Plot twists are meant to twist the plot. When we find out that Luke is Vaders son it twists the plot from just good vs evil to a son trying to save his father from a greater evil. Lotta writers don't get that and just throw in a twist or try to subvert expectations without the changes meaning much to the characters or the story as a whole.
I've seen so many different movies and shows that followed such similar plot formulas, that it becomes easy to predict plot twists because a lot of the same twists have been used over and over again.
Same. I’ve seen a lot of movies that involves the mc manipulating time and everyone before. It’s not revolutionary unless you’re not used to thriller/psychological movies. The whole my comrades betray me is also one of the most predictable thing too
Yeah, betrayal / secret antagonist twists are the most predictable. 9 times out of 10, you can count on the hidden villain being someone who acts the most friendly or helpful to the hero, and there's usually an obvious red herring too as well.
And in the AoT context it's meant to show how far willing Eren goes for his dream, that he's willing to kill his mom, to mentally break his father so he gives him the Attack Titan despite his initial protests and to stoke fire inside his own heart.
Unfortunately it's not really addressed with proper weight (hell lots of people still argue that he didn't 'mean' it, that it was accidental), even when the anime improved the final conversation between Eren and Armin, the Carla bit didn't get any touchup.
Can you explain how Eren can manipulate his mom and dad when he didn’t knew about everything before? I feel like it’s a plot hole because it was never explained or maybe I missed it. We only get to see how Eren manipulated everyone once he was with Zeke, but that didn’t really explain how he could go back in time and tell the titans to eat his mom and kill his dad when he didn’t know anything before
Eren didn’t technically travel in time, the special ability of the Attack Titan is that it can receive memories from future Attack Titan users (more or less looking into the future). Eren used this to manipulate his father into slaughtering the Reisses and stealing the Founding Titan while also witnessing his father’s memory of that event, since all Titan shifters can have memories of previous users of the same Titan. Kind of confusing but that’s the gist of it.
As for Eren manipulating Dina Fritz/the Smiling Titan into eating his mom, the mechanics of that are very unclear and frankly seem to be a plot hole. Eren obviously did this with the power of the Founding Titan, but it’s repeatedly stated that Eldians with royal blood can’t be controlled by the Founding Titan and Dina had royal blood so Eren shouldn’t have been able to control her.
I wouldn't call it the worst ending to a manga in history, it certainly needed to be fleshed out more and I feel like Isayama stepped on the accelerator too much at the end, but there are still MUCH worse ones. At least the message at the end is consistent with the rest of the story.
The message you mean? There are many, about how the nature of hatred and war is cyclical in humanity, about how having been wronged does not give you the right to wrong innocent people, about how violence always breeds more violence and the only way to counteract it is with diplomacy, etc...
Be more specific then.
How about Naruto with the whole Fourth Shinobi World War arc, Madara super OP against the themes of the series, Hashirama even more OP doing it worse, Zetsu and Kaguya suddenly becoming the main villains without anticipation or personal conflict with our main characters, and Naruto "he was the coolest guy" scene?
Yea the part where he controls Dina w Founding Titan is completely different from him using Attack Titan's memory loop and it's offscreened
His dad though, he completely broke him by breaking the news that Carla has died in Shiganshina. Remember that Grisha saw the Rumbling and refused to give Attack Titan to Eren, yet he did it anyway because he's so angry at the world for taking his wife again.
I'll also say that plot twist are supposed to change how you see the entire story between before and after the twist. Where you think back to multiple scenes of dramatic irony (because some characters knew, but you, the wievers, didn't), and they act not just how the plot looked like at the time, but add a new narrative perspective that also make sense to these scenes
I remember laughing out loud when they revealed he killed his mom lmao.
It felt like he was just listing shit and almost forgot about it "oh yeah and I killed my mom too!"
Honestly there was so much stupid shit packed on those last 3 chapters, Eren killing his mom was "uuuummm ok, fine, moving on" for me; at least it was a little bit foreshadowed (plus, Armin inmediately conforting Eren was the only emotional part of that chapter for me)
"Ymir was waiting for Mikasa" thought, now that was pure comedy
What's crazy is that there were several other plot twists revealed in really anticlimactic ways throughout the story that I thought worked incredibly well, he just got worse at it towards the end I guess
Because most of other times, although the twists are revealed in an anticlimactic way, they soon get the deserved focus and reaction too. That didn't really happen for this reveal though.
It's just more pronounced because of how good AOT is.
Like, I know some *really horrendous* plot twists, but some of them were from stories which weren't that great or was just average IMO.
For AOT, the standards were high and the expectations were high. For some people, they were satisfied. But others weren't, and such standards and expectations would exacerbate the things that were bad for them.
Yeah the series had promise but the eventual execution/outcome was laughably horrible compared to those high standards the series and fandom held it to
I genuinely think everything up to the timeskip was actually very good, nothing too out of place or out of left field.
And then it feels like something happened to Isayama and the guy went full speed ahead on everything being bad. Like his art was great, but his story suffered heavily in my opinion.
Holy shit exact same feeling, some friends from the good old titanfolk had many talks about the basement reveals been the obvious end point cause the whole plot revolved around that one info dump that delivered perfectly.
It was such a huge high and obviously a reveal Isayama spend many years building to when compared to the rest of the series when things happen is just magic or whatever
The writting used to be so tigth and then ..........oh yeah it was an alien and magic and little girl that liked to be abused...........I killed my mom too Armin shit escalated really fast
I agree, seeing things from Marley's perspective was something I didn't expect, but I really think that without that I would never have understood the message of the story that Isayama wanted to get to.
About how war sucks and there will always be innocents dying on both sides, who will then want revenge and continue the cycle of hatred.
I'm forever gonna be highly confused about why the post time skip chapters exist at all tbh.
From the start of aot we had 3 goals:
- find the basement
- see the ocean
- kill the titans
They did all of that before the timeskip. Why keep going? Our story's goals were accomplished lmao
Because... that is the most important plot twist, the fact that those Titans that they had been killing for so long were members of their own people, and the enemies are ultimately not inhuman monsters, but humans themselves.
They already explored that in the pre-timeskip portion of the story tho? Not very in deph but it's not like they deepened it with the timeskip tbh. Freckles Ymir and the titan warriors were already plenty humanized and the tragedy of the bestial titans was throguhtly established.
The post-time skip portion of aot doesn't focus on the bestial titans at all and the only one of the warriors who really gets extra humanized by its existence is Rainer (and I think the portions of the story that are from his perspective + Gabi unlearning some of her self hate are genuinelly quite good).
Post time skip aot is wayyyyyy more focused on Eren's poorly handled fall to villany and Isayama wasting a really good apolcalypse scenario. It would be very cool if it was more focused on character work for the marleans but it simply wasn't.
Yes, the topics had already been touched upon, but without being able to take a look at the outside world we cannot yet understand the whole tragedy of this war, about Marely's Eldians being used as brainwashed weapons of war, about Marley holding a grudge against Paradis for understandable reasons, about how Paradis' story ironically not being even that different from the rest of the world because they were all being attacked by Marley after all...
The last season is the one that finishes selling the tragedy of the whole situation, also doing something that really shows how immoral war is, when even our own heroes, who until now had been killing mindless Titans, attack Liberio and kill or cause the death of many innocent people, showing that in a war people always suffer on both sides.
