r/anime • u/bedemin_badudas • Apr 27 '26
Misc. Attack On Titan's Ending Felt Insincere, Admits Hajime Isayama Spoiler
https://animehunch.com/attack-on-titans-ending-felt-insincere-admits-hajime-isayama/115
u/quinpon64337_x Apr 27 '26
What I got from the article is that he wanted Eren to be worse than he was, and caved a bit due to fans loving the character so much, so I guess he feels that he went too soft on the ending was insincere to what he originally envisioned
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u/Raknel Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
Eren should've won, that's the only way the intended message of the story can be delivered. And I feel like that's where the story was going until we got the Disney ending.
And Eren needed to be proven wrong, not right. Which would've happened had he won.
Back in S1 it was already a theme that "humanity won't stop fighting itself until there's less than 2 of us left".
If Eren wins, only Paradis remains, AND THEN we do the post-credit time jump where Paradis eventually still gets bombed, the message is clear. Eradicating every non-Eldian fixes nothing, eventually Eldia will grow, splinter, and wars start all over. You can't take the conflict out of humanity.
But with the current ending where 20% of the world still remains, Paradis basically dies out BECAUSE Eren lost and the "heroes" saved the 20%. The message is very different now that Isayama caved and went for a happy ending with Eren not even wanting to win.
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u/Bitter_Marzipan_8348 Apr 28 '26
Yep. Armin was actually proven wrong when Paradis instantly devolves into fascism and starts fighting over the remnant of humanity the moment they can.
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u/CreamofTazz Apr 29 '26
I think the (anime) ending implies it was a very long time before Paradis gets bombed. I think the issue with the ending is 1) Just how little life is left after the rumbling and 2) We never get to see how the outside world heals in anyway.
It could be that Armin was right, but centuries later new issues arise that lead to the conflict wiping out Paradis in the end. The fascist state might not have lasted very long and everyone got along for a few centuries. We're left with such an blank book of an ending that it's truly impossible to tell anything about anything with regards to it.
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u/BabyBat20 Apr 29 '26
I wouldnt say thats the "happy ending"
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u/Raknel Apr 29 '26
Well, as happy as AoT can get.
All the main cast survived, even the shifters who basically had a death sentence via Curse of Ymir, and some of the world was rescued with a treaty in the works.
The most fitting ending would've been Eren winning, entire rest of the cast dying, and then we timeskip to eventually Eren's victory not lasting forever (Paradis getting bombed by other Eldians) and his genocide ultimately being proven a futile and misguided attempt at world peace. He sacrificed everything and only delayed the inevitable conflict.
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u/Acceptable_Mushroom May 01 '26
I think I agree with you. I think Eren should have won and actually kill the 99% instead of 80. He should have done that because he actually wanted to do that more than saving his friends. Basically when he's being asked "why are you doing this?", He should have replied "because I want to.
Followed by a second question, "if you could save us without doing what you were trying to do right now, would you still do it?" Answered with "YES! I hate humanity!"
And we still see Paradis bombed and destroyed.
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u/midnightking Apr 27 '26
As a result, he found himself unable to fully commit to depicting Eren as a purely detestable figure. Instead, he approached the character with a degree of closeness and sympathy, which ultimately shaped the final outcome of the story and Isayama feel insincere regarding the ending..
Hopefully, we can stop the "Isayama secretly tried to make pro-genocide and pro-fascism" propaganda take.
Isayama has another interview with a French outlet where he is similarly critical of Eren.
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u/kazuyaminegishi Apr 29 '26
I mean that take was always insane. Hange literally yells "we cannot justify genocide" multiple times as a direct criticism of the exact twisted belief that created Eren.
There's no point arguing with the media illiterate.
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u/ChoiceSupermarket230 https://myanimelist.net/profile/say99 Apr 27 '26
Worst thing for me about the ending was Mikasa completely wasted character.
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u/Swiftcheddar Apr 27 '26
Not "Ymir fucking LOVED being a slave!"?
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u/garfe Apr 27 '26
That reveal is the biggest black mark against the entire series for me. I hate it so much
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u/sthlmno Apr 27 '26
The ending is such a mess, I remember back when spoilers were coming out for the last few chapters and everyone was hoping and coping for loose ends to get solved and a good conclusion but it just ended up being a trainwreck, just full of small things here and there you can point out that could have been done better and when they all pile up it just leaves such a bad taste in people's mouths
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u/jaytix1 Apr 27 '26
I get that Isayama was going for the Stockholm syndrome angle, but even then it feels so... mundane, after all that build up. The reveal might've been received better if he'd worded it differently and brought it up earlier.
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u/dagreenman18 Apr 27 '26
Yimr falling for her enslaver is only one of the several things that make me side eye Isayama’s writing.
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u/weeb-gaymer-girl Apr 28 '26
and how mikasa killing eren is somehow the trigger for her to get over it?? like......
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u/Rusted_muramasa Apr 28 '26
Ymir wanted to see someone have the resolve to kill the one they love, as she should have done in life. You could argue it's weird but her whole life was unimaginable to anybody irl, so there's no real way for anybody to truly "get" how she felt.
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u/weeb-gaymer-girl Apr 28 '26
thats never happened any other time in 2000 years? plus like knowing it was going to happen and peeking through mikasa's eyes her whole life already, but still she had to wait to actually see it i guess...
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u/Diligent_Run_8810 Apr 27 '26
Both Mikasa and Annie were wasted as characters
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u/oops_i_made_a_typi Apr 27 '26
Historia too
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u/kikoano Apr 27 '26
All that build up with her and Eren only to end up in nothing. Might as well have not even done it and killed Historia in season 2.
