Eren: A Plot-Device Made Protagonist
I like that Eren aka the protagonist is revealed to be in the end nothing more than a plot device.
It is not his choice that frees Ymir, but Mikasa’s.
He can’t really see a future where Paradis Island integrates back in the world, but Armin can.
All in all, Eren completely inverts the meaning of his father’s words:
Grisha’s words are incomplete alone. For them to be understood, Carla’s words are needed too:
However, Eren interprets Grisha’s statement in the opposite way:
He thinks that being free is something special… something one is either born with, like Armin:
Or has to fight for, like Mikasa:
Eren himself flips flops between these two ideas in regards to himself. He was either born free or will reach his own freedom through fighting. He is either special or a complete loser.
He can’t really accept that he is just like everybody else and that this is what makes him free. This is because freedom is actually really hard. It is about making difficult choices whose consequences are impossible to predict. It is about sacrificing something the moment you choose something else.
Eren chooses instead to believe freedom is some sort of special quality. He sees it as the complete absence of boundaries, as somehow having no limits.
Well, the Coordinate is the thing most similar to Eren’s idea of freedom in the world and it is actually terrible:
Eren is literally given no boundaries at all both when it comes to time and to space. However, this only makes him a slave.
This idea is interesting also from a meta-narrative perspective, especially since I think Isayama once commented that Eren is a slave to the story. Well, this statement conveys Eren’s essence as a character perfectly. In the end, he is given a power, which can be used to do anything. In other words, Eren could have become a writer of his own story… but in the end he is not really able to:
He chooses to let Bertholdt go because he could not die there. However, this results in Carla’s death.
Eren is literally the writer that writes himself in the corner and is not really able to come up with a story he likes. He is the writer who becomes a plot-device in his own story, so that others can choose in his stance and solve the conflict.
And in a sense, we readers too are asked to choose in the end, so that we too can be free.
We must choose how to read Eren, who is all built on contradictions.
Did he really do it all for his friends’ sake?
Or did he do it because he wanted to?
Will we choose the cruelty or the beauty? Or can we somehow choose both?
