Attack on Titan Final Season THE FINAL CHAPTERS

Episode 2

“You could call what's happening right now the tragedy of life's being ruled by fear.”

We've come to the true and final ending of Attack on Titan, after ten years and nearly a hundred episodes. You'll forgive me for indulging in a little reflection before getting into the thick of things, but this has been as daunting an assignment as I've ever approached during my time as a professional critic, so I felt that a setting of the stage was warranted. I mean, how in the hell do you even write about the ending of Attack on Titan, with the world in the state that it is right now? The word “genocide” is no longer something that so many of us with the luxury of safety and distance can consign to the history books—as if it ever were a dead and buried thing to begin with, and not a very living horror that some of us around the world just agreed never to acknowledge outside of the realm of history books and fictional thought experiments.

Every day, in November of 2023, we are confronted with the suffering of thousands of people who are fighting and dying for the right to exist. War is being fought on multiple fronts, all over the world, and the cost of all the lives that have already been lost is as incalculable as ever. How does this show, which has so deliberately (and sometimes very clumsily) borrowed from the histories of bloodshed and terror of real people, find its ending? How can it bring its long and painful story to a close in a way that doesn't feel, at best, callous and misguided, if not genuinely harmful in its ignorance at worst? For years, manga readers have gone to great lengths to warn me of Attack on Titan's imminent failures, and of the ending that was so terrible and tone-deaf that it was enough to ruin the entire series in retrospect. Going into this finale, I was genuinely afraid that the series wouldn't just fail in a manner that disappointed me as a fan, but that it would become so toxic and radioactive in the context of the times that everything about it would crumble into salted earth.

What I immediately remembered upon beginning the first few minutes of this truly epic finale, though, is that Attack on Titan has always been more humane, more compassionate, and more expertly written than its detractors have given it credit for. Amid all of the incredible spectacle that MAPPA managed to wring from Hajime Isayama's manga, in between all of the heartbreak and chaos and thrilling drama that comes from watching all of these characters that we've come to love (and also despise) bring this terrible conflict to its Earth-shattering climax, there is love. Painful, ugly, terrible, impossible, and undeniable love. It is this love for his fallen brothers and sisters in arms that Levi grasps as he slices Zeke's throat in two. It is this love for playing catch with a sad and broken man that Zeke allows himself to remember for a moment before offering his throat to his executor. It was this love for her captor and her king that grew in the heart of a young girl named Ymir; there is no rational way to explain its existence, and it was so tortuous to the Founding Titan that it twisted the fabric of time and space to bring 2,000 years of unending war upon the world.

The final chapters of Attack on Titan are often thrilling, often horrifying, and often so covered in that thick muck of violence and cynicism that you almost begin to think that there is no way that this could end without everyone losing everything. To a certain extent, that is true. As Eren eventually explains to Armin, when the two are allowed a brief and bittersweet reunion in the Paths before Mikasa strikes her fateful killing blow, 80% of humanity will be gone by the time The Rumbling is through. The Eldians on Paradis may technically be safe from a completely destructive reprisal, with its enemies as broken and scattered as they are, but even Eren still has sense enough to know that his actions haven't saved anyone from anything. He led his friends to their deaths. He has sinned so great that nobody could—or should—ever forgive him. After spending nearly an hour on the white-knuckle terror of the struggle to simply minimize the death toll of Eren Jaeger's apocalypse, we are told by the boy himself that there was never any changing it, and even if there was a different path to take, this is what he wanted, all along. To shake his fists and scream an empty world into existence.

Here's a secret I have avoided mentioning in these reviews, up until now: Despite doing everything in my power to come into each episode blind as an anime-only viewer, this final conversation between Eren and Armin was the one thing I had spoiled for me a long time ago. I was fully aware of the “You became a mass murderer for our sake!” line that so many folks waved around as proof of Attack on Titan's folly, and of the story's insistence that we sympathize with and potentially even justify Eren's role as the villain of the story. Given the series' 10-year-long track record of loudly and emphatically not being fascist apologia, though, I held on to my reservations and waited until today to make my final judgement about how Attack on Titan handled the fate of its main protagonist and the themes of its story. Would it truly try to convince me that Eren was secretly a hero hiding in a demon's clothing all along, a la Code Geass' Lelouch? Would I have to sit down and write that Attack on Titan's ultimate message wound up being, “Sometimes genocide is okay, so long as you do it for the right reasons”?