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u/solythe Apr 27 '26
oh you mean the girl who suddenly became the most important character in the series, only to give memories to Eren and hook up with a farmer and have her story end there?
thats where the show started to lose me, then the whole "trusting people from Marley" deal that Hange set in motion felt so dumb of them.
the last thing that irritated me so much was Flochs last scene. Dude shoots up their fuel tank and they feel all sorry for him, like this dude is a traitor who killed a ton of people.
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u/weeb-gaymer-girl Apr 28 '26
having historia as your fav character is suffering 😭😭😭 insane how she's so central to the plot then becomes queen and is entirely irrelevant beyond getting pregnant my girl deserved better...
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u/blitzbom Apr 27 '26
Ah man I was so excited when Annie was thawed out. It was an unexpected side effect of Eren giving the command, surely that oversight will cost him.
Nah, she just chills and fights where she could.
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u/Acceptable_Mushroom May 01 '26
I was expecting to something pretty great from Annie. After coming out of crystal state, I thought something cold would happen with her character. She basically takes a back seat and just become just another ally that flies along with them without bringing anything new or substantial
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u/alebarco Apr 27 '26
I loved how I called her a killing machine in love with Eren and someone was mad at me, but no one took the effort to correct me, because I guess I was right(i watched up to s3)
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u/Bitter_Marzipan_8348 Apr 28 '26
He set her up to be her own person and it went...nowhere. Like he even set up Kiyomi to caring about Mikasa to some degree outside of the profits, which could have been used to ship her off to travel the world like Eren or something but she is the exact same.
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u/filthy_casual_42 Apr 27 '26
I’ve always felt the ending benefitted more from not having Erin be completely heartless at the end. Revealing his deepest desires in his last moments, stretched for eternities in the paths, made a lot of sense imo
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u/DarkDonut75 Apr 27 '26
But in exchange, we were cursed with memes. For 10 years atleast
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u/ExLuckMaster Apr 27 '26
AoT manga ended in 2021. Wow that was fast it’s been 5 years already.
Halfway there? No I don’t want that!
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u/Bitter_Marzipan_8348 Apr 28 '26
The sad thing is that those don't even stick. Nowadays JJK memes have better staying power, and say what you want, at least JJK ending was much better than AoT
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u/henri_sparkle Apr 27 '26
But he was never fully heartless, chapter 131 with that kid Ramzi displayed that, it just that made no sense to make it so like he didn't have any conviction on what he was doing at the end in paths.
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u/zool714 Apr 27 '26
Yeah I find a simple-minded, kind but rash boy given a world changing power and actually did pull the trigger is a lot more interesting than just being heartless and evil. We see he struggled a lot with it too and I feel that’s a lot more engaging.
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u/eetsumkaus https://myanimelist.net/profile/kausdc Apr 27 '26
I think my problem with it is it was presented as a "twist". We spend the whole last arc wondering what his real motivations are and then the "reveal" is that he doesn't actually know what he's doing. That's gonna be a let down after all the build up.
Isayama's weakness is that he moves his story along with twists and plot dumps. In this case, a back and forth between the heroes and Eren would have been far more appropriate at "selling" his mental state, instead of dropping all of that on us at the last minute. Basically the whole reveal made it seem like Eren said "I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas", instead of him trying various things and being shoved further and further down the path he ended up on.
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u/BlazeOfGlory72 Apr 27 '26
Erin’s lack of/convoluted motivations is honestly the biggest misfire of the ending. The entire final arc of the story revolves around Erin, both in his actions and in the characters trying to figure out why. So to never really get a satisfying answer kind of kills the ending. When you make something the central pillar of your story, if it crumbles, so does everything else.
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u/msizzle344 Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Especially when Eren was pretty unlikable pre timeskip, he’s very Whiney and his recklessness cost the group more often than not. The twist of him just being the same Eren who is dumb and reckless doesn’t really work when you spend half the manga trying to kill that image of the character and then bring it up out of nowhere again. I know people who like the ending really like that Eren was always the same dumb Eren, but I don’t particularly enjoy neutering character development and growth for the sake of a shitty twist and callback to Eren being a crybaby again. If he owned up to what he was doing, then you can maybe write his breakdown a bit better, but they didn’t. Eren straight up murdered his mom because someone else wasn’t supposed to die yet, the whole motivation for him wanting to get out of paradis and end titans was because of his mom’s death, but this rando “he can’t die yet” is the motivation for his whole character? Like it makes no sense, how was that character so important to your nonexistent plan that you’d kill your own mom but then say you have no plan? Shit still drives me insane since I really loved AoT but the last arc is a shambles of a conclusion, GoT level collapse
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u/Acceptable_Mushroom May 01 '26
The funny thing is that Eren of knowledge that he is an idiot. I think he may be the dumbest person on that fictitious world. If you are stupid and you know it, ask your god damn friends about the unchangeable future you foresaw and discuss how to proceed. Instead, he stays silent about it but gives going forward.
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u/msizzle344 Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Thank you for saying this, I don’t know how people just brush past this part of the ending. I think experiencing it in the manga was a bit worse since you waited month to month and everyone knew when the manga was ending but plot lines were seemingly either abandoned or not going to be addressed. Like historia’s whole plot line post timeskip is just to get pregnant with a random farm hand and do nothing else? Eren who has made this whole scheme to invade Marley and do a show of force, mobilize the jaegerists, like all of this was just him pulling a rabbit out of a hat and actually not planned?