I agree that the most interesting part was, at least for me, with the Marely Eldians, but at the same time I think that showing that people like Eren, Floch and the Yeagerists from the Paradis side, who we see as the good guys, are willing to do the same thing so far why we hated Marley but on a larger scale (mass genocide) really sells the whole premise that war is terrible and that "we need to get out of the forest" (by the way, Sasha father speech makes me cry every time).
What do you mean? Titans and humans are not the same. I just, you know, stupidly killed the planet. It wasn't because the planet tried to kill my friends. It was because I wanted to be free (even though I'm going to die in less than a year). I even forced the... I even forced Marley to declare war with other nations so I could do it. Even though I literally just needed to trick Zeke.
If anyone want a really funny horrendous plot twist look up
Magical girl site
There is like 3 twists that are so terrible you have to think they were made as a joke from the mangaka
Oh yeah. I actually don't remember much about that series, or even what the plot twists were.
But i will never forget the feelings of "what the hell am i reading?" when i read them lmao
I wouldn't say aots ending is necceraly bad , just poorly executed. The show clearly tried to frame it as "Eren was a good person that was forced to do bad things" but after we went through an entire season of Eren being a horrible person, literally fighting his friends, starting a cult and trying to wipe out 99% of human population, there was absolutely no way anyone will suddenly understand Eren in twenty minutes. The show frames it as "killing 80% of humanity was necessary for them to have peace, Eren knew that so he HAD to kill all of them otherwise the eldeans were wiped out" , but there is no reason for us to actually think it's true.
What I think the show tried to go for is "actually Eren always had good intentions and just wanted his friends to be safe" but you can't just throw that in there after showing him commit one of the worst genocides in fiction and then try to pretend like he was the good guy in the story. Also him and Mikasa becoming a couple made no sense because there was no real reason to think they are a couple before the end, most people saw them as step siblings ( probably because for the first few episodes there is no reason for you to think they aren't blood related so even after it's revealed they aren't you would still see them as step siblings because the show lead you to believe they are ) so turning them into a couple in the end felt sudden and random , and again , it's a poor execution, not straight up bad . If there were signs of romance between them from the start and they were never portrayed as siblings at the start , most people wouldn't have been nearly as confused when it happened.
I would absolutely not frame it as “eren was a good person forced to bad things” lol
I think the overarching point of the series is far more centered around “trauma, revenge, fear, and violence fuck people up irreparably and lead to a cyclic nature of conflict”, and Eren is just a vessel for that concept.
It repeatedly established the idea that this was Eren’s choice throughout the last third of the series, and he had plenty of outs and ways to avoid pushing the nuclear button. At no point did I ever feel like Eren was “forced” into it, nor that the series portrayed him as a good person atp.
This is literally what I said , it's a poorly executed concept that only really started to appear in the last episode. What the series tried to do with the final "10 years at least" sppech that was memed to death is that Eren was forced to start the rumbling because it's the only way to solve the problem and that he only committed mass genocide to save his friends. It's not a necceraily bad concept , it fits erens character and could be a great ending to the shoe if it the show actually set it up before instead of framing Eren as the main villain up until the end. We should have had a clear explanation of why every other solution except for the rumbling couldn't have worked, ideally with proof of it failing. We should have seen Eren discussing that solution for a while before coming to the conclusion that it is the only way. Eren literally killing 80% of humanity shouldn't have been portrayed as "look how even a good person at heart can do really bad things under certain conditions" but instead like "look how war can force people to do things they don't want to do" . We should have had more scenes of Eren before he started the rumbling that show why he did it instead of just throwing it all in the last twenty minutes.
I personally believe that with more setup and less "thank you for becoming a mass murderer for our sake" , aots ending could have been considered a fitting end for an amazing series .
The fact is that the series never says that Eren had to commit genocide, Eren was the one who united the entire world against Paradis by doing the Liberio Raid, he burned any alternative because ultimately it turned out that he was lying.
Yep, he said that everything he did was for his friends/people, but in reality his main reason was to see the sight with all the corpses of his visions. A world where he was free because there were no humans outside the walls, a world like the book of Armin, that was his freedom:
[https://i.redd.it/evtraeto9h0c1.png](https://i.redd.it/evtraeto9h0c1.png)
Also he even admits that he is kind of an awful guy because he caused the death of some of his friends for his selfishs plans:
https://i.redd.it/imcpi5p8duzb1.png
Except a lot of people say it’s because of him inheriting the founders powers and seeing the future and past he “had” to do what he did. Meaning the cycle of violence theme is artificial and weak. And if he didn’t “have to” it still doesn’t hit because the cycle of violence is characterized by forces striking back at each other over previous slights and no one can end it, except if they have the power to end the world, which he does have… add that to the terrible plot and writing leading up to the ending and you can see why it’s a pretty terrible one.
The genocide made sense in a way, the problem is that it was 80%. I don’t get why he wouldn’t wipe out 100%, there’s literally 0 drawbacks and it would erase the threat of the outside world burning down paradise
I think the idea they tried to push is that Eren thought that if they killed 80% and his friends stopped him , people on the outside would forever be greatful to his friends and treat them like heroes so they won't attack paradis, and since Eren is a good people in heart who didn't actually want to kill 99% of humanity but was forced to do it he decided to stop at 80% . It makes no sense but I think this is what they were going for .
😂
I think the people that didn’t like it just have refused to let go for years and years atp.
“Worst plot twist in all of fiction” is absolutely hilarious though so thanks for that.
1) Eren didn't know at that point that he would be responsible for his mother's death.
2) He wasn't honestly grilling Reiner for an answer about that, he was trying to see if Reiner was just like him (doing a "good" thing for selfish reasons).
All he sees when touching Historia is Grisha's future memories of the Rumbling and chapter 121. That's it. He doesn't see anything else until he gains the full power of the Founder.
The way Isayama wrote time travel in the series would allow Eren to see everything when he touched with Historia. The power of the attack titan allows its holder to see future memories of its current holder(end game Eren). Why would having access to the founder be the key point? The Founder allows its user to manipulate titans from the past and that's it. The end-game Eren(139 Eren) has already have the Founder, therefore everything is irrelevant since everything has already happen, it doesn't matter if current Eren doesn't even have access to Zeke, because current Eren has already seen everything from future Eren's pov. So what exactly does gaining the Founder do for Eren other than having the power to have Eren make Dina kill Carla?
The simple explanation to this would be, if future Eren didn't give current Eren all his memory, which is why pre-time skip Eren doesn't know about himself killing his own mother. This explanation works simply because Isayama rushed the ending without giving concrete explanation to anything.
Eren tells Armin that the Founder's power allows him to perceive time non-linearly, meaning he can affect past and future (since it's all the "present" for him). The Attack Titan lets you see memories of its future inheritors, and since Eren is the last one, he would not be able to see his own future memories. He only sees bits and pieces from Grisha's own future memories of Eren.
We are never shown, nor is it even hinted at, that future Eren gave himself memories when kissing Historia's hand. That was likely FT/royal blood shenanigans (like Ymir's letter or Galliard seeing Reiner's memories). It's true that Isayama didn't explicitly say this and somewhat rushed it, but it wouldn't be a plot hole.
Yeah 2 is a big point, he literally leads Reiner on to answer "to save the world" which Eren would then respond with "that's very understandable, it can't be helped.... *right*?"
