And here’s another reunion that was so good for me. It brought back my feelings about the Eren+Levi relationship, which has, frankly, kinda fallen to the back of my mind for lack of recent content. But I used to have a lot of feelings about it, and hey! Here they are, again. Kind of.
What I’ve always loved about it is the incongruity of headstrong, determined Eren willingly deferring to Levi. He’s always done this, always cared about Levi’s good opinion to some degree, and I wondered how the time skip would affect their relationship. Like, when they met Eren was a fifteen-year-old kid dealing with a lot of internal turmoil, and Levi, though likely very different from Eren’s image of his childhood hero, proved to be there for him a surprising amount. Levi was a leader whose authority over him Eren accepted with zero resentment, and he always kind of looked up to him. But that was Eren then, right?
Eren now–this unnaturally composed, cold-eyed young man–is a very different beast. So, seeing the man who calmly manipulated a child, reduced Reiner to tears and threatened to blow up a whole building of civilians (a threat that he then, it should be said, followed up on)–I wondered how that man would relate to Levi. I wondered whether Eren would still defer to him in the same way, whether Levi would even like him.
Some of these answers I got immediately, with that very first frame of their reunion. Eren climbs into the ship, and Levi is looming over him, throwing a disparaging comment his way. Eren doesn’t snap back, but he doesn’t give any indication that Levi’s words affect him, either. He still addresses Levi as “captain,” indicating at least nominal acceptance of Levi’s authority; but, given that he’s coming back from a rogue mission, this deference rings hollow. Still, he’s not on his guard, as such; he doesn’t lean back, doesn’t get up–which would surely make him tower over Levi by now. In fact, he stays down on his knees and, if anything, he’s waiting to see how Levi will react to everything that’s happened. Almost like he’s waiting, calmly and defiantly, for Levi’s judgement.
This judgement follows at once, and it brings flashbacks to one Levi and Eren’s earliest encounters.
Levi himself draws deliberate parallels to that earlier event. Back then, as Levi was laying a smackdown on Eren, he’d said:
And Levi comes back to this right now, when he says:
There’s a lot packed in this exchange, but not least of it is the power statement, right, a dominance play of a sort. Levi had no trouble seeing through Eren’s defiance earlier, and Levi is not amused. He’s not going to hold this conversation on Eren’s terms, so he literally knocks Eren off balance and reminds him whom he still answers to, who promised to keep him in line all those years ago. And he basically says: you haven’t learned that much, haven’t become that big and bad, if you’re still so easy to kick, Eren.
Eren, in turn, accepts it, but doesn’t submit.
Sure, he says, you can beat me up and chain me down and do whatever. But I was still right. I did the thing that had to be done.
And then he adds, looking up at Levi with dead eyes: wasn’t that good enough for you?
And Levi looks down at Eren, sitting beaten and filthy by his feet, just back from flouting authority and yet not showing a single spark of life for it, and says with genuine sadness:
It’s the “you, too” that makes it sound so very personal. Because Levi liked Eren, and did his best to make sure that kid made it through alive. And to see that once bright flame reduced to this…
Lots of people have commented on the similarity of Eren’s kicked-dog hunch in this chapter and Levi’s kid self. And that’s true, and I’ve no need to rehash it again here. But what struck me also was that, with all the parallels to their early meeting here, Levi has to be comparing the Eren he sees in front of him now with the kid he met back then, and coming against Eren who went from this:
It’s worth remembering, at this juncture, that back in the day Levi was among the very few who actually found rage mode!Eren interesting rather than alarming. When many others figured the kid was intense and potentially inhuman, Levi’s reaction was “oh, not bad.” Levi has always understood Eren’s drive, and his willingness to do whatever it takes. But he’s never wanted to see Eren become this.
And it’s his “I’m not even mad, I’m disappointed” stance that finally touches a nerve and provokes a reaction from Eren.
Gone are the half-lidded eyes, the unshakeable calm. Eren didn’t expect Levi to react like this; didn’t expect him, maybe, to care this much about Eren as a person at this point. He’d been prepared for a lot of responses, but not this, I think.
(He wasn’t ready for his own response to Sasha’s death, either. Maybe he wasn’t quite as prepared for the consequences of this cold-blooded plan as he’d thought; didn’t think he’d still be this easy to kick, in more ways than one.)
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