the fucked up thing about it isn’t just that the others don’t recognize levi’s pain or his deeply held emotions. they sure don’t, but eren DOES recognize levi’s pain. he just doesn’t care about levi’s pain.
and he not only understands it for what it is, he digs his nasty little fingers into the wounds and tries to bend levi to his will. pure manipulation.
he SEES THIS. and he puts two and two together. he understands, in this moment, that levi is emotionally committed to erwin. and he digs his hands in anyway.
what eren doesn’t understand is that levi’s emotional bias is not unfair. it just is. levi’s emotional bias fuels him, but it is not the driving force behind his decision. levi doesn’t JUST make this decision to inject erwin because he loves erwin. he makes this decision because it is the right one. levi loves erwin, not only because of his personal relationship with him, because erwin IS levi’s hope, but erwin is humanity’s hope as well. levi doesn’t have to sacrifice his feelings because they are in line with the objective.
what’s disgusting is that eren recognizes levi’s emotional bias, but prioritizes his own hurt feelings over levi’s. in this moment, he does not give one single shit about levi or his commanding officer.
of course, after all this i think we can say that regardless of whether erwin were to live or not, the entire agenda of the survey corps was doomed. they were never supposed to protect eren. eren was never supposed to have the coordinate power. they risked themselves for eren again and again, and it is clear now that eren has almost singlehandedly obliterated their cause.
eren’s mentality over everything being a strict dichotomy of wrong and right is set up for us right from the beginning. as one of the few characters with this viewpoint (excepting marlowe), he struggles to understand anyone’s actions, fails to view others as humans with their own personal battles they think are worth fighting for, and believes that those who wrong him/others should be punished unrepentantly.
uri asks kenny in one of their final scenes together, “the two of us were on an unstoppable path of mutual destruction. what was it that turned us into friends?” and the next question kind of hangs in the air: “was it violence?”
it wasn’t. they came together through violence, but it was ultimately uri’s willingness to understand and forgive kenny, to be kind to him, that allowed them to stop fighting.
the moment that violence began to brew inside the walls, it was from selfishness, greed, a lack of human regard, hatred, a desire for power and control, all of those things. it created poverty, starvation, genocide, and senseless death.
these themes are repeated again and again and again in this story, that everyone is fallible, everyone has a reason for their battles, but the root of discord within the wall population began because of a lack of regard for their fellow human.
we still don’t know what reasons the warriors have (i fail to see how killing so many people was necessary in the first place) but i have a suspicion that literally no one is truly right here. the only thing i can make sense of right now is that isayama is condemning their failure to approach each other as empathetic humans, and that exerting control over populations for the sake of power and control and selfishness will always lead to our doom. our failure to understand each other will kill us.
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