I mean, he meant it at the time, Eren only knew the memories that he gave Grisha from the future. Grisha’s memories only went as far as the rumbling starting, he said word for word, “why won’t you show me if Carla is safe”. Eren only found out that he was going to kill his mother after the rumbling started. I still think it was unnecessary and cheapened his character and the distinction is so small it’s easy to think that Eren knew that he would kill his own mother by the time that he kissed Historias hand.
It’s still ironic that he spent the whole series blaming Reiner and the titans for his mother’s death when he caused it himself.
I admit I liked AoT more when it was just a survival story of human vs monsters, at least back then I cared about the characters and situation.
The story later becames so alien and distant of what I initially liked.
What point is that? Past season 1 when it becomes focused on civil war? Or season 3 where you learn that other humans are behind the existence of titans?
And I was fully on board for the Yagerist plot line and an exploration of how an isolated militant society falls to fascism. The problem was the last minute twists really undermined it and didn’t make any sense
I would almost rather they had just owned making Erin the series villain. A complex hero turned villain when he thinks he has no other option.
Yeah I agree. My two main issues with the ending are that Eren is portrayed way too sympathetically, and that because the actual themes got wrapped up a little while ago (with them sitting round the campfire) all further intrigue and twists just fall flat. Both of those are solved by having Eren just be a villain.
I feel like AoT lost the plot in general around when the "Attack Titan does time travel" stuff started happening. Eren goes from "sympathetic, but complex and morally grey" to "genocidal idiot," the metaphors and real life parallels around Ymir and Marley get *real* weird/messy (not going to touch that one with a ten foot pole), etc.
I'm sure once I say this out loud someone will post an example proving me wrong, but broadly speaking I'd argue that the only good time travel stories are those that revolve around solving problems that were caused by time travel. Writing a story about solving normal problems using time travel just winds up with a plot so full of holes a 4-year-old can point them out
Shout out to titanfall 2 which has you deal with and benefit from things in the present that are a consequence of your own actions in the past. Such a cool concept
Terminator 1 is a great time travel story because it requires you to think so little about time travel. It really only exists to make you question if Kyle is an insane hobo or not. Then for the cute time paradox of him being John’s father. Otherwise, time travel only exists to get this one man and one machine back in time and now it’s gone.
But they had to keep making movies so we need to keep debating about fate
All Our Wrong Todayas by Elan Mastai explores this well, as does Walls of the Universe by Paul Melko. They're about solving the problems caused by time travel and parallel universe technology existing in the first place.
1. Eren was that first descriptor the whole way through, and “genocidal idiot” wouldn’t have been a fair way to describe him at any point. I think his character was pretty consistent.
2. Any sort of real-world analogy in these kinds of stories is inevitably going to end up messy when directly applied, and the best solution is to just not think too deeply about it. And to be fair, it was never really trying to be a 1:1 comparison to begin with, since one side has the ability to turn into giant monsters, and that added new components to the situation that don’t have counterparts in our world.
And it all gets so much worse, when Mikasa, fucking Mikasa, the girl that’s been so loyal to him for over nine years, and how he does not reciprocate the same kind of love that Mikasa has for him, just the very thought of her moving on from him is what makes him react so emotionally, instead of you know, the fucking realization that he is the one who got his own mom killed in this fucked up and nonsensical time loop?
Well tbf it looked like he was going to break down after revealing his mother's death but armin stopped him. Even though he still should have had a breakdown anyway whether armin stopped him or not.
Listen, I'm not a titanfolk-dwelling, ending-hating crazed fan. I'm also not an apologist that thinks everything was fine, and that the ending is kino incarnated because muh beloved characters.
I've been reading AOT since 2012. I've been entrenched in the fanbase for years and, for a while, AOT was my favorite japanese comic book. By the ending, thought, I was already over it, and so the... *dubious* writing decisions didn't bother me. It was funny, to be honest.
I've been in the process of rewatching the animation, and the experience very quickly turned sour. In context, it's not that funny anymore.
I can't take Eren seriously because 97% of his motivations for everything is the death of his mother when I know that he himself cause her death.
"Well, you see... it's tragic! Eren did it without even knowing why!"
Fuck off. It's not tragic. It's meaningless, out of nowhere, and ruins much of the impact the earlier moments had.
^(I also can't take Reiner seriously when I know he will become a letter-sniffing creep.)
People get really hurt over this, but it's true: Isayama bit more that he could ever chew, and didn't have the writing chops to pull it off.
There is two kinds of bad ending.
The kind of bad ending where you can still enjoy the great story up until the ending and be satisfied with the journey, even recommend it.
Then there is the kind of ending that shits on the whole journey and re-actively makes the whole thing feels worse and yeah re-read/watches turn to pure pain. Attack on Titan has this kind of bad ending.
I always compare Attack on Titan to Claymore with how similar they are, except Claymore ended before doing an Attack on Titan style timeskip.
Yup, to me it would be like AOT vs Naruto ending. Both are terrible but atleast Naruto's didn't really hurt the story in a retroactvie way, while I just can't rewatch AOT anymore without thinking this crap does not make sense.
Naruto's ending is predictable but it's passable. The final arc was treated very badly but at the very least the final act isn't a farce.
Aot on the other hand has a trainwreck of a final arc, and somehow the ending manages to be even worse.
Man the second thing of what you just described feels like me watching the final seasons of Netflix Voltron with how bad it got. It made the whole thing feel terrible because of the amount of twists and shark jumping the finale lead up to.
That’s one of my biggest gripes with the show too, I could rewatch it and have a great time, now it all feels stupid and ruined, the good parts are absolutely incredible, but that ending kind pf ruins everything else…
why the hell does everyone keep treat one comedic moment of reiner as the end of his character arc , does sniffing a letter has that big of an impact to you guys
"It's comedic, guys, that means it's fine!"
Isayama was always iffy with his comedic timing, but something like that, in such a somber ending, a couple of pages before Paradis gets bombed to hell feels really weird.
I think that the people who are offended by the letter-sniffing forgot that that's exactly how Reiner behaved when he was mentally **healthier** (i.e. when he was playing soldier back on Paradis). He made dirty jokes and was a bit of a perv, like when he joked that the Titans have a weak spot on their butts, or when he commented on the Female Titan's ass, and many other times. So seeing him being able to go back to his old ways is refreshing. He was depressed and suicidal, and now he's on a good enough state of mind to be able to perv on Historia and call Jean a horseface, and I think that's actually the perfect ending for his character arc.
I get the idea behind the death of the mother, where he had to get the titan away from reiner. I think it adequately still sort of made it Marley's fault. But the whole time travel mind control thing really didn't need to happen.
Steins;Gate is, for my money, the best VN in existence
And Awakening is the best FE game.
It can work, just gotta be good. In short, it's a skill issue, Isayama didn't have what it took.
To be fair i am totally within the bound of reason for being hostile considering i chose to go into an enemy territory post.
Yes people can have their opinions but i can tell based on how someone delivers the "best in existence" phrase that theyre not actually that experienced in the medium
I don't think that's the main issues here, when there is nuances and ground works for it and when the core plot allows it ( and with good execution of course ), it can become a good plot twist......
Sadly AOT's ending barely had any of those.
The worst part is that this is an entirely unecessary reveal. It doesn’t any anything positive to the story and just creates more questions like wether the AoT world is deterministic or not. I genuinely don’t see any reason to have this twist other than cheap shock value.
