(no subject)

Belatedly, I want to talk about the current developments in Historia’s storyline. Originally I found the pregnancy plot deeply upsetting (unwanted or ambivalent pregnancies are a huge squick for me, especially with a character I’m so invested in), and it worried me to see a character’s autonomy taken away for the sake of an edgy storyline that may not take into account her character or her previous story arc. But as I’ve turned it over in my mind through this month, my view has changed. The themes implied in this storyline are intimately tied to Historia’s character; it wouldn’t work with anyone else.

Issues of family and acceptance form a major part of Historia’s psyche. Her mother rejected her from the beginning (”I am not this child’s mother! She has nothing to do with me!”), followed by her father (”Very well... neither of them are related to me.”). These early rejections form the basis of her former martyr complex and suicidal tendencies: she must win the acceptance of others, and even her life is not too high a price to pay for it. Her character development in Uprising comes as she rejects them in turn--first by smashing the serum and then by killing her father--and accepts herself in spite of them by identifying herself to onlookers by her own name.

And then she opens the orphanage. Of all of the things she could do with her power as a queen, we are explicitly told, this is what she’s chosen to do. Historia wants to be a mother to these children, as Frieda couldn’t truly be for her. She wants to give them the love and acceptance that she didn’t have. Her arc follows a clear line: from rejection, to self-acceptance, to paying it forward.

But an emerging theme in this story is the mistakes of the parents haunting their children. The protagonists have inherited a world fucked up by their parents’ mistakes, and increasingly they are faced with the same forces their parents grappled with--and find themselves perpetuating the same cycles as the previous generations. And so the story has placed Historia on the other side of the table: now she is an expecting mother with a child forced upon her by circumstances she doesn’t fully want. (“If only you were never born--”) It places her in her mother’s shoes and asks her, implicitly, “What will you do? Will you be better than your parents?”

Halfway through Uprising, I took a break from the manga. After Levi strong-armed Historia into agreeing to take the crown, I couldn’t see a way for the arc to end that I could be okay with. Any road from there seemed doomed to end in Historia being installed as a puppet queen under threat of violence, with her wishes and indeed her personhood being trampled for the sake of the greater good and the wishes of the military. (And doesn’t that sound familiar?)

Instead, it ended with Historia getting one of the manga’s rare true victories. After several chapters of struggle, she took the situation into her own hands, and took the crown on her own terms. She didn’t change her circumstances--the coup still needed to happen and they still needed her to take the crown--and she did not run from them, as Levi suggested. But she took control of them. She refused to be treated as a puppet in her own life. By the time she took the crown, it was her choice to do so.

So much symbolic good--or evil--rests in Historia’s child, and the choice she may now be presented, to embrace or reject it. And she is perhaps the best of the cast to rise to the challenge. So when fate faces Historia and asks her “What will you do?”, she may do what she’s done before: take the circumstances that were forced upon her, and make them her own.