#teetanjaeger

[animeandfilmotaku]

@teetanjaeger YOOOOOOOO I know right, it has been a while since I seen good VA acting since Romi Paku in FMA when Ed found the truth. The moment I feel fearful for her, is when Akito screamed to Kana about the marriage which I am like JFCCCCCCCCCCCC. This is like ACTING. I am like genuinely terrified when I see Akito walking into the school I mean 2019 fruits basket is killing me with its casting.

BTW I love your psychology analysis's as they are so good.

[lyonsdenprojects]

Eren’s Motivations

There’s a lot of talk going on in the fandom about Eren in the latest chapters. And, as all my regular readers know, Eren is hands down my favorite character. So I decided to weight in.

The thing about Eren is that even from the beginning he had a bigger picture in mind.

Sure, these are the words of a child who does not yet fully understand the world around him. But if we fast forward just a little to Trost, I’d like to bring up one of my favorite soliloquies of Eren’s as it's been such an awfully long time since it’s happen:

Armin: Why did you want to go to the outside world, Eren?

Eren: When we’re born...all of us...are free. People who reject that, no matter how strong they are...don’t matter. The burning water, the land of ice...anything will do. Anyone who saw those things...would be the freest person in the world. Fight!! Who’d value their life… over something like that? It doesn’t matter how terrifying the world is. It doesn’t matter how cruel the world is. Fight!! Fight!! FIGHT!! (Vol 4, Ch 14)

Eren is the type of person who, at his core, believes in an ideal of freedom for all. Yes, this is before he knows the truth about the walls and Paradis. Let’s fast forward again.

Right there, see it? At the bottom of the page, Eren’s reaction to Willy’s statement: He hears the beginning of his own beliefs in Willy’s words...

...And he is let down in that small hope that maybe he will not have to go through with his plan after all, that someone else in the world may be on the same page as he.

Eren’s entire conversation with Reiner is just SO POIGNANT. As I’ve sat here writing this, I keep wanting to just copy paste the entire conversation into this post. I implore you, go back and read Eren and Reiner’s full exchange in Chapter 100. I’ve painstakingly pulled out the bits that are most important to my point.

Eren: Willy Tybur is right. I’m the bad guy. I might just destroy the world. But you looked like bad guys to me, too…. Why did you destroy the wall?

Reiner: ...My mission….

Eren: What was that mission?

Reiner: ...to retake the Founder. Our goal...was to save the world…

Reviewing this conversation breaks my heart a little, I mean look at his expression. Its a mixture of sadness and regret. Eren finally gets it. He started as a character with this solid idea of right and wrong, black and white, as I’ve written about before. His journey has been one of learning that the world is actually grey.

He’s reached a conclusion that Reiner was never truly able to reconcile in his own mind. Reiner had to create a different persona in order to cope with this reality. And, really, that’s perhaps Reiner’s end goal was always a personal goal to cover his own ass in the first place. By the time they got to the Walls, Reiner was fighting for himself. Annie got it, but had her own motivations and followed those through to the end of her plot. We now know she fought for her father.

Eren, just like Annie, realizes he must follow his motivations through to the end. Because he’s not fighting for himself. He is still fighting for the ideals he started this story with, he just now understands the sad realities of war and what happens when parents lay their sins upon their children. Eren, I believe, fights for the freedom of Paradis and the people inside the Walls, just as he did in the beginning. As quoted in an earlier post, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster”.

Consider: If Eren had chosen not to rampage here, Marley would have come to Paradis anyway. The war would have been fought anyway. Innocents inside the Walls would have died instead. I cheer for Eren because he chooses to be the bad guy, the monster, in order to protect whom he loves and cares about. Which, I now think, is another major overarching theme of Snk: Those who fight for themselves vs those who fight for others. The Self vs The Whole.

[lyonsdenprojects]

Otakon 2018: Success!

This weekend the the @reblcosplay-blog crew and I attended @otakon 2018! We had a fantastic time and truly started to feel reconnected to our hobbies for the first time in awhile. Despite my best intentions to return to blogging and hobbyist sphere this year, I have just not been able to raise my motivation to write as I used to. I won’t lie, it’s sucked. This year has largely been spent getting acclimated to, well, myself. I’ve been deciding what I wish to do with my career and interests as well as settling into my acceptance of my PTSD. I feel I’ve done fairly well on that.

For those who have attended Otakon in the past and have been unsure of the conventions move to D.C., let me tell you: IT IS WORTH IT. The venue is gorgeous and much much better equipped than in Baltimore (no more LineCon!) and the planning comity has been doing an excellent job of getting wonderful panels in. My only complaint in the price, it has jumped up a great deal to attend. I am hoping it evens out as more people come to appreciate the D.C. venue.