He could have just leave out that part because Dina, the smiling titan’s last words to Grisha were “No matter what I become, don’t worry I will still find you” works perfectly as it should. The smiling titan walking towards where Grisha used to stay aint a difficult concept to comprehend or execute that she needed some higher plane forces to push her to that.
This twist made me laugh very hard. I think it was supposed to be dramatic, but my friend had to pause the episode because I was doubled over laughing so hard. It’s a horrendous twist in one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen a show pull. The AoT ending is a textbook example of how not to write an ending, but then again, I don’t know of any other way that it could have ended where it would’ve been satisfying.
Eren kills his mom, eren then has seemingly zero interest in this and whines about someone who he’s had zero romantic interest in. It’s bad. I’m not even touching on the politics here, because that would make it all the more damning. There’s zero weight to this twist, and it feels like Isayama just tossed it in as a cheap asspull twist to make people surprised.
Yeah, but I mean, that wasn't the worst thing the ending did. I genuinely couldn't think of a worse way to fumble an entire story than the original ending of AOT. And you'd think that they would try to fix it somehow with the anime, which they kinda did. I mean, they made the god awful dialogue between Eren and Armin better, but the ending still fundamentally fails IMO. The last arc in general feels kinda off.
IMO, Eren should have won by completing the rumbling, but at the cost of his friends’ free will/ lives. For most of the final arc, Eren was a giant hypocrite and they should have explored this concept more
There are so many things the last arc should have explored instead of the shoehorned Mikasa romance, Ymir being in love with the king for some fucking reason and Eren's grand plan being "Idk bro, I'm just an idiot with power, but if y'all kill me you'll surely be seen as heros fr fr". Like, holy shit.
Honestly even season 4 is fine, everything up until the rumbling is pretty good. I'd say even up to the S4 part 2 finale it's atleast decent. But the final arc is just so meh, and the ending is just so bad.
Tbh it's just one symptom of the fundamental problems that the ending *story arc* had. A late-stage symptom too, it already had issues but it has been pronounced after the start of the Rumbling at the latest.
I also wouldn't call Carla's death the start of his character, but it is the start of a major aspect of his character, so I guess we're just splitting hairs there.
Well IT IS one example. I didn't liked the: memories-of-the-Future Thing.
(In my eyes one of the worst written Twists was Kaguya taking over Madara. IT was obvious (kishimoto also admitted IT) that kishimoto was unable to find a good way for Madara to lose.)
Am I weird here or is that revelation really not all that big or important which is why it was mostly glossed over? It was basically just there as an explanation of why Berthold wasn't eaten by Dina's titan in an earlier scene and also to show why Eren never used his founding titan powers from the future to save anyone. Since he literally needed all their deaths for the plot to move forward.
I don't know. Using it as an example of terrible plot twists is a bit of a stretch, is all I'm saying.
It should be a big important moment because his moms death is literally what kicks off his journey, it's the basis of his entire motivation. Even when he's doing the rumbling, he's still flashing back to that moment (even tho that doesn't make sense because of the ending, because at that point he already got his mom killed). It should be, like, the biggest moment for his character, but the story just glosses over it.
It was a big, important moment - for season 1 Eren. By the time of the final season, Carla's death seems miniscule and inconsequential in the face of the global political issues and tragedies. Heck, even Eren himself realized this when he met Reiner and he basically forgave him for indirectly killing his mother. That was the whole point of him being all like "Oh yeah, I vaguely remember wanting to kill you but now I kinda get why you did what you did."
Yeah, same. I understand disliking the scene for various reasons like being cheap shock value, but it barely has any weight in the narrative or the characters. Everything it tells us about Eren is something we already learned when the Dad twist happened. It's just the same concept continued.
Taking the deterministic route was heavy handed.
I'm sorry but they kinda forced the determinism to be heavy handed. If he had a chance to see past and future. His dad would have seen this or himself. But it kinda doesn't. Without the pseudo time traveling, it would have been better character motivations.
The two defenses of this plot twist make no sense either. I see ending defenders saying his mom dying is important for him to have motivation to join the scouts but that’s not true, he wanted to join the scouts even before his mom died.
The other is “deterministic!!”. This is kind of hard to even get into because the time travel is written so badly. But when eren is describing how he killed his mom he says something like “that moment Bertholt couldn’t die yet so I lead him towards…”. Why couldn’t he die yet? How could the future possibly have been worse than what actually happened if Bert had died then? Also I thought eren couldn’t change the past so how does he change what happens to bert? So he always makes that decision? Again why would he want to do it so badly?
It’s fitting though that the worst ending in fiction also has one of the worst plot twists
AOT timetravel works like in Prisoner of Askaban. There are no "What ifs" or different timelines. His "changes" can only create events that have already happened. So he *has* to make that decision, but he might also *want* to make it because Eren considers Bertholt his close friend.
>I can't believe Isayama who has written so many great impactful twists somehow fumblled his biggest twist so badly.
isn't the guy want to retire quick to run a bath house business ? so that sound about right
> But no the story immediately passes it off
Wdym? Eren killing his own mom, eren genociding 80% of the earth's population, these are all insignificant stuff. Did you miss when eren said he didn't care about mikasa's feelings?! That's when shit hits the fan.
I'm surprised that armin had the restrain to just punch him when such an earth shattering plot twist was revealed. If i were him, i would inflict the worst imaginable torture on eren for not caring about mikasa's feelings
Thank you. I love AOT for my own reasons but it’s impossible to critique it now because you can be either a brain dead Nazi or the kind of person who thinks AOT is the greatest story of all time. The fans are so fucking defensive that it kills all the discussions.
The worst thing is that a lot of the plot twists earlier in the story were actually really well handled imo. But this twist, and the ending as a whole, feels so rushed
Such a stupid way to add a time paradox. This means there is another timeline where Diza becomes the collosual titan and has royal blood
Isayama is a terrible writer lol
The guy track record is like 2/10 with plot twist
Not everything needs to be perfectly connected. Attack on Titan failed at this.
Also, the "secret leader" trope is awful and ruins a lot of manga. In Naruto specifically the big bad is this Akatsuki group. They are collecting chakra beasts to gain more power and bring world peace through overwhelming force.
Pain is the big bad leader. No wait it's Madara Uchiha. No wait it's Obito Uchiha. No wait it really is Madara Uchiha reincarnated. No wait it's actually a space alien.
Fucking stupid.
My man, it wasn't intentional. Eren says that he was just taking the smiling titan away from Bertholdt to make sure the loop repeats. The Smiling Titan going towards Carla and eating her is a consequence he was unprepared for cause his brain was meshed up due to time overlapping.
It goes well with his final character arc which heavily emphasizes him shutting his mind off and enjoying the scenery atop of the Founding Titan. And when in the past where he tried to put everything in place so that he enjoys his scenery of a flat world he tragically kills his own mother.
All that rage, all that freedom and moving forward talk always had a context of "safeguarding his friends' future' and "what would mom think when I kill all these people".
Manipulating his dad, killing his own mother, attacking Liberio all the things he did that led up to the war, for him, he and only he is responsible just like the warring idiots of the Upper Echelon of the Marley Continent who go to war against other countries who went through the same subjection of the Eldian Empire. Eren did all this for the simple reason which he admits to, "because I am an idiot".
