Would you be the savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned

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Introduction

When Zeke Yeager comes up in conversation, the very first issue raised is that of his morality. As an oppositional force to the leading cast, Zeke often gets portrayed as downright evil. His ideas are radical, his actions are questionable, and (especially in the earlier seasons) his behavior comes off as objectively cruel. None of this makes Zeke any less fascinating to me. In fact, it is precisely why I find Zeke so interesting as a character. Anyone who has watched Attack on Titan knows that he is absolutely, completely, ripping-my-hair-out frustrating. But it is not Zeke’s character that is most frustrating to me: it is the simplistic, reductive way his morality is discussed without an in-depth consideration of his character. I suspect this stems from the fact that many people (rightfully) do not like him one bit, but that should not stop us from diving into his character to understand his moral framework. There is much interesting analysis that stands to be lost when we boil him down to our most juvenile understanding of morality: good guy vs bad guy.

1. Introductory Concepts and Paradigm

I am going to make my most radical statement at the start of this essay, as it provides the necessary framework I will be working from while exploring Zeke’s morality. Good and Evil do not exist. I mean this not with some request that any readers of this essay view Zeke as morally grey. I mean it quite fully. Evil (and oppositionally, Good) is not real. They are simply paradigms that we have created to understand our world. This moral dialectic, even with the addition of greyness, is extremely reductive and limiting. What I will be working from, rather than any concept of Evil, is that of suffering. While all of us can attest to the reality of suffering, none of us has experienced “true” Evil because Evil is an inherently vague and subjective concept. The idiosyncratic nature of understanding what Evil is is why I think there is so much conflict regarding Zeke’s morality. Therefore, in the context of this essay, Zeke’s moral framework will be measured and informed by suffering. Moving forward with this paradigm shift, I will focus on two primary questions regarding Zeke’s morality: How has Zeke experienced suffering, and how does this experience inform his views and actions?

2. Zeke’s Personal Experience of Suffering

If we suspend our personal opinions of Zeke, it is hard to deny that his childhood was anything less than tragic. Suffering is the primary experience we are shown regarding his upbringing. Zeke is growing up as a member of an incredibly oppressed race. He watches as everyone who is a part of his community receives indiscriminate abuse from their oppressors. Their movement is limited, their cultural history is suppressed, their people are sent off to die in wars they did not start, and they face the threat of violence and persecution at all times. Zeke is already growing up in an environment of collective suffering that touches the lives of every Eldian – but his suffering extends to his home life as well.

At home, he is stripped of any personal identity and is left with only a purpose decided for him before he was even born. Children need to develop their own identities to grow into functional adults, but he is not given a chance. If he wants his parents' affection (which all children do), he must fulfill his predetermined purpose. He is given hardly any opportunity to play, to interact with other children, or to explore his already limited world. He must work hard constantly and sacrifice normal experiences of childhood joy, which is an experience of suffering, if he has any hope of alleviating the suffering of emotional neglect. It is a Catch-22. If he wants to stop suffering in one way, he must suffer in another. There is no escape. Growing up in an environment like that will inherently lead to feelings of helplessness because (and I cannot stress this enough) he was helpless.

Zeke also grew up in a secretive environment. He cannot reveal his own heritage or his parents' activities even to his own extended family. He cannot be honest because it puts his entire family and himself at risk of death, which is often viewed as the ultimate expression of suffering. He cannot be vulnerable until he is made to feel that death is inevitable and preferable to his existence, and only then can he form an emotional connection with another person. While he was fond of Tom Ksaver, it wasn’t until he was aware the government was closing in on his parents that he truly opened up. Vulnerability is the root of all emotional intimacy, something humans need to be healthy, given we are social creatures, but for Zeke, vulnerability is death. It begins with the risk of his own life; then he must trade his parents' lives to have it; and after Ksaver’s death, he is once again at risk of being killed if he is vulnerable with anyone else. Zeke is not able to form connections with other people. He is isolated despite constantly being around other people. The only times Zeke can break through this are with Eren and again with Armin, at which point he had already accepted inevitable death. This isolation is important to note, as it will come up again when we discuss his views on the suffering of others.

All of this suffering is not to say that Zeke had no joy in his early life. He did. He had an emotional bond with Ksaver that helped him shape his own identity. He had his grandparents, whom he clearly loved as a child. He played catch for no reason other than enjoying it. But for Zeke, the combination of community-wide, familial, and personal suffering far outweighs any experience of what we point to as goodness in his life. Things like joy, mercy, kindness, love. These were all scarce in the context of Zeke’s childhood, whereas suffering was so overwhelming. It is no surprise that he concluded that life is merely an inevitable experience of suffering. But if life is only pain, why did Zeke continue to live? Why not do what many others do when they descend into complete despair and take his own life? It seems like the natural conclusion to deciding that life has no purpose beyond pain – but Zeke is not so simplistic.