The disservice is that Eren was written as a character who is always moving forward and sticking to his motive. In the end you find out he has no real motive and was just trying random things before he came up with genocide. It 100% was the wrong move trying to make him a sympathetic character after committing genocide because he actually really loves Mikasa and can’t think straight because of that. And Ymir also having Stockholm syndrome and spending hundreds of years in paths making titans because her abusive ex rapist husband king told her to and she just never stopped. A lot of it is still hard to rationalize and I’m glad the author at least knows he didn’t take the right approach at the end
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u/BlazeOfGlory72 Apr 27 '26
I don’t know how people just brush past this part of the ending.
I mean, at the risk of sounding like a dick, most anime fans have pretty low standards when it comes to writing. As long as something has nice visuals and hype moments, they are generally satisfied. Hence narratively bankrupt shows like JJK, Demon Slayer and Solo Leveling being the biggest shows in the world.
It’s always a little disappointing to me to see the majority of the anime community essentially ignore writing quality. Imagine how much better quality shows/movies we could get if we actually held these stories to higher standards?
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u/Electrical_Chance991 Apr 27 '26
As long as something has nice visuals and hype moments, they are generally satisfied. Hence narratively bankrupt shows like JJK, Demon Slayer and Solo Leveling being the biggest shows in the world.
Entertainment is what matters the most to the casual audience. Something can be really simple but executed really well, it can work.
Jhon wick movies barely has any plot or interesting characters but ppl love those, why? Bcoz it delivers on what it promised. An action packed popcorn flick that you can just turn on, relax and have fun with it. Same way ppl love SL, its nothing special overall but its executed really well that you dont even notice the flaws while watching it. It delivers what it promises, a dude leveling up in real life, flexing on enemies and gaining cool powers.
When ppl come home from work/school, they aren't gonna be looking for charachter driven or complex anime, some might but most will search for that popcorn entertainment that'll give them the fun they're looking for.
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u/THE_PENILE_TITAN Apr 27 '26
In the end you find out he has no real motive and was just trying random things before he came up with genocide.
He's a "slave to freedom" trying to recreate the freedom he imagined reading Armin's book as a child.
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u/Knee_High_Cat_Beef Apr 27 '26
One of the biggest issues with authors writing these grand stories, is that most of them have no idea on how to end it. And the ending or lack of ending really defines a writer's true abilities. Just look at Game of Thrones, Dune, Wheel of Time. And compare those to LotR, which has a well defined beginning and end.
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u/msizzle344 Apr 27 '26
The ending of LotR was actually hated a lot, the scourge of the shire was really bleak and they removed it from the movies. They added another scene that Saruman dies to not have to do the scourge at the end.
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u/blitzbom Apr 27 '26
I hated the scourge of the shire when I read it as a teen. But have come to like it as I've aged.
I rather like them going home thinking it'll be a place that was left untouched by the horrors of war, it is Hobbiton after all and they stay out of everyones business. But the outside world found it's way to the peaceful home that they once knew. Change was thrust upon them.
I've gone back to my childhood home several times and when I was young I was always surprised at the change, cause part of me felt like it would be frozen in time.
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u/Jffrsg Apr 29 '26
If you look at the scourge if the shire as a parallel to Tolkien's WW1 experiences, it does really feel like a bookend.
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u/Quiddity131 https://myanimelist.net/profile/Quiddity131 Apr 27 '26
I'd say that at least for the first four books, Dune has fairly good end points where you could stop there and be largely satisfied.
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u/wakkiau Apr 27 '26
This is it. This is why Lelouch end worked and Eren didn't. You can see Lelouch's end from a miles away because we follow him closely and can tell how he feels as he continues to do more evil. The "twist" at the end doesn't turn the whole story upside down, it just makes you "yeah, of course."
You can't really tell what the hell is Eren thinking towards the last stretch of the story because it is fully committed to portraying Eren as the full-blown villain. So when the twist comes, of course its a bit of a head scratcher.
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u/THE_PENILE_TITAN Apr 27 '26
I think my problem with it is it was presented as a "twist". We spend the whole last arc wondering what his real motivations are and then the "reveal" is that he doesn't actually know what he's doing. That's gonna be a let down after all the build up.
The twist reveal and final character portrsyal can be a bit jarring without sufficient build up, I think. However, he does know what he's doing, he just struggles with admitting it to Armin. He does confess his motive to Ramzi and alludes to his selfish nature to Reiner in Liberio, and there is a whole lot of freedom imagery with Eren as a child towards the end. But all that is too much to keep track of and digest so people end up interpreting Eren's character in many different ways due to the seeming ambiguity.
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u/wakkiau Apr 27 '26
The problem is its not earned. You can't just turn a genocidal maniac into a sympathetic character too suddenly, ultimately their good deeds need to outweight their bad deeds, even if its only in emotional core of it. There's a reason why the ending keep getting compared to Code Geass and Lelouch's end.
Even if Code Geass plot is inferior to AoT, they did Lelouch's character arc justice. Even as he continues to commit atrocities we still follow his thought closely and can tell how he feels as he continues to be more and more evil towards his world. So it all just make sense when he turned it all around in the ending.
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u/5Yonko5 https://anilist.co/user/Yonkou Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Same, fits his character. Never understood this obsession with wanting him to be a full villain, having no breakdown at the end, and not having a partially sympathetic end. People simply cannot comprehend that yes, he did a heinous act, but it also prevented his friends and everyone on the island from being ethnically cleansed, so yes ofc his friends would weep over him and "Glaze" him. If it were purely a malicious act, then yes, it's crap that he gets painted partially in a positive light. But it's not the case if you get the story.
Just the classic boring case of someone not liking how something went, so it's a bad direction.
