#snk chapter 129

[claire-melon]

[momtaku]

Keith left us and their students will never know he was one of the heroes that helped them. I can't stop crying, so tragic... But he... Oh, Mom. He's so special to me. What do you think about his last scene with Magath? I will miss them a lot... Respect!

Me, every chapter leading up to this one:

Even though I've been expecting his death, I cried. And then like all the good deaths in this series, I smiled.

All I ask for the characters I love is that they go out knowing they mattered, knowing they accomplished something, and feeling like it was worth it.  Shadis got that. He’s a character who fell into depression when he recognized he wasn’t special, so Magath telling him that he’d be remembered as a hero could’ve been Shadis’s big moment of catharsis. It wasn’t. That ship had long sailed. Shadis didn’t crave that kind of acknowledgement anymore. No, what made Shadis proud at the end of his life was seeing the difference he made in the lives of the people he trained. 

When I thought about Shadis’s death, I imagined it would be a big heroic moment where he realized he was special. Instead it wasn’t about the heroic moment at all. It was about seeing the growth of his students and feeling a sense of pride for that. And honestly, that blew me away.

Thanks for the ask! We’ll cry together

[seekerthefalcon]

Kiyomeme.

[dorovahkiin]

SnK Chapter 129: My personal thoughts (SPOILERS)

- Armin is knocked out. I feel like this is a plot device for Armin not participating because him nuking the port in the end would be too easy?

- If Hanji is right, Liberio is probably doomed. I feel so sorry for the warriors and their families

- I wonder where this Odiha twist leads to, I have no idea

- Is Annie going to rebel because they probably won't go to Liberio? I can't wait to find this out

- Jean thinking about Fez-kun is nice because it shows he cares for non Eldians

- Finally seeing my peeps Reiner and Annie fighting again and more importantly - together!

- Reiner protecting Annie was one of my top moments! I love them so much

- I don't agree with Floch's values, but damn he is well written and I enjoy seeing him on screen because he spices things up. Even if he butchers Erwin's words

- In general I like that Yams is showing more of the Jägerists perspective. I don't agree with it, but it's nice that Isayama tries to show different point of views

- Damn Levi, when are you finally going to talk again lmao I want to hear your thoughts!

- Falco remembering Porco is another fav moment of mine because I love Porco and miss him. When is Pieck finally mentioning him though?

- Connie saving Annie and Reiner's ass. He wanted to "repay this debt of being saved by them" since season 1 and 2, so it's nice Isayama hasn't forgotten about it

- Connie used to be too much comic relief, but he becomes a deeper character chapter by chapter and I like that!

- Jean and Mikasa calling Annie and Reiner friends and saving them too? Wtf. I fcking love it!

- Falco's jaw looks really cool and creative, but nothing beats Porco's titan look! I wonder: Is there any special connection to Zeke's beast (other than the fur) because Falco became a titan by Zeke's spinal fluid?

- Did Floch really think he could destroy that ship with one thunderspear? LMAO

- Gabi shooting Floch was unexpected, but damn, this girl is something else

- But I don't believe Floch is dead because dying by one simple shot of Gabi, a person he doesn't know, would be really underwhelming for a character like Floch. It would be like Arya killing the Night King which was a bad choice

- I was afraid of Pieck because she got attacked by Falco, but in terms of story telling it's nice Isayama stayed consistent to the fact that first titan transformations are usually risky since the shifters lose control

- Is it just me or was the 'Magath cuts out Falco' scene a bit rushed?

- Page 38 is my fav. I love how the Survey Corps are supporting the warriors. I totally support the alliance and them getting closer again. It will take time of course because it's not easy to forgive old fights, but I want it to happen and it seems like Isayama is heading that way

- I feel like Floch managed to sneak on the ship...

- Magath is the MaGOATh for staying behind to secure their escape. This man had amazing development

- Shadis and Magath meeting is something I wanted for so long and it's awesome it finally happened even if it didn't last long...

