This episode is also on Bilibili too.
Today we’re going to talk about the ending of Attack on Titan. There’s a lot I want to say about it. My script ran to around ten thousand Chinese characters, which would make for one ridiculously long video, so I split it into two episodes based on the content.
In this episode, I’ll come at it from an evolutionary psychology perspective and try to understand Ymir Fritz’s mental state. What exactly was the Founder thinking and doing in the final few chapters? Once we understand Ymir, we understand the ending of Attack on Titan.
In my reading, the ending of Attack on Titan may not be the brain-dead train wreck many people took it to be. It may actually have a coherent internal logic. The catch is that, as we’ll discuss next time, this logic—coherent though it is—doesn’t quite connect with the story that came before it.
When I recorded this episode, the extra pages for the final chapter hadn’t come out yet. So the analysis below is based on the ending as serialized. By the time you watch this, the added pages may very well have slapped me in the face all over again. But that’s fine. Ever since I wrote that series a few years ago, “A Two-Thousand-Year Dream: A Complete Plot Analysis of Attack on Titan,” the later plot has been mercilessly slapping my old analyses around. My face still hasn’t stopped swelling.
Now, back to the point. In this episode, we’ll psychoanalyze Ymir Fritz and use that as a basis for understanding the ending of Attack on Titan.
But to figure out what Ymir Fritz was doing, we need to start with the third-to-last chapter—the one that comes before the final two, Chapter 137—which seems to have nothing directly to do with her. In that chapter, Zeke tells Armin in the Paths why he wanted to carry out his euthanasia plan, essentially a plan for self-extinction. Their exchange looks like a few throwaway lines, but the key to understanding Ymir and the ending of Attack on Titan is hidden right there. I’ll first spend a fair amount of time unpacking Zeke and Armin’s conversation in Chapter 137, then use the framework it gives us to understand Ymir Fritz.
Zeke and Armin’s Conversation
After meeting Armin in the Paths, Zeke explained his euthanasia plan like this: “A long, long time ago, when the world consisted only of matter, various things kept appearing and disappearing. Eventually, something survived. We call it life. In the end, the reason life survived is that it had the trait of ‘reproduction.’ To expand its population, life gradually changed its form and adapted to all kinds of environments, and that’s how we got to where we are today… So, the purpose of being alive is ‘reproduction.’”
Zeke then steered the conversation toward extinction and death. He said that death—in other words, the extinction of a species—violates the purpose of reproduction, which is why fear exists as a form of punishment. The reason people fear is that this reproductive instinct is making trouble.
Armin clearly couldn’t quite keep up with Zeke’s rhythm. He said, “I’m not ready to give up yet.”
Zeke said, “Why? Is it for reproduction again? Is continuing the species really that important to you?”
That question finally made Armin freeze: Right. We’re fighting like hell—but who, in the end, are we doing it for?
Zeke immediately twisted the knife. He said, “What’s happening now can be called the tragedy caused by life ruled by fear—the fear brought about by meaningless life activity.”
“Why can’t we lose? People live, and sooner or later they die anyway, don’t they? Maybe, right before death, they’d actually feel relieved. The days they spent being manipulated by others, without understanding what any of it meant and doing it all just to reproduce, would finally be over. At last, they’d be free.”
Slaves to Our Genes
The subtext here is pretty obvious: Are we humans really fighting for ourselves? Actually, no. When you get right down to it, we’re simply driven by the instinct to fear death. And the purpose of that instinct isn’t to preserve me as a person, or the soul inside my skull. Its only purpose is reproduction—to make a copy of the genes in my body and pass it on!
At the moment of death, we breathe a sigh of relief and feel that we’ve finally gained freedom. Is that really because we realize we’ve escaped other people’s manipulation? No. It’s because we realize we’ve finally escaped our genes’ manipulation.
You could sum up Zeke’s view in one sentence: The reason people aren’t free isn’t that we’re other people’s slaves; it’s that we’re slaves to our genes! What enslaves us ultimately isn’t an enemy outside us, but the genes inside our bodies.
So is there any way to escape this genetic enslavement and finally become free?
Zeke thinks the only way is to break completely with our genes. That’s where his euthanasia plan came from. We don’t want to be slaves to our genes anymore, so we kill ourselves and go down with them.
(Revision: Zeke thinks our bodies, souls, and genes are one and the same, sharing the same fate. So the only way to escape genetic enslavement is to go down with our genes—to break completely with them. That’s where his euthanasia plan came from.)
But is that the only answer?
