hushpiper

...I have a problem: I'm spending far too much time on Artbreeder.

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(This entry is in response to both a Tumblr ask and a followup anonymous comment here.)

Asked by Anonymous

Did Eren really mean it when he said to Levi Armin is different than him because he has dreams and all he had was killing the titans and revenge? I think he either didn’t understand himself or i didn’t understand him right

You’re referring to this page?

Eren: But that was a dream we had as little kids. I’d forgotten it a long time ago… All I had left in my head was hate… getting revenge for my mom… and killing the titans… He’s different, though. Fighting isn’t all he has. He dreams, too!!

I do think Eren meant that, yeah.

From a story perspective, I think that page is less about Eren than it is about Levi. The whole stretch from late-Uprising through Return To Shiganshina could in some ways be characterized as “Levi Has Thoughts: The Arc”. People say things, and we see that Levi hears and is thinking about them, but he keeps the actual contents of his thoughts private. But while Levi is that sequence’s main purpose, it does also say a lot about Eren, and about how Eren sees himself and Armin. I don’t think Eren is in any way duplicitous when he’s saying this: he is desperate, and entirely earnest. This is what Eren truly thinks.

And the thing is, the rest of the story supports it.

Before shipping out to Shiganshina^(c72), the trio discuss their future while Levi eavesdrops, and Mikasa asks whether they’ll be able to go back to the days when they were children. Eren’s answer is his typical combination of determination and anger, saying they’ll bring back what they can, and make them pay for the rest. It’s Armin who turns the gloomy tide of the conversation by telling them stories of the outside world, even calling Eren out for seeming doubtful–a moment so important that we see it twice, first in chapter 72, and then again in Levi’s flashback in 84.

On their way to Shiganshina, we get to see Eren recounting his memory of the first time Armin talked to him about going to the ocean, and how it affected him. The most striking thing there–other than how strong an effect Armin’s dream has had on Eren’s life–was that Eren never talked about it inspiring him to explore or see these things for himself; only about the realization that he had, when looking at Armin excited face just then, that he wasn’t free. He caught a glimpse something beautiful and reacted with anger.

In the battle at Shiganshina^(c81) we even get a direct contrast: we see Eren in flashback saying “When I think about getting my freedom back, I feel strength welling up inside of me,” followed by Armin in the present thinking back on Eren’s words and saying “When I think about the outside world, I feel courage welling up inside of me.”–and then a beautiful repeat of Armin waking Eren up as he did in Trost.

We get sequence after sequence painting this same picture, of Armin filled with awe and optimism, and Eren able to find nothing but anger in response–and by the end of Uprising, Eren is aware of the pattern. I was talking to a friend about this, and she said she thought the whole thing was deeply sad: Eren knows that the kinds of feelings he saw in Armin exist. He isn’t blind to them. And he knows that he doesn’t have them.

Chapter 72, Eren: You looked like you were having an amazing dream. A dream I couldn't see.

Chapter 72, Eren: You looked like you were having an amazing dream. A dream I couldn't see.

Eren sees Armin’s dream as a beautiful thing that he’ll never be able to fully experience, and when it comes down to life and death–and it does come down to life and death, not only in Shiganshina but all the way back in Trost, when Eren pulls Armin from the titan’s mouth–we’re shown that this is what he sees in Armin that’s so important to him that he’d rather die than see it go out of the world: Armin has a dream, where Eren doesn’t. Armin opened his eyes.

Anonymous asked:

Hello. Do you think Gabi and Falco will become a part of Historias arc in these upcoming chapters?

I do.

I’ve got a post in my drafts, dated December 31st–chapter 100–about this exact topic (I definitely know how to spend my New Year’s Eve). I’ve fussed and fussed over it, because I wasn’t sure of the exact right way to word it, and I didn’t want to get it wrong. But in the chapters since then, Gabi and Falco made it onto the airship to Paradis, and are now loose on the island where Historia is waiting. Against all odds, the pieces for the scenario I was hoping for in the wake of chapter 100 just keep moving into position. So this is what I wrote–to myself–about Gabi at the time:

This girl spent every day of her life being told–directly and not–that she and the people she cares about are monsters. That they’re scum, that they shouldn’t exist, that they don’t deserve to exist.

