Zugzwang P)
zugzwang.
[ What’s the trickiest problem they face in their life right now? ]
taking a look at her life right now, mikasa is an eternal state of error — she’s almost braindead to the point that her functions are robotic and garners very little humanity for someone who’s supposed to be human. by that i mean her cognitive psychology is at an all time low — she’s wired to react to certain situations, and she’s apathetic to most, if not all scenarios around her. in order for someone to accomplish a state like that, you need to either grow up in an environment where you really have no choice not to give a shit about everything and everyone around you (conditioning by environment), or you have to be absolutely traumatized by a situation that happened in the past that demolished your sense of humanity (and by humanity, i mean human state of nature, the human identity as a compassionate being — probably want to read up on rousseau’s idea of what instinctual human features are in the state of nature: ‘discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men part i’) that further disallows an individual to connect with the outside world. it disconnects her from reality and puts her in a constant state of being unable to move forward, where she is neither forward nor backwards, but is in a constant state of being. she is the reactor in her life, not the catalyst — she merely exists, and that’s a problem that she doesn’t see.the problem with living like this, in the constant state of just existing, never living. when a person lives, they live for themselves, and they develop their relationships over time and migrate towards an identity that better suits them — while that takes over years to accomplish, and even then as an adult, you still grow little by little. mikasa had to learn who she was, who she would become, and who she would be, all in the matter of seconds — she had to pick up the knife or not pick up the knife, to kill or not to kill, to live or die, to be strong or to be weak; all of this was decided in the split second she chose to continue fighting. mikasa doesn’t live, and thats a problem that she knows is there, she is very, very aware of it but she doesn’t acknowledge it — she never lets it come to light and there’s nobody in the world that understands mikasa enough or pays enough attention to her to realize this is her utmost mentality. what they understand is that mikasa is strong and she has been strong ever since she went through an extremely traumatizing situation with eren. that is their understanding of mikasa, and unfortunately, that’s not good enough to make a lasting impact on this problem of hers that she barely recognizes. she’s going down a path of self destruction and doesn’t even spare herself time to think for once and realize where she is going, what road she’s chosen, and what she’s doing to herself.her problem stems back to the trauma that she had to go through as a child. there’s something that happens to people who are in traumatizing situations together, where they’re both going through it and their interpretation of the situation is so warped that their emotions spike and they imprint on the person who is going through it with them (i really forget what theory this is in psychology because i can’t even pull up a name, but its out there). as soon as eren showed up when she was absolutely ready to die, she basically established him as her savior as we’re all well aware, and made it so that she was to pay him back for her life — that her life was forfeit since the moment she hit the ground and every step she takes, every breath she exhales is because he made it just in time. she basically gave him a set role in her life and enforces it in her being and identity to the extent that she will take it upon herself to ensure he survives. its why shes so shaken whenever eren is near death or close to danger, because to see her savior fall is basically her falling with him, because shes still struggling to see her life as hers, where she treats it more as a machine, an object that is wholly there because eren saved it, and if she cannot be there for him, then she has failed in her objective to repay him with what she wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for him.to live like that isn’t the most healhiest thing, and in my eyes -- it’s an incredibly big and persistent problem that nobody pressures mikasa because she’s strong. she has the belief that because she’s strong, because she has acquired strength, she can live and continue to live (see the chapter where she thanks eren for ‘teaching her how to live’, not ‘saving her’). her strength has become an obsession with her at this point because she never wants to be stuck in that position where she was helpless ever again, where she can’t help herself, or others -- she keeps herself strong because that is what eren told her in those moments, where you can’t live unless you fight. and to be able to fight, you need to be strong. so she ends up on a path of self damnation if i ever saw any, because nobody tries to pull her back for a moment and tell her to breathe, to live, to stop seeing things as obstacles and goals, to stop mechanizing herself as a tool of strength and to start realizing herself as more of a person -- the only people who tell her to back down in any scenario are eren and armin (eren more than armin, they fight about any decision they have to make tbh), and even then, they don’t realize that this is a result of her rather dysfunctional psychology. the only things that people see of her is that she’s an excellent soldier, that she’s strong, and that she’s on top of her class. the only real evidence that i’ve found where this dissonance between her mind and body is addressed is probably during that one part where that soldier had asked mikasa what happened to make her like this.