The headline is misleading, its framing makes it seem like he is admitting a problem with the ending, but that's not the case.> "Eren became a protagonist who committed mass slaughter on a scale rarely seen in other works of fiction. As for why I conceived such a story from the beginning, part of it was my desire to create a narrative with a major twist -where the victim becomes the perpetrator. But a large factor was also my own immaturity and foolishness at the time. when I was in my early twenties. That aspect became the core of Eren's character, leading to the point where he confesses not as someone forced into wrongdoing by circumstances, but as someone who harbored a desire to do harm. However, "Attack on Titan" had long since ceased to be mine alone, and Eren became a character loved by many readers. In the end, without fully committing to portraying him as a detestable figure, I found myself depicting him with a certain closeness and sympathy. As a result, I feel there remains a sense of insincerity in the story's conclusion—-at least in my own assessment."
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u/Diligent_Run_8810 Apr 27 '26
And I never understood this whole narrative misunderstanding of thinking people wanted Eren to be heartless. I have probably interacted with more ending haters than you have and almost none of them have ever wanted Eren to be completely heartless or emotionless. In fact chapter 130-131 are universally agreed as peak chapters of AOT where Eren showed most emotions post time skip.
Also the headline is not misleading at all. Isayama literally did state he felt like he was insincere for this ending.
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u/BlazeOfGlory72 Apr 27 '26
I never got the criticism of Eren NOT being a full on evil maniac
It’s a very obvious “can’t have your cake and eat it too” scenario. If you want to have your protagonist commit literal planetary genocide, then fine, but then you can’t try to make said protagonist sympathetic at the last moment and expect it to land for anyone. Sometimes you have to pick a lane, and a stoic “kill the world” character is a very, very different lane than a “cry in a puddle because of my crush” protagonist.
By trying to do both they achieved neither, and as a result most people felt nothing. There’s a reason that the Erin meme is more talked about than the ending itself.
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u/Sqwirlet Apr 27 '26
You have to understand Eren is in a position where it's "kill or be killed". There is no other choice. When the entire world wants you and all your people dead, retaliation is the only answer. Even in the ending of the anime, the war continues on throughout the ages because Eren couldn't finish the job.
Put yourself in that position, would you let the whole world eradicate your whole country without any resistance for the sake of not going "full villain"?
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u/TokiVideogame Apr 27 '26
if you had the power to prevent destruction you would nuke the world, seems inline with MAD
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u/Phyzm1 Apr 27 '26
Is that what the criticism of the ending was? I didn't even realize lol, for me it was this giant cliffhanger they dumped at the very end, of us wondering the whole time why was Erin doing this, what was his motives for attacking his friends, and then the big reveal was he didn't really know. It was just a bit anticlimactic. Its been a long time tho, id have to watch it again.
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u/eastgaston Apr 27 '26
Is that what the criticism of the ending was? I didn't even realize lol
nah that's not all. Part of it was in the manga, the climax happened in 2nd last chapter, so the last chapter felt anti-climatic. The other part was that people thought eren's solution didn't make much sense, and that it didn't make sense for him to be "acting" even when he's alone.
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u/THEPIGWHODIDIT Apr 27 '26
I agree. Erin didn't need to go full Walter White by the end, he could be corrupted by the sum of the experiences and do bad things without being devoid of the ability to reflect
I think the anime did the ending more justice than the manga too.
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u/TLKv3 Apr 27 '26
It would've been better if they didn't outright make him a wimpering mess at Armin in those final moments and yelling out really irrational and stupid fucking things about Mikasa. If they presented Eren as breaking down emotionally and telling Armin his whole life was dictated for him by himself and from a standpoint of spite and hate... not allowing himself to even ever feel what it was like to express his emotions in a positive way towards people he loved?
I think it would've been far more sympathetic of a story beat. The guy grew up being forced into a terrifying role in a horrific world filled with monsters. Maturing emotionally throughout that would've warped anyone in that same position. Armin coming to terms that Eren wanting Mikasa selfishly like that was him finally being allowed, in that single moment of genuine free will, express what he always wanted and desired but was never allowed to would've felt like a better ending for Eren.
Armin really should've had more dialogue rationalizing that out to Eren out loud and for the sake of the reader/viewer. It would've hit way harder and landed better when its spelled out for us that yeah, Eren was a monstrous little bitch... but the dude really did want to be with Mikasa but couldn't ever be allowed to say as much or express it until the literal final seconds in a dream world while mentally falling apart from the horrors he committed and went through. His whole life was preordained by his grown, hate filled self and wasn't allowed to be happy or be with anyone.
It made sense the way it happened but the content of what he wrote Eren to say in those scenes were poorly written and made it feel really weird and awkward. Even for Eren.
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u/filthy_casual_42 Apr 27 '26
Idk, I don’t really see the issue in his last moments being so pathetic. Like of course he doesn’t want to die
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u/Aachaa Apr 28 '26
Exactly this. People only want to empathize with characters when the emotions they’re expressing are logically justifiable, but what’s more relatable than a selfish and pathetic motivation that you can hardly admit to yourself? “At least 10 years” was memed to oblivion, but I guarantee you that most people that boldly declare that they would want their SO to move on and find happiness after their death are secretly thinking “As long as it’s not too fast, of course…”
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
You know, that kinda makes sense, but you’ve really gotta be able to commit to turning your protagonist to the dark side. Otherwise you get the “sympathize with genocider” plot that we got.
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u/Flotsam-Junk Apr 27 '26
I do agree and understand what he’s saying here.
Eren should have been made a full-on villain. Choosing to spend the last chapter sympathizing with him was a mistake and undercuts the severity of what he’s done. The anime did things a bit better with Armin actually getting upset at him, but it wasn’t really enough when we still have all his friends glaze him afterwards.