But she never believed it. She looked at herself and her people and said, “No, we’re not monsters, we’re not dangerous, that isn’t true.”

“And I’ll prove it.”

She’s so determined. She’s going to fix it, she’s going to save all of them, she’s going to make it right. She’s so determined, and so heartbreakingly young. She doesn’t know yet that she can’t convince anyone. It doesn’t work that way. All the things she plans to do will only enable and empower the people who continue to exploit and abuse her, who have exploited and abused and ultimately broken her cousin before her. And because Gabi is strong, and Gabi is determined, she will continue to fight the wrong fight until it breaks her too.

And all the while, there will be more Eldian children born into this world just like her, but not as strong, and so when the people around those children tell them that they are monsters, that they deserve to die for the crime of having lived, they will believe it.

That part wasn’t hard to write; sobbing over the tragedies of these characters is the easiest thing in the world for me. What was hard to write–what I’m still not sure how to write–was the part that came next.

Because this was chapter 100, the chapter when we got Willy’s speech, when we see the depth of his self-hatred and the real face of the poison that has sickened the Eldians in Marley: “I… would choose to have never been born, if it were up to me. I’ve hated my blood, more than anyone else.” Words that sound so strangely similar to what we heard about Historia, of all people. Historia, who was never wanted, who should have never been born.

Read backwards, and Historia’s words to Eren in the cave, during the Uprising, sound like a response to Willy: “I can’t be a good girl… and I don’t want to be a god. But when I see someone crying, saying no one needs them… I want to tell them it’s not true. No matter who! No matter where! I’ll come to the rescue!!”

There’s an entire country of children being told, as she was, that they aren’t wanted–that they’re horrible people from birth and can only become accepted by allowing themselves to be used up and spat out, just as she was led to believe about herself. These are the people she wanted to help, “no matter who, no matter where.”

And now two of them are practically on her doorstep, newly angry and grieving and questioning, right at a time when she may be desperately needing a reminder of her purpose. Who did she take the throne for, if not for Gabi? Historia is the antidote to the poison that’s been fed to Falco and Gabi in Marley, and I just want them to make it to her to find it.

Anonymous asked:

So what do you think is going on with Eren in terms of his relationship with the 104th? Do you think he cares (as Mikasa indicates) or do you think he doesn't anymore/isn't the same person (as Jean and Connie imply)? Personally I think they're both wrong and right. I think Mikasa is lying to herself a little bit ("he's doing this all for us") but I do think she's correct in saying Eren cares about them. Similarly I don't think Jeans wrong in saying that Eren certainly isn't acting like he cares. But him and Connie misinterpreted the laugh he gave at Sashas death. So they aren’t completely correct either. Where do you think Eren’s headspace is at in regard to his friends?

I think I’m largely with you on this anon. I definitely think Eren cares, and I think Jean and Connie are misinterpreting him in general, and specifically over the laugh. (Understandable; he’s gone spectacularly off the rails, and they’re all second-guessing their understanding of him.) I think Mikasa knows him better and is much closer to correct, but I suspect her opinion of Eren here is probably a little… overly sunny? That’s my compact answer.

For my less-compact answer: Eren does care about his friends–about their safety, their dignity, their rights, their happiness. But about his relationship to them? Look, I’m not exactly saying that Eren could be perfectly content if his friends were safe and free but they hated him and he never saw them again… but I am kind of saying that.

Eren’s pretty shit at relationships, I think. He’s always been an outcast due to his uh, radical ideals–ideals he was never willing to compromise on, regardless of the social consequences–and I suspect he just got used to that. (See his exchange with Grisha over his lack of friends as a kid; it’s very telling.) Solitude and ostracization is, in a weird way, his comfort zone.

