From R-L panel: Could be that Mikasa assisted Levi with the inspection of equipments?
Chapter 133:
"Just... Lend me your strength."
Mikasa's face expression. Helping each other out.
Chapter 133: (Paths - Silent interaction)
Needless to explain the way Levi looks at her and agree with her.
Chapter 134 & Chapter 135
Protection and Guidance.
Chapter 135:
Levi: "... Even if I was in top shape... I still wouldn't choose to charge into that. So stay calm. Mikasa. Don't rush. Wait for me to get their attention. I'll act as bait."
Mikasa: "Captain!!"
Trust and concern.
Desperation.
Chapter 136:
• Realizations.
I did include the others' faces. I think it's a great way to let the readers know that Connie and Jean realized that both Levi and Mikasa felt the same way when accepting that it's time to let their lieges go.
Chapter 137:
Acceptance and care.
Parallels showing that only the two of them are looking in the same direction.
There is so many more I like to mention, so many RivaMika panels and interaction that happened since Chapter 132 up to date... But shitty tumblr only allowed me ten pictures for a post. So I chose the most important ones (Cause hell, every RM panel for me is fucking important) and yeah. Here it is. If RivaMika still not canon, I don't know anymore ahah.
it really took these mfs mass gen0cide to fucking realize their mistakes lol
this panel, man. so fucking sad, and heartbreaking but at the same time so beautiful? like the way they desperately continued to save the baby even tho death was inevitable. goddammit. the whole time i was reading this chapter, my mind was chanting "Eren.... i love you bUT PLEASE STOP NOW SWEETIE FOR FUCK'S SAKE"
anyway
ARMIN WAS SO BADASS HERE. Armin Protection Squad where u @
shit is about to go dOWN FOR REAAAAAL
way to build up the hype for next chapter dkskskd. i cant wait for their conversation.
also,
-Levi Ackerman, 2020
(shit had me laughing. head empty, no thoughts, just monke)
A few quick 134 thoughts or else I will actually burst ...
I’ve been consumed with real life so talking about Attack on Titan and responding to online friends has taken a backseat, but I am eager to talk about the chapter as soon as I have a moment. Since that keeps not happening, I thought I’d drop just a few quick thoughts now.
I’ve long hoped for a “cruel yet beautiful” ending but with this chapter I’ve giving up hope on anything other than cruel. This chapter was game over. Nothing can repair the damage that’s been done. The world has been rumbled and millions of innocents have been mercilessly slaughtered. No matter who, no matter where. The devout offering prayer at the temple, the urban and affluent in the city, the rural families running with no escape all met the same fate.
Meanwhile those who actually bear some guilt in this are being shown to have a change of heart. While the natural reaction would be anger, they are instead expressing remorse and vowing to do better. None of that matters either. If innocents and those having a change of heart are instantly slaughtered, what's the actual point?
It makes me wonder about the overall messaging here. Everyone including the 104th, the Alliance, Kiyomi, the General, and the crowd gathered at Fort Slava are willing to accept blame for the rumbling, yet there's been very little blame assigned to the person doing the rumbling and surprisingly little anger towards him. I don't know if that's clumsy messaging on Isayama's part, or if we are supposed to at least partially recuse Eren from this horror. That bothers me. I dropped that thought in a discord and my friend Kingsgrave shared his thoughts. I’ll end with those because it provides a lot to think about.
I think the narrative supports Eren a little too much. His ideas and rationalizations are treated as inevitable and not really pushed back on by the main cast, the main cast just laments about how terrible the world is.
We also never really had anyone in the narrative actually support alternatives, often they were proposed by some 3rd party and then they went nowhere. Isayama seemed to make it a point that those who supported alternatives were seen as fickle, indecisive, and weak compared to people like Floch and Eren.
It also doesn't help that the only major alternative proposed, the 50 year plan, was never an actual plan because it was proposed by a guy who was later revealed to want the extinction of Eldians. Making the plan a farse.
