Ready for Final Season

[serpentjl]

Vinland Saga

[serpentjl]

Levi Ackerman

©erenusurper

[serpentjl]

Those Days....

[revaill-deactivated20150923]

ATTACK ON TITAN FANS UNITE

I have a very important wish for you guys to do,its real simple.

The day isayama ends shingeki no kyojin,i want all of you guys posting selfies saluting,i dont care if you are crying or happy or whatever,just post a selfie saluting.

[lyonsdenprojects]

Eren’s Motivations

There’s a lot of talk going on in the fandom about Eren in the latest chapters. And, as all my regular readers know, Eren is hands down my favorite character. So I decided to weight in.

The thing about Eren is that even from the beginning he had a bigger picture in mind.

Sure, these are the words of a child who does not yet fully understand the world around him. But if we fast forward just a little to Trost, I’d like to bring up one of my favorite soliloquies of Eren’s as it’s been such an awfully long time since it’s happen:

Armin: Why did you want to go to the outside world, Eren?

Eren: When we’re born…all of us…are free. People who reject that, no matter how strong they are…don’t matter. The burning water, the land of ice…anything will do. Anyone who saw those things…would be the freest person in the world. Fight!! Who’d value their life… over something like that? It doesn’t matter how terrifying the world is. It doesn’t matter how cruel the world is. Fight!! Fight!! FIGHT!! (Vol 4, Ch 14)

Eren is the type of person who, at his core, believes in an ideal of freedom for all. Yes, this is before he knows the truth about the walls and Paradis. Let’s fast forward again.

Right there, see it? At the bottom of the page, Eren’s reaction to Willy’s statement: He hears the beginning of his own beliefs in Willy’s words…

…And he is let down in that small hope that maybe he will not have to go through with his plan after all, that someone else in the world may be on the same page as he.

Eren’s entire conversation with Reiner is just SO POIGNANT. As I’ve sat here writing this, I keep wanting to just copy paste the entire conversation into this post. I implore you, go back and read Eren and Reiner’s full exchange in Chapter 100. I’ve painstakingly pulled out the bits that are most important to my point.

Eren: Willy Tybur is right. I’m the bad guy. I might just destroy the world. But you looked like bad guys to me, too…. Why did you destroy the wall?

Reiner: …My mission….

Eren: What was that mission?

Reiner: …to retake the Founder. Our goal…was to save the world…

Reviewing this conversation breaks my heart a little, I mean look at his expression. Its a mixture of sadness and regret. Eren finally gets it. He started as a character with this solid idea of right and wrong, black and white, as I’ve written about before. His journey has been one of learning that the world is actually grey.

He’s reached a conclusion that Reiner was never truly able to reconcile in his own mind. Reiner had to create a different persona in order to cope with this reality. And, really, that’s perhaps Reiner’s end goal was always a personal goal to cover his own ass in the first place. By the time they got to the Walls, Reiner was fighting for himself. Annie got it, but had her own motivations and followed those through to the end of her plot. We now know she fought for her father.

Eren, just like Annie, realizes he must follow his motivations through to the end. Because he’s not fighting for himself. He is still fighting for the ideals he started this story with, he just now understands the sad realities of war and what happens when parents lay their sins upon their children. Eren, I believe, fights for the freedom of Paradis and the people inside the Walls, just as he did in the beginning. As quoted in an earlier post, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster”.

Consider: If Eren had chosen not to rampage here, Marley would have come to Paradis anyway. The war would have been fought anyway. Innocents inside the Walls would have died instead. I cheer for Eren because he chooses to be the bad guy, the monster, in order to protect whom he loves and cares about. Which, I now think, is another major overarching theme of Snk: Those who fight for themselves vs those who fight for others. The Self vs The Whole.

[lindowyn]

SnK 1-101: Who is the real enemy here?

Erwin knew, but he could not possibly fathom the breadth and depth of just how insidious the enemy of their world is. I say their, because every living being in this story shares the same world. It’s the most poignant question, I think, to keep in mind while reading this series. There are ordinary and exceptional people who behave badly, there are bad people, there are good people, there are good people who behave badly, and bad people who behave themselves for a time. It comes down to how we view the choices that are made. It is easy to condemn from the outside, or from looking back and going whoah boy, bad idea, but apart from the mysterious Owl/Kreuger, no one appears to have unusual time warp informing abilities. Even exceptional people have weaknesses. Eren, as a protagonist, in many ways symbolizes this awkward discovery as we move along and unwrap the layers of this plot. He’s a straightforward guy pushed into the realm of grey where he can no longer be certain of anything, even his own desires. What do you do when you understand, truly, the motivation that led to your mother’s murder…because you have become that yourself when you felt you had to? The matter of who is a good person and who is a bad person has been brought up eons ago in a conversation between Armin and Annie. In this world, and in ours, they don’t exist. There will always be someone that is horrible for one person, and a blessing to another. In every hero lies his villain, and every villain fancies themselves a hero. What many of them have in common is that villain was planted very early in their lifetimes; as child soldiers and warriors they are irresponsibly indoctrinated or alternatively traumatized. It gives them drive, purpose, or the makings of their undoing. Their choices will decide.

We knew, starting out, that Eren swore revenge. A simple thing, given the situation. A monster ate his mom, so first he hated the monster. Humans drove the monsters, so then he hated the humans who did it. Now he’s discovered that an entire culture is completely indoctrinated with the belief that he and all like him are the enemy. Enemy is such a subjective term. 

Clever really, as the body of Ymir was the giant used to create the world in Norse mythology. In a panel, the enemy is the world.

A child cannot understand this because they are truly innocent in any culture, but hate is a thing we learn. As Reiner learned that the people he was taught to hate and spurred by a sense of obligation were no different than him, and the truth of that split him in two. When Eren discovered it, from what we see thus far, he is fully aware of his actions with his follow-through. He, like Erwin actually, is willing to make calculated risks of human life with the intent of…well we aren’t sure now are we? Is it revenge? Or does he desire to achieve peace through affirmative actions. Could you still love him if all it meant to him was to become a monster to avenge his mother’s death? Or do we choose to believe in him, that he has some higher goal in mind with unfortunate side effects. Eren’s motivations remain unclear, but it is possible that driving out the warhammer titan was his endgame goal since he’s asked the SC to pull him out. Mikasa doesn’t seem too thrilled that he’s out there, either. I suspect someone might have Grisha’d his way through a little rogue plan, but we will see.  The real tragedy, is not only that the cycle of hate repeats itself, but that it starts so early. Child soldiers. Childhood trauma. I used to darkly refer to AoT as ptsd the manga, but I’m beginning to see why Isayama’s cynicism led him to desire to kill everyone in the end and wipe out humanity. At the time, it might have been his only solution to this problem. The level of pain these characters endure goes above and beyond what your average story characters encounter. 

The enemy is everyone, it’s in everyone, and the outcome will be decided purely by who can overcome that and be free of it, truly free of it, by rendering their traumas powerless inside of them. In the following chapters, we will get to see I think the sort of adults all of our children have become and how they have chosen to obtain their goals; is peace, freedom?

If you are finding it difficult because of the future unknowns, or because characters you supported are acting in ways you could not, remember this. They’re only human, afterall. All we can do now, as ever, is hope that hope itself will overcome…that it will all be worth it, empiric as that may be. Can you accept humanity, just as it is, or will they rise above humanity and find resolution.

[guren-no-sasageyo]

A tribute to Zofia and Udo.

(I know you are bound to die at some point but I didnt expect it to be this soon. :( )

[serpentjl]

My First drawing for 2018.

What if.......