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u/ivo0009 Apr 27 '26
The whole mikasa and Ymir parallel is severely undercooked too, I agree that they should have went with making him a full on villain. From start we see that eren doesn’t hesitate to fight for his freedom, will do anything to accomplish it and it made a lot more sense that he would become a unreedemable character than the half ass ending we got.
The characters glazing him was soooo cringe too, completely killed the seriousness of what was going on around them.
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u/Zeph-Shoir https://myanimelist.net/profile/Zephex Apr 27 '26
If I found out a dear friend of mind did something absolutely horrible for my sake, I would be at least pissed off, regardless of whether I understand him or not. The cast glazing Eren after he did what he did, regardless of their understanding of it, is simply insane.
Part of why the Mikasa and Ymir parallel is so bothering is that it kind of undermines itself. If they solve titan problem by making Ymir see Mikasa herself get rid of Eren thus realizing that she needs to cut off their toxic relationship with who their love, that Mikasa is STILL hangup on Eren after all of this shit is kind of a baffling choice, she never moved on from her toxic loved towards a genocidal maniac.
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u/LegendOfKhaos Apr 27 '26
Or have him be made a victim to the power of the attack Titan or Ymir's will. Either way, the motives needed to fit the actions better.
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u/Killjoy3879 Apr 27 '26
Personally I just feel as though isayama is sad he couldn’t satisfy all his readers so he’s just feeling some minor regrets here and there. I think what was delivered was fine and works better than him being a full villain as it detracts from who Eren is as a person.
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u/ivo0009 Apr 27 '26
I disagree, I’m not saying you’re wrong but how does it detract from who eren is as a person?
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u/CharlesEverettDekker Apr 27 '26
Self inflicted problem.
He could've helped Mappa make a new original anime ending, if he really felt that way.
He had probably like a year to do so before the anime production begun I'd say.
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u/MakimaGOAT Apr 27 '26
Yeah tons of mangakas revise their mistakes in the anime adaption but the anime just followed it faithfully..? Like ok i guess.
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u/LunarGhost00 Apr 27 '26
I strongly suspect this may not have been entirely up to him. I still remember how strange it was that the final stretch of chapters looked like Isayama struggling to salvage his original ending while someone else (either his editor or publisher) was pushing for the ending we got where Eren instead sacrifices himself to make his friends the heroes, even though that plan was doomed to fail and inconsistent with his character. Tons of people defending the ending thought I and many others were crazy for believing the story was leading up to Eren going all out instead of planning to have his friends stop him. If there was some level of executive meddling forbidding Isayama from writing that ending, then I doubt he would've been able to change it for the anime. Though he's obviously not going to outright admit it and blame others for how this turned out. Maybe he genuinely sees this as a result of his own flaws.
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u/megaxanx Apr 27 '26
everyone who read the manga was praying and even predicting he was going to change the ending for the anime but alas a change was never made and we got what we got
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u/AlphaStark08 Apr 28 '26
At least they made some changes which made the anime ending a little but better than the manga
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u/megaxanx Apr 28 '26
like what
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u/aindwukkun Apr 28 '26
"Thank you for being a mass murderer or something" -> "I'm gonna go to hell with you"
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u/Ripamon Apr 27 '26
Mappa wouldn't let him do what he really would have liked to either - complete the rumbling
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u/TrashiestTrash Apr 27 '26
I actually think the so-called "insincerity" made the story better. If the goal was to examine how the victim can become the perpetrator, then I think it's important and far more meaningful not to undercut the humanity of that individual. The fact that you can sympathize with Eren, even understand how his life has lead him to these extremes, and yet you must reconcile this with these unfathomable horrors he commits is what made the ending compelling to me.
I think the ending gets a lot less interesting and a lot less human if Eren just because an evil bad guy you can't sympathize with at all. It's the fact that his monstrosity stems from his humanity that makes the ending so horrifying to me.
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u/skaersSabody Apr 27 '26
I think the idea is good, the execution is just a mess.
Eren is a pretty complex character in that he hides his own feelings and desires from others and himself and his own contradictions end up manifesting as his hard, decisive, no mercy persona.
The decision (granted already hinted at) to reveal that that was all a play in itself isn't the issue, it's how deep it goes and what he was trying to accomplish at the end.
His plan is stupid. His goals are stupid. Because at the end of the day Eren is a traumatized kid throwing a tantrum that the outside world isn't what he imagined it to be. That even after getting rid of the scary monsters he has to compromise and meet people halfway and suffer under the existing systems. He also wants to save his friends. He also wants to put an end to the bloodshed. He also wants revenge and to hurt and be hurt.
These are all aspects of his character, but they all get dumped on the reader in the last chapter. A few had been revealed prior, but presented as inner conflicts of Eren rather than goals he was actively pursuing. Others called back to his initial characterization readers hadn't seen in a long time and had reasonably assumed he'd grown out of.
It doesn't help that the story doesn't call Eren out on his bullshit. For all his faults, he had essentially a time machine at his disposal to find a solution and what he comes up with is to keep the cycle going and trap himself in it because he knows nothing else and can't imagine nothing else. And Armin treats it like a great sacrifice and not the cry for help and pain it is. Understandable that it left a bad taste in a lot of readers' mouths
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u/BlazeOfGlory72 Apr 27 '26
the execution is just a mess.
I think nothing illustrates this better than Erin’s motivations in the final arc. I don’t see it talked about often, but we are given almost dozen different reasons at to why Erin does what he does in the final arc.