I think the biggest thing that confused/upset me was in 123 at that conference that Eren walked out of. That character seemed to exist to yet again remind us and Eren that there is no such thing as peace.
So maybe its a cautionary tale but honestly it feels more like Isayama is constantly justifying Eren. The text of the manga supports Eren's side far more than it does the other side, which makes arguing about it when you aren't on Eren's side incredibly difficult. Which might be the point but I hesitate to give Isayama credit for that.
Again those are not my words but I share the concern. Thank you @kingsgrave for permission to share them. Also thank you (and sorry) to everyone in my inbox. I hope be discussing the series soon.
Thank you. Thank you so much. This means so much to me.
(Ofc this chapter is called “In the Depths of Despair.”)
Sigh.
So, I guess I have to have an opinion on this chapter now.
For a while there, it looked like SNK had made the right choice.
Eren was the asshole. He was insubordinate, ungrateful, uncooperative, and above all else, a fucking sociopath. Cool, got it. One and done.
But then his friends started talking about how it was really their fault he’s doing this.
Ok, that’s fine. They’re desperate to stop him, so they’re just saying whatever they think will ingratiate themselves with Eren and help talk him down. Dynamics like that are very common in abusive relationships.
Now we arrive at this chapter, where even random people are saying Eren is a victim *as he is murdering them!*
It is patently absurd that Eren is having a warranted or natural or reasonable reaction to what he’s been through.
If Eren were a better person, he would have known that mass murder against the Eldians was wrong because mass murder is wrong. Unfortunately, Eren is a fundamentally amoral person. The only moral compass he has to guide him is a childish belief in “you hit me, so I get to hit you.”
He’s said as much on multiple occasions. He has said, “If someone tries to take my freedom away, I will take their freedom away.”
Instead of being the better man and ending the killing, his solution was to kill more people than them, faster and on a larger scale.
I think the clearest picture of Eren’s worldview was given when he spoke to Historia. He said the only way to end the cycle of violence was to destroy the whole world.
That is Eren’s deeply felt belief: there can be no peace or coexistence; the only way to win is to be the last man standing.
This mindset is so natural to him that he will even kill his friends for opposing him.
He told them that they were free to oppose him, and he was free to fight back. That’s how he justifies killing them to himself. They have the choice to oppose him, so if he fights back and kills them, it’s their fault they died, not his, because they could have made the choice to flee and live, but decided to stand and die.
In reality, the alliance is fulfilling a moral duty to protect life, while Eren is an asshole who has killed billions.
The series wasn’t kind to Eren about that. He was depicted as a cheering child as he murdered everyone. The Rumbling was not white washed either. The take away was obviously that Eren’s decision was not the product of a sound mind.
And yet.
Now I have to wonder if the series is seriously trying to say the Rumbling embodies some form of justice.
There are multiple layers to this issue, so let’s start at the surface level.
So in what is obviously a ham-fisted attempt by Isayama to lecture the audience about morality, a Random Commander Guy filibusters about the ills cast by the Marleyans on the Eldians and how this has rebounded back at them.
It is generally considered good writing for characters to get their just desserts. If someone sells drugs to kids, you expect something bad to happen to them. If someone helps a kid cross the street, you expect something good to happen to them.
What’s different between a generic case of just desserts in a story and this chapter in SNK is that the dessert is typically delivered through some nebulous, karmic force, rather than a vengeful twerp with God-like powers.
When the drug dealer’s car blows up, it’s karmic fate, not revenge.
The car doesn’t blow up because one of the kids devoted his life to exacting revenge, it’s because the car just blows up for no reason, or because something completely unrelated to the dealer causes a bomb to be planted in the car, or the dealer brought it on themselves by getting caught up with terrorists.
People may or may not deserve to suffer, but it’s fine to show people suffering if you’re just trying to make a point about how people should act.
Eren’s a different case. For several reasons.
To help untangle why, let’s think about the death penalty.
The death penalty is an example of retributive justice. Put simply, it’s the idea that retribution can be morally just.
The Rumbling is immoral precisely because it is something a supporter of retributive justice would emphatically NOT support.
