Floch is one of my favourite characters from Attack On Titan (said with the caveat that I have only watched the first season in full and I am a clip watcher/wikia reader for the rest. I know.) because he represents (see previous caveat) what happens when you treat an emotional person like an object, they survive, then you release them back into society and expect them to go about like normal. Instead, they go off on their own and look for ways to make their second death meaningful, because they don't expect to survive for long enough to focus on life instead of death, given that they already prepared themselves to die once and they are not highly valued as a survivor, and they simultaneously ensure that whatever life that they have left is lived as unobjectified for themselves as possible.
In the case of Floch, military leadership sent him off on a suicide mission because the strategic value of his death was greater than the personal value of his life to them. When he survived along with the commander who ordered his death and therefore condemned him to the haunted life of a survivor, the rest of the military leadership did not return the same value judgement for the commander as was returned for Floch and decided to let the commander die because he would have been too haunted if he had lived, even though his strategic value would probably have been greater than whom they saved in his place. (The mangaka has said that this part was inspired by Life Is Strange. Much to think about.)
Floch later says that they were wrong to let emotion rather than military strategy rule their decision of whom to save. He presents this as his honest opinion. I do not think that he is lying, but I think that he is leaving one of his observations out: 'I do not matter to my comrades in the way that they matter to each other'. Emotional rule is not going to save him, either literally or from further emotional turmoil, like it is going to save the others because the others do not care about him that much. If he can make himself more strategically valuable alive than dead and convince others to prioritise strategy over emotion, he might be spared. This logic sets off a chain of actions in which he makes himself strategically pivotal to the execution of the coup and tries to act like the sociopathic commander who convinced him to go on the suicide mission, in order to keep the coup going and therefore keep himself more strategically valuable alive than dead. However, Floch is still more of an emotional person than the commander was, and his attempts to act sociopathic fall somewhere between numb ruthlessness, because he still somewhat regards himself as a dead man walking with nothing resembling his pre-suicide-mission life to live for, and fanatical ruthlessness and extremism, because his increasingly valuable role in the coup is making him into an increasingly valuable target to be taken out by the opposition.
I think that there is something to be said about the ideological (emotional) cause that he attaches himself to after the suicide mission, as well: survival of his nation, his countrypeople, in the face of genocide, even if he dies in the process of achieving it. It is what he was intended to die for the first time around. On the one hand, the situation that they all find themselves in (facing genocide with nowhere to take refuge) forces their only options to be to fight the genocide, endure it (because one possible means of genocide is sterilisation rather than murder), or commit suicide. Consequently, it is not strange that Floch believes in fighting the genocide when successfully doing so would be the option that achieves the most freedom for himself and the innocents on his side, like those innocents whom he lamented dying in the suicide mission. On the other hand, his willingness to risk his life and the lives of innocents on his side speaks, to me, to his not truly believing that he survived the suicide mission. In the beginning, he calls himself a coward and tearfully laments that he and his slain comrades were signed up for what they were too innocent to comprehend as a suicide mission until it was too late to leave with their lives. Later, he stops calling himself a coward and behaving like one, but he also stops showing emotion altogether aside from anger, erratic glee, and fear until he is once again being killed and once again allows himself to reach the verge of tears, lamenting the killing of new innocents on his side. It is like only once he is being killed or dying can he allow himself to return to who he once was: someone who cared.
I know that his character is divisive. To say the least. But my overwhelming emotion around his character is sadness. #KingFloch supporters see his second mission as cool and admirable (to say the least) when I can only see it as his self-perpetuation of the final leg of the suicide mission given to him by someone else because their dire situation and devaluation of his life called for it. Which is to say nothing of his unadmirable role in the genocide of the other side and objectification of his own side. His entire story after the suicide mission is marked by his loss of innocence and subsequent loss of respect for life, which he never lives long enough to regain. There is nothing cool or admirable, even if you only consider the personal effects on him, because all that it gives him is another premature death. Meanwhile, most of the Floch critiques that I have read have flattened his emotional core that I describe above. Some have been good, though, and helped me to gather my thoughts and feelings on the subject...
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