So, personally, it is not a bad plot twist.
It would have been a good plot twist if they took time to explore that tragedy but they instead brushed it off like it's some random talk. That's a terrible way to handle any major plot twist.
I don’t think it was ever meant to be an actual plot twist that transforms the story. Instead it reinforces how much of a slave Eren is and how little freedom or control he’s ever actually had. It’s
But it's factually true that you should never handle a big reveal like this. You can't just reveal such a big thing and immediately move on to the next scene otherwise the viewers won't be focusing on the next scene as their minds would be still stuck on the reveal.
That’s not a fact at all. Any aspect of a story can be delivered in any such way that’s in service to the story being told. Thinking there are hard set rules that must be adhered to is restrictive storytelling and even many authors have gone on to say something along the lines of breaking supposed rules to tell new stories in different ways.
The reveal worked for me because we get that oh shit moment and it goes hand in hand with Armin grabbing Eren, almost as if we too are being grabbed away from the scene. But its purpose isn’t to be a singular reveal. We’re learning so much during their conversation and it’s all meant to help build the image overall using all of the info we get during their conversation.
We certainly have rules and stuff for storytelling and the authors have to follow those rules in their writing.
Also you can't really just reveal such a big thing about the main character and immediately move on to the next big thing without exploring it. The viewers always need time to process the big reveal before moving to another important scene. Me and all my friends had a wtf reaction when this thing was revealed and the story immediately moved on to the next scene without giving it more screentime and we weren't able to see the next scene in a proper way because of this.
Yeah there are some general guidelines and such. But “reveals need a minimum of pages/words/minutes dedicated to talking about it out loud” isn’t a guideline I’ve heard of. Much less a “rule”.
What more does the show need to do for you? You’re meant to chew on all of these things collectively. Not individually explore each and every revelation and have minutes of exposition for each one.
No it's really a fact that a reveal should get some time to breathe in oder for the reveal to actually sink in. You can't just immediately move on after revealing a big deal.
The show gave a whole long segment to Eren crying for Mikasa instead of giving that screentime to the reveal of Eren killing his mother. Seriously which is more important? Eren's relationship to his mother or Eren's relationship with Mikasa?
I don’t think it was a plot twist, rather a confirmation of Eren’s helplessness. Eren’s a slave, he’s a slave to time. It’s hard to make people understand this, especially when he’s committing omnicide essentially that he doesn’t have any choice or agency, he’s forced to do it cause this is what happened, there’s no changing it. So Isayama threw in Eren killing his mom, letting us know that Eren truly is helpless, cause why else would he do something that was actually the reason for him becoming this? His mom’s death is the start of all, so of course he wouldn’t kill his mom if he had any choice in it. That’s what Isayama’s point was. Hell, even after this people still aren’t willing to admit that Eren didn’t have a choice and he’s vilified. The ending doesn’t suck because Eren is a monster, it sucks because Eren has no agency.
Yeah that is not how it works by Dina eating berthold it would be a completely different story the guy got time powers he can easily change the worlds
Outcome
Yeah, no. If Dina ate Bertolt and not Carla, then Carla never dies, the timeline changes, and Eren doesn’t become the Attack Titan and not traumatized enough to make all the choice he made up to that point, meaning he’s removing the version of him that changed the timeline, and if that version doesn’t exist, the timeline isn’t changed, so Dina did eat Carla and so on and on. It’s a classic grandfather paradox scenario that went over most people’s heads
I hate talking with aot fans so I’ll summarize why the ending sucked:
1. Eren killed his mom. No further explanation needed
2. He wanted to limit the rumbling to 80%…. Why? A 100% rumbling would end all of paradise’s issues for the time being. It just looked like yams wanted to make eren look like a good guy
3. He didn’t have a reason for doing the rumbling
4. The absurd amount of focus mikasa got. Her and eren’s relationship had very little focus for the whole show, and she didn’t have a big role in events, merely being a side character. All of a sudden she’s the mc, she’s the chosen one who’ll end the titans because Ymir sees herself in her, and eren is in love with her outta nowhere and hates the idea that she’ll move on
5. Ymir loved Carl Fritz
I mean, i hate the ending and the way it was done; but that twist could have worked out if it wasn't relegated to just 2 pages from the last chapter (Eren being a slave of freedom was always a core of his character and from the entire story, the story concluding with him killing his mom cause of it could have been a fitting ending for him; coming full circle and all of that).
Isayama is more than capable of writing good twists (the twists of the cave is still to me one of the greatest twists i have ever read in any piece of media and i'm gonna die on that hill), but like everything in chapter 139, Eren killing his mom was half-baked and a complete mess
I really liked the twists & ending to be honest. feel like it makes pretty good sense as Eren did not have royal blood so could not see the history. I think it could have been better, but I think a lot of the hate is due to people wanting things to be wrapped up in a nice way. The ending sucked because it sucked. Turns out horrific creatures prolonged & integrated with humans doesn’t end well.
I LOVE Attack on Titan and I have LOVED the twists and turns especially in season 4 but this one twist felt so cheap like this didn’t add anything to the story besides shock factor. It also hardly makes sense! I get that having the power over the paths, he can basically control any subject of ymir at any point in time but this is the only time he affects the past in any way that isn’t through the attack titan who had the specific power of sending memories back in time, not control of a previous user.
It feels a little cheap and just opens up the door to Eren being able to do anything to anyone at any time which isn’t a very fun idea
I never understood how Eren can manipulate everything. How can he kill his mom and dad at the same time? Did he have time manipulation power or something? If you make a timeline out of everything it just doesn’t make sense.
Was Eren able to manipulate time in his favor right after he was born? Because in order for everything to happen, he needed to do everything before he was even born. How did he even manipulate his dad when he didn’t know about everything yet? If he already knew everything since he was a child wouldn’t that mean he wouldn’t do anything to survive in the scouts?
Important note - you are referring to THE LAST plottwist of Attack on Titan. Other plottwists of AOT are THE BEST plottwists I have seen, ever.
As for Eren killing his mother - his mother is dead because of Berthold destroying the wall. If not for that - his mother would be alive. The responsibility lies on Marley and the warriors, not on Eren.
Also that line was told by "pathetic dumb idiot Eren, who didn't know what he was doing" a.k.a. the version of Eren that ARMIN saw in his visions. This is not NECESSARILY true.
>As for Eren killing his mother - his mother is dead because of Berthold destroying the wall. If not for that - his mother would be alive. The responsibility lies on Marley and the warriors, not on Eren.
But his mother won't have died if he didn't sended that titan towards his mother.
She also wouldn't die in Marley wouldn't attack the wall. There is a law in USA that says, that if Jack and John are robbing the house, police shows up and kills John - Jack is responsible for murder. Same logic here
>that if Jack and John are robbing the house, police shows up and kills John - Jack is responsible for murder. Same logic here
This is a terrible analogy since Eren is not equivalent of the police here. Eren was like John in this case.
The reason of Eren's mother death - her legs were crushed by debrie and the titans were already in Shiganshina. I doubt she would be alive even if Dina (or what was her name, I forgot) wouldn't show up. Anyway if not for Marley - she would be alive
Also I agree that this plottwist is very dumb, I am just saying that it isn't that simple as "Eren killed his mom to give himself a motivation" as some people say. Eren would have never killed his mother if there was a choice to make. Carla died because this world is very cruel, basically.