I’m sure that having friends has been wonderful and comforting for him these past years; not only friends but comrades in his fight. People who accept him for the weird-ass ragemonster he is, who even value that in him. This is kind of new, for him, and we see him glom on to new friends–like a good shonen protagonist!–despite himself, as soon as the opportunity presents itself. If they died, or got hurt because of him, he would be heartbroken–we’ve seen that. And losing their acceptance would be a blow. But he’s used to not being accepted; his heart will go on.

So I think the way he’s acting now–as though he doesn’t care–is less about him changing, and more about him… going back to his baseline. They’re angry, they disagree with what he thinks and what he’s doing, fine. Story of his life. He will do what he feels he must, what he feels is right.

I don’t know whether I think Mikasa’s right that he’s doing it all/specifically for them (as opposed to partially for them, or for Paradis in general). Actually if you’d asked me around chapter 107 I would have said he did it all either purely for The Cause or specifically to try to save Historia; but after 108? I’m coming around to Mikasa’s view on it a bit. I think there’s an element of rose-colored glasses there, but I suspect of anybody in the room, she’s the closest to the truth.

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.

Asked by Anonymous

Thank you for answering my question about shifter lifespans! I loved what you had to say, and I had never thought about how gaining the shifter power might actually end up lengthening Armin’s life considering how fast the SC are dying . Also interesting how Zeke may be replacing Armin in Eren’s life. Do you think Eren and Armin will ever be at the same level of friendship as they were before the time skip, or do you think they’ll only grow further apart? (I’m trying to avoid spoilers)

Thank you anon! I’m glad you enjoyed it, cuz I enjoyed answering it. And I support you in your spoiler-avoiding endeavours! (Do blacklist “snk spoilers” though, since I occasionally reblog spoiler content with that tag.) So I’ll answer before reading the 106 leaks, and we’ll very quickly see how wrong I end up being. ;)

For anyone reading who didn’t see the previous post: I mentioned in the tags that Zeke may potentially be replacing Armin’s role in Eren’s life as the more level, strategic mind telling him where to direct his efforts and channel his energy. Eren seems at his best when he has somebody like that in his life, but with his apparent split from his friends, it seems Armin may no longer be that person.

It kills me to say this, because I have always been so emotionally invested in the EMA dynamic, but I don’t think Eren and Armin will ever get back to where they used to be in their relationship. Too much has changed.

One of the trends in the EMA relationships in general is that though they are close and though they love each other, basic misunderstandings abound. Each of them are very different people with very very different goals in life and understandings of the world. Eren and Armin in particular are opposites in a lot of ways. This starts to become clear in the return to Shiganshina, but is really driven home in the ocean scene: they’ve both been devoted to the dream of reaching the ocean, but their reasons have been completely different this whole time.

Armin is driven toward the ocean by a sense of curiosity and awe, traits that were probably encouraged in him by his parents. (After all, he got those banned books from somewhere.) The world, he learned early on, is enormous–far bigger than what’s inside the walls, where he’s bullied and disdained. It’s full of oceans and deserts and mountains that spew fire, strange and amazing things that he wants to see and understand. He looks toward the ocean with a sense of hope; he smiles when he talks about it, and you can see him light up.

Eren’s drive is very different. When he looked at those books, he didn’t feel curiosity or awe. He felt anger. Little bitty Eren, lying in bed, covers pulled up to his nose, stewing: beyond the walls there’s oceans and deserts and mountains that spew fire and he’s never gonna see them and it’s not fair. He should be free to go see them, everybody should be, but instead they’re penned up inside these walls with wolves snarling at the gates and nobody cares. Fuck that. He’s going to be free, he’s going to make it to the ocean, with Armin at his side, and fuck anybody who tries to stop them. He looks toward the ocean and feels righteous determination.

