I Don’t Understand Eren On A Very Basic Level And I Need You To Understand Why

I want to talk about the incident in the cabin all those years ago, when Eren rescued Mikasa. This topic is the grapeseed in my wisdom tooth, the thorn in my boot, the irritating pop song stuck in my head since six episodes into the anime back in 2013. My frustrated curiosity over this is what originally kept me going with the manga after the anime ended. If I had one thing to say about this series, it’s what’s in this meta.

Of course, this scene has been commented on before, all over the place! But in the commentaries I’ve read (admittedly nowhere near all of them), the consensus seems to be “wow, what a fucked-up, rage-filled child, he can’t possibly be mentally stable”, and that, to me, seems to miss the mark. Because what we saw in that cabin wasn’t rage.

It was training.

There’s still something here that we’re missing.

Let me tell you what’ll happen if you throw your average adult into a room with a knife, two aggressors and a tied-up girl to save. For this example let’s say they’re also the bravest, ballsiest, angriest person you know. You put them in that room and they’ll try to brute force it: they’re gonna run at the nearest guy, and they’re not gonna prioritize targets or watch their backs or look for potential advantages, because rage blinds you and makes you stupid, and most people don’t have the experience or tactical understanding to turn a situation like that to their advantage. If you put a child there–especially a fucked-up, rage-filled child–and it’s even more true, because children are not great at tactics, or emotional control, or like, cognition. The adult, if they’re fast and strong, has a chance of getting out of it okay. The child is pretty much fucked.

But Eren came to that cabin with a plan, and once he was inside he quickly sized up the situation and improvised. He didn’t just kill two adults, he did it quickly and efficiently, while taking no injuries himself. The only reason he got in trouble at all was because there was a third assailant that he didn’t know about. That’s… honestly, that’s impressive. That’s impressive for an adult. For a nine year old…

Let me take a few screenfuls of screenshots and text to explain what I mean.

 

Eren’s got a lot of disadvantages in this situation, mostly involving his size. He’s a kid: he’s small, and he’s not very strong. He’s too short to reach many vulnerable spots on an assailant, and any adult will have the reach to hit him before he can get close enough to hit them.

The thing is that Eren knows exactly what his disadvantages are, and everything he does from the moment he opens the door is geared toward mitigating them. Throughout the scene he finds ways to overcome the reach issue, and leans heavily on the advantage of surprise to cover for the strength problem.

For the first guy, he accomplishes both by playing the lost and frightened child:

 

This entices the man to let down his guard, yes, but it also lures him close. He actually bends down until he’s eye-level with Eren, so that Eren has no problem whatsoever getting at the man’s throat.

 

But then there’s still another target to deal with, and in killing the first man, Eren’s lost the element of surprise. The second man has seen what just happened, and he’s momentarily stunned but will recover and charge Eren within moments. Eren can’t win a head-on fight here–so he doesn’t try. And this is the part where I went “whoa whoa whoa, wait, pause. What?”

 

He beats a tactical retreat. This, first of all, is not what you do in a fit of rage, and it’s not the sort of thing we’d expect of the Eren we eventually get to know, but we’ll put it aside. By closing that door between them, he breaks line of sight, and suddenly he has the element of surprise on his side again. And then:

 

He improvised a weapon to overcome the reach disadvantage. I don’t know if he did this before he originally opened the door and initiated the encounter, or if he did it in the precious few seconds before the second man opened the door to come after him, but either way–he finishes the job.

 

His actions may be fueled by rage here, certainly, but that is only the fuel. They’re guided by cold, hard, practical tactics.

 

Children do not do this. Children aren’t necessarily innocent–plenty of them have violent thoughts and urges, either because of their background or just because. But they don’t do this. They don’t think in terms of tactics–they’re barely capable of understanding them.

Understand, if this child was Levi, or one of the titan trio, I wouldn’t be writing this meta. We know that Levi was raised in part by a serial killer whose entire relationship to him was based on teaching him this sort of thing, and that he spent his childhood in an environment surrounded by death, suffering, and human cruelty. The incident in the cabin would be normal–though troubling–behavior for him. I would understand it coming from one of the titan trio as well, because they were literal child soldiers, and would have been coached in it extensively. But children don’t do
this sort of thing unless an adult has taught them to do it, and
increasingly, I think Isayama is aware of that.

So this is where we stand: Eren couldn’t have learned to do something like this on his own, but we have no idea where–from whom–he might have learned it. So far as we know, Eren had a normal childhood, in a peaceful town, with
a loving mother and a caring, if distant, father. It seems that as far as Eren’s past and character go, there’s a shoe that has yet to drop.