Actually, no.
Zeke’s argument isn’t some especially fresh insight. His whole line of thinking clearly comes from the idea of the “selfish gene” proposed by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
In his classic book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins popularized an important idea: the basic unit of evolution is the gene, not the individual organism.
If we look at biological evolution through an anthropomorphic lens, evolution is basically genes doing everything they can to keep copying themselves. And we organisms are merely the gene’s vehicle (or carrier, or container). Genes constantly tweak the parameters of our vehicles so they can preserve themselves and replicate and spread as much as possible. We living creatures are really just tools genes use to copy themselves. All the various abilities we display exist to serve genes; at bottom, they’re all about helping genes survive and reproduce more effectively.
—So organisms are actually slaves to their genes. Up to this point, doesn’t that sound exactly like Zeke’s view?
So does the selfish-gene theory mean that a vehicle can only meekly serve as its genes’ slave, with no freedom at all?
Not at all. A vehicle can rebel against its genes.
The Rebellion of the Vehicle
Vehicles can rebel because the control genes exert over them is often a form of weak control. Under weak control, we gene-carriers may be able to defy the genes’ “will.” (Of course, “will” is in quotation marks here. Genes have no consciousness; this is anthropomorphic language. A lot of ideas in evolutionary theory become awkward if you refuse to anthropomorphize them, so please don’t nitpick this point.)
So what is weak control? Weak control is the opposite of strong control.
Strong control is like flying a model airplane with a remote control: every movement the plane makes comes from the controller in your hand. Genes can control their vehicles the same way, dictating every movement an organism makes. For example, some insects have genes that encode a complete set of detailed instructions for building nests. Guided by these genetic instructions, some ants and bees can construct nests that are astonishingly complex and beautiful.
The advantage of strong control is that it gives you extreme command. The model plane listens to you one hundred percent of the time and will never make a move outside your instructions. The downside is that it has almost no flexibility. If the model plane accidentally flies out of sight, it has no ability to adjust on its own, so it can easily crash into a building—taking itself, and possibly someone else, with it. Organisms work the same way. If an ant or bee nest is damaged even slightly before construction is complete, they can never finish it; they simply cannot correct the error. The behavior may look incredibly complex and elegant, but if it was completed under the genes’ strict instructions, it’s actually rigid as a board. A model plane can perform all kinds of dazzling flips and rolls under your remote control, but its flexibility is really zero. Once it flies out of your sight, it’ll use those dazzling flips and rolls to crash into a building.
In Attack on Titan, Zeke is essentially a supporter of the strong-control theory of genes. He believes humans are also under strong genetic control. Like ants and bees, people can only act according to genetic instructions, so there is no possibility of resisting genetic enslavement. To escape, the only route is to break completely with our genes.
But what Zeke doesn’t know is that genes have another way of controlling their vehicles: weak control. Weak control means handing part of the control authority over to the model plane, so it doesn’t fly one hundred percent according to the remote’s commands, but can decide some of its movements for itself. For example, you could install a distance sensor on the model plane and program its chip to avoid obstacles. Whenever it gets close to an obstacle, the plane temporarily ignores the remote’s command and decides to fly in the opposite direction. With this kind of weak control, the model plane becomes much more flexible. Even without explicit instructions from the remote, it won’t blindly crash into a building.
The more a gene’s vehicle has to adapt to a complex and ever-changing environment, the more flexibility it needs. Pushed along by evolution, genes therefore tend toward weak control. Compared with strong control, the clearest feature of weak control is that genes don’t directly issue clear-cut, rigid instructions for action. Instead, they give the organism broad, general goals. Genes don’t command you: “The moment you see a woman with these three measurements and this kind of face, go over there and have a baby with her.” No, genes simply make you experience certain emotions and desires. When you see a woman with a great figure, a pleasant face, and an elegant air, you don’t immediately go over and carry out the act of making babies with her. Instead, you feel that you’rein love. Driven by that impulse, you can more flexibly and autonomously overcome all sorts of unforeseen hardships and obstacles, and ultimately try to end up together with her and complete the act of reproduction. Weak control uses emotions and desires to shape thegeneral direction of behavior, without interfering with thespecific route of action. It’s an indirect, roundabout form of control, but it can often reach its goal more flexibly.
Weak control adapts flexibly to change, and we humans are the champions of adapting to change on this planet. That means we humans are, to a great extent, merely under the gene’s “weak control.” We’re model airplanes packed with all kinds of sensors. Most of the time, we don’t mechanically carry out specific instructions from our genes. We can make our own choices based on the situation in front of us—and that freedom to choose is what we callfree will.