3. Zeke on the Suffering of Others

It might seem a bit of a stretch to claim that Zeke is concerned with the suffering of others, given his actions, but I will lay out my argument for why I believe he is. I feel quite strongly that he is not sociopathic, like I have seen people propose. I do not deny that Zeke causes the suffering of many people. He hurts people; he kills people; he seems to enjoy doing it. These things are unforgivable, but that alone is not enough to call him outright “evil” or sociopathic. We must, when properly analyzing Zeke, consider why he does those things. To begin, we must take a look at Zeke’s ultimate goal.

3.1 Discussion of Antinatalist Philosophy and Ethics

Zeke aims to end the Eldian race through what he describes as “euthanasia”. He wants to sterilize all Eldians so they might die out naturally without further reproduction. The term for this viewpoint is “antinatalism”. It is a much older concept than one might initially expect. The idea that it would have been better not to have been born at all dates back to ancient times. In Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles writes, “Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came. For when he has seen youth go by, with its easy merry-making, / what hard affliction is foreign to him, what suffering does he not know? Envy, factions, strife, battles, / and murders. Last of all falls to his lot old age, blamed, weak, unsociable, friendless, wherein dwells every misery among miseries.” (Sophocles, Line 1225-1235). We also see proto-antinatalist thought in early religious movements, such as Gnostic Christians. To give an incredibly simplified explanation of Gnosticism: Gnostics believed that the material world in which we live was not divinely inspired – it was a prison made by the “demiurge”, which trapped the human spirit from communing with the true God. In rebellion against this demiurge, some gnostic groups took an antinatalist position. They believed that procreation should cease, lest more divine spirits become trapped in our material prison. We see this in Gnostic groups like the Manicheans. We can again be certain that this antinatalist sentiment was present in the 3rd-4th centuries, as Augustine of Hippo mentions it in On the Good of Marriage: “But I am aware of some that murmur: What, say they, if all men should abstain from all sexual intercourse, whence will the human race exist? Would that all would this, only in “charity out of a pure heart, and good conscience, and faith unfeigned;” much more speedily would the City of God be filled, and the end of the world hastened.” (Augustine, 753)

Even in this proto-antinatalist thought, there was a concern for the collective rather than just the individual. Both Sophocles and the Gnostic Christians were concerned with the collective suffering of humanity and saw antiprocreation as a way to rebel against that suffering. While it might be slightly unclear to our modern sensibilities, it is important to note that for Early Christians, the end of the world was a prophetic and eschatological necessity as well as a net positive since it would bring about the Kingdom of God and end all suffering for all eternity. When Augustine wrote about hastening the end of the world, he was not writing about fire and brimstone (that was a later addition to Christianity and did not yet exist in the way we think of it now), but rather about the fulfillment of Jesus’s promise to take away all pain.

Antinatalism proper, or at least as we think of it today, got started in the early 20th century by authors like Kurnig and his book Der Neo-Nihilismus (1903). He dedicated this book to anti-procreation, and given that we are discussing ethics and morality, it is important to note that it was a response to Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion, which Kurnig took a step further. From the Antinatalist viewpoint, refraining from bringing children into a world where they will inevitably be made to suffer is the most ethical, compassionate thing you can do. Kurnig writes, “Life is suffering; to abstain from procreation is philanthropy and duty.” (Kurnig 84). Antinatalism is radical, as procreation feels inevitable, so naturally it is often misconstrued – but I cannot harp enough that Antinatalism is almost always built on a framework of sympathy, compassion, and pity. It is not about disliking children or humanity. David Bentar, who coined the term Antinatalism in his 2006 book Better to Have Never Been, responds that antinatalism exists “not from a dislike of children, but instead from a concern to avoid the suffering of potential children and the adults they would become.” (Bentar 198).

3.2 Zeke’s Antinatalism

Returning to the topic of Zeke, we can apply what we have now come to understand about Antinatalism. In season 4, episode 15, Zeke says: “If no more subjects of Ymir were born, titans would vanish from this world in the next hundred years. The world wouldn’t have to live in fear of titans or suffer anymore.” This statement is made in conversation with Ksaver as Zeke is coming to his initial conclusions about Antinatalism. It is my belief that Zeke is not referring to the Marleans and their oppression of Eldians when he mentions the world's fear of titans. In the context of his life, Zeke would inevitably be extremely aware of the destructive military power that the Titans had come to be used for by Marley. It is the cycle of military violence and destruction that Marley inflicts on the rest of the world via the use of the titans that Zeke refers to when he mentions this fear. Zeke is shown to be someone who thinks quite thoroughly, and I struggle to believe that his statement would be so shallow as to refer exclusively to Marlean's justification of discrimination when there is an issue that causes a much greater and more tangible fear than just personal prejudice.