They’re two outcasts who found each other, and found a goal that inspired them both, and this carried them a long way. Armin never would’ve dared to make the push to get out to the ocean without Eren’s drive, and Eren would never have gotten anywhere without Armin’s guidance. But when they finally made it to the ocean, the fundamental differences in their viewpoints became impossible to ignore.

Any reconciliation that Eren and Armin have will have to come only after they realize their differences, and build new bridges and new bonds accordingly. They have to shift their relationship and reconnect as adults. It won’t be what they had as children, and it might always be bittersweet. But it might also be better, because they may come to understand each other in a way they never did before. I hope they get there–I hope they have time to get there. (And if they don’t, well, bury me in a pile of fix-it fic, friend.)

Anonymous asked:

Thank you for answering my question about shifter lifespans! I loved what you had to say, and I had never thought about how gaining the shifter power might actually end up lengthening Armin’s life considering how fast the SC are dying . Also interesting how Zeke may be replacing Armin in Eren’s life. Do you think Eren and Armin will ever be at the same level of friendship as they were before the time skip, or do you think they’ll only grow further apart? (I’m trying to avoid spoilers)

Asked by Anonymous

How do you think the knowledge of his limited lifespan influenced Eren’s choices and decision making after finding out about it, if at all? How do you think that knowledge affect Armin? This was something I was thinking about after reading the latest chapter and I was curious to hear you thoughts! Would knowing there is no possible way you’d live to old age make fighting and killing easier or harder?

Hi anon! This is a great way for me to distract myself from upcoming spoilers, so with the standard meta writer “this is just my personal, falliable interpretation of their characters and psychology” disclaimer:

I think the knowledge of their impending doom adds to the weight of pressure and depression for both of them, but the differences in how they’d think about this really highlight the ways in which they differ as people.

Death itself isn’t something Eren fears. But my instinct with Eren is that what he does fear–deeply, desperately, more than anything else–is powerlessness and insignificance. Of dying with the knowledge that he’s accomplished nothing, that he wasn’t strong enough to change anything. So there’s no new sense of doom here: I doubt Eren ever thought he’d live to an old age anyway, or particularly wanted to. He’s just not built for peace. He’d take a short and brutal but meaningful life over a long, peaceful, unimportant one in a heartbeat. “I would happily give my life if I knew it would change something.”

All the knowledge of his own short lifespan would do is increase his sense of urgency: if he wants to make a change, well, gonna have to make it quick. He’s on a deadline. Which… could be a problem. The last thing “suicidal bastard” Eren needs is a reason to become more reckless.

Armin, on the other hand, does fear death–like any reasonable person. And unlike Eren, he’s the sort of person who would want to live to an old age if he could, even though he knows logically that his choices in life have made that possibility very slim. Armin would thrive in peace, but peace seems unlikely to come in what’s left of his lifetime. All he has left to look forward to now is the fight; he’s never going to see the metaphorical ocean. That would be a difficult blow for him to take.

But Armin has time now. Yes he’s going to die in thirteen years–but considering the death rate in the Survey Corps, he’s also more likely to live thirteen years than he was before. Shifters are hard to kill. He works best when he has time to think things through, without the pressure making him freeze up; well, he’s got time. Thirteen years. He just has to make them count.

But I suspect that we’ll find that the effect of Ymir’s curse on Zeke played a bigger role in Eren’s decisions than any worries about himself, and likely influenced Armin and other decision makers as well: Zeke is the key to a potentially war-winning weapon, and his time is very short indeed. If they’re going to use the coordinate for anything, they’d better make it quick, and they’d better make it count. The more dramatic and permanent the impact, the better.

Whatever they do, it needs to outlive all of them.

Asked by yuu-nat

Since you said it's easier to write your thoughts when you have a specific topic to talk about (and I really liked the way you talked about chapter 105 Eren when we were discussing the chapter in the Eren discord server), I want to ask: thoughts on Eren in chapter 105? and also on his current mental state? thanks <3 (this is daya btw)

Ahhhh! Hey there, Daya! Thank you for the ask!

