I want to know what people think is the biggest problem with how Eren was handled in the end.
Because I’m seeing a lot of different things people say, and honestly some of them feel trivial compared to what’s actually important, like Eren’s motivation shifting from wanting to secure freedom for himself and his people by killing his enemies, to flattening the world because he somehow thought that was how the outside world was in Armin’s book.
So what do you think?
Him accepting his fate by outright planning to be stopped is directly against literally everything about his character. Isayama even specifically showed Eren "giving up" in the uprising arc and show him learning to NOT give up. Eren's entire mantra is about not giving up. Why would that be his mantra at all when he not only knew he'd be stopped but actively planned for it?
That's also a big problem. Compare that to when he was inside a titan's stomach with half of his limbs missing and he still didn't give up.
but I still think his motivation changing is worse.
This is the answer.
He learned to accept himself. By the end of season 1 and 2 he already had so much sacrifices and weigh on his shoulders, which led to the climax of season 3(part1) where he went through a rough phase of not valuing his life "I was a mistake/wishing I was never born".
Historia liberated him, and then after learning of his mother's words "He's already special, because he was born in this world" he learned to see his life with value, not as a disposable one.
Eren's character is about "keeping moving forward", which he did. He arrived to his "scenery" and Mikasa's choice, which he wanted to happen. BUT it did came out of nowhere to be honest, I mean, who could've guessed that would eliminate titans from the world.
"Accepting his fate"? Eren was going to die either way by the curse of Ymir, but he chose to die to the alliance. Not saying it's a happy choice, but he chose the one he would regret less I suppose.
The issue is Eren deciding to be stopped by the alliance at all, seeing as he says mutiple times that his plan is a full rumbling
Hey real quick could you explain to me what your problem with this video is showed you was. https://youtube.com/shorts/ATwrFi7jRxs?si=3TC88yAnLvMPS6a_
All he said was he liked the ending, he wasn't being rude or disrespectful, hell he even said he understood why people didn't like it.
Every single thing he praises is entirely vague and when it comes to criticism he just brushes everything off without much explanation
So what, he doesn't have to give an explanation as to why he likes something, plus his content is YouTube shorts. He's not someone who talks hours about something. What's the problem with him saying he understands why you dislike something so trivial
You can still have a non-vague point in a YouTube short. If you can't do that, don't try to explain something that should be explained non-vaguely.
His points weren't vague though he was straight and honest
You can't just say "the themes of this are great" and not give actual examples of those themes, why these themes are good and how those themes were handled in the overall context of the story.
Yes you can
It's just making a claim without using evidence to support it.
Some false assumptions here. Accepting an unavoidable outcome ≠ giving up and knowing you’ll be stopped ≠ wanting or planning to be stopped. Eren's arc isn't about not losing, its moving forward even if losing is a possibility.
Huh? Literally the whole message of tha arc is learning to choose for yourself. Missing that means you probably misunderstood Historia's entire character arc too. Unfortunate
But eren doesnt give up or plan to be stopped. He continues acting toward the future he already knows he will reach, accepting death as a consequence, which is fully consistent with a character whose mantra is about choosing to move forward despite the outcomes he saw. What part of his character required death to be a sign he gave up?
Yes but that's still different than PLANNING to be stopped.
Eren already had learned to choose for himself, choosing to join the survey corps and learned to choose to side with Levi squad during the female titan arc. It was only Historia that learned to choose. Eren learned to live, seeing as he was literally begging to be killed until Historia knocked some sense into him, which he refers to as saving his life.
He says it was his plan to Armin in 139
You're logic only makes sense if he wasn't planning to be stopped, which he says he was in 139
... exactly?
not really. In Uprising Eren says he should die because he has no right to live. Historia rejecting that makes clear to both of them that you live because you choose to, not because you can justify it, which is thematically called back to later when Eren chooses to move foreward despite knowing the cost of his own death. The whole message really had nothing to do with life or death, it was just the circumstance that enabled their learining of choice in that arc.