- I understand Isayama can't include everything in 45 pages, but I wish we saw how Keith sabotaged the train

- Keith told his students to join the Jägerists and now killing them is a bit meh, but I understand his choice because genocide is madness

- Such a touching moment of Shadis and Magath talking about their students and Magath wanting a happy life for the warrior kids. They are definitely the characters of this month

- But was it really necessary for both of them to die? I guess both are a bit suicidal in the end, just like a lot of snk characters lol

- Shadis arc ended well imo. He didn't die as bystander, but as hero, just too bad no one knows beside Magath who died too

- I'm happy about Magath's development too, but... As high ranked Marleyan general who got rid of his nationalism he would have been a key figure in making peace between the nations. Now that he's gone it will be way more difficult and maybe not possible at all

- My rank: 7/10. It was a good chapter, but nothing special. Magath's and Shadis' sacrifice was a bit rushed imo, but it was beautifully made

- I like Armin, but I feel like if he didn't pull off his talk and deceive plan at the port (which obviously failed) Magath and Shadis still could have been alive. I wonder what he thinks about talking to Eren now or if he considers killing him

- Next chapter hopefully more dialogue and warrior focus. Also Bert talk when since his death was never mentioned again? Marco got his resolve in 127, now it's Bert's turn!

- I'm afraid Floch is going to kill someone next chapter, wtf are you planning with him Isayama?

- I feel like the Survey Corps are more and more understanding the warriors which is really nice because I like both

- What the fck are Historia, Zeke and Eren doing!?

- Personally I'm not sure about those 5% remaining story. I hope Isayama didn't really calculate and stated a number without giving too much thought because I think finishing this masterpiece story in 6 or so chapters could be really difficult without rushing it. I say at least 10 more chapters

[yeaew]

A spoiler (with Floch) without context

[youhearbiggirls]

YHBG Guest Announcement: @grimmheim​ and Neetaku

We’ll be recording our chapter 129 podcast tomorrow, Jun 17th @ 9:00am EST. We’re excited to be joined this month by our favorite Shadisstan, the lovely @grimmheim​. We’ve also invited Neetaku from the AotWiki  to join in the conversation. He says he’ll be there if he wakes up in time. Fingers crossed for that.

If you have topics you’d like us to consider or questions for us or our guests, please let us know soon.

Thanks as always for your support!

About this Podcast YHBG is a monthly Attack on Titan chapter discussion that is available on Youtube, Stitcher, Spotify and iTunes. If you enjoy our content and would like to help offset costs, please consider supporting us on Kofi or Patreon. If you’d like to be a guest, please visit our website.

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 129 Review

*

Attack on Titan is a very violent series. People get torn, crushed, cut, shot, and bludgeoned basically every other chapter. Loved ones are lost tragically. Mangled corpses feature regularly. The main character is one of the most ruthless people in the world.

What makes SNK so interesting is how it depicts violence. People have described the series’ depiction of violence as “unvarnished” and “real” and I’d say that’s true, but there so much more to it than that.

It’s not just that the series depicts violence viscerally. That’s been done before.

It’s not even that the series depicts violence as a fact of life.

What sets SNK apart is that it treats violence as endemic.

In Attack on Titan, violence is not only real and unfortunate, not just a fact of life we have to deal with, it’s ever present.

Yeah, this is a story about people who have to fight giants, and then the whole world, to survive. Violence would be an inevitable part of the plot no matter what.

But Attack on Titan goes above and beyond that.

It’s about the emphasis. Some stories would argue that violence should be avoided at all costs. The hero and villain are at odds with each other, but they manage to broker some kind of deal.

Or a story could acknowledge that violence is sometimes necessary. It could be an action movie that kicks off after the conflict has already spiraled into violence. In that case, the question of why people start shooting at each other isn’t necessarily important.

Or the story could show how the conflict came to violence, but emphasize the undesirability of resorting to war.

What makes Attack on Titan unique is that it focuses very much on the origins of violence, but doesn’t emphasize the undesirability of it.

Every conflict in this story is resolved using violence. If this were just a mindless action show, that’d be fine, but this is a series that invites the reader to dwell on whether violence was appropriate.

Unlike most stories Attack on Titan concludes, after all its philosophizing, that non-violent alternatives are a waste of time!

Paradis’ attempts to broker peace with the world are presented as flailing and unsuccessful. Every attempt by Armin to negotiate with the enemy fails.

King Fritz is depicted as a coward, a control freak, and a fool because of his ideology. His ideology of non-violence.

Attack on Titan seems to mock people who don’t want to have to kill. Because of that, the series almost seems to revel in its bloodshed, even as that bloodshed is depicted as gruesome and ugly.

SNK isn’t like Gundam.

Gundam has always had the theme that war is bad. SNK’s theme seems to be that war is unfortunate but necessary.

The difference between those two themes is huge but subtle.

Another important pillar of this series is freedom.

The Survey Corps rides out into the outside world constantly. Every one of them knows they’ll be trampled and torn apart at some point; they do it anyway because they believe in their cause.

That cause is to fight for freedom.