Most supporters of the death penalty would justify it as an act by a legitimate societal authority. Eren is not that.
Eren is not an authority figure. He does not speak for the Eldian people and has no right to exact this genocide on their behalf. No one made him King of the Eldians. It’s not his place to decide what’s in the Eldian’s best interest.
Also, killing people because “it’s what the scumbag deserves” is usually justified because it’s a sentence for a crime handed down in a legal process.
Rights can be taken away, but not arbitrarily. Transparency is an important part of this. Acts that are a crime are public knowledge, as well as the prescribed punishments. The criminal law is also supposed to apply to everyone equally, not selectively. To say nothing of the law itself being duly enacted by a legitimate governmental authority.
The same principles apply to the process by which a right is taken away. The process must be laid out in a law that was duly enacted by a legitimate government authority, applies to everyone, and is publicly known.
Eren’s process, of *fucking* course, is nothing like this. Eren has no legitimate authority. He’s a Guy With an Opinion who bumbled into attaining absolute power, and now he’s acting on that Opinion.
He not the government punishing a convict. He’s a guy with a gun shooting people he doesn’t like. The Rumbling is not just retribution, it’s just murder.
Commander Guy says that if they knew this would happen, they would have acted differently.
That’s a good point.
Why the fuck do they deserve to die, then?
To some extent, everyone’s worse impulses are kept in check by the knowledge that there will be consequences if they act rashly.
But it’s not just that.
Laws are public knowledge for a reason: it’s fair. If you know your act is a crime and that performing said act will result in a certain punishment, then by committing the act anyway you have tacitly accepted whatever punishment will be meted out.
The moral onus is placed on you.
This is why knowledge that you are committing a crime is necessary to be convicted of a crime.
In principle, the case with the Marleyans is the same. Is it fair to punish someone for an act they did not know would carry that punishment? No.
They may know the act was immoral, but that is not the same thing as knowing it will lead directly to their death.
And needless to say, but you only deserve to be punished for an act if you deserve to be punished for that act. The Marleyans do not deserve to be punished for that act.
There are multiple ways a wrong can be righted. There are punitive ways, in which the perpetrator is harmed outright. There are also restorative ways, in which the victim is compensated for the harm done to them, usually at the expense of the perpetrator.
I have already explained why Eren lacks the authority to pass judgement on the world, and that the process by which he made his decision was completely illegitimate, but it needs to be said that this punishment is totally improper in itself.
Wiping out humanity is purely punitive. To use the obvious analogy, I don’t think any sane person would argue white people deserve to be punished for racism. Supporters of racial justice usually talk about restorative, rather than punitive, forms of justice, like reparations.
The Rumbling does not make the Eldians whole again. It does not restore their trampled dignity. It is purely an act of vengeance.
Casting it as some kind of deserving retribution is crazy.
Oh, and, you know, suffering is bad, so retributive justice is wrong even disregarding everything I just said.
You could theoretically believe life is a miracle, but that people forfeit that right if they act wrongly…it’s not something many people would support.
If Dino!Eren had been depicted as a random force of nature that visited ruination upon humanity, we could have potentially gotten a good story about how hatred leads to no good outcomes. Like how Godzilla is a metaphor for the ills of nuclear weapons.
Instead we get a nihilistic tale about two sides punching each other until one keels over dead. And somehow the one that keels over deserved it.
What makes it nihilistic is that you could easily reverse it. What if right before Eren destroys Fort Salta, aliens invade the Earth and help the Marleyans.
Now the Eldians are on the verge of annihilation and *Eldian* Commander Guy gets his turn to say “Woe is us who surrendered to hate. We deserve this.”
There is no right side or wrong side. No deserving side or innocent side. The Eldians were cheering for genocide the same as the Marleyans. The difference is the Eldians had a God on their side.
The morality of this series is just all over the place.
The Alliance and Eren are equally sinful, but now Eren is an agent of karmic destiny and his victims “deserve it.”
There isn’t much to talk about this chapter besides that.