He follows it up with “Moreover, if we had never been born, we wouldn’t have to suffer!” Twice over, Zeke is concerned with suffering. Both on a larger scale and on a more personal scale for his own people and self. This puts quite a dent in the claim I mentioned earlier; Zeke is a sociopath. His entire philosophy and end goal are structured around reducing suffering. Due to the fact that birth and life are seen as positive things in almost every viewpoint, I think people struggle to understand Zeke on that front. If he does not celebrate life, he must be morally reprehensible. As I have displayed, it is quite the opposite. His lack of celebration surrounding life does not coincide with a disregard for life – it is foundationally structured on a concern for life. What he grapples with, rather than some devious desire to see all Eldians gone, is the scaling of suffering-joy. In the context of his life and what he has witnessed, suffering is both inescapable and overwhelming.

3.3 The Ends and the Means/Remorse

When discussing Zeke in the context of morality and the suffering of others, his actions must also be taken into consideration. Zeke kills a lot of people. Before I begin actually discussing it from a framework of moral philosophy, I want to set something straight. Some viewers hold killing particularly strongly against Zeke. I think that’s a bit unfair when watching a show like Attack on Titan. I do not mean that it was morally just to kill people, but holding it against Zeke in particular is unreasonable. Every character in Attack on Titan kills people. Eren kills people. Armin kills people. Levi kills people. Erwin kills people. Everyone in Attack on Titan is killing people. To hold Zeke uniquely responsible for killing people while neglecting the other characters makes for a poor analysis. I believe the reason this occurs is that Zeke kills characters beloved by fans. If that makes you dislike Zeke, I think that’s perfectly reasonable! What I think is not reasonable is weighing his killing more harshly than other characters when analyzing morality in the context of Attack on Titan, just because he kills characters with names and faces you recognize. As I am writing this essay, I want to take all killing with equal seriousness, including those who do not have names or faces.

Death and violence are large themes in Attack on Titan. They are also quite hotly debated in moral philosophy. Anyone who has taken an introductory course on morals has been presented with the question: “Is killing always wrong?” The answer almost always boils down to “What is the context?” I have already explained the context of Zeke’s killing extensively. Whether or not an individual agrees with Zeke’s philosophical perspective and goal is ultimately what is going to inform their response to whether they believe Zeke’s actions are justifiable. If you came to this essay looking for some objective answer (which I doubt you did), there isn’t one to be found. I am not going to tell you whether he was right or wrong. What I am going to ask is that any reader take some time to chew on his philosophy and see if it provides any deeper understanding of why he made the choices he did.

I think Zeke’s actions in seasons two and three are worth mentioning in this section. In these seasons, there is a gamification of killing for Zeke. Zeke is seen again to be sort of lackadaisical with his murdering in season four (particularly when he’s in the forest with Levi), but it is at its full force here. I will pause my philosophical waxing and do some speculative character analysis for why this might be and why I doubt it is the result of killing for the mere joy of killing.

As established earlier in this essay, Zeke is concerned with life and suffering. He does not look at the Eldians on the island as inhuman. Ignorant, perhaps, but still human. When he is met by them with inevitable resistance, he must once again scale suffering. Are the suffering and deaths of these individuals worth the pursuit of ending a greater, more pervasive suffering? Do the ends justify the means? For Zeke, the answer is yes. I speculate, knowing what we do about Zeke’s history, that this was not a particularly difficult decision for Zeke to make. He has been raised in a militaristic setting and desensitized to violence since he was a small child. He has been killing individuals who are faceless to him in wars since he was 17. He has made even greater sacrifices and sentenced his own parents to death. Still, I do not think Zeke is heartless. I think the gamification of killing is caused by a psychological defense. To do what he believes he must in chasing a grandiose goal of ending suffering, he cannot let himself be put in a position where he would be burdened by guilt. If he were to allow himself to fully feel his actions, it would leave him unable to advance – but he must because it is his only meaning in a life that is meaningless and already full of suffering. Furthermore, I find it interesting that his preferred method of murder is by throwing things in a way that is very reminiscent of how he played catch with Ksaver. I won’t make the claim that he is doing it for Ksaver. That claim would not align with his own statements. Still, Ksaver is a key influence. His memory is kept close, through the glasses Zeke always wears and through his method of murder. The latter allows him to commit those actions while being reminded of why he is doing what he is doing.

