Attack on Titan The Final Season Part 2

Episode 80

”Hear me, Subjects of Ymir. My name is Eren Yeager.”

It happened like this: 2,000 years ago, in a tiny village ruled by a cruel and ambitious king, a young girl was accused of losing two pigs. Her tongue was cut out, and her family had been burned to ashes, so whether or not the girl was responsible for the lost pigs is beside the point. The king declared that a culprit must be punished, lest everyone in the village lose an eye instead, and the villagers cast their fingers down and singled out the girl. Her punishment was swift. She was set upon by dogs and soldiers and hunted like an animal, only finding refuge in the hollow of an ancient tree. There, the girl stumbled and fell into a hidden lake, too exhausted to swim back to safety. Just as the last gasps of air were choked from her lungs, though, the girl came into contact with a creature. What exactly that creature was is just as irrelevant as whether or not the girl was guilty of the crime that damned her to begin with. What matters is the way the villagers so easily cast their spiteful fingers down on the girl; the scramble through the forest; the barking of the dogs; the awkward stumble into the dark of the hollow.

What matters is the fall, and everything that happens after.

Ymir's transformation into the Founding Titan was likely not what started the war with Marley. King Fritz was clearly aiming to make a great nation out of his tribe, one way or the other, and “From You, 2,000 Years Ago” doesn't really sweat the small details. Maybe the Eldians and the Marleyans have been fighting since before history began getting recorded. Maybe their encounter with Ymir's twisted and unfathomably powerful Founding Titan was one of their first battles with the Eldian Kingdom. Either way, Ymir's awesome new power is nothing but a boon for King Fritz, who wastes no time in turning his slave into a warrior-god for all of his people, and later, a bride who can bear him the children who will rule those people when he is gone. The girl couldn't have been much older than ten when her flesh and bones were first twisted by that primordial being into something altogether too strange and powerful for any human to fathom; I can't imagine many years passed after that before the king demanded that Ymir receive “the gift of [his] seed.”

There is so much that we learn in “From You, 2,000 Years Ago,” and so much to unpack, but what Attack on Titan will never let us forget is how, at the end of the day, it is the children who suffer the most in this story. One simple act of callous disregard was all it took for Fritz to literally throw this abandoned child to the woods, and she could not find any peace or freedom even after being granted the most power that any human in the world had ever had cause to wield. Throughout her short and bitter life, Ymir was used as a tool, and then as a king's concubine, and eventually as his sacrificial lamb. Even in death, Ymir was spared not one shred of dignity. Her flesh was ripped apart and fed to her daughters, a brutish ritual of passing down the power of the Titans that would become only somewhat less horrifying over the next two millennia.

Worse yet, her soul was left confined to The Coordinate, where a faded echo of her childlike self was tasked with sculpting the twisted forms of her own progeny out of water and sand. Back and forth with her pail Ymir trudged, as the generations of children that came after her fought and died for the pride of a nation that once happily tried to cut her down like one of those pigs who ran off, way back when. I wonder how often Ymir's thoughts drifted back to those pigs. Did she wonder what became of them? Did they live free, in the end?

What happened to the pigs isn't important. It never was. Children like Ymir have been made to suffer for the pride of their kings and their countries for thousands of years. Ymir has just suffered more than most, is all. It's a story that Eren is all too familiar with, and so in spite of everything he has done, I feel like it's hard not to understand him when he takes Ymir in his arms and becomes perhaps the first person in 2,000 years to acknowledge the wrongs that have been done to her, to acknowledge her humanity. He knows all too well what it is like to be stuck like a cracked gear in a self-devouring machine. I think it is especially important to note that his promise to Ymir is to end the cycle of conquest and destruction that the Eldians themselves started. It's impossible to know which side's propaganda has clouded the truth of history more over the generations, but the point that Eren has come to makes this constant game of passing the blame utterly meaningless. Eren is not concerned with who started this eternal war. He simply intends to finish it.

I've seen some folks poke a bit of fun at how AoT's art style tends to render its characters' facial expressions (especially when it comes to anger), but I can't say that I was laughing when Ymir's face was shown in full detail for the first time in the series. Her teeth clenched, her eyes sunken in but still soaked with tears—it's the look of a child who cannot even begin to express the depths of her anger and resentment. What can you do when eons of suffering and betrayal have left your mind, your body, and your soul completely incapable of standing up to the seemingly endless reservoirs of cruelty that the world has in store for us?

Eren has an idea.

When he and his friends first came to the sea, Eren asked if they might at last be free if all of their enemies across the ocean were defeated. Now, having seen what he's seen, having done what he's done, Eren has apparently concluded that the only way to truly protect his home and the people that he loves, the only way to be sure, is to leave no stone unturned. With the Titans of the Walls unleashed upon the world, Eren has twisted his own body and his own soul into the perfect avatar of vengeance for a hundred generations' worth of corpses. He is going to kill every last living soul on the planet. A temper tantrum for the ages. One final apocalyptic scream from a boy who is tired of being told to simply accept the world for what it is.

The introduction of the eldritch worm-thing that gave birth to Ymir's Titan form has helped ameliorate some (but not all) of Attack on Titan's questionable forays into racial allegory, and the tragedy of the Founding Titan is another stark reminder that Attack on Titan has never been pro war. I think, much like Eren himself, this story is simply trying to vent all of its anger and confusion over existing in a world where all of this suffering and conflict and exploitation of the weak feels so baked into the fundamental blueprint of human existence. Is it Eren's fault that he was born into the world with a gun-barrel pointed at his head? Is he to blame for taking whatever action he must to keep that gun from going off?

In the case of planet-consuming genocide, the answer is very obviously “Yes.” Eren's actions are no longer sane, or rational, or humane. They are human, though, so as unjustifiable as Eren's actions are, they are coming from a place that makes a certain awful kind of sense, at least from a certain broken perspective. After all, how many kids, at some point in their lives, wished they could just get rid of all the other people that make them feel like they're losing their minds? And we've seen for ourselves that Eren's world had gone mad long, long before he was ever born. Two lost pigs and one dead girl were all that it took to set the future on its path to ruin. Eren is simply the logical conclusion of that long-ago king's cruel ambitions, a monstrous blade that has been finely honed over two thousand years of bloody work. He's going to finally do what the adults never could, and end their war for good.

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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.

Attack on Titan The Final Season Part 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.