I didnt read the way Isayama used plan as Eren deliberately planning to be stopped and making his friends ambassadors. We know he only saw the outcomes in the future and made his own path to get there, making himself morally justify concessions along the way which kinda lead to this giant self coping session. So when eren says for example he pushed his friends away so they would be seen as heroes, that doesn’t really imply his goal was to lose. It means that when he already knew he would lose, he pathed the outcome so his friends would inherit political leverage and Paradis would gain time. I think you're over simplifying this a bit.
Eren word for word says it was his plan in 139, and says it was his reasoning for distancing himself in his friends meaning he had been planning since he left them in Marley.
Eren saying it was part of his plan doesn’t mean that being stopped was the objective, it means that it was accounted for once the future was already known. From Marley onward, Eren already knew the endpoint meaning his friends stopping him was inevitable. That means any "planning" after that point is reactive to his sense of inevitability, not evidence that he wanted to lose. Being stopped was only part of the plan in the sense that it was something he had to work around, not towards. Distancing himself doesn’t show he planned to be stopped, it shows he knew they would stop him and shaped events so their opposition would leave them in a state in accordance with his goals. Being alive alive and free
But the idea of it being out of his control is ridiculous. You're telling me someone with God-like power who knows the future and can mind control nearly all of the alliance, has millions of colossal titans and hundreds of thousands of titan shifters, has no control over the situation?
Ok we've devlolved into "but thats stupid" territory. I'll entertain it for a bit but I'm probably done after this.
Eren has the ability to do things that would change the future, but he does not have the freedom to choose those options, because he already knows he won’t choose them. the story treats knowledge of future events as binding. If Eren were ever going to use that power, he would have seen a future where he does. The fact that he didn’t tells him he won’t choose that option. So the ability exists, but the freedom to select it doesn’t. It's circular on purpose "I do this because I want to and I want to because I will do this". That's what the slave to freedom thing means in the anime. The desires are fixed, his future self is still the cause of past knowledge, and changing the future would require him to become someone who just doesn't exist.
I think you fundamentally wanted a Lelouch type character and made your own headcannon of who Eren was in the process.
But then you're saying Eren is just choosing to do things just cause, like he had no reason to other than to do what he sees in the future. But why would that be the future in the first place? You're saying Erens motivations don't matter at all becuase he had to do everything becuase its predetermined.
because its the future he willed into existence. It's the future created through what he will choose based on his own values and desires. the future exists because that’s what he will choose when confronted with those circumstances.
... I thought I said pretty clearly that Eren's motivations are what directly result in the future. Like im not sure how much more clear I can be man.
if you want to keep being a child by not reading what im saying and petty downvoting every one of my comments because you've already died on the "this ending makes no sense" hill, then i will not engage further
Having that weird “war never changes” and humans always fight theme in the final few pages. Like I get it, it’s a fine point especially with the Eldian and Marlayan history. But it just feels the show wasn’t focused on this until the very very end.
Eren felt like fighting against his own destiny and finding a new future.
His motivations. They're just all over the place and messy, and all of the possible in-universe motivations are either incoherent shit or character assassination. It's extremely obvious that Isayama pictured the cinematic ending he wanted: "alliance teaming up and beating Eren in an epic fight, where Mikasa kills him in a poetic tragic way" and THEN he tried to reverse engineer the explanation after that. Not the other way around, which was typical for AOT. And the fact that you can smell his pen trying to achieve this makes it feel cheap and cringe.
First we are made to think he's doing it for Paradis, to achieve ultimate freedom, but then why doesn't he stop the alliance?
If "because he chose to give them freedom" -> then why did he jail them to meet with Zeke? Why did he threaten Historia with erasing her memory? Those are violations of freedom. This explanation is incoherent.
If "actually he always planned to do only 80% and be killed by the alliance so they could be seen as heroes of humanity and live a long life" -> he himself says he was just trying to convince himself that he was doing it for them, but it was a lie. And even if it were true this is just ASS. Anticlimactic, contrived character assassination.