Free will
But from the gene’s point of view, human free will is a double-edged sword. Free will gives humans an extraordinary capacity to adapt, providing the gene with the best possible guarantee of replication. At the same time, humans with free will have realized a crucial fact: theinterests of the vehicle and theinterests of the gene often don’t overlap at all.
The most typical example is sex. Genes make us feel sexual desire and pleasure. For genes, the purpose of those feelings is to motivate the vehicle to have sex and thereby replicate the genes. But this gene’s vehicle can choose to have sex while using all kinds of contraception. The moment humans decide to have sex purely for their own pleasure, from the gene’s perspective, that amounts tothe vehicle’s rebellion.
So wherever there is weak control, there is free will; and wherever there is free will, the vehicle has a chance to rebel against the gene’s enslavement.
When the gene’s vehicle ignores the gene’s manipulation and acts according to its own will, what is that? It’sfreedom in the evolutionary sense.
So our species, humans, can’t really be called slaves of the gene in the first place. Many human behaviors and choices already deviate quite dramatically from the gene’s original goal of replicating itself.
When you drink a diet soda, enjoying the sweetness without giving your body any calories, you’re free.
When you watch a pretty girl dance on Bilibili instead of pursuing girls in real life, you’re free too.
We humans are both the gene’s most powerful vehicles and its most rebellious rebels.
Humans don’t need to rely on self-extinction to escape the gene’s enslavement, because we already have a certain degree of freedom. So Zeke’s whole argument doesn’t hold water. Even if his euthanasia plan has some rational basis, he can’t argue for it on the grounds of freeing organisms from genetic control. He fell victim to the fact that he hadn’t read evolutionary psychology.
In fact, in Chapter 137, the moment Zeke finished saying all this, Armin slapped him in the face—repeatedly. Armin saw a leaf in the sand of the Paths, remembered the past, and said:
“It was at dusk. The three of us raced to see who could reach that tree on the hill fastest… The wind was so warm that day. Just running felt wonderful…
Back then, I don’t know why, but I used to think: Could it be that I was born so the three of us could race each other here? I thought the same thing when I stayed home reading on rainy days, when a squirrel ate the fruit I gave it, and when we all went to the market together.
It felt like these ordinary moments were actually incredibly important. To me, even though they had absolutely nothing to do withreproduction, they were all incredibly important.”
What was Armin saying? Wasn’t he talking about the vehicle’s rebellion against the gene? The gene tells us to reproduce, reproduce, reproduce. But we go up into the hills to feel the wind, stay home and read, and feed fruit to squirrels. Sometimes, we can choose not to be slaves of the gene. In those moments, we’re free.
That pretty much wraps up my reading of the conversation between Zeke and Armin in Chapter 137. It wasn’t many pages, but if you dig into it, there’s actually quite a lot going on. I’ve spent a fair amount of breath today trying to explain it, and I’ve only just managed to make it clear.
Based on that reading, you could say Zeke’s euthanasia plan belongs in the category of “ignorance is terrifying.” So what exactly were Ymir, Eren, and Mikasa up to?
What did Eren actually accomplish by wiping out the world? What did Ymir want? Why did the story’s final key turn out to be Mikasa? These are the questions I want to answer next.
We have to look for the answer in Ymir’s mental state. And once we have this framework of “the vehicle rebelling against the gene,” we can use it to interpret Ymir Fritz’s mental state and understand the point of the entire Attack on Titan ending.
Ymir’s mental state
Let’s start with the conversation between Eren and Armin in Chapter 139. Eren tells Armin that after coming into contact with Ymir Fritz in the Paths, he discovered something unbelievable: for two thousand years, Ymir had continued to love King Fritz, the man who abused and enslaved her. That bond kept Ymir from being free for two thousand years, leaving her wandering the Paths.
Eren goes on to say that he doesn’t really know what Ymir is thinking deep down, but he can feel that she has suffered terribly in her pursuit of freedom. Eren thinks Ymir loves King Fritz deeply, but he can’t understand why she would want to break free from that love.
When Eren says this, I think it leaves readers confused in two separate ways. First, the idea that Ymir fell in love with King Fritz feels incredibly abrupt; many people think it’s Attack on Titan’s biggest blunder. Second, Ymir loves King Fritz but also wants to escape those feelings—what is that supposed to mean?
