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the topography of pieck’s grey morality

at first glance there is a sort of tragic, damning irony in the way that Pieck is cognizant of the terrible system she and everyone in marley participates in, and yet still continues to have quite a prominent hand in maintaining it. every warrior is inflected by this irony in spades, and all of them face the common bind of having to make terrible choices in conditions that are structurally abject from the get-go, but what distinguishes Pieck from the others is her approach for responding, or her stance towards the world and all the misfortunes it brings.

unlike Annie who literally cordons herself off from being appropriated by wider forces or Bertolt and Reiner who have relatively explicitly articulated moments of outburst and struggle with marley’s tentacular influence and ideology, any resistance Pieck can be said to have is quieter and more attenuated. she jokes, she uses sarcasm, she renders quotidian comfort and benevolence to people she’s bonded with, and she makes observations in quiet about people who might not have her or her allies’ interests at heart. but just as true at the same time is the way she participates in marley’s various imperialist strikes (e.g. in the middle east war) and unambiguously is both directly and indirectly responsible for many deaths; she does not necessarily rebel against marley in the material and practical where it counts.

of course, it’s difficult for any of the warriors to do so, and she’s hardly unique in this aspect, but alongside her mode of response it makes her a morally grey character in ways others aren’t. she has her declaration of dissent in 116, but it is overshadowed by the realities of the situation at hand: she is part of a mission that will bring her even further away from her ideals of eldian liberation if it succeeds. it is also possibly undermined, depending on how you read the scene, by the fact that they were made for the purpose of deception: she spun her statements specifically to ingratiate the enemy long enough to lead them where marley needed them (i.e. they had some grain of truth to them, but she was definitely leaving out nuances/complexities in that moment for the sake of more instrumental objectives at hand).

her approach of going along with a regime that has none of her interests at heart is probably just informed by practicality (to ask her to go against marley in that moment would’ve been a tall order), as well as coercion and the sheer absence of any tenable alternative. but I think it also builds into her characterization as someone who rebels not through loud antagonism but through banal moments of care for others. she tries to work in the system and carve out small pockets of prefigurative care and hope, that won’t contest the system at large but might be able to alleviate life within it.

what makes this morally grey in the eyes of some readers is the question of how far this is distinguishable from rolling along unthinkingly with the system. she ideologically opposes everything marley does but the total effect is the same regardless of whether she does so: her actions still amount to the maintenance of marley’s imperialism.

(i suspect one reason some people chafe at the widespread adoration for her is that the tenor of that adoration overlooks how, in some respects, pieck has very much been capable of indirect moral cruelty and direct, obvious forms of physical harm against innocents such as those caught in the crossfire of the middle east war. she’s not all sunshine and wholesomeness.)

this is only one reading however. it is a tempting one, but also potentially superficial, and elides the fact that the game for pieck and the others was already rigged from the start. no matter how she responds, any decision will have untoward costs. if she defects, her father likely gets it. it’s impossible for her to speculate about some hypothetical benefit that will accrue to her if she defects, and thus to judge whether the benefits outweigh the price of more explicit, resistant dissent.

this reading would also ignore the fact that her acts of everyday survival have significance of their own beyond their power to contest the system. pieck, in trying to cultivate optimism/relief within the unremarkable margins of her and the warriors’ lives, is also trying to dwell as well as she can in the boundaries of the life marley has circumscribed for her. she could very easily not do all the nice things she is known for: to be bitter, be more excessively cruel, be impersonal. but in making the attempt at all, it is as if she is saying that there is potential to resist in quieter, more unremarkable ways. as if it is worthwhile nonetheless to sustain the tolerability of life until a day when more overt revolution will be feasible. quiet, everyday resistance-- a la James Scott’s “weapons of the weak” idea if you will-- still matters on its own terms, especially for extending the resilience of those living in unfeasible conditions, and even if it’s not as demonstrative or effective as outright resistance. canon doesn’t exactly frame it as a big resistance vs. small resistance debate. but given how canon consistently depicts her comforting others and dedicates valuable panel space to their significance (see: pieck squeezing gabi’s hand!) and the manga’s themes of trying to rise above predetermination and the hand given to you by fate, it’s possible to say that these are far from useless choices of acts. whether unintentionally or not, the manga seems to be making statements about the meaning of these acts.

pieck overall appears to be the walking embodiment of the “beauty in cruelty” message for some people. for others, trying to find beauty in a system of cruelty without doing anything to oppose it is a morally grey act or even... downright condemnable. i think that reading can have value for some, but my take is that: pieck’s character isn’t so much about “finding beauty in cruelty” as “beauty coexists alongside cruelty” (because pieck very much has the capacity for some cruelty) and also “precisely because beauty coexists with cruelty within people, and you can be responsible for both at any one time, it is an active choice to uphold that beauty and try to nurture what is good for other people, and the agency committed in that choice must not be understated; the choice to cultivate beauty also could be read as a refusal to give in to a system that does not encourage kindness and encourages lots of cruelty”.