hushpiper

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?