But once we place this part of the story within the evolutionary psychology framework we discussed earlier—the vehicle’s rebellion against the gene—both confusions are cleared up at once.
The truth is actually very simple: ordinary humans can’t be called slaves of the gene, but Ymir Fritz can.
Ymir was the product of a human merging with the source of all living matter. Maybe because that creature is far less intelligent than humans—after all, it looks like a soft-bodied animal—we can infer that it is under its genes’ “strong control.” It seems to have little free will and to act almost entirely on direct instinct.
After merging with that creature, Ymir’s behavior took on the same characteristics of being under strong control. In some matters, it seems that the gene issued Ymir direct, non-negotiable commands. The clearest example is that Ymir couldn’t use her own will to break free from her attachment to King Fritz.
Eren did indeed sense something in the Paths that looked very much like love. But it wasn’t love. It was an animal-instinct-like attachment, what’s known as imprinting.
Ymir’s imprint
Imprinting is a concept from ethology. It refers to a phenomenon in which, during a sensitive period in an animal’s development, genes switch on an instruction that causes the animal to form a behavioral pattern very quickly and very rigidly.
That instruction is as if it were imprinted directly into the brain. Once imprinted, the animal carries it out like a mindless zombie, as if the organism and its genes had signed a demonic contract—unbreakable.
A demonic contract? That sounds familiar.
The most typical example of imprinting isfilial imprinting in some bird species (Filial imprinting). Its function is to teach young birds to recognize their mother. For example, after ducklings hatch, they may treat the first relatively large, moving object they see as their mother. But this imprint is extremely mechanical, and once it happens, it’s hard to change. If the first thing a duckling sees after hatching is a toy car, it will follow that toy car with absolute devotion for the rest of its life and never recognize its real mother.
Imprinting could be called the most extreme form of strong control that genes exert over their vehicles.
If we look at Ymir’s feelings for King Fritz through the concept of imprinting, don’t we find that they look far less like love and almost exactly like imprinting?
And this isn’t the first time the concept of imprinting has appeared in Attack on Titan.
Before this, there was another group in Attack on Titan deeply affected by imprinting: the Ackerman clan.
The Ackerman clan’s imprint
Every member of the Ackerman clan forms an imprint on another person at some point in life. They become irresistibly attached to that person and devote themselves to serving them, without question. Captain Levi’s attachment to Commander Erwin and Mikasa’s attachment to Eren are both examples of this.
This attachment doesn’t resemble a human emotion so much as a duckling’s response to the first living thing it sees. It’s completely beyond the control of the will—it’s compulsive.
Seen this way, the mental state of the Ackerman clan resonates with Ymir Fritz’s mental state in an extraordinary way.
In short, ordinary humans are mainly under the gene’s weak control: free will outweighs mindless obedience. Ymir Fritz and the members of the Ackerman clan, by contrast, are mainly under the gene’s strong control: mindless obedience often overwhelms free will.
This also lets us understand Ymir’s contradiction. She is uncontrollably attached to King Fritz and serves him with absolute devotion, but this isn’t based on her free will. It’s based on an imprint, like a duckling’s attachment to the first living thing it sees.
And yet that tiny bit of free will in Ymir’s mind, though it doesn’t have the upper hand, refuses to accept such an animal-like fate.
That is the contradiction Eren sensed in Ymir. On the one hand, she is irresistibly attached to King Fritz; on the other, she longs to break free from that attachment.
So for two thousand years, she kept searching for someone who could help release her from this suffering.
Eren said: This person finally showed up in the end—and that person was Mikasa.
Why could Mikasa set Ymir free?
Why Mikasa?
Right up until the end of the story, neither Eren nor Armin understood why it had to be Mikasa.
But within the framework we’ve been using, the reason actually isn’t hard to understand.
Why were both the Ackerman clan and Ymir so deeply troubled by the mark? Was this really just a coincidence Hajime Isayama threw in on a whim?
Of course not.
Do you remember how the Ninth Titan—the Attack Titan—came into existence? There were originally only eight Titans in the world. The Attack Titan was created by Ymir’s free will.
In other words, although Ymir herself had long since left the world of the living, she could project her spirit into the human world. The Attack Titan was the embodiment of free will in Ymir’s mental world.
Free will, projected into the human world, became the Attack Titan.
So where did the part that wasn’t free get projected?
Obviously, onto the Ackerman clan. That’s why the Ackermans, like Ymir, were “not free” .