Eren’s mental state in 105: pretty fucked, all around.

The ways that people realistically react to and cope with seeing or doing terrible things have been a primary feature of this manga from day one. We see people shaking, screaming, and crying with fear, throwing up, lashing out in anger, going blank, questioning themselves, rationalizing their actions, repressing memories, forming separate identities, falling into depression or self-loathing–and that’s not even a complete list. In a genre usually characterized by power fantasies, Shingeki no Kyojin instead goes to pains to show us the powerlessness of its characters, and Isayama puts a lot of time and care into depicting their reactions to the trauma he inflicts on them.

Eren’s probably pretty depressed at this point. Mind, it’s hard to be a character in this series and not experience some depression, especially after the revelations in Grisha’s journals. In the past, Eren dealt with trauma and depression by pushing and fighting harder, and he only started to despair at the times when he thought his anger and determination wouldn’t be enough to change anything. But after the basement, it seems that he really isn’t strong enough to change this, at least not in any way that will matter. The world will never stop hating him and his people, simply because of what they are. No amount of shonen protagonist grit and determination can change that. Anger isn’t enough anymore.

Which of course is nowhere near enough suffering for Isayama’s taste. So on top of having the dreams that drove him kicked over like a sandcastle on the shore, and on top of all the events of the series up until the timeskip, he also has several lifetimes of traumatic memories seething somewhere in his mind. So: you have the memories of devouring your father, of yourself being devoured, of watching an eight year old girl being devoured by dogs–and the list only gets more horrible from there–all forcing themselves, in full sensory detail, into your consciousness without warning. The memories are there now, out of the box, you have them. What do you do with them?

Put them away again.

So let’s talk about dissociation. Speaking very generally, dissociation describes the human mind’s ability to disconnect parts of itself from the rest as a way of coping with stress. It covers everything from daydreaming to depersonalization to amnesia, and most people have experienced low-level versions of it. In intensely traumatic or stressful situations a mind can keep itself calm by putting the emotions (or even the memories) over there, far away from itself. At its most dramatic it can take the form of identity issues like Reiner’s, but at other times it might “just” feel like the world is strangely far away, and you’re not really a part of it. Like whatever awful thing is happening, you’re not the one experiencing it, or doing it–or you are but it doesn’t seem real–and in any case it just doesn’t hurt like it should. And you can’t snap out of it.

Dissociation probably isn’t a new coping mechanism for Eren: his memories of his father’s death were locked away tight for years, and he can press on through enormous amounts of physical pain. He’s never leaned on it quite this heavily before, but with the constant pressure he’s under, his old responses of anger and determination just aren’t enough to help him cope anymore. And when he reaches for something stronger, the dissociation is there, letting him take the things that would be too much to deal with and–not necessarily consciously–put them over there. That eerie calm that we’ve seen in recent chapters is alarming, but not surprising. It’s not even new: we saw it begin to take hold before the timeskip–and even earlier than that, after the coup.

And so we come to Liberio.

Although we don’t yet know why Eren decided to take this course of action, he clearly did feel that it was necessary. But the cost is high. This wouldn’t be the first time Eren has killed, but in the past he’s killed people he’s thought of as animals and monsters, not people he’s seen as being victims like himself. He’s jeopardizing his relationships with the people he cares about. He’s playing the part of the murderous monster that someone has to be, he’s isolating himself from others, and he doesn’t even know if it’ll be worth it. (”Maybe it’s hope. Maybe it’s yet another hell. I don’t know which it is.”)

There’s an element of walking stoically into the flames to Eren here. The person he’s always looked up to is looking down at him with disdain. This is fine. His friends are angry and may never trust him again. This is fine. He killed a lot of people today, including children. This is fine.

His friend is dead, and her last words were absurd, and this is not fine.

