A Sushi Roll

You know… I was trying to buy the two last volumes 28 and 29… I didn’t even care enough to buy them when they were released. Looking at older volumes I couldn’t help but to think how sorry I am.

It’s this feeling of wasted time and energy. I hope this wasn’t the last feeling I have for this story. I even feel that SnK isn’t the same story anymore.

Some would say “That’s because this character moved on and blah blah”…

Those who know me well know also, that I don’t care about romance enough to think that SnK lost its spirit in the last two chapters just because of that.

What bothers me is to feel that most of the best quotes… from Krüger and Uri were clowned without mercy. We were supposed to think that this would change something.

Nothing changed at all.

Let’s take this: Let’s say they let Eren exterminate the rest of the world. This would have prevented the extermination of Paradies 50 years later. Faceless people for faceless people. I don’t really see the difference. I can’t see how things are different… Just that titans aren’t there anymore but that could have changed with the power of the titan… What was the point of this?

To know that reality is shit, I rather read the news. SnK was something because of its characters… that Isayama treated them since the beginning as disposable tools for a message… To me this made this ending feel so… less touching and personal.

Kill a character. Do it. But show me the purpose on killing every single individuality on this story for good.

The transition between individuals to the collective lost its meaning as it wasn’t properly displayed… In those last pages, the meaning of hope was trampled under the message that you can’t escape the flow of the eternal return of events.

I could have accepted this message. I could have done it if just the scale were properly balanced. Let’s take again the nietzschean eternal return: It’s expected that at the end of your life a demon would tell you your punishment is to relive your life as it was, over and over again for the eternity. You would say yes as it’s the most beautiful offer he could do because you lived as you wanted and learnt to love everything. It was all as you pleased. It’s difficult but it’s supposed to show the way we accept and end up loving fate.

I get Isayama wanted to point out that life is made of both: cruel and beautiful. That some failures or cruelty are needed in order to make the beauty possible…

Where did he failed at? In my personal opinion… he failed at the balance. I didn’t experience where the beauty was. There wasn’t any recapitulation about it… just the silence of “You are supposed to think this paid off”. I know what I’m supposed to value. I just don’t see how things have value inside this fictional world. What did Eren think about his ending? What did he think about Mikasa’s decision? What did Mikasa think about this all after some years?…

There’s this incoherent display of the ending: I’m supposed to feel that Mikasa’s decision led this child to exist and go towards the tree without knowing why. I’m supposed to appreciate the importance of every single moment and the whole point of existing when at the same time I get 4, 5 random panels that point out the collective and vanish the sence of intimity and individuality… a faceless child, a faceless Mikasa, a faceless… Jean? (who also accepted to be a repleacement…at the same time I’m supposed to feel that this is not the case and Mikasa loved him when she never specially cared about him.. reducing everything to a “we are together because he died. Otherwise…” )… But again about the resource of “faceless” characters… I feel like I’m rereading the story of Ymir. They were all puppets of the story, so our characters became puppets of the story too, as well as the child of the last pages.

I’m supposed to feel the importance of having existed is way stronger than time and the big force of time that tramples individuality in its unbearable flow.

That’s what I can’t really fit… I thought that Ymir and those people were puppets of the story in a world of hatred. But turning our characters into the same and making them live in a world where hatred wins is… pointless.

I just can’t really get this cadavre-exquis-ending.

Somethimes I have this very personal feeling that the author hated us all. Consciously or not, he hated everything: the story, the characters, the readers and the industry. He clowned the whole story.

Yeah…“It wasn’t pointless as they fought to exist.”

Yes. But under which circumstances? Again this about the balance… Where are the highlights. Where is this reason that justifies bearing the suffering? Since he chose not to develop that, since there wasn’t further development about that with Mikasa and Eren… I just missed the point. I needed a proper encounter a better farewell with “SnK spirit”.

This was about Mikasa reverting Ymir’s choice, wasting a requited love and giving birth to more children… to a child that would do I don’t really know what. Just life multiplying… the opposite of Armin’s message.

All in all… this story turned out to be something I want to move on from… I can’t even find that beauty that justifies the suffering I went through. That’s what happen when there isn’t balance… when the author takes more than he/she gives.