Freedom in Attack on Titan means being able to decide your own fate. If you want to explore the outside world, you can do that. If you want to found a family, you can do that. If you want to virtue signal by adopting the same dream as your friend, you can do that.

But people don’t have to literally be a slave to be unfree.

In Attack on Titan, you can be unfree just by being a slave to other people’s expectations.

People expected that Eren would be humanity’s savior. He was sold to the public as a trump card against the titans: a human who had their power. He was the advantage humanity needed to win. After 100 years, humanity catches a big break, and his name was Eren Jeager.

But it never panned out that way.

The expectation was always unrealistic. Eren was still one (not particularly bright) person, and he was never going to destroy all the titans himself.

Come the end of the Uprising arc, and Eren has not really contributed anything, and he starts to give himself grief.

When it’s revealed his existence seems to have impeded humanity’s survival, Eren begs for death. The weight of everyone’s expectations had crushed him.

Eren had been a slave to the Rogue Titan hype machine.

After Historia’s ahem “pep talk” and some post-cavern ruminations, Eren starts to let go of that way of thinking, and he’s better off for it.

He still works hard, but he doesn’t think he has to carry the world on his back, and thanks to Historia and the military overshadowing him in Uprising, people in general expect less of him, too.

Eren had been liberated from people’s expectations.

Freedom also means freedom from the past.

The Eldians are dogged by their history. Every major villain so far has thought Eldians deserved to die for the sins of their ancestors.

Reiner, Bertolt, and Annie were brainwashed to believe Eldians were devil children.

The Marleyans hammer at that point to this day.

Zeke is convinced Eldians are a curse partly because of the animosity caused by the Empire’s history.

We haven’t seen King Fritz yet, but he’s probably the craziest one of them all. He is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo convinced that Eldians carry an irredeemable stain because of their ancestor’s actions that he’ll let their enemies slaughter them.

So it’s not just what people do in the present that can make you unfree. Attack on Titan is also about not being held back by the past.

There’s one more aspect of freedom in SNK to bring up, and I think it’s one of the more underappreciated ones: the importance of posterity.

Isayama loves children.

Soldiers in SNK are asked to devote their hearts for the sake of humanity. “Humanity” means not just people alive today, but their progeny.

People join the Survey Corps despite the high death rate because even if they die, they feel they’re contributing to a future their children can enjoy.

Erwin’s soldiers know they’ll die when they charge Zeke. Erwin sells them on it with talk of paving a way forward for future soldiers.

Parents who abandon their children are presented as bad or weak people. People like Grisha, Rod Reiss, Reiner’s mother.

Gabi is spared by Mr. Blouse because she’s just a child.

Zeke thinks being born is a curse and wants to sterilize a whole race.

Oh, and there was also that hilarious non-sequitur speech Onyankopon gave about children.

The heroes fight because they’re working to a free future for future generations. For their posterity.

Attack on Titan implores people to fight for our own freedom, but also for the freedom of our descendants.

So Attack on Titan has two major components to its message: violence is necessary, and freedom for yourself and your offspring is worth bloodying your hands for.

But fighting for freedom has its limits.

…aaand because I need to tie this post in to the actual chapter I’m supposed to be reviewing, I’m going to use Floch and Gabi to illustrate this point.

In this chapter an ice cream swirl takes flight, ready to fulfil his dreams. They are mercilessly shot down by a kid with a gun. How did we get here?

Floch and Gabi were two wild fanatics starting out.

Gabi was born into a family that had a warrior in it, and it’s clear she aspired to follow in his footsteps. She and Reiner were close, and she wanted to carry his legacy.

Floch joined the Survey Corps because he heard a call and decided to answer. He idolizes Eren, and sees him as an example to follow. Eren is vicious when he fights, and Floch thinks that makes him a good leader.

Both of them wanted to free their respective peoples. Paradis is stuck on an island and feared by everyone around them. The mainland Eldians are stuck in a ghetto and feared by everyone around them.

Gabi believed the mainland Eldians would prove their worth by destroying Paradis, thus displaying their virtuousness to the world.

But Gabi was also a bit self-serving, too. She also wanted to prove that she herself was a good Eldian. She was showered with praise because of how good a fighter she was; she was driven to become that good to prove her own value.

Gabi was raised to believe her self-worth came from how well she fought for Marley. Sources of self-esteem are external for her. They come from the gratification of others.

Floch’s self-esteem is also external. He derives all of his self-worth from his identity as an Eldian. He pounds his chest about the glory of the Empire because if Eldia is glorious, then he, as an Eldian, will be glorious.