It’s hard to say where Eren’s going to go from here, emotionally. Sasha’s death overwhelmed him, but the dissociation will probably come back, and keep coming back, until he no longer needs it in order to keep going. That is Eren’s defining characteristic, after all: he keeps going, no matter what. Fight, because if you lose you die, and if you don’t fight then you can never win.

“Keep moving forward. That’s all we can do.”

So. In chapter 99, this happened:

The Lanky Soldier who went on to drop Pieck and Porco into a trap told Zeke to go on ahead. After chapter 102′s ending, I have been trying to think of an explanation for this that doesn’t require Zeke working with Paradis, and nothing I come up with is convincing. But I think the possibility that Zeke has turned traitor is not so unlikely as it seems now.

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There’s something about Eren that I don’t think I can emphasize enough:

No matter the age.

No matter the time or place or circumstances. Eren is the Attack Titan. I don’t know how the paths between the Children of Ymir are supposed to work, but if we look I think we have to conclude that Eren’s own fate and personhood were deeply tied up in what he would become long before it was ever certain. Maybe it’s so strong in him because he would eventually become the Coordinate, where all the paths converge–I don’t know. But:

No matter the age. Eren could have been born in paradise, in a world of perpetual peace–he practically was–and he would still be angry, and he would still be seeking, because there is no amount of freedom that is sufficient. (Thought: how much of Eren’s reaction to the slavers who took Mikasa was down to the fact that they were slavers?)

He’s doomed to restlessness, in any life. He can’t just stop and be satisfied, any more than he can stop breathing. Even if he settles down, even if he forgets, that’s the truth that’s always going to smolder at the bottom of his heart, and all it will take is a tiny blue-eyed boy telling him about the sea to wake him up to fight once more.

That’s who and what Eren is.

Remember how some very observant people have pointed out how if you flip a world map upside down, Marley lines up very well with South Africa, and Paradis with Madagascar?

There’s an interesting thing about this: in the real world, The Madagascar Plan was a plan proposed by the government of Nazi Germany to relocate (kind way to put it) the Jewish population to Madagascar.

The island was a French colony at the time that the plan was proposed, but France was very close to falling. The idea was to make them hand over Madagascar when they were forced to surrender, then ship away the Jews to Madagascar, where many of them would likely die due to the environmental conditions there.

The plan didn’t work out: the British blocked their ships from getting down there. So they turned toward the Final Solution instead.

Put this one into the Isayama Likes His WWII Parallels An Awful Lot and Isayama Is A Huge Military History Dork files.

I haven’t been active in this fandom for very long so this might have been discussed to death already and so I’m sorry, but something just clicked for me:

Marley’s the only one who knows how to make pure titans–specifically, Marley’s military. I don’t think that was ever stated outright, but it’s been implied by everything, and I don’t remember anything contradicting it. At the very least, it is heavily implied by the fact that no other country has actually used titans as a weapon. That’s purely Marley’s domain.

Udo has said that conditions for Eldians outside of Marley are much worse; it’s also said by several people that Marley keeps Eldians around, in the ghetto, so that they have a stock of potential titans around to unleash if needed. But this makes sense: if other countries don’t know how to turn regular Eldians into pure titans, they can’t utilize them, and they have no reason to keep such a hated people around.

Then the hatred the other countries have for Eldians makes sense on a whole other, sickening level: they don’t know how Eldians become titans. These people don’t even know how it works, they don’t know that the Eldian they just bumped into in the street isn’t capable of suddenly becoming a mindless killing machine simply out of spite. And that Eldian doesn’t know it either: they might wish they could be that powerful, that they could spit in the grinding oppression and hatred they live with; or they might wish they just knew where the monster was in themselves so that they could cut it out and finally be accepted; but they can’t.

JFC every time I think of this fucked-up world I find a new reason to be horrified.

I’ve been doing a lot of World War I research lately for a project, and with momtaku‘s posts about Erwin today, it brought on a thought.