In other words, Ymir’s spirit split in two and created two avatars in the human world: her free-will avatar, weakly controlled by genes, became the Attack Titan; her animal-instinct avatar, strongly controlled by genes, became the Ackermans.
And between the two, the Attack Titan actually isn’t the crucial one. It was already the part of Ymir’s spirit that didn’t need redemption. The truly crucial part—the one that needed redemption—was the Ackerman.
Looking backward from the story’s ending, we know that Ymir, trapped in the Paths, apparently had no way to redeem herself directly. But she could accomplish it through her avatar in the human world. In other words, if the Ackerman in the human world successfully broke free of strong genetic control and severed the marked bond between herself and the person she had been attached to for her entire life, then Ymir in the heavens would also break the mark binding her to King Fritz, complete her rebellion against the genes, and attain complete spiritual freedom.
In other words, the war humanity fought on earth was really just a “proxy war” for a god. The fates of the god’s avatars in the human world determined the god’s fate in lockstep.
That’s why the story’s final turning point fell entirely on the last representative of the Ackerman clan—Mikasa. Because Mikasa Ackerman’s freedom was Ymir’s freedom.
That’s also why Ymir’s fate was ultimately decided by whether Mikasa could swing that blade at Eren.
That blade symbolized free will defeating genetic control in Mikasa’s mind. Once she swung it, Mikasa and Ymir together completed the vehicle’s rebellion against the genes.
From the moment she swung that blade, Mikasa in the human world changed from a “gene’s slave” into a “human being” . Only then did Ymir in the heavens gain true freedom.
So, did the blade Mikasa finally swung at Eren sever “love”? Actually, no. What Mikasa severed was the mark—that animal-instinct-like attachment she couldn’t control by herself.
Before that blade was swung, Mikasa’s feelings for Eren actually contained no love at all, only attachment. Her blade severed Eren’s head, but it also severed the hold that genes and instinct had over her will.
Some people say that Hajime Isayama actually used love—a device that had barely appeared anywhere in the entire work—to wrap things up in the final few chapters. That’s straight-up mental derangement. But in reality, that is precisely the point of these final three chapters.
Before Mikasa severed Eren’s head, she truly had never been in love with him. Because love belongs only to “free people” ,not to “gene’s slaves” .
Without that blade, Mikasa could never have kissed Eren. A kiss is an expression of love, and that too belongs only to free people.
Why did Ymir smile off to the side when she saw that kiss?
Was she a psychopath? Did she feel delighted watching a woman kiss a head she had just chopped off herself? No. Ymir’s smile was actually her way of saying to Mikasa—and to herself:
From now on,
you are no longer a god of war swinging a cleaver,
nor a slave driven by your genes,
you’re just an ordinary person capable of love.
Child, you are free.
P.S. One small addition:
Although I’ve described Founder Ymir as if she were some warm, understanding big sister, if you think about it again, isn’t she actually a completely unhinged evil god? To complete her own personal redemption, she treated humanity’s fate and lives as if they were nothing more than blades of grass.
What did Ymir’s self-redemption cost? The extinction of 80% of the world’s population!
Don’t say the end of the world was Eren’s solo act. The book contains plenty of details suggesting that the Rumbling was the shared will of Ymir and Eren:
From Eren’s perspective, the Rumbling was partly about leveling the power gap between the Eldians and the outsiders. But from Ymir’s perspective, the Rumbling was nothing more than bait—a lure meant to draw out that one blade from Mikasa.
It was precisely the stimulus of the Rumbling that caused unprecedented free will to erupt in Mikasa’s mind, allowing her to smash through the shackles of the mark. That was what set Ymir free. Eighty percent of the people on earth died horribly just like that. Their deaths were nothing more than the price of Ymir’s personal redemption.
Before Chapter 137, people’s mutual oppression had turned the world into a living hell. That was one form of Heaven and Earth being ruthless.
After Chapter 137, the god regarded human life as nothing more than blades of grass. That was another form of Heaven and Earth being ruthless.
The universally acclaimed first 137 chapters and the seemingly downright satanic final three chapters actually arrive at the same destination by different roads.
Before the final chapter came out, Hajime Isayama was Schrödinger’s Isayama, suspended in a quantum superposition of militarist and pacifist. After the ending came out, he seemed to collapse toward the militarist side. But I don’t think Hajime Isayama is on either the militarist side or the pacifist side. He’s on Laozi’s side.
Because from the first chapter to the last, Hajime Isayama was really saying only one thing:
Heaven and Earth are ruthless, treating the myriad creatures as straw dogs.
By: Zhichao Wei
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