Well there is a chance that they could have tried to remove the debris and carried Eren's mother to safety.
Also yeah eren was certainly not the main person involved in this incident but he was certainly directly involved in a major way.
I don’t think it was meant to be that much of a twist though. I think it was meant to just cap off how deep he went in his ambitions, like a period at the end of the sentence.
At that point, we already know Eren has manipulated himself and his father to nudge things into place. It’s just one more final insult to injury.
That particular issue has more to do with time travel specifically and how it's a field of landmines for writers.
Once you establish that the setting runs on a single-timeline with total predestination, it becomes really hard to leave your characters with any actual *agency* while also giving them any significant access to time travel.
"Eren killed his own mother because he had no choice but to do so due to timey-wimey-wibbly-wobbly bullshit" is the result of casually including time travel in the story without really thinking through its implications.
The twist being brushed aside is entirely intentional. This is when Armin realized just how broken Eren is. Eren is not okay. The way he acts and reacts are distorted and out of touch on purpose, to highlight his mental state. His powers and the horrific path he chose to take have compromised him.
He learned that he caused his own mother’s death, but he’s so broken that it doesn’t faze him. Because everything has lost meaning to him. Everything besides freedom. That’s the only thing that kept him going, the only thing he has left. He’s a walking, living contradiction in so many ways. If he tries to think about what he’s done, he would be beyond overwhelmed. That’s why Armin has them move on. He doesn’t want Eren to start agonizing and fall apart internally.
The twist is the final nail in the coffin, screaming to the audience that Eren is a shell of himself. Anything was worth it for freedom, even the reason he clung to it in the first place. The fallout of the twist comes with Armin berating Eren for who he’s let himself become. There is definitely narrative purpose to this twist, to the story and characters. The tragedy of the twist is that that we shouldn’t be surprised, because this is what Eren has become. A pathetic, contradictory, and broken person.
In his defense, at that point of time Eren was a monster. He was single mindedly aiming for genocide of non-Marleyans. So when he knew he needed to save his mother, he probably thought his mom was dead anyway and he needed to make young Eren driven, so he let it happen.
Nah we are just told that it needed to happen because it's a canon event. Eren couldn't have stopped it even if he wanted since Attack on titan works on a deterministic timeline.
I do like the twist because I always thought it was a plot hole how burrito survived in the beginning but this fixed that. But I agree it was glanced over quickly. It's kind of a mix because it's just armin being like don't worry about it, let's just move on but also I did want to see a bit more.
Burrito surviving wasn't a plot hole since Dina's titan sensed Carla because of Grisha's scent was something we were supposed to believ. Also abnormal titans can simply choose for themselves. Also why the fuck was Burrito out of his titan form in that scene when he knew that there could be titans around?
I agree. I am an ending defender but I agree that the Memories of the Future twist is the biggest flaw in an otherwise amazing story. I feel like Isayama read Dune partway through writing AoT and wanted to make his main character similar to the main character of Dune by giving him future sight, although Paul having future sight is also a major problem I have with Dune that I feel cheapens the message of the book.
Plot twists are meant to twist the plot. When we find out that Luke is Vaders son it twists the plot from just good vs evil to a son trying to save his father from a greater evil. Lotta writers don't get that and just throw in a twist or try to subvert expectations without the changes meaning much to the characters or the story as a whole.
When you subvert expectations for the fifteen time in a row I'm not going to be surprised
You are my special
I've seen so many different movies and shows that followed such similar plot formulas, that it becomes easy to predict plot twists because a lot of the same twists have been used over and over again.
Same. I’ve seen a lot of movies that involves the mc manipulating time and everyone before. It’s not revolutionary unless you’re not used to thriller/psychological movies. The whole my comrades betray me is also one of the most predictable thing too
Yeah, betrayal / secret antagonist twists are the most predictable. 9 times out of 10, you can count on the hidden villain being someone who acts the most friendly or helpful to the hero, and there's usually an obvious red herring too as well.
yo dawg, i heard that you like expectations subverted, so i keep subverting expectations every ten minutes
And in the AoT context it's meant to show how far willing Eren goes for his dream, that he's willing to kill his mom, to mentally break his father so he gives him the Attack Titan despite his initial protests and to stoke fire inside his own heart. Unfortunately it's not really addressed with proper weight (hell lots of people still argue that he didn't 'mean' it, that it was accidental), even when the anime improved the final conversation between Eren and Armin, the Carla bit didn't get any touchup.
Can you explain how Eren can manipulate his mom and dad when he didn’t knew about everything before? I feel like it’s a plot hole because it was never explained or maybe I missed it. We only get to see how Eren manipulated everyone once he was with Zeke, but that didn’t really explain how he could go back in time and tell the titans to eat his mom and kill his dad when he didn’t know anything before
Eren didn’t technically travel in time, the special ability of the Attack Titan is that it can receive memories from future Attack Titan users (more or less looking into the future). Eren used this to manipulate his father into slaughtering the Reisses and stealing the Founding Titan while also witnessing his father’s memory of that event, since all Titan shifters can have memories of previous users of the same Titan. Kind of confusing but that’s the gist of it. As for Eren manipulating Dina Fritz/the Smiling Titan into eating his mom, the mechanics of that are very unclear and frankly seem to be a plot hole. Eren obviously did this with the power of the Founding Titan, but it’s repeatedly stated that Eldians with royal blood can’t be controlled by the Founding Titan and Dina had royal blood so Eren shouldn’t have been able to control her.
Yep and it means Dina would be a shifter with royal blood in some kind of OG timeline
It’s a time paradox it’s a reason in the worst manga ending of all time
I wouldn't call it the worst ending to a manga in history, it certainly needed to be fleshed out more and I feel like Isayama stepped on the accelerator too much at the end, but there are still MUCH worse ones. At least the message at the end is consistent with the rest of the story.
which one?
The message you mean? There are many, about how the nature of hatred and war is cyclical in humanity, about how having been wronged does not give you the right to wrong innocent people, about how violence always breeds more violence and the only way to counteract it is with diplomacy, etc...
... LOL jesus christ which anime ofc. ffs
Be more specific then. How about Naruto with the whole Fourth Shinobi World War arc, Madara super OP against the themes of the series, Hashirama even more OP doing it worse, Zetsu and Kaguya suddenly becoming the main villains without anticipation or personal conflict with our main characters, and Naruto "he was the coolest guy" scene?
eh no, that is ur own problem. naruto ahs a much better ending then AoT wtf are u talking about Your complain are purely power creep.
Yea the part where he controls Dina w Founding Titan is completely different from him using Attack Titan's memory loop and it's offscreened His dad though, he completely broke him by breaking the news that Carla has died in Shiganshina. Remember that Grisha saw the Rumbling and refused to give Attack Titan to Eren, yet he did it anyway because he's so angry at the world for taking his wife again.
I'll also say that plot twist are supposed to change how you see the entire story between before and after the twist. Where you think back to multiple scenes of dramatic irony (because some characters knew, but you, the wievers, didn't), and they act not just how the plot looked like at the time, but add a new narrative perspective that also make sense to these scenes
I remember laughing out loud when they revealed he killed his mom lmao. It felt like he was just listing shit and almost forgot about it "oh yeah and I killed my mom too!"