At the heart of it, Isayama is really a military history buff, and he can’t be unaware of the stories that were told–good and bad–of the officers in WWI. And I wonder how much of what we see of the leadership and the deep comeraderie in the Survey Corps might be based on the relationships between the front-line officers and the soldiers in that war.

Unlike the higher-ranking staff officers, these officers lived with their men in the trenches of the Western Front: they endured the same conditions, lived with the same danger, and their men depended on them for guidance and purpose. They had to embody a certain unshakable courage and moral force in order to command the solders’ confidence, even when they themselves were terrified, and the soldiers often admired them deeply for it.

And it had to be that way. These officers were the ones who would lead their men over the tops of the trenches into poison gas, barbed wire, and machine gun fire in no man’s land–and their men followed them. Ordered to go anywhere, even out into the open, “they’ll go like lambs as long as they’ve got an officer with them.”

Every word of that applies just as strongly to Erwin and the Survey Corps: he rides out with them, putting himself into the same danger as the rest of them, and to them he is an almost superhuman figure in embodying the cause they give their lives for, and never wavering. And for his efforts, the soldiers trust him to decide how they die, and to give their deaths purpose.

But the bond was never one way only. In letters home–the only place they could be really expressive–the officers rarely talked about their own deeds or heroics. Instead, over and over, they spoke of their men–and that’s the part that reminds me most of Erwin. The letters of one officer, Captain Thomas Kettle, make me think so strongly of Erwin and his humility and unending regard for the people he led and the sacrifices they make, that I could imagine him having written them:

What impresses and moves me above all is the amazing faith, patience and courage of the men. To me it is not a sort of looking-down-on but rather a looking-up-to appreciation of them. I pray and pray and am afraid!–they go quietly and heroically on. God bless them and make me less inferior to them.

Erwin Smith died, alongside many of his men, in a successful attempt to retake Shiganshina and all of Wall Maria, an offensive which he knew he likely would not survive. Captain Kettle died, alongside many of his men, in a successful attempt to retake the village of Ginchy at the Battle of the Somme, an offensive which he also knew he likely would not survive. In his last letter to his brother he wrote:

We are moving up to-night into the battle of the Somme. The bombardment, destruction and bloodshed are beyond all imagination, nor did I ever think the valour of simple men could be quite as beautiful as my men’s. I have had two chances of leaving them–I have chosen to stay with my comrades.

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.

Friends, I wanna talk about the last pages of chapter 101. Is Eren working with Paradis / the Survey Corps? Is he rogue and they just came to save his ass, or was he actually supposed to be in Marley? It’s the happenin’ topic right now.

I’m not gonna get into anybody’s exact wording here, because we ain’t got the official translation yet. However, I had–and I swear this is true–already sketched out an analysis of when the festival crashing plan must have been conceived, which I did not bother posting earlier because it didn’t seem relevant. Ha. Ha. So conveniently, I already have thoughts on whether it’s possible that Eren might have been working alone, based entirely upon things we had already seen as of c100:

Fuck no. And also, yes.

For this specific operation, at the festival, fuck no: he was working in concert with the others. There are too many pieces here moving smoothly together over separate locations for it to be accidental. There’s a plan here, and everybody knows their part in it. Otherwise it is a massive asspull–things rarely go this smoothly even when they are planned.

However, Eren did not come to Marley specifically in order to crash the festival, because it’s very unlikely that he knew about it beforehand. He likely found out about the festival either from Zeke or when the public found out about it, meaning c95 at the earliest; meanwhile, he was already in place around c93, or c94 at the latest. Too soon for the festival to be his reason for infiltrating.

So there’s two possibilities I see here:

Eren came to Marley in an official capacity, as part of a plan that was likely as bare-bones as “infiltrate, set up some line of communication as soon as you can, then gather information and watch for an opportunity.” This sounds unreasonably sketchy, but keep in mind that it’s about the same as RBA’s mission, so hey–more opportunities for parallels.
Eren came to Marley in an unofficial capacity for his own reasons, with or without the blessing of the rest of his people, but contacted them as soon as he saw the opportunity in the festival, or sooner.