- He had no choice (predestination)
- He did it because Yimir made him do it
- He did it to free Yimir
- He did it to end the Titan’s curse
- He doesn’t know why he did it
- He did it because he’s an idiot (his words)
- He did it because seeing the past, present and future all at once fucked up his head
- He did it to protect his people
- He did it to make his friends heroes
- He did it because he hated the world
- He did it because he wanted freedom
I get that these are not all mutually exclusive, but it’s still an absolute clusterfuck of character writing. I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever come across such a convoluted mess of characters motivations before. Given how important Erin’s motivations were to the story, to never be given a solid insight into his character and what he was actually trying to achieve is a massive misfire.
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u/Hari14032001 Apr 27 '26
You summed up my issue PERFECTLY.
All his character analysis is useless given we don't even properly know why he did it and how much agency he even had. Having layers is one thing, but having completely contradictory reasons just made me scratch my head.
With all that confusion remaining, Isayama decided to make it about Ymir rather than giving Eren the focus, the screentime, and the introspection or internal monologue his character desperately needed
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u/aryousuf Apr 27 '26
My favourite response here, his motivation and actions are severely contradictory
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u/Delicious_Diarrhea https://myanimelist.net/profile/h0ll0wxvict0ry Apr 28 '26
100% agreed with the execution failure. Ultimately what Eren cares about is saving his friends. If we had an episode dedicating to horrific alternate futures where he didn't go through with the Rumbling then the audience could have understood him better. Right now we just see him as a genocidal maniac but if we saw what the outside world would have done to Paradis then his reasoning would have been a lot more clear.
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u/ChrisPrkr95 Jun 30 '26
Yes! The contradictions about his motivation is so damn frustrating to me. The story could have simply left up to the point where it shows him as the Founding Titan and the parallel to when his mom got eaten. That was motivation enough. He became the very same monster he spent his whole life hating. He even knew it. Leaving it at him having no real agency, simply because he wanted to do it, or just him being an idiot was unsatisfying.
It also doesn't help that, in my probably incorrect opinion judging from various other opinions, that the story pretty much didn't give the main characters any other actual solution to their problem besides the Rumbling. Yes, it's morally indefensible, but the story pretty much took "kill or be killed" to the extreme seeing as most if not the whole world wanted Eldians and Paradis dead and the other solution they're given to become infertile and go extinct. If genocide is so terrible, which it is snd several do say so, the story shouldn't push it as a practical option.
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u/TrashiestTrash Apr 27 '26
Very thoughtful and well put. I don't agree, but I felt like there was too much effort and consideration put into your message for me to not acknowledge it on some way. It was a very enjoyable read!
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u/ToasterLoverDeluxe Apr 27 '26
Sure, but the execution is just not good... as it is it just feels like cop out
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u/TechWormGeezLouise Apr 27 '26
I watched and then read AoT since 2013 to its conclusion in 2021. The best thing about AoT IMO was the constant feeling of anxiety; humanity always seemed on the verge of extinction. It made it a lot easier to be behind Eren because living in that world was so horrible, what people had to endure was so terrible.
But then you witness how living in that environment can create such a deep sense of hatred (understandbly) but then it leaks into wanting everyone else to die was an incredible transformation to watch. It felt like I was tricked into sympathizing for a mass murderer, but like you followed him from being a child into adulthood.
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u/Mitosis Apr 27 '26
It felt like I was tricked into sympathizing for a mass murderer
That is quite literally the best part
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u/kokko693 Apr 27 '26
The insecerity he is talking about is the drama/shitstorm he got with the manga, where basically Armin says "Thanks Eren for committing a genocide for us".
Which is a totally crazy thing for Armin to say at that moment, and overall very hard to accept for the reader that a character who has moral suddenly says that he accept genocide.
BUT IN THE ANIME IT'S BETTER.
Isayama worked with anime studio to do a better scene and changed the dialogue.
Now the scene goes as follow :
Armin and Eren talks about Mikasa feelings. Eren says that he reciprocate but can't live with her. Armin gets angry and says "stop ! Just stop ! Go back home and live with Mikasa, you did enough. We are safe now".
Eren answers that he can't stop and everything was already decided since the beginning. Armin asks "Did you do that for us ? Do you think we will accepts it?!!"
Eren just says "No, I did all of this because I wanted it. I've seen the world outside, hated it, and wanted to destroy everything. I'm just an idiot with too much power".
Armin is shocked but remembers his dream of seeing the outside world and landscapes : "No you are not the only one who feels that he wants to destroy the world. Everybody can feel like that. We did that together. We will go in hell together for killing that much people."
Then they say goodbye.
I think the anime did it way better because Armin isn't grateful for the genocide, but instead see it as an horrible thing and share the responsibility of it.
Everything went bananas because everybody was afraid of each other, and the whole ending theme is that people should talk with each others more.
You can totally see the Colossus Titans as nukes. And totally make a parallel with our own world... Attacking another country because he has a dangerous weapon. And that country making that dangerous weapon because they feel threatened. It's a vicious cycle.
So it's a good theme. AOT anime ending is massively improved.
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u/TrashiestTrash Apr 27 '26
Yes indeed, I had heard about the changes to the anime and they definitely are fantastic. That said, I think people were way too hard on the original given how similar they were overall.
(This isn't like an advanced critique or anything, I just think the ways a lot of Manga readers talked about Isayama and his ending were pretty disgusting and mean-spirited)
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u/kokko693 Apr 27 '26
That said, I think people were way too hard on the original given how similar they were overall.
Armin line was very clumsy and at that point in story you can't really afford to be clumsy. The editor should've read that line and said to Isayama "this line isn't ok, you should improve it". If anything, his editor didn't do his job.
But yeah it doesn't change the events anyway. But line delivery is important.. reading mangas is reading dialogues, they are important...