If "not for his friends, he just wanted to flatten the world because he saw humans outside the walls as an obstacle to his freedom." -> then why did he stop at 80%? Plus this is also ASS. "I just wanted to" kind of cop out.
Am I missing more explanations? It's hard to list all because even ending defenders can't agree on one lol.
You’re 100% right. The current “consensus” is basically that Eren just wanted to flatten the world because he’s a generic misanthrope villain. And apparently this is justified because the author wanted a Breaking Bad–style "reveal", turning Eren into a 1:1 Walter White parallel.
Which is dogshit writing because Eren was never written like Walt lol
thats just not the consensus. Eren had very clear motivations that could not all perfectly coexist in the future he willed into existence and he had to justify things personally in retrospect. The entire point is that Eren is literally coping in the entire last chapter, and escpecially so in terms of how much he contradicts himself between inevitability and responsibility. I have no idea where you saw that people think Eren is just a madman villain
Oh so you're one of those who brushes off Eren's confession in 131 and 139 as "nah he was just shouting nonsense! He didn't actually do it for a scenery of a flattened world!"
You're the one coping.
You really thought that was a gotcha? Being horrified by the consequences of your actions doesn’t mean they aren’t something you ultimately wanted, given what Eren said he valued. Wanting it doesn’t mean he had the freedom to choose a different future given that what he valued and his desires wouldnt let him walk away from that path. The whole point was that his own desires willed a future that he had to fulfill, which is where the slave to freedom thing comes in
This might turn into a back and forth where i repeat myself over and over, so refer to my many other comments under this post and see if I addressed what you're gonna say first
Also blocking me when I know you're reading this anyway is funny
Okay that's not what I'm arguing about. The problem is that Eren "wanting" the Rumbling in the sense that he "wanted" an "empty, flattened world" is:
That's the whole argument. I don't care about the whole "slave to his own desire" thing. I mean it's good writing and all but I thought the "desire" was freedom from oppression for himself and his people, not some weird misanthropic, empty earth fetish.
Also I never blocked you wtf are you talking about?
Disagree and disagree. His true desire was always freedom from constraint. This didnt change but the scope of it did as he learned more about the world. 131 reframes his desire for freedom as something that turned catastrophic when pushed to its absolute extreme and the entire world becomes the metaphorical wall. It's still him removing everything he sees as a constraint. You're free to not like that, but its disingenuous reading to call it a mischaracterization. I don't even think its that far fetched to think with the power to do so, he would have a very narrow view of "theyre something i need to remove for freedom", I mean the dude killed someone as a child. He was very early on willing to go there.
This argument sounds very familiar hmm.
Like I said before, the entire world became a metaphorical wall because it was largely filled with violent racists who wanted to genocide him and his people, not because their mere existence “ruined” some misanthrope’s idea of a perfect world.
Eren’s desire for freedom was always directed at an active/imminent, physical threat, not a passive abstraction like “humanity as a concept” or the idea that humans existing somehow spoil the world he imagined.
This is a mischaracterization because Eren never showed disdain or disgust toward humanity as a concept. His conflict was with enemies who were trying to destroy him and his people, not with human existence itself.
He didn't start the rumbling because he wanted to die or be on his Lelouch shit. It's literally just where the results of his desires naturally ended. He saw his death as necessary. There's no master plan here, everything he said to justify it came after it was impossible for anything else to happen. Eren wanted to wipe out the entire world, keep his friends alive, keep himself "free", and keep his friends free to act, and these four things couldn't perfectly coexist in the specific timeline he willed into existence.
