and subconsciously, she will dig in her catalog of emotions that are attached to memories in her brain, until she finds one that could be similar, and then use it to do so. Empathize I mean. Or she could accept the fact that she was extremely arrogant in the statement that she so thoughtlessly made. Who said her children would suffer after she died? They might be sad for a while but they certainly, will not, and cannot, have the same outlook on life that she does, because her experience here, is uniquely her own. Back to the man waiting. Let’s hypothesize that he has two children, he obviously has a mother, and a father, absent or not, and maybe some siblings. Okay let’s narrow it down. He has a mother. Right now, while he still lives and breathes, these few, are the only people that can possibly be effected be the choices he has made, but in their own individual way. But, he is waiting for the death penalty, so that means somewhere, there was a crime he committed. A murder, maybe simple, maybe torturous, but a murder no less. Now there are other individuals involved, with an entirely different set of uniquely diverse range of emotions on this spectrum. Okay, the one that died. He/she no longer exists. All that pain, those distinctive sufferings, this person’s everything is gone. It no longer exists, it is done. What is left however, are the particle sufferings of the individuals that were relative to him/her. Obviously, a mother, maybe some children maybe a father, just like the other man. They all have their own set of uniquely individual sufferings. A mother lost her child, and a child lost their parent, these two cannot empathize with one another though they might try, it will not be the same. They can only attempt to relate in some haphazard way in relation to each other.  But that wasn’t the point, MY point was that when each, and every one of these individuals are gone, when they cease to exist, so does the suffering. The entire act in of its self never happened, because is no one left for it to have happened to.  It stops. It isn’t thought of, recollected, reminisced, or recalled. The situation is over. Her retort was one of confusion. She circled back around and again made some foolish statement, crossing a hypothesized scenario with the actual point I was making, which was, that nothing really exists and time is limited here, and she made the statement that she did not agree with any of it at all and it all sounded like a bunch of “go kill, go murder, none of it matters so fuck over the planet, do what you want!” I laughed so hard, and my only response at that point was “Sure! If that is indeed your moral compass.” I brought everything I had said previously about her agonizing suffering being something she cannot change, and that she has no control over and dropped it right there at her feet. She didn’t have much to say and it took several moments for her to respond, not really knowing what to say. I guess, what can you say when someone looks you in your face and says “bullshit, you are in control of your life while you are here.” She finally did respond however, with “right, what was I thinking, all that negativity. I don’t know why I went there, it has been a long day and I need coffee.” My point was, that our time is limited here and suffering is both imaginary, and temporary. It is as temporary as we make it in our own minds. Life escapes us more quickly than we realize, and one day we no longer have it, so we might as well put our sufferings to and end and make life as enjoyable as possible, because it’s short. Perception. All we have is what we remember, and we only remember, while we are living.

 I realized after I made my closing statement, that you, the reader may be wondering why this is titled “A bunny and a dick.” The reason for that is because, I remind you that this conversation took place through a serious of text messages, and was over in a matter of 30 minutes. But while it was happening, I was looking at an image in the back ground of my phone screen, of a man. A man clads only in men’s briefs, running shoes, and a bunny mask. A tall, thin, pale and scrawny man. All I could see was a bunny and a dick.