This episode is also on Bilibili too.
This is the second half of my reading of the Attack on Titan finale.
Last time, I argued why the final three chapters of Attack on Titan actually make sense as a whole. Today, though, I want to talk about how, even if those three chapters are internally coherent, they are disconnected from everything that came before—from the preceding 136 chapters. If the previous video was an attempt to rehabilitate the Titan finale, this one is here to talk about its problems.
Main text begins:
Why did the Attack on Titan finale leave so many people with such a bad impression? I think the key reason is that, in these final few chapters, readers and Hajime Isayama ended up seriously misaligned on the meaning of one crucial question.
That question is: what, exactly, makes people unfree?
Almost every event before the third-to-last chapter—the 137th chapter—hinted at the same answer: we are unfree because, in the world of Attack on Titan, the conflict between people and between groups is brutally intense. It is in that brutal conflict that people lose their freedom. After all, throughout the entire work, Hajime Isayama has painted this savage oppression between people in extraordinarily heavy strokes.
We have no freedom because we are enslaved, conquered, and imprisoned; because we live in fear, never knowing what tomorrow will bring; because we are controlled by powerful hostile forces. That is why we cannot live freely.
Put in one sentence: we are not free because we are other people’s slaves.
After all, the earlier parts of Attack on Titan contain far too much setup along these lines.
Take the Eldians on the island. They are brainwashed, deceived, and imprisoned behind towering walls; they are slaves to the First King’s pacifist ideology. They also live day and night in terror of being controlled by Titans. They, too, are slaves to the Titans beyond the walls.
Or take the Eldians beyond the walls. In Marley, they are enslaved, discriminated against, and imprisoned; they are slaves to all the foreign peoples beyond the walls.
Or take Ymir Fritz, the Founder. For two thousand years, she has always treated herself as King Fritz’s slave, acting in the Paths according to a slave’s status. In the chapter “To You, 2,000 Years From Now,” Eren tells Ymir: “You are not a slave. You are not a god. You’re just a person. You don’t have to obey anyone’s orders. You can make your own decisions.” That also suggests that freedom means escaping other people’s control.
In Chapter 131, Eren, who has already turned into a devil, returns to his childhood in a flashback—to the moment when he and Armin imagined the world beyond the walls. Armin says: “Ever since I was born, there’s always been this annoying wall in front of me. The world outside must be several times larger than this. Anyone who has seen it will be the freest person in the world.” After hearing this, a young Eren spreads his arms, imagining himself roaming through the vast world beyond the walls, and says, “This is freedom!” Then the camera cuts to the Eren of the present, using the Rumbling to flatten that world beyond the walls. The contrast between the past and the present is unbelievably cruel.
In that same chapter, Eren, tears streaming down his face, says to the little boy he will one day trample to death: “When I learned there were people beyond the walls, I was… disappointed.” To me, this is the most heartbreaking line in the entire Attack on Titan story: if the world beyond the walls contained nothing but monsters, I could happily take my revenge. But my enemies just happen to be people exactly like me. I wanted to try being a brave dragon slayer, but in the end I had no choice but to become a butcher who kills his own kind.
This scene is probably the best explanation, before Chapter 137, of the question “What, exactly, makes people unfree?” On the surface, freedom is blocked by that high wall. But at its root, it is blocked by the brutal oppression between people.
The answer is so obvious that we readers were not really expecting Isayama to offer some special new interpretation of freedom in the final few chapters. He only needed to follow through on everything he had set up and finally untie the knot of “the brutal oppression between people.” Or he could tell us that the knot cannot be untied and end with a grand tragedy. That would have worked too.
When Isayama first revealed the final scene of the last chapter, his idea was different from the finished product we got. He originally drew a man holding a baby on his shoulder and saying, “My child, you are free.” When I first saw that scene, the unspoken dialogue I added in my own head was: “Child, our generation has torn each other apart. We were enslaved and controlled. But now it’s all over. No one is here to control you anymore. You can live freely.”
I’m guessing you expected something like that too—eight or nine times out of ten.
Anyway, when most readers were thinking about the theme of “freedom,” they naturally looked outward. After all, so many details suggested that, in the world of Attack on Titan, the threat to freedom came from other people’s hostility—from outside.