The Zeke thing actually fits into this. Eren chooses to imprison the alliance under pressure because he is trying to save the continuity of a future he already knows he will walk into, where the rumbling causes enough lasting damage to the world before he is stopped, not because "oh i gotta make sure I hit 80%" or because he is tactically reacting to his friends gaining too much ground. In fact we have no reason to even assume exactly 80% of the world died because it really doesnt matter. Its a post stat that isnt planned. I think Isayama including a number at all was kinda pointless but I digress. His future memories are only fragments of outcomes and intuition that comes from filling in the gaps to get to the end points he knows will happen like the rumbling starting, the outside world being irreversibly fucked up, his friends alive, and himself ultimately dead, and when that trajectory is threatened too early, the imprisonment becomes his way of preventing something from happening that shouldn't. He uses coercion only to buy time, delay interference, and keep the path moving forward long enough to “matter", because being stopped before the world is fundamentally broken would leave him as a mass murderer without even his own warped justification of necessity, messing up both the future he has already accepted and the internal narrative that allows him to keep moving. But at the same time, he draws his own personal line between force that enables continuation and force that erases opposition permanently, which is why he imprisons his friends but refuses to kill them preemptively, take away their titan powers, erase their memories, or lock them outside causality, since crossing that line would turn him into someone who decides the entire future alone and annihilate the freedom he is obsessed with. You can also probably say this about how Hange went out. Obviously Eren didnt want Hange to die but because she wasn't someone who he considered as part of the group he wanted to protect under any circumstance, he probably saw Hange's death as necessary. All of his motivations have slight inconsistencies which I thought was actually pretty clever set up for the end when he basically admits to himself "yea I'm the freedom guy but i was never actually free"
I find it funny how you think there has to be one correct interpretation of the ending. The reality is that it was made to be the product of a fundamentally and intentionally incoherent character, which by default leaves some of the ending hard to rationalize. I mean the dude is a thematic contradiction in almost every way, it's hard to not think some of his motivation would be interpreted differently by different people. And you could probably spin that into "so he's intentionally poorly written" and I guess you could, I'm not the enjoyment police. Every conclusion you come to you could probably find a contrivance, but you can with literally any work of fiction. Escpecially in manga. I can think of much more contrived and stupid and damaging endings (cough cough MHA)
Yeah I can accept this. I just think it's ass and bad writing. It doesn't resonate with anyone and it's not an inevitable natural continuation of the emotional and cognitive beats the series was great for. It feels like an after the fact justification, probably because it is. You get exposed to Isayama pointing at the screen telling you "see? The point is that the character is... incoherent and contradictory! Isn't that so brave and deep and awesome?" And you go "uhh yeah great!" But it doesn't just "click" like the revelations in season 3, or the ending of Steins;Gate. It's not a realization you'd cry to.
It's like the difference between the awe you feel contemplating art like the Mona Lisa vs the banana taped to a wall. For the latter you need a hipster to explain why it's so philosophical and intricate and revolutionary and you go "ohh I see. I get it. That's cool!" But not the "oh shit" kind of click that hits you hard, which AOT was known for.
Ultimately it's not that "incoherent and open to interpretation" is a bad thing per se. Maybe another work can pull off the banana taped to wall. But every work makes a contract with the viewer, just like you love when the characters smile at the camera and dance in Shrek but you wouldn't expect that from game of thrones. AOT built itself upon the contract of tight causal logic, revelations that just snap into place and hard hits that come directly from those. Not any "meta" provocative avantgarde thing. So when the logic reeks of after the fact philosophy switching as justification for the desired epic battle, it's just bad writing.
I mean I can't tell you how to feel about it. I would argue strongly that its an exact continuation of the story's themes and beats but I would be here all day and idc enough to convince someone who has already died on the "ass" hill. The only thing I can slightly agree with is that AoT did make a meta switch towards the end that feels a bit disjointed. Not a big deal for me personally but themes were definitely prioritized instead of explaining the minutia
The way the rumbling stopped makes no sense at all. Why would Zeke dying change anything if Eren already had full control of Ymirs powers in Paths? Did seeing Zeke and Armin play in the sand like children convince her to stop genociding
I can never understand the mechanics of Eren influencing the past no matter how much I read explanations. It seems needlessly convoluted and the story could have been wrapped up more cleanly if that detail was just never included, instead it brings Erens entire character development and core motivations into question.