The message about diplomatics: Forget it. It doesn’t work at all. Realistic? Yes. But do we need our young people to think everything is pointless? No.

Hi!

This is a bit of a weird situation for me XD mostly because I've never participated but at this point hopefully it's okay :p Mikasa says おやすみなさい …ユミル oyasuminasai ...Ymir. It is technically "goodnight", but more literally "have a (good) rest", so it is used in the situation when someone is going to bed, or leaving at the end of the night when it is reasonable to wish that they have a good sleep when they get home ;) So this phrase in this context has for me the meaning that Mikasa is wishing Ymir a well-deserved rest.

Hope that helps! :)

Commissioned translation, DO NOT REPOST in full, always include credits and a link to this post if you use or share any parts of it.

Question: Congratulations on completing Shingeki no Kyojin’s serialization! How do you feel now that you have finished writing the final chapter?

Isayama: There’s still some work left to do when it comes to putting together the final manga volume*, so I don’t actually know how a “life without deadlines" feels like yet (laughs), but by publishing the final chapter, I feel like I can finally breathe again. However, there are still several things that need to be done.

(*Translator’s note: usually, putting together a volume includes: fixing drawing mistakes, sometimes even redrawing certain scenes if the author wasn’t satisfied with how they looked/their composition, fixing text (both wording or simply changing the Japanese characters used), drawing omake/extra pages, like the High School Caste fake previews, which usually take up 2 pages, and so on. So, of the 8 extra pages he mentions below, probably only 6 at max will be used to add new original story content.)

Q: What?! What else is there to be done?

Hi!

I'm just past my initial reading, so...

Honestly I am in a fair bit of a bubble where this is my only social media plus whatever I happen to decide to look up and a large part of my fandom experience involves what I like to call "ranting at my captive audience" XD My spoiler holiday is largely a full-on offline experience which means I also do, fortunately or unfortunately I don't know, miss out on the bulk of the initial reactions. I don't really check out the japanese fandom at all either unless in the search of some answer.

But one thing that's been on my mind a long while that I've never talked about here is the way that war and conflict is portrayed in the western, or personally I feel a bit more specifically, Hollywood media, is 1) the taking of sides and 2) that one side is on the cause of right and 3) that side's actions are justified because of (2). Whereas I think of a few japanese movies, forefront in my mind Princess Mononoke, where they never make a judgement or pronouncement on who is right or wrong but explore the topic and the various groups' motivations (this of course can also be argued as being the mentality of the party of the losing side but that's another topic) and leave it up to the reader to think about it. This kind of portrayal on the other hand, can end up being a very deeply unsatisfying experience for those used to the first formula and come across as weak, unwilling to take a stand or even advocating for the "bad" side, because silence on the topic equals complicity.

This could be one of the reasons for the viewpoints.

War is not clean or that easy to dissect, and even harder if it is a civil war, where your fellow countryman is now also your enemy, and friends turn against each other. Again I feel that countries who have experienced this or people who've studied such have a deeper understanding of the complexities, where even when you win, you still lose.

We are very clearly in a story with the second formula. This is not a winning or a moralising story, it is a story exploring how people fight back or behave when their backs are against the wall (haha sorry). There are rights and wrongs, but no ultimate divine right or wrong for being on the good or bad side, and there is no One Solution to Fix Them All. That in itself I think is going to be problematic for some people.

I have my quibbles but for the main I was satisfied with the broad resolution. Isayama confirmed unequivocally for me that this was a young boy trying to solve the problem in his young boy way that kept to his character, so I was happy with that. Nobody is a god, least of all Eren. I think one of the issues people had was that Armin was thanking Eren for the genocide, in other words that Armin was advocating or approving the genocide, however, I read Armin's statement as that he was thanking Eren that it was for their sakes rather than for that he enacted a genocide, in other words, that: "your heart is in the right place, but your actions are wrong, but I will not let your efforts to try and save us go to waste either". Basically that Armin was promising that out of the wrong he would make something good come out of this.