Neither of those possibilities say anything about whether anybody was happy with what Eren’s doing, or with the plan if there was one. And so Mikasa’s unhappiness fits either way; it’s really a question of whether she’s expressing her own feelings or everyone’s general sentiments, here, and that’s a question for both the official translation, and chapter 102. Either way, the plan being enacted right now was conceived sometime between c97, when Eren established his line of communication, and c100. Not before.

But I have a much, much more important question, extremely relevant to this discussion: How did that letter get to Paradis? Do they have a PO box in Marley or something? WTF?

Re-entering tumblr by way of writing meta on a chapter that has the fandom drawing out battle lines is totally a good idea, right? Right?

I’m not gonna touch characterization, despite my many thoughts and feels, beause we don’t have enough information on what’s going on yet. I prefer to have a better idea of what a character is thinking before I meta it up about them, and Eren’s thought processes over the past years have been purposefully withheld from us. But we will find out, hopefully soon. Steady on.

Let’s talk strategy.

( Read more... )

And he did.
He did exactly what his father told him to, and he never wavered. He played the role he was given so well that to this day, the actions he took in turning his parents in as a child continue to afford him privileges that no other Eldian has.
To this day, he has never told Marley the reasons for his special abilities.
I don’t know where Zeke’s loyalties lie. I’m not sure Zeke was ever loyal to Marley. I don’t think he’s loyal to his father’s revolution either. He doesn’t seem to have any interest in the people of Paradis, and is utterly callous about their lives and happiness. But he cares about Eren, even just as a mirror of himself: “Someday, I’ll come to save you.”

I have a lot of thoughts about the state of SNK right now (YOU DON’T SAY–this is what you get when you decide to marathon catchup on the manga and end on a bombshell chapter), and most of them start as a question. Here’s one:

Q: Why did Eren wait until practically the end of Willy’s speech, when all the damage was already done, before, ah, stopping him? If Willy’s PR move is successful, it could win allies for Marley, which could be a huge issue for Paradis.

A: He wasn’t waiting for the end of the speech. He was waiting for the declaration of war. This way, in the future they can assert, truthfully and with everyone in the audience as witnesses, that they didn’t fire the first shot. Marley kicked down their walls, Marley sent battleships to their coast, Marley declared war. Paradis is not the aggressor here. This is a purely defensive war, and they can hold onto that and point that out later on, as they move into more offensive actions. (Like, you know, having one of their titans rip a guy into three pieces in front of a crowd of reporters and diplomats.)

Incidentally, I should note that Marley’s casus belli here boils down to “we don’t like their new government”, which is a pretty common imperialist sort of reasoning, and would not be considered a just cause for war today. (He follows it up with “we’re afraid they might attack us”, but that is also no dice.) I wonder if the same body of international law that Gabi violated has opinions on just cause…?

It occurred to me that I should probably formally state something about how I’m approaching basically all the things I’m thinking and meta I’m writing about SNK lately:

I’m assuming that everybody here is a rational actor, and that everything we see happening is the result of a logical, reasonable choice on somebody’s part.

This is inevitably gonna steer me wrong at some points, because people act stupidly or imperfectly or out of emotional impulse all the time in this manga, and mind control is a real and fascinating possibility that we can’t rule out. It’s just that I think this has to be our default assumption. Otherwise the sheer volume of things we don’t know overwhelms our ability to make sense of anything. So I’m giving preference to rational explanations for people’s actions–especially Eren’s actions–wherever such explanations are available. And so far, there’s always been one available.

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I'll admit it...

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Zeke’s Loyalties (As Of 102)

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The Madagascar Plan

This Whole Titan Thing Is Kinda Fucked, vol. XCVII

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

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chapter 100 birthday bash

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