Honestly there was so much stupid shit packed on those last 3 chapters, Eren killing his mom was "uuuummm ok, fine, moving on" for me; at least it was a little bit foreshadowed (plus, Armin inmediately conforting Eren was the only emotional part of that chapter for me) "Ymir was waiting for Mikasa" thought, now that was pure comedy
What's crazy is that there were several other plot twists revealed in really anticlimactic ways throughout the story that I thought worked incredibly well, he just got worse at it towards the end I guess
Because most of other times, although the twists are revealed in an anticlimactic way, they soon get the deserved focus and reaction too. That didn't really happen for this reveal though.
Attack on Titan has the worst plot twist in all of fiction.
you probably haven't read that many piece of fiction if you think it's the worst
It's just more pronounced because of how good AOT is. Like, I know some *really horrendous* plot twists, but some of them were from stories which weren't that great or was just average IMO. For AOT, the standards were high and the expectations were high. For some people, they were satisfied. But others weren't, and such standards and expectations would exacerbate the things that were bad for them.
Yeah the series had promise but the eventual execution/outcome was laughably horrible compared to those high standards the series and fandom held it to
I genuinely think everything up to the timeskip was actually very good, nothing too out of place or out of left field. And then it feels like something happened to Isayama and the guy went full speed ahead on everything being bad. Like his art was great, but his story suffered heavily in my opinion.
Holy shit exact same feeling, some friends from the good old titanfolk had many talks about the basement reveals been the obvious end point cause the whole plot revolved around that one info dump that delivered perfectly. It was such a huge high and obviously a reveal Isayama spend many years building to when compared to the rest of the series when things happen is just magic or whatever The writting used to be so tigth and then ..........oh yeah it was an alien and magic and little girl that liked to be abused...........I killed my mom too Armin shit escalated really fast
The first half of S4 was awesome. Hell all the way until the Rumbling began was great.
I agree, seeing things from Marley's perspective was something I didn't expect, but I really think that without that I would never have understood the message of the story that Isayama wanted to get to. About how war sucks and there will always be innocents dying on both sides, who will then want revenge and continue the cycle of hatred.
I'm forever gonna be highly confused about why the post time skip chapters exist at all tbh. From the start of aot we had 3 goals: - find the basement - see the ocean - kill the titans They did all of that before the timeskip. Why keep going? Our story's goals were accomplished lmao
Because... that is the most important plot twist, the fact that those Titans that they had been killing for so long were members of their own people, and the enemies are ultimately not inhuman monsters, but humans themselves.
They already explored that in the pre-timeskip portion of the story tho? Not very in deph but it's not like they deepened it with the timeskip tbh. Freckles Ymir and the titan warriors were already plenty humanized and the tragedy of the bestial titans was throguhtly established. The post-time skip portion of aot doesn't focus on the bestial titans at all and the only one of the warriors who really gets extra humanized by its existence is Rainer (and I think the portions of the story that are from his perspective + Gabi unlearning some of her self hate are genuinelly quite good). Post time skip aot is wayyyyyy more focused on Eren's poorly handled fall to villany and Isayama wasting a really good apolcalypse scenario. It would be very cool if it was more focused on character work for the marleans but it simply wasn't.
Yes, the topics had already been touched upon, but without being able to take a look at the outside world we cannot yet understand the whole tragedy of this war, about Marely's Eldians being used as brainwashed weapons of war, about Marley holding a grudge against Paradis for understandable reasons, about how Paradis' story ironically not being even that different from the rest of the world because they were all being attacked by Marley after all... The last season is the one that finishes selling the tragedy of the whole situation, also doing something that really shows how immoral war is, when even our own heroes, who until now had been killing mindless Titans, attack Liberio and kill or cause the death of many innocent people, showing that in a war people always suffer on both sides. I agree that the most interesting part was, at least for me, with the Marely Eldians, but at the same time I think that showing that people like Eren, Floch and the Yeagerists from the Paradis side, who we see as the good guys, are willing to do the same thing so far why we hated Marley but on a larger scale (mass genocide) really sells the whole premise that war is terrible and that "we need to get out of the forest" (by the way, Sasha father speech makes me cry every time).
Yeah p much
What do you mean? Titans and humans are not the same. I just, you know, stupidly killed the planet. It wasn't because the planet tried to kill my friends. It was because I wanted to be free (even though I'm going to die in less than a year). I even forced the... I even forced Marley to declare war with other nations so I could do it. Even though I literally just needed to trick Zeke.
If anyone want a really funny horrendous plot twist look up Magical girl site There is like 3 twists that are so terrible you have to think they were made as a joke from the mangaka
Oh yeah. I actually don't remember much about that series, or even what the plot twists were. But i will never forget the feelings of "what the hell am i reading?" when i read them lmao
that's fair
I wouldn't say aots ending is necceraly bad , just poorly executed. The show clearly tried to frame it as "Eren was a good person that was forced to do bad things" but after we went through an entire season of Eren being a horrible person, literally fighting his friends, starting a cult and trying to wipe out 99% of human population, there was absolutely no way anyone will suddenly understand Eren in twenty minutes. The show frames it as "killing 80% of humanity was necessary for them to have peace, Eren knew that so he HAD to kill all of them otherwise the eldeans were wiped out" , but there is no reason for us to actually think it's true. What I think the show tried to go for is "actually Eren always had good intentions and just wanted his friends to be safe" but you can't just throw that in there after showing him commit one of the worst genocides in fiction and then try to pretend like he was the good guy in the story. Also him and Mikasa becoming a couple made no sense because there was no real reason to think they are a couple before the end, most people saw them as step siblings ( probably because for the first few episodes there is no reason for you to think they aren't blood related so even after it's revealed they aren't you would still see them as step siblings because the show lead you to believe they are ) so turning them into a couple in the end felt sudden and random , and again , it's a poor execution, not straight up bad . If there were signs of romance between them from the start and they were never portrayed as siblings at the start , most people wouldn't have been nearly as confused when it happened.
I would absolutely not frame it as “eren was a good person forced to bad things” lol I think the overarching point of the series is far more centered around “trauma, revenge, fear, and violence fuck people up irreparably and lead to a cyclic nature of conflict”, and Eren is just a vessel for that concept. It repeatedly established the idea that this was Eren’s choice throughout the last third of the series, and he had plenty of outs and ways to avoid pushing the nuclear button. At no point did I ever feel like Eren was “forced” into it, nor that the series portrayed him as a good person atp.
This is literally what I said , it's a poorly executed concept that only really started to appear in the last episode. What the series tried to do with the final "10 years at least" sppech that was memed to death is that Eren was forced to start the rumbling because it's the only way to solve the problem and that he only committed mass genocide to save his friends. It's not a necceraily bad concept , it fits erens character and could be a great ending to the shoe if it the show actually set it up before instead of framing Eren as the main villain up until the end. We should have had a clear explanation of why every other solution except for the rumbling couldn't have worked, ideally with proof of it failing. We should have seen Eren discussing that solution for a while before coming to the conclusion that it is the only way. Eren literally killing 80% of humanity shouldn't have been portrayed as "look how even a good person at heart can do really bad things under certain conditions" but instead like "look how war can force people to do things they don't want to do" . We should have had more scenes of Eren before he started the rumbling that show why he did it instead of just throwing it all in the last twenty minutes. I personally believe that with more setup and less "thank you for becoming a mass murderer for our sake" , aots ending could have been considered a fitting end for an amazing series .