Of course not. I wouldn't have found that to be true even if this finale hadn't significantly revised and expanded this final sequence to make it as explicit as possible that Eren is, in fact, a sad and pathetic child whose war-addled brain and petulant heart simply could not handle the power he'd been given. It's obvious what Armin means, here, whether he says that silly line about mass murder or merely thanks Eren for showing him the world beyond the walls of their home, for good or for ill. Armin is merely recognizing that Eren is a human and that humans are capable of doing unforgivably terrible things when they think they are using love to rationalize their mistakes - love of friends, love of country, love of life itself. It doesn't matter because what inevitably happens is that fear twists that love into its crudest and most brutish form, a blunt instrument with which one will hammer down the enemies that might take what they love away from them. Armin loves Eren too, after all. That's what bade him show Eren that book of the wonders they might find beyond the sea.

Ultimately, I believe that there has been a mistaken assumption that Attack on Titan was trying to use its muddy allegories and fantasy-horror spectacle to make some grand statement on war, and the morality thereof. Now, more than ever, I do not think that was ever really the case. War is an inextricable part of the story that Attack on Titan is telling, of course, but I suspect that some viewers have inadvertently placed the consequence ahead of the cause. As the tragically fatalistic end credits of this finale make clear, Attack on Titan isn't so much about war as it is resigned to the destruction that people will never fail to inflict on each other, for whatever reasons they can conjure up. Even after our heroes save the surviving vestiges of humanity and earn themselves a chance at lives beyond the battlefield, the world doesn't learn anything in the long run. Old suspicions fester and spread. Old borders and barriers get reinforced and dug in deeper. Mankind even finds ways to create weapons of war that surpass the destruction that even the Titans were capable of. Mikasa and her companions may have been given some more years on Earth than they ever thought possible, but their homeland, and all memory of everything they fought and died for, still ends up getting buried in ruin.

No, I don't think Attack on Titan ever had any interest in war for its own sake. War is just the inevitable conclusion when entire societies allow their lives, and their love, to be ruled by fear. We will fight and die for the people we care for, even the systems that perpetuate our fighting go beyond any rational understanding. We will hate and fear people that we've never met, so long as we are told that we're doing so out of love for what we hold dear. We will tell ourselves that love has bound us to our fates, and we will move unceasingly forward no matter how terrible the torment that flows in our wake.

In this sense, you could say that the core of Attack on Titan's story grew from its grasping on to a single question and turning it over repeatedly, endlessly inspecting it for whatever answers might be there to find. This story asks, “How is it that we can take the most beautiful thing about us and let it become the thing that ruins us?” In the end, I don't know if Attack on Titan managed to find any singular truth that would put that question to rest, but I have found another, more prescient question that was borne in its absence. In its final hours, Attack on Titan asks, “How can we live with ourselves, and with each other, despite the harm that we do in the name of fear and love?” If there is an answer to be found, we might find it in the melancholy smile that Mikasa wears when she ends Eren's life for good, or in the silent peace that Ymir is granted when she sees this girl kill the thing she loved the most in the world. The lesson that Attack on Titan wants us to learn from Eren's story has nothing to do with what can be gained when you're given all the power you've ever dreamt of, or whether there is any good that can come from wielding it against your supposed enemies. It is, instead, trying to get us to see whether we can grab hold of even a few small scraps of peace and comfort while making our way through this frightening world if only we are allowed to live lives that are not ruled by fear.

With the world being what it is, I don't see how Attack on Titan could have ended any differently.

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Attack on Titan Final Season THE FINAL CHAPTERS is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Hulu.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.