As mentioned, I return from the convention with a new enthusiasm and desire to return to the hobbies that have given me so much joy in the past. Earlier this year, I asked you all if you would be interested in reading anything from me that was not exclusively about SnK. I received a positive response, which I greatly appreciated even though I have not yet followed through on it. My trouble as of late with SnK is that I just feel there is less for me to write on it. I established this blog on the premise of using contextual clues and real world knowledge to guess at the plot and motivations of the characters. But as most of the meta plot has now finally been revealed and we careen towards the climactic ending, I meta thoughts have been falling short. I still love the series with all my heart and have been LOVING season 3. I feel expanding my purview will help encourage more writing though.

As such, I have created a Facebook page! Please follow me there for more frequent updates! I find the Tumblr platform clunky and I know we all generally dislike the development team here. I don’t know what other platform to blog on though! On Facebook I plan on sharing nerdy news I find interesting and using it as a way to collect smaller thoughts before writing them into bigger posts here on Tumblr. I look forward to seeing you there!

[lyonsdenprojects]

U know i always wondered how strong levi must be mentally. Looking at a character like him and the quote ''what doesn't kill you make you stronger'' do you think that it makes sense that his past made him stronger? Yo srry for my english thoo :D

That’s an interesting question, anon. I’ve been pondering this question for a couple of days now.

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

I’ll be honest in that I’m not typically a fan of Nietzsche; I am probably the antithesis of a nihilist and of the opinion that there is purpose and meaning in life and hold very strong beliefs. That said however as I did a little research on this quote in order to answer, I also came across this other quote from Nietzsche:

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. 

Sound familiar?

Ok, its not an exact copy of the Nietzsche quote. But the similarity did strike me. The theme of becoming a monster when fighting monsters is a very strong one in the entirety of the story. Just skimming over the Wikipedia page (yah, I know, but it really is a good overview just to get an idea), I recognized a lot of similarities with themes in SnK.

It does appear that Nietzsche’s works had a strong influence on SnK.

As such, it makes sense to me that Levi (and Mikasa for that matter) is intended to be a personification of the idea that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. Actually, that’s probably intended to be literal:

For those interested in real life applications, there does appear to be some research drawing a positive correlation between trauma and “posttraumatic growth”. I’m, of course, a little skeptical as the research so far is based entirely on self reporting surveys but it is an interesting read and totally plausible.

[lyonsdenprojects]

Disclaimer Stuff

Hello followers! As I’m currently working on coming out of hiatus much like a groundhog peeks its way out of its hole to see if winter is over, I felt it important to make a disclaimer. A lot of this will be stuff I’ve said before, but its good to have it all collected in one place. Plus there might be some new people who haven’t heard it yet. 

Firstly: This blog is for entertainment purposes only.

I am a psychological researcher with a MSc from the University of Edinburgh where I specialized in qualitative research (which is words, as opposed to quantitative with is numbers). My dissertation was about discursive analysis. My bachelors was in theatre where I heavily studied script and performance analysis. The type of writing I post here is an outlet for me and it, quite genuinely, my opinions only. I’ve been correct in my theories many times but also wrong, that’s why I created a tracker.

So that means: I am not qualified to diagnose anyone.

I’m not an mental health care professional. I purposely try to write using language that says “it looks like”, “it appears if”, or “it reminds me of” because I’m trying to not definitively say “this character has x”. And, they’re fictional characters so the author could randomly change something on us at any time.

But: I believe in learning through my interests and hobbies.

I’m not an escapist. I use my hobbies to teach myself about new things, new skills, new cultures, new writing/art styles, etc. That’s why I write this blog, in hopes that my readers are the same. I have read critiques from other bloggers about me that they don’t think we should apply real-world psychology to fictional characters. I have to politely disagree. I think it helps us a.) learn about psychology and human behavior in a way that’s interesting and b.) become better readers and critical thinkers. And what the world needs desperately right now are more critical thinkers.

You don’t have to agree with my opinions or theories.

But I do expect you to be polite about it. Feel free to challenge me, ask me questions to poke holes in my logic. If I don’t know the answer to something, I’ll go do some research and see what information I can find. Conversation is how we grow and I have a love for academic debate. But if you roll up and are rude, I will be rude right back.

[lyonsdenprojects]

Just discovered your blog, and I must say I love it. Hands down, one of the most wonderful blogs I've been on, thanks

Thank you ever so much! Its comments like this that used to keep me going, I do hope I can sit down and write some new content soon!

[minigenos]

teetanjaeger replied to your post:Ok can someone with experience in the following...

What that sounds like right off is perhaps your ISP resets the connection or throttles your bandwidth at that time of night. I experience a similar thing with Comcast. Between 10-12 at night, the connection will fail.

They assume less people are using the internet at that time so will do diagnostic work or what not during that period.

I figured that might be the best scenario case and I’m glad someone else has the same thing happen at a similar time with a different isp. Thanks for your help.

[morganaskywalker-blog]

teetanjaeger I’m not sure that’s the case, because while the blog is in the recommendations, I still can’t either open it on that side view thing or like/reblog their posts. Weird.