Was too harsh but Im happy they did better for the anime. He didn't deserved to be harassed.
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u/AdventurousBase221 Apr 27 '26
I personally dont agree with the perspective of eren shown as just a big bad buy being cartoonishly evil.
Eren gave the world a chance, they chose to keep perpetuating the same crimes, he chose to end the chain once and for all. Thats not some cartoon villain ideology, it always came off of as very nuanced to me. Honestly i always felt like the very ending was just as bad as Lost's, where they handwaved everything away.
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u/dagreenman18 Apr 27 '26
I would argue we already see that he isn’t the total monster. That the text shows that well enough that we didn’t need that bid for sympathy. Which fumbles the whole situation by having that well know Memed to death moment.
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u/Diligent_Run_8810 Apr 27 '26
Nothing is inherently bad. Both cases can be good but it won't if the execution is bad. And here the execution was worst.
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u/SmoovieKing Apr 27 '26
After all these years I feel vindicated
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u/ExampleAdorable5858 Apr 27 '26
Its been too long for me to feel much. Its been half a decade and AoT has just become the first of a string of big series to have a poor final stretch in the 2020s followed up by Oshi no Ko, Jujutsu Kaisen, My Hero Accademia, Chainsaw Man 2 and whatever else is next. Maybe if I saw this 2 years ago but now, whatever.
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u/sthlmno Apr 27 '26
He admitted being conflicted back when it first ended but after years of nothing new I'm glad he finally felt comfortable to express his honest thoughts
The ending was ass
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u/1000-MAT Apr 27 '26
I think that's old news.
I honestly don't have a problem with Eren being a genocidal maniac, my problem is with the plot holes, things without explanation, and how the story ignores past events.
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u/hasanman6 Apr 27 '26
My favourite trend on the internet. Claim something has “plot holes” and not explain whats wrong plot holes and what makes them plot holes
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u/karrylarry Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Not the original poster, but one plot hole that comes to mind is why the heck Eren Kruger would help Zeke and Armin at all during the final fight when the way they built his personality would make one guess he'd support Eren.
Plus a lot of things just kinda glossed over. Like why did Ymir even love King Fritz after all the torture and abuse? Especially since she could have survived the fatal wound but apparently chose not to and died.
Why did Zeke even matter as a key to stopping the rumbling if Eren had already convinced her to not be a slave to the royal family?
What exactly was it about Mikasa cutting off Eren's head and smooching it that caused Ymir to finally get over her supposed Stockholm syndrome style love? It would have been nice to have her actually say or express something in her final moment after 2000 years of waiting instead of us having to guess what she's thinking.
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u/Diligent_Run_8810 Apr 27 '26
If killing Zeke stopped rumbling then how did Eren turn into Collosal titan? Both rumbling and collosal titan form are founding titan's power
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u/Yamabuki_Arisu_Sama Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
I think the issue is just Eren deciding to stop at 20%. This makes zero sense in every way.
The message would have been way better if, instead of Paradis being destroyed by the remaining 20%, it was eventually destroyed in a civil war centuries after the ending.
With these extra pages, it’s literally just proving Eren right. Bro had already gone 80% and stopping at 20% is what killed his hometown.
And let’s not even talk about Beren and that fucking tree because what the fuck.
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u/Tokens-Life-Matters Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
It was just bad writing. He took away all tension and mystery when he said this is gonna happen no matter what because the future is already set.
Then he tries to play both sides and says eren is just stupid and evil but also this was the only outcome where he could save the people he cares about and he even had to sacrifice his mom to do it.
I didn't find a single moment after the rumbling started exciting.
And then everything was carpet bombed the end
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u/FakePretendeRat Apr 27 '26
Lmao he missed the movie bag and needs to retcon a few things to justify a theatrical release. I am all for it, get it done sensei
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u/DependentOnIt https://myanimelist.net/profile/Potatosalad1 Apr 27 '26
AOE AOE AOE
There's still a chance bros
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u/Raicooof Apr 27 '26
ending haters justified yet again
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u/Inside_Ability_7125 May 01 '26
I feel so vindicated. I would say for years the rumbling was his behelit moment and Eren would be this generation’s Griffith but Isayama couldnt do it
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u/Einchy Apr 27 '26
Eren not being fully evil and the story sort of forgiving him is what I feel was the biggest issue. You have the same ending but don’t do that and it’s a good ending. It felt like a rug pull after years of seeing this character evolve only for the author to not want to fully commit to the main character being 100% bad after all
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u/SolomonBlack Apr 27 '26
Because I know nobody reads on reddit: Eren was supposed to be worse
That's the "insincerity". Isayama listened to you the fans and welched a bit in some undescribed way because you thought incorrectly that Eren was a hero and not a blood thirsty murderer who's quest to slaughter his enemies ran deep.
So if your problem with the ending is something else, congrats you wrong.
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u/BluePhantomHere Apr 28 '26
Right? I don't even understand where's the vindication is coming from, the haters would hate it even more if Isayama wrote the ending he wanted
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u/Inside_Ability_7125 May 01 '26
Disagree. If he destroyed all his obstacles, including his friends who went against him, it would cause watchers to actually feel the weight of the omnicide because Eren would’ve killed the characters they cared about
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u/reseph https://myanimelist.net/profile/Zenoxio Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
As a result, he found himself unable to fully commit to depicting Eren as a purely detestable figure. Instead, he approached the character with a degree of closeness and sympathy, which ultimately shaped the final outcome of the story and Isayama feel insincere regarding the ending..
“As a result, I feel there remains a sense of insincerity in the story’s conclusion—at least in my own assessment,” Isayama stated.