But what hardly anyone expected was that, when Isayama finally brought the theme of “freedom” to the surface in these last few chapters, his interpretation of freedom went completely against that expectation. While we readers were looking outward, Isayama himself turned his gaze inward, toward the human psychological world. That is what I discussed in the previous video. Starting with Chapter 137, Isayama actually uses Zeke to throw out another answer to the question “What, exactly, makes people unfree?” Namely: we are not free not because we are other people’s slaves, but because we are slaves to our genes.
The threat to freedom, when you get right down to it, does not come from outside. It comes from within—from the genes inside our own bodies. Everything we fight for is, ultimately, just a way of ensuring the continuation of those genes in our bodies. The thing enslaving us is not the enemy. It is our genes.
Wait—after spending more than a hundred chapters telling us that the threat to freedom comes from hostility between people, you suddenly say in the third-to-last chapter that the threat to freedom comes from genes?
Once Isayama tossed out this possibility, we felt a little like we had just finished a Chinese-language exam and were watching the teacher write the answer key—only for them to suddenly decide to go off the rails and say: “Actually, this wasn’t a language exam. It was a riddle.”
Naturally, we felt a strong urge to tear up the exam paper and hit the teacher.
Actually, this kind of deliberately unconventional plotting, designed to sidestep readers’ and viewers’ expectations, can work. A lot of cult films love this route: the earlier plot deliberately misleads the audience and makes everyone think the story will develop in one direction, then, out of nowhere, it takes a sharp turn—the plot, the pacing, even the genre suddenly shift. The audience is first left baffled, then delighted: “Holy crap, they can make a movie like this?” Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk till Dawn is a classic example of this kind of anti-expectation storytelling. If you watch the first and second halves separately, you might not even realize they are from the same film. But it is precisely because the movie contains this insane mid-film twist, which kicks all the audience’s expectations straight into a ditch, that it earned such acclaim.
See? Even a story as divided in half as Attack on Titan can work.
So why didn’t people buy this twist at the end of Attack on Titan? I think the reason is pretty simple: the twist came far too late. 136 chapters versus 3—that ratio is absurdly lopsided. Some readers might enjoy a deranged, brain-melting twist, but nobody enjoys a rushed one. If Isayama had introduced the theme “The thing enslaving us is not the enemy, but our genes” about ten chapters earlier, maybe some readers would have called it a brilliant twist and a brilliant development. The reviews probably wouldn’t have been this bad.
In other words, I think the main reason people are not buying the Attack on Titan ending is not really the plot itself. It is the story’s narrative pacing.
But finally, I also want to make a rushed twist. I think the final three chapters of Attack on Titan, although disconnected from the preceding hundred-plus chapters on the theme of “What is freedom, anyway?”, are unified with them on a higher level. Because beyond “freedom,” there is another theme that better sums up the entire book: this is a cruel world.
At the end of the previous video, I made Ymir Fritz sound like some warm, understanding big sister. But actually, she is straight-up an evil god. To complete her own personal self-redemption, she treats the fate and lives of humanity as if they were blades of grass. What price does Ymir pay to complete her self-redemption? The extinction of 80% of the world’s population, that’s what!
Don’t say the global genocide was something Eren did all by himself. The book contains plenty of details suggesting that it 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 foreign peoples. But from Ymir’s perspective, the Rumbling was nothing more than bait—a lure meant to bring about Mikasa’s one decisive slash. It was precisely the shock of the Rumbling that caused an unprecedented free will to erupt in Mikasa’s mind, allowing her to break through the shackles of the brand. That was what finally set Ymir free. Eighty percent of humanity died horribly like this, and their deaths were merely the price of one woman’s redemption.
Before Chapter 137, people’s mutual oppression turned the world into a living hell. That is one kind of heaven and earth being unhumane.
After Chapter 137, a god treats human life as blades of grass. That is another kind of heaven and earth being unhumane.
The classic first 137 chapters and the cultish final three chapters actually arrive at the same destination by different roads.
Before the final chapter came out, Isayama was Schrödinger’s Isayama, existing in a quantum superposition of militarist and pacifist. After the finale appeared, he seemed to have collapsed onto the militarist side. But I don’t think Isayama belongs on the militarist side or the pacifist side. He belongs on Laozi’s side.
Because from the first chapter all the way to the last, Isayama was really saying only one thing:
Heaven and earth are not humane; they treat all things as straw dogs.
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