A Heroic Parallel, Part 3: Eren & Keith
Welcome to the final instalment of the Heroic Parallel miniseries! Strap in your seat-belts - this one’s gonna be a wild ride!
Now if I’m done talking like a TV presenter, I best explain the premise for the unfamiliar: here I examine how the main trio are paralleled in the Veterans of the Survey Corps, as well as how they are becoming more like them in the so-called (by me and no-one else) ‘Soldierfication’ process. Previous instalments discussed Armin & Erwin and Mikasa & Levi, so for Eren that would presumably leave Hange. But there really aren’t many points of comparison between the two apart from Hange’s remark that they too once hated the Titans. I was confused about this for a long while...and then Chapter 71 came along.
There was another surviving veteran that fit Eren’s bill perfectly, and shone a bright light on what Eren could have been if he had never been injected with the Titan serum.
Keith Shadis was a man who strongly believed himself to be ‘special’. He looked down on anyone without the same drive as him;
He insisted on aggressive tactics against the Titans out of his hatred;
And he, at the end of the day, simply wasn’t special - a lesson he could only learn through the deaths of his comrades;
And his leadership of the Survey Corps can only be described as disastrous.
This is both the man Eren Jaeger used to be, and the man Eren Jaeger could have been. Eren’s passion and determination, the very features that seemed to be his most positive at the start of the manga, are shown from an entirely different angle; revealing how his passion was also his arrogance, his determination was also his narrow-mindedness. It highlights the importance of Eren’s development, as if he had never received the serum and if he survived Trost, he would surely become the same failure Keith did.
Where Soldierfication is concerned, my great hope here is that because Eren has already realised his own failings and has greatly improved as a person, he won’t go down Keith’s route; and that the reveal of his parallel was simply the conclusion to an arc that has already taken place to make the previous subtleties more explicit. Or else, Eren will take up Keith’s mantle in guiding the true Chosen One to success by aiding Armin. Because the alternative would be Eren screwing up so badly that he chooses to fade into obscurity and help other people become the hero he never could be, which frankly my heart cannot handle.
Warriorfication and Soldierfication are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Just as the difference between warriors and soldiers are blurry, so can the trio find that both paths lead down the same route. And given the current state of both the Warriors and the Veterans, we can tell the Shiganshina Trio have an even harder road to walk down before they reach the end; whatever that may be.