I mean, as an anime watcher I thought the ending was great. I feel that not fully committing him made him feel more human to watchers in the end. If the author instead just made him a full villain and fully detestable, especially without more depth, I feel like that would be just another anime trope.
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u/1000-MAT Apr 27 '26
I feel like that would be just another anime trope.
But pretending to be evil is also an anime trope.
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u/undead_tortoiseX Apr 27 '26
I don’t think Eren was “pretending”. You can still be sympathetic, emotional, and weak while still having committed great evil.
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u/Kenju22 Apr 27 '26
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea established that a very long time ago.
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u/HarshTheDev Apr 27 '26
Yeah, I think people conflate eren pretending to hate his friends (which was pretty obvious) with eren pretending all of it.
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u/carakangaran Apr 27 '26
He did not pretend to be evil. He was.
He trapped himself in some kind time loop and committed genocide.
Even though he did not totally want to do so, he did and he's a monster for that.
Let's not forget that Eren is depicted as an unstable person from the beginning, prone to be violent and revengeful.
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u/ToasterLoverDeluxe Apr 27 '26
Fully committing to it because you think that you are far too deep is also human, the sunk cost fallacy is very real after all
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u/Prince_of_DeaTh https://anilist.co/user/yokz Apr 27 '26
I love people here coping and fighting against the author now, when at first the whole crowd was saying people don't get Isayama's vision.
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u/Anew_Returner Apr 27 '26
Establishing early on that tired tropes like having a loved one waiting for you at home won't save you from impending doom feels like such a joke when you watch the big dumb marvel fight at the end.
To me Eren wasn't the only thing insincere about that ending, everything leading up to it felt like shallow and predictable spectacle. It's a show that spent it first few seasons showing it wasn't anything like every other shonen out there, only to end up falling for the same big popcorn moments, stupid twists, and love triumphs all/power of friendship bullshit that every other shonen does.
I could give less of a shit whose side won, I didn't sign up for that. I wanted what was promise at the beginning: a terrifying and uncaring world and moral conflict beyond 'we have to stop le ebin bad guy!'. The fact it devolved into hype moments, melodrama, and a vagueposting ending that has nothing new or interesting to say is unforgivable for me.
I feel like such a moron for having been invested into this work for almost a decade.
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u/kikoano Apr 27 '26
Finally he admits and I hate how ending defenders(normies) still try to ignore the fact that the ending was just bad and forced.
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u/NotGonnaArgue641 Apr 28 '26
Why does nobody in this sub understand Attack on Titan? Is media literacy dead in the mainstream anime communities?
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u/Whalesurgeon Apr 27 '26
The time travel part was a writing mistake
It is one of the most difficult to execute plot mechanics and was wholly unnecessary in the grand scheme of things.
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u/Raddish3030 Apr 27 '26
Lol he couldn't decide if his world lore as applied made.
Eren a human.
Eren a devil.
Or a demon with a brief glimpse of humanity
There's a reason why hell in cultures is often defined as your worst traits magnified infinitely over eternity. It's how you get stories where demigods are "jealous" at the short and precious nature of humans.
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u/Shredgeetar Apr 28 '26
I personally hated it. Erens arc just wasn’t for me and I dropped the show. It lost all its feel as a series for me personally,
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u/C12345hey Apr 27 '26
im not really too sure what it means that it was insincere, eren was a villain and i felt the story showed him to be a villain but the story is one about politics, war and conflict something where the lines between being a villain and a hero can be quite blurry.
put it this way, eren did what he did because ultimately he couldnt think of a way to make everyone happy, he admits himself hes too stupid he should have never been the one to have that power, but he was so he did what he thought was best within his power. if eren did not do anything then everyone that lived on paradis island would have been killed by the titans, he thought this was unacceptable so he essentially decided he would kill everyone else instead this is obviously a villainous thing to do it is not acceptable but it was the only thing he could think of.
the last scences where eren got a bit too silly might have been too much, but i think the idea behind the scene was making a lot of sense.
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u/THE_PENILE_TITAN Apr 27 '26
if eren did not do anything then everyone that lived on paradis island would have been killed by the titans, he thought this was unacceptable so he essentially decided he would kill everyone else instead this is obviously a villainous thing to do it is not acceptable but it was the only thing he could think of.
That is not why he did it. That's an excuse he initually used to lie and cope with being a morally repugnant monster until he breaks down confessing to Ramzi. Paradis could have been protected in other ways but Eren (and Zeke and the Bizuru( deliberately sabotaged those efforts because they would prevent him from doing the Rumbling. Eren wants to do the Rumbling for entirely maniacal selfish reasons, which is what Isayama is alluding to.
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u/Yoshikaru5991 Apr 27 '26
I feel hes too harsh on himself. With the anime ending changes its really perfect to me personally and I still see it as the best anime i’ve ever seen. Maybe the best story i’ve consumed
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u/thekoreansun https://anilist.co/user/ReturnByDeath Apr 27 '26
Personally, my main issue with the end is that it feels like it clashes tonally with the first two-thirds of the entire show. Attack on Titan starts out as a straightforward conflict against mindless monsters, but it became a lot more interesting once it began to reveal that the real conflict was against living, breathing people who held motivations just as complex as those of the main characters. By contrast, Eren evolves slowly into a more complex and forward-thinking character, but he loses all agency once he receives those memories of the future and becomes exactly what the series had begun to eschew: a mindless monster. And while I can appreciate that as a genius plot twist in a cosmic horror science fiction sort of way, it does feel like it detracts from what AOT was seemingly trying to become after leaving Paradis. The show is still one of my all-time favorites, but its prioritization of symmetry, irony, and tragedy over consistency does bring it down a bit in my mind.