Other gaping hole is the ecological devastation that a 80% rumbling would entail. The planet would be fucked outside the island, but its implied the other countries bounce back and destroy Paradis within a few generations.
The ecology would bounce back pretty quickly. Maybe not with as much diversity but life finds a way. Except Liberio where the titans were bunched up though, that’d stay a wasteland for much longer.
Killing his mom. Watching her die was the very first thing that established depth into his character, and it was simply snatched away. It makes me question everything he's ever done and said and ruined him as a character for me.
It's because Isayama tried to forcefully convey this message "Even tho Eren has the powers of a god he's still powerless. He's still a slave" but he did it in the dumbest way imaginable lol
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Eren's mom actually was not crushed under the house to the point she couldn't flee. She simply needed help getting out from the mess. If you rewatch the scene where she gets eaten, her legs are moving and fine. So, no, she wasn't dead anyway.
As others have mentioned, his motivations have never been so unclear in such a manner. They were so consistent throughout the earlier seasons, even up to the raid on Liberio, but towards the end its just all over the place. Imo the greatest flaw was Eren's weird fucking kink to seeing the world flattened that he spoke of? It makes absolutely no sense and it demolishes his whole character arc.
THANK YOU. It’s good to see people who agree with me. Eren killing hundreds of millions of people for an empty-earth fetish strips his character of all tragedy and nuance.
And this “motivation” is only revealed in the last 9 chapters of the fucking manga.
I think Isayama wanted to force a 1:1 parallel between Eren, Reiner, and Walter White. So Eren doing the Rumbling for the freedom of himself and his people wasn’t “personal enough” for him. He had to come up with an exclusively selfish motivation, like Reiner wanting to be a hero. And Walt wanting to feel powerful.
This is only one of the camps that the ending defenders fall into.
These are the different pro-ending interpretations we got:
Eren was dumb
Eren was just doing it for his friends
Eren was doing it for himself cause of "muh nature" but then also "muh determinism."
(The whole determinism problem is that people conflate it with fate, but that's a whole other problem)
I only bring this up because I feel like these factors into the different things people say with regard to the ending.
If you ever argue with someone about the ending, since they can't seem to agree on one of the endings I provided, you have to find out which camp of autism they fall into and go from there
As for me, the biggest problem is the motivation change, like you said, followed by the fact that he apparently didn't understand Ymir and, by extension, freed her, but for pretend, I guess? Next up would be the change in how the founding titan powers work (it was never some limitless power that was 4D until the end), and then the switch up to actually being in love with Mikasa.
I probably forgot some problems, but those were the ones that came to mind
Oh yea, killing his mom was a real shit change too.
lmfao so true.
What I see from twitter morons is mostly this: Eren did it because he thought the outside world was empty of humans. And when he found out that it wasn’t, he was disappointed, because he's like the generic misanthrope villain "muh humanity always comes with muh conflict" or some bullshit variation of that.
So humans existing ruined his "dream". Because he has disdain for humanity's itself. Not because they were violent racists ready to genocide him and his people.
I agree. Eren's motivations are a mess, and the writing is cowardly. The idea that Eren did what he did because he wanted a blank canvas, or because he was dumb, or to let just his friends have long lives without being sterilised, is nonsensical and doesn't add up to what Eren's character was throughout the entire series.
The worst part of the ending was erens character for me. All his dialogue post timeskip, flushed down the drain. I dont think I wouldve hated it as much if he never cried over fuckin mikasa. Like this dude killed his own mother, father, his friends and millions of people but the one he cries like a bitch for is mikasa?
She was practically throwing herself at him for years and only in his final moments, he pulls a 180.
Very dissappointing end to a potential fantastic character.
The only explanation is that Isayama had to deliberately try and ruin eren's character for him to end up so pathetic.