Armin still hopes to take Eren alive, but good luck with that.
Eren can manifest other titans from his body, which is cool I guess, though it’s pretty clear this power only exists to give the Alliance things to fight.
There were a lot of allusions to parenthood this chapter. The baby and the cliff. Reiner’s mom realizing how shitty she’s been. Historia’s pregnancy. The Commander Guy saying it’s the fault of “us adults.” The numerous shots emphasizing the kids at Fort Salta.
Child abuse is a common theme of SNK. And not just parental abuse, but societal abuse, too. Children are the victims of individual foibles and broader social ills, like racism and police brutality.
The cycle of violence at the heart of the series’ conflict is bad for everyone, but the story emphasizes that it is bad for children in particular. It harms them, and leads to a world that is worse off for them.
If there’s one takeaway from SNK, it’s that we should think of the children. Adults shouldn’t just take care of their kids, they should fix broader social issues, if not for themselves then for the children’s sake.
It’s a fucking insult.
Historia’s pregnancy is all but confirmed here. There’s no way it’s fake. There may have been motive to fake being pregnant, but there is no fucking way she’d have a reason to fake *birth*.
I always leaned towards the pregnancy being real, so that didn’t get to me. What gets me is that Historia is just…there. On Paradis. On the sidelines.
Not only was Historia, who is the only likable female character in this show now, impregnated, she’s also been MIA most the last two story arcs.
I had thought Isayama was saving her for the finale. Surely, Isayama understands that if you sideline a major character for no reason, they have to come into play at some point, I thought. Surely.
Characters are tools; they exist to be used. So use them.
But no, it seems Historia is legit not going to be a thing in this final battle. My dreams of the domineering boss saving the day are dashed.
But what really messes with me is how shafted Historia has been since basically the end of the Uprising Arc.
Historia’s only contribution to the plot after Uprising, but before the pregnancy was making the disastrous decision to make the truth of the world public, which paved the way for Paradis society to become radicalized and back Eren’s coup.
She has done nothing other than that.
Obviously her pregnancy will have thematic importance, but at this point the best Historia stans can hope for is that she’s the main character in the epilogue.
I’ve always assumed the pregnancy was the product of a loving relationship. For all his incompetence with Historia, I was willing to assume Isayama would not force her to carry a forcibly impregnated child to term.
And you know that even if the child is the product of rape, Historia will still have to say she loves and accepts them as her child and will raise them lovingly, with no regard or acknowledgement of the trauma of having to raise a child born out of her being raped.
Because the theme of the story.
All life is a miracle.
All children deserve to be loved.
Even if it was rape.
Except it’s more complicated than that, and I’m terrified to think that Isayama may not understand that.
So for now, I choose to presume that Historia is pregnant because she loves someone, decided to have a family with them, and we’re being led to believe she was raped for shock value.
But arguably more important is what this means for the queer audience.
Historia’s first love interest was another woman.
She’s queer. A lesbian. A dyke. What have you.
Now you’re telling me she either loves a man, or was not only raped, but has to love and accept the child that results from that trauma?
And for what?
So we can end the manga on a speech by Historia moralizing about the value of posterity?
Historia stands at the nexus of two subjects in this manga: the value of posterity and the denigration of queer people.
It is very homophobic of this series to pair a queer character with a dude to affirm a message about the value of children and motherhood.
As if queer people can’t have children.
We seem to be headed down that path.
It didn’t have to be like this.
Queer people can have children through artificial insemination. And artificial insemination is conceivable with Paradis’ current level of technological development.
Isayama is choosing to do this because queer people are not a part of his vision of a world where people, especially children, are able to live free.
That’s very sad, because it shows how empty SNK’s morals are.
So who’s the slave here?
Who here is truly free?
The ones who are free are the ones who aren’t reading Attack on Titan anymore.
This month’s poll questions were brought to you by /u/berthototototo, /u/_Puppet_, Humble, and @momtaku. We’d all like to say a big thank you to everyone for supporting the community poll!
