Y’know, I kept thinking that the Marley files were, like, a recent thing that I was still not used to. Sometimes I’d grudgingly acknowledge that I’d been incepted into them, but mostly I still thought I viewed them as a new, alien land.
So that made watching the first few eps of SnK s2 a wild experience yesterday, because that shit seemed so weird. These are the people in focus?? These are their problems??? The gap between their situations then and now is so large, it was actually hard for me to connect with them, because howdy boy do these characters have no notion of anything. They still think titans are the big deal! They don’t even know what Marley is!
It’s a weird day when you feel like Pastor Nick gets your feelings better than your protagonists do. (He doesn’t. But at least now I know what his thousand-yard stare is about, and he seemed as disconnected from the narrative as I was.)
Eren is a baby?? Levi’s biggest problem is his broken ankle. Historia is still Christa. Nobody knows they’re Eldians–never mind that, they don’t even know anything about the first king or the coordinate yet. Like. It’s not even that everyone will have gone through the wringer between then and now, though that’s true too. But it’s also that the story is so fundamentally not what they think it’s about that it doesn’t even feel like it’s the same story.
And all this time I thought the Marley story was the one that didn’t fit. But apparently somewhere along the way I’ve assimilated enough of it that now, looking back, it’s the days before this knowledge that are somewhat baffling. And it’s impossible to look at Reiner, surrounded still by his friends in the 104th, without seeing the guy who will sit in his room with desperation in his eyes and a gun in his mouth. I didn’t even think I liked Reiner that much?? And I’m not sure that I do. And yet he seemed the most relevant and alive one among his peers to me today.
(Well, no, okay, I loved every moment Mikasa was on screen. But Mikasa is a different story.)
The bottom line is, I guess whatever Isayama is doing, it’s working on me, at least. And I hadn’t realized it was working, which is why this encounter with the past was so jarring. I expect it’ll get easier as I watch, but man, did I not see this coming.
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