I'm also pleased that Isayama seems to confirm that Mikasa was a wildcard, as an allusion to the Ackerman powers, not so sure about that Mikasa also appears to have been subject to the mind wipe? Also only slightly aggrieved that he did not confirm it or not for the 2 characters that I have big question marks on this topic about, Hange and Historia. (My last crack theory, spot-on and yet not XD)

Historia... I still want to think about this one. I haven't decided if it's definite throw under the bus or whether there's still something redeemable out of it, I need to reflect on the possible motivations and see if I can make something work. I think there's going to be an interview with Isayama next month, I wonder if anything on this topic will come out of that.

I suppose I have to mention the very satisfying resolution for what's the closest thing to a hero in this story. No mention of the podium place arguments that I can imagine happening, you'd think that isayama spent a whole month contemplating their placings so that he could offend everyone at the same time XDD

These are my initial thoughts anyway, I'm sure there'll be more to come as I reflect some more, and then on other aspects of the overall story.

Why she becomes like that? When I read yesterday "Ymir would be proud of her" yes but she definitely won't be proud how she is doing the things right now.

And now I remember what she uses to make houses for child and now she is good with kill childs and people too

Ymir willingly helped Armin stop Eren, so I have to assume seeing Historia take up his “fight ‘til the other side is exterminated” mantle to thunderous applause is not quite what Ymir had in mind when she followed that girl into the army. 

We’ve known Historia to say “well sadly smushing children is just what you gotta do, some children are potentially dangerous idk what to tell you 🤷🏼‍♀️” before though; it’s a sentiment she and Eren have already bonded over. That cave really did a number on those two. And those were her own siblings, no less. 

Prior to this, I was willing to pin Historia’s admittedly callous approach to killing children who have the perceived potential to cause problems in the future on a sort of useful resignation - what 15 year old can envision a better solution, especially when accepting/defending Grisha’s massacre was the one thing that would comfort the guy who just helped rouse her self-preservation instinct? We’ve even had people within this very fandom, presumably older than 15, say that Grisha did the right thing. It was troubling, and made me dislike Historia personally (while still being enormously pained by her position as potential broodmare afterwards, as well as having a great deal of sympathy-by-association via my girl Ymir), but I have to say I absolutely never saw that progressing to a self-induced teen mother who aided and continued a legacy of fascistic genocidal advocacy.

You could not have convinced me that Historia, weird and harsh-minded but with an unfair burden placed on her nonetheless, would devolve to this. The leap was too far. You could have convinced me that she made an uneasy alliance with Eren, perhaps out of necessity, perhaps bargaining for the remaining 20% of humanity (Eren could easily have kept going for 95%, leaving the rest of the world truly fucked and no fears of retaliation whatsoever) - but I would never have believed in anything as bizarre as this kid just straight-up doing a 180 to being fully devoted to Eren’s mentality of “murdering everyone else is the only way to defend yourself”, to the extent that after the dust settles and the genociding is done she is the actively participating leader of the movement. 

Historia is now a person who sends letters to peace advocates telling them she believes they and their families will have to die from her vantage point (Reiner is an unadulterated psychopath for sniffing that) while taking some of their families ‘under her protection’ (which has hostage implications if I’ve ever seen a political drama, and I’ve seen at least one). They are apparently so nervous of her approach to things that they float the idea of her committing a war crime on a boatload of fucking diplomats. This is, to me, incongruous with what I saw of Historia up until this point. She was certainly willing to make excuses for killing when she couldn’t see any way around it, but this has taken on an entirely new level: ideology. And I’m not necessarily unsatisfied with the notion that she would find an ideology to hang her name on, especially as a figurehead of a nation, but recycling Eren’s old tatakae schtick is not something I’m able to reconcile with her characterisation and development so far.

She had a lot of endearing aspects that weren’t limited to her purposeful packaging as everything-conventionally-attractive. The vulnerability, the trauma, the triumph. That aching need to be loved, to have someone dedicate themselves to you and love you above everything. Almost everyone resonates with some aspect of her tragedy and suffering, because it’s far more universal than watching your mother get eaten alive or stabbed to death by sex traffickers. 

Historia was unloved, wanted love, found love, lost love, overcame her own demons and loved herself...got pregnant in the service of genocide and became a fascist dictator.