Dial V For Vertigo

You can think what you like but I don’t think it works. Where this falls apart is that what happened to Rhaenyra—beginning with being targeted in her own home by Alicent, and being usurped, which leads to the war and her death—was unjustified and driven by misogyny. I’m not interested in a story about how THIS woman, this time, DID deserve her fate, and we did legwork to show you why so you’ll agree. I would find it far more progressive (and more satisfying) to see a story about a woman being mistreated and then killed and the narrative framing it as horrifying, and gendered, rather than her being put down like a bad dog by someone who—in Ryan Condal’s own words!—is now “more suited to the throne”, since Rhaenyra has been “contorted” by power

reiner was not actually fighting to save the world or liberate continental eldians, above all else he wanted to earn personhood, absolution, and embracement for himself by becoming the abstraction of helos, a propaganda tool of the marleyan empire that was always a semblance. this is because he is an internally colonized dehumanized undesirable that is a victim of systemic oppression, racist violence, and child abuse who internalizes oppression and empire, and believes that exceptionalism will grant him respect. this is the reason that he keeps moving forward despite confronting the humanity of his victims and the reality of paradis and his mission, which fractures his psyche. his naive and tragic attempt to assimilate through becoming a tool of imperial violence is what positions him as the ultimate perpetrator and villain in the first half of the story while he ironically sought to become his hero abstraction, placing the very world he supposedly wanted to save on the track towards the rumbling/omnicide.

zeke was not actually fighting to liberate the world and resolve the conflict and achieve world peace, above all else he was driven by generational trauma and child abuse that drove him to nihilism and pessimism. he internalized the belief that the single greatest salvation is never having been born into this world, which is a conclusion that he projects onto his entire race, and even all of humanity. this is why he keeps moving forward with his plan despite knowing that titans are on track to be replaced by weapons anyways (see what war continuing in the epilogue implies about the injustices that we witness during the story and what they were actually rooted in) and how he has to be convinced by armin to help stop the rumbling.

eren was not actually fighting for paradis or his friends’ lives, or even the end of the titan curse, above all else he wanted to achieve his abstraction of absolute freedom = a world beyond the stifling walls that is an empty plain, which is the negation of a world outside of the walls that he finds out to be the same as the world inside of them. it is a radical rejection of the complex realities of human existence as a result of his self-loathing based view humanity and his understanding of injustice as a timeless metaphysical condition. this is why he forecloses any serious account of coalition, compromise, contingency, or transformation, and why he causes sasha and hanji’s deaths, and “getting [his] precious friends wrapped up in this conflict (makes them fight the yeagerists, paradis) without knowing that they would survive or not”, and gives paradis a death sentence down the line.

this doesn’t mean that these other factors were not driving forces to an extent, and they are solely facades to delude themselves and others with towards which they hold zero care for, it is just that they were and always would’ve been dominated and consumed by their true desire.

i think “a man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants” is a defining quote for this series.

erwin atones by choosing to give up on his dream and die for the scouts and for access to the truth, he never sees the basement, and his last words are his question to his teacher father in the classroom as levi decides to not save him instead of armin during serum bowl.

when he remains with nothing but the confrontation with reality, his regrets, and the consequences of his actions, reiner gives up on his selfish desire and wants nothing more than to end his own life. this is not only because of guilt and self-loathing, death is about the escape from serving a system that oppresses him and will never accept him and that he had shed copious amounts of blood to uphold. the main reason he doesn’t blow his own brains out is the responsibility that he feels for the next generation of eldian children that mirror him and are destined to share his fate/the “we must get the children out of this forest, at least” theme, and the obligation he feels to repay his actions by stopping the monster that he created. the irony of his arc is that he comes to embody the hero that he originally sought to become once he does not want to be it, and saves the world when that goal is not a cover for his personal selfish desire.

zeke’s nihilism is penetrated by armin’s existentialist “race towards the tree on the hill” speech, and he realizes that he would not have minded being born again if it meant that he could play catch with ksaver, placing value to human existence while still not abnegating the validity of the malthusian aspects of his sterilization plan in his own eyes, but choosing to sacrifice himself to stop the rumbling despite his newfound appreciation for life that he knows will not redeem him for all the killing that he has done.

eren never stops moving forward, but part of him wants to be stopped and desires to be put down as a result of his deep self-loathing and desire to erase the very monster that he turned into that his whole life was about defeating and killing, which is why he does not take his friends’ freedom to stop him. he mirrors reiner again once he actually starts paying the price for his dream. the thematic lynchpin of the final arc is that these characters and what they embodied within the narrative can always be defeated or overcome, even if the “the forest” and “the walls”, the systems and the powerstructures underpinning all of the things that caused all of this tragedy and conflict to begin with, were not resolved within the story. that final title card and the kid exploring with his dog and finding the tree and entering it juxtaposed with ymir the slave being hunted by dogs and touching the hallucigenia and spawning the curse due to intense fear for her very life suggest that things can get better, and that the hope for that future without war should always be thrived for.