Normally, a protagonist would develop as the story evolves but eren completely regressed and the story was reduced to a contrived romance.
Yeah, this just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth with AOT. I wanted to like the ending so badly but the fact that according to the logic of people who defend the ending and the author himself, Eren has not develop as a character, everything since his mom died was pre-determined and not of his own free will.
I wish I could share the same fondness they have towards the ending. I just cant unsee eren as a waste character
Mikasa, this outfit cost me five thousand dollars.
That there is no clear motive ask 100 people his motive and you'll get 100 different answers.
The fact that we do not get any POV from Eren until 130-131 is a Huge problem for the series because for such a character shift you need to justify those characters actions and there's nothing to do that. I know he wanted to do a Himenole thing with it, but Himenole goes hard into justifying the murderer and his desire to murder.
Also you can compare and contrast other justified heel turns in Madoka Magica Homura gets a whole movie to justify her heel turn despite it being clearly foreshadowed prior or in the movie Falling Down at first you can understand William's crash out but he does start to slowly cross a line and you realize he's the bad guy.
He never had any feelings for Mikasa and trying to convince us that he did all of a sudden is so forced. Oh and don’t get me started on him killing his mom, him wanting to try and make everyone stop him (for what reason!?!)
Character and story theme assasination
Elaborate if you want
I think he already figured out how the world works, a lot of nations clearly has decided on what they wanted to do with Eldians, Eren sincerely didn’t want to become the person to commit mass genocide BUT he also didn’t want Eldians to get erased from society. He was clearly depressed but did his intentions until he completed what he needed to do.
But here's the thing, that's not what the ending says he did the Rumbling for.
The ending says he did the rumbling "for himself". He just wanted to make the world a "blank slate". That's it.
None
You lack media literacy
Saying that while missing the whole point of Attack On Titan and its protagonist
You're the one who disregards 130+ chapters and only cares about the last ones lol
Eren always had a violent and self-entitled nature, the manga just never explicitly talked down to the audience to show it
"Self entitled" lol Eren1, Eren2, Eren3
Should I continue and make you look even more ridiculous?
Those were all pre-timeskip, before he stopped trying to pretend he was selfless, he only said those things because he was in situations where he had no other choice but to sacrifice himself
During the timeskip, he becomes completely selfish
"self-entitlement". you rationalize op's examples because its from the pre-tiemskip as a means to dismiss what he's saying.
But lets look at erens character post-timeskip, but before the ending chapter. You mean to tell me that it is "self-entitled" to be free from racial oppression? To say he is self-entitled in that context is unironically the craziest thing I've ever heard in the history of ever.
"I don't want my people wiped out based on race. How entitled of me."
Eren wanted freedom for HIMSELF and himself alone, that’s the whole point of the show, he was literally a slave to the idea
No it wasnt.
"whole idea of the show"
This concept you speak of is not present in seasons 1-3 so drop that bs.
Show me elements of the story that back up your interpretation. Here's the catch: you can't use chapter 139
Have you done an IQ test before? Is he pretending in his own internal monologue? He didn't need to sacrifice himself for historia. That's literally what happened in the end. But he still offered himself. What is wrong with you?
I swear these people damn near unironically see Marley as the victims based on how they're characterizing Eren, and it's insane
There’s thing called “self-denial”, and Eren was literally TIED UP IN CHAINS AGAINST HIS OWN WILL and Rod and Historia have literally told him they’re gonna eat him, it’s not like he could have told them to unchain him
Do you have anything to prove that he was in self denial? I thought not.
Seriously are you trolling right now? Did you even watch the show? Kenny literally cut his forehead so he'd be able to transform and save himself if he wanted to and he didn't. Historia literally asks him why he doesn't transform. God what is wrong with you?
he wasn’t in chains on the first two, you’re making excuses
The fact that he wasn't stopped sooner.
You mean the fact he didn't allow himself to be stopped sooner