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Sep. 3rd, 2018 10:35 amHello. 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.