Despite his ability to gamify much of his most reprehensible actions, I do believe I have grounds to stand on when I say that he is not without remorse. The scene with Colt and Falco gives us a glimpse at Zeke’s ability to acknowledge remorse and to watch as he decides once again that any current suffering is justifiable in the pursuit of abolishing suffering. When Colt is begging Zeke not to use Scream, Zeke looks genuinely pained. His face crumples and trembles. He closes his eyes. He has to take the time to justify to himself once again. He sympathizes with Colt. Without any mockery, he says, “That’s why it’s a shame” before he continues to do what he perceives he must do. He takes no joy in killing Colt or Falco (who he believes will also die). Even if he wants to treat it like a game at times, Zeke does not take active joy in killing. If anything, I would say the delight he expresses in the forest with Levi is not at all about killing Levi’s comrades. It is because he believed he had outmaneuvered Levi. Zeke is capable of and actively displays remorse and sympathy for others. He has a moral compass – but he is also of the belief that ends justify the means.

What I find interesting is that the death that people despise Zeke most for is of the character who most resembles Zeke in this mindset. Despite having an arguably more selfish goal than Zeke, Erwin is more beloved. This raises a fascinating juxtaposition about responsibility. Zeke is despised for his active role in the deaths he causes. Simultaneously, Erwin knowingly sends soldiers to their deaths, which puts him in the role of an indirect killer. This thereby reduces the strain of responsibility. Is killing human beings directly to further your own goals worse than killing humans indirectly to further your own goals? I don’t raise this point to slander Erwin; I enjoy his character much in the way I enjoy Zeke’s, but I do find it to be an interesting moral loophole that appears prevalent in conversation about Attack on Titan.

4. Attonement and Change

Moving into our final section, we must return to Zeke’s perception of the suffering-joy dialectic and the isolation in Zeke’s backstory that I noted. When Zeke first comes to his own Antinatalist conclusions about the reality of life and suffering, the person he admired most (Ksaver) breaks down in tears and proclaims, “If only I hadn’t been born into this world!” This marks a turning point for Zeke’s philosophy. When he expresses that suffering is the only outcome of life and the only true solution would be to never have been born, he is met with agreement. This solidifies to him that, beneath the surface, suffering is everyone's reality. This also marks the very last time Zeke is put in a position where he could experience pushback for his viewpoint until the very end of his life. Zeke’s isolation creates an echochamber of suffering. Receiving pushback on our views is how they are changed, but as I stated before, Zeke cannot express himself without risking death. This pushback finally comes in his conversation with Armin.

The discussion between Armin and Zeke in the paths is by far my favorite scene in all of Attack on Titan. It is a philosophical clash between Zeke’s nihilistic and aburdist worldview with Armin’s existential, humanist perspective. It also opens up an interesting discussion around change, forgiveness, and atonement. The conversation occurs when Zeke is at his absolute lowest. Once again, the universe has asserted to him that life is meaningless. His meaning came when he told Ksaver that he would free the world and Eldians from their suffering via euthanasia, but after all his struggling for this, Eren ended any hope of his only purpose in a meaningless world ever coming to fruition. Zeke asks Armin why fight against the crushing inevitability of meaninglessness. It is a purposeless struggle, driven only by our hardwired biological desire to keep on living. He sees relinquishing himself of the struggle and accepting death as freeing. Armin’s response to this is beautiful. Instead of telling Zeke he is just wrong, he engages in meaningful discussion. Meaningful dialogue is the only way to expand people's horizons and introduce them to new viewpoints. He affirms that perhaps there is no grand meaning, but lists small moments of beauty and joy that shine brighter than the immense suffering he too has experienced. He concludes by saying, “I feel that those otherwise ordinary moments were incredibly precious”. At this moment, hearing Armin's words and seeing the ball he used to play with, Zeke changes his mind. Only when he acknowledges that it was meaningless, and regardless of that, he would’ve been happy to do it forever, do those necessary to help them escape the paths appear.

Zeke’s final actions are ones of atonement and remorse. He speaks to Ksaver and to his father. He implores them to help Armin and his friends stop Eren so that those remaining can go on to experience more precious, meaningless moments. He knows he is going to die. He has to die. But what little is left of his own life, he spends it trying to reduce human suffering. I think this is what makes Zeke’s death particularly sad. When he emerges from the path, he finally has an opportunity to live with this new perspective, but he chooses to give up his own life. Moreover, he chooses to give it to Levi. Zeke doesn’t want to die; he acknowledges that when he hails Levi over, saying, “Over here! You wanted to meet me, don’t you, Levi? I don’t want to, though.” Despite his own desire not to die, he is willing to give his life and does not fight. He seeks atonement and to unburden Levi of the unfulfilled promise Levi has been carrying. In his final moment, he looks out at the sky one last time before closing his eyes and says, “What nice weather. If only I’d thought of that earlier… Well, I suppose that's too much to ask after all the killing I’ve done.”

Conclusion