He wants to bask in the warm, glowing light of world domination. Of the knowledge that his race is the most powerful group of people in all the world.

I don’t know if Floch believes that Eldians are superior to other races, but that’s not the point. In his mind, the power of Eldia and his own power are inextricably tied together.

The big difference between the two is that Gabi isn’t an idiot.

Say what you will about her, but Gabi is actually talented. She’s smart, strong, a good shot, a good fighter, and a dutiful soldier.

Floch’s only talent is his absolute shamelessness.

He has no moral compass, so he’s willing to do things that his enemies won’t. He’s also stupidly audacious, so he’ll do crazy stuff most won’t consider.

This allowed him to get the upper hand at first. People didn’t expect him to leak information about Eren’s imprisonment to the public or that they’d work with Eren directly.

But now that our heroes are going against him in basically a fair fight, he’s losing badly. The only strategy Floch’s puny brain can muster is to keep spamming our heroes with redshirts.

Compare Floch’s shamelessness to Gabi.

Gabi…is a good person.

She wants to prove her self-worth like Floch does, but she’s not fucking pathetic about it. All she wants is for herself and her people to be recognized as equal to everyone else.

She does not, in the end, want to revenge kill Marleyans just to feel big and strong.

She only wanted to wipe out Paradis because she was indoctrinated to think that way. Once she realized that Eldians on Paradis weren’t devilish, and that the Marleyan system was crap…she stopped hating Paradis and didn’t hate the Marleyans for it.

Floch, on the other hand, nurses a massive victimhood complex that he uses to justify genocide.

This is where the series draws a line between justified violence and unjustified violence.

Floch does not give a shit about human life. He kills people wantonly, and the lives of his own troops doesn’t seem to be a factor in his strategy this chapter.

Floch, very expressly, fights to oppress others and take away their freedom. His big talking point is about Eldian freedom, but in reality his actions go beyond that into cruelty.

Gabi, even when she was a brainwashed fanatic, was never sadistic and hasn’t done anything egregious that I can remember.

In this chapter, Gabi shot a killed people with her rifle. The Yeagerists…didn’t actually kill anyone this chapter, but they tried.

But Gabi is with the good guys because she’s right on principle and isn’t motivated by sadism, or personal insecurity, or a desire for revenge.

The same is true for all of the Cringevengers.

They’re all fighting to oppose global genocide.

The Yeagerists, including Floch, are fighting because they think global genocide is justified if it saves their country.

That is inherently selfish.

Those are the themes of the series in a nutshell.

This is where things start to get questionable.

First off, I object to how pervasive war and violence are shown to be. War is an institution, meaning it is the product of human behavior. That means human behavior can be changed to make war less violent and less common.

And war has, in fact, become less violent and less common.

Attack on Titan has paid lip service to that fact, (see: Gabi, above) but it remains that we are 95% into the story and there is still zero hope for a peaceful resolution.

There is almost zero chance the Cringevengers stop Eren. Even if they do, the world will be whipped into a fury at the destruction he caused, and not only would Paradis be wiped out, the mainland ghettos would conceivably be overrun by angry mobs and Eldians would be killed in the streets.

By the way, I think this would happen even if Magath had lived. I do not understand why people thought just one person’s word would have mattered at all.

Obviously it’s not a peaceful resolution of Eren destroys the world.

Secondly, while the series makes a point that excessive violence is bad, remember that the series also makes the point that appropriate violence is often bloodier than we’d like.

The issue, as I just said, is that Attack on Titan overestimates how often situations calling for violence come up, so functionally the series seems to lean in favor of violence as a general rule.

The series flat out conflates pacifism with defeatism.

King Fritz is a defeatist. He chooses to let his subjects die rather than work towards undoing the caste system that he ruled over.

Instead of making Marleyans equal to Eldians, he let the Marleyans do as they pleased while hiding out on Paradis.

And if the Marleyans came knocking, he was going to let them kill everyone.

He hoped to create a utopian world in the time that he could. This world was built on brainwashing and dictatorship.

But King Fritz’s ideology isn’t identified as defeatist in the story.

He’s identified as a pacifist.

This is why I always thought it was ridiculous that people said Attack on Titan was anti-war. As if a series that implores people to fight could be anti-war.

This chapter was good on its own. I didn’t even mind the violence since it’s a battle and the never ending bloodshed was conveyed really well.

Then the wider context of this fight came to mind…

[jollibeaaa]

best girls from chapter 129