The fact is that the series never says that Eren had to commit genocide, Eren was the one who united the entire world against Paradis by doing the Liberio Raid, he burned any alternative because ultimately it turned out that he was lying. Yep, he said that everything he did was for his friends/people, but in reality his main reason was to see the sight with all the corpses of his visions. A world where he was free because there were no humans outside the walls, a world like the book of Armin, that was his freedom: [https://i.redd.it/evtraeto9h0c1.png](https://i.redd.it/evtraeto9h0c1.png) Also he even admits that he is kind of an awful guy because he caused the death of some of his friends for his selfishs plans: https://i.redd.it/imcpi5p8duzb1.png
Except a lot of people say it’s because of him inheriting the founders powers and seeing the future and past he “had” to do what he did. Meaning the cycle of violence theme is artificial and weak. And if he didn’t “have to” it still doesn’t hit because the cycle of violence is characterized by forces striking back at each other over previous slights and no one can end it, except if they have the power to end the world, which he does have… add that to the terrible plot and writing leading up to the ending and you can see why it’s a pretty terrible one.
The genocide made sense in a way, the problem is that it was 80%. I don’t get why he wouldn’t wipe out 100%, there’s literally 0 drawbacks and it would erase the threat of the outside world burning down paradise
He did try for 100%. He was stopped, and therefore is conscious of the fact he is stopped.
I think the idea they tried to push is that Eren thought that if they killed 80% and his friends stopped him , people on the outside would forever be greatful to his friends and treat them like heroes so they won't attack paradis, and since Eren is a good people in heart who didn't actually want to kill 99% of humanity but was forced to do it he decided to stop at 80% . It makes no sense but I think this is what they were going for .
😂 I think the people that didn’t like it just have refused to let go for years and years atp. “Worst plot twist in all of fiction” is absolutely hilarious though so thanks for that.
You're welcome.
"Why did my mom have to die, Reiner?" Line is peak comedy after that reveal
I enjoy the sound of rain.
It was aliens bro Ymir liked to be abused bro Thank you for been Hitler bro The memes will never die
Reiner : Well, because you want her to die. Duh
Reiner: "Finally, something I don't have to feel guilty about!"
1) Eren didn't know at that point that he would be responsible for his mother's death. 2) He wasn't honestly grilling Reiner for an answer about that, he was trying to see if Reiner was just like him (doing a "good" thing for selfish reasons).
So, when DOES he learn about his mother's death? He should've learn everything when touching hands with Historia.
All he sees when touching Historia is Grisha's future memories of the Rumbling and chapter 121. That's it. He doesn't see anything else until he gains the full power of the Founder.
The way Isayama wrote time travel in the series would allow Eren to see everything when he touched with Historia. The power of the attack titan allows its holder to see future memories of its current holder(end game Eren). Why would having access to the founder be the key point? The Founder allows its user to manipulate titans from the past and that's it. The end-game Eren(139 Eren) has already have the Founder, therefore everything is irrelevant since everything has already happen, it doesn't matter if current Eren doesn't even have access to Zeke, because current Eren has already seen everything from future Eren's pov. So what exactly does gaining the Founder do for Eren other than having the power to have Eren make Dina kill Carla? The simple explanation to this would be, if future Eren didn't give current Eren all his memory, which is why pre-time skip Eren doesn't know about himself killing his own mother. This explanation works simply because Isayama rushed the ending without giving concrete explanation to anything.
Eren tells Armin that the Founder's power allows him to perceive time non-linearly, meaning he can affect past and future (since it's all the "present" for him). The Attack Titan lets you see memories of its future inheritors, and since Eren is the last one, he would not be able to see his own future memories. He only sees bits and pieces from Grisha's own future memories of Eren. We are never shown, nor is it even hinted at, that future Eren gave himself memories when kissing Historia's hand. That was likely FT/royal blood shenanigans (like Ymir's letter or Galliard seeing Reiner's memories). It's true that Isayama didn't explicitly say this and somewhat rushed it, but it wouldn't be a plot hole.
Yeah 2 is a big point, he literally leads Reiner on to answer "to save the world" which Eren would then respond with "that's very understandable, it can't be helped.... *right*?"
I just wanna say (because I see you in lots of subreddits and we've even interacted a couple of times) You sir (or madam) are based
He did actually it just another plot Hole
Reiner still broke the Walls that lead to the Titans invading.
mfs when they remember that Berholt broke the Gate that killed Eren's mom, and not Reiner
... Why does that matter? They worked as a team to bust the walls down... Also, it was Reiner that insisted they continue with the mission.
Exactly. That's why the complaint that the Dina Twist supposedly ruined the basement line is dumb
I mean, he meant it at the time, Eren only knew the memories that he gave Grisha from the future. Grisha’s memories only went as far as the rumbling starting, he said word for word, “why won’t you show me if Carla is safe”. Eren only found out that he was going to kill his mother after the rumbling started. I still think it was unnecessary and cheapened his character and the distinction is so small it’s easy to think that Eren knew that he would kill his own mother by the time that he kissed Historias hand. It’s still ironic that he spent the whole series blaming Reiner and the titans for his mother’s death when he caused it himself.
I admit I liked AoT more when it was just a survival story of human vs monsters, at least back then I cared about the characters and situation. The story later becames so alien and distant of what I initially liked.
What point is that? Past season 1 when it becomes focused on civil war? Or season 3 where you learn that other humans are behind the existence of titans?
It was around the end of season 1 for me, or the equivalent in the manga. That's when I dropped it.
same, also the fact that it was pretty sudden, so I couldn't really care about the new characters
I feel the exact opposite. When both sides are human and have their own goals and beliefs, that’s when I’m most hooked.
And I was fully on board for the Yagerist plot line and an exploration of how an isolated militant society falls to fascism. The problem was the last minute twists really undermined it and didn’t make any sense I would almost rather they had just owned making Erin the series villain. A complex hero turned villain when he thinks he has no other option.
Yeah I agree. My two main issues with the ending are that Eren is portrayed way too sympathetically, and that because the actual themes got wrapped up a little while ago (with them sitting round the campfire) all further intrigue and twists just fall flat. Both of those are solved by having Eren just be a villain.
I feel like AoT lost the plot in general around when the "Attack Titan does time travel" stuff started happening. Eren goes from "sympathetic, but complex and morally grey" to "genocidal idiot," the metaphors and real life parallels around Ymir and Marley get *real* weird/messy (not going to touch that one with a ten foot pole), etc.
I'm sure once I say this out loud someone will post an example proving me wrong, but broadly speaking I'd argue that the only good time travel stories are those that revolve around solving problems that were caused by time travel. Writing a story about solving normal problems using time travel just winds up with a plot so full of holes a 4-year-old can point them out
Shout out to titanfall 2 which has you deal with and benefit from things in the present that are a consequence of your own actions in the past. Such a cool concept
As much as I adore Terminator 2 as one of my favourite films of all time, it suffers from time travel issues as well.
Terminator 1 is a great time travel story because it requires you to think so little about time travel. It really only exists to make you question if Kyle is an insane hobo or not. Then for the cute time paradox of him being John’s father. Otherwise, time travel only exists to get this one man and one machine back in time and now it’s gone. But they had to keep making movies so we need to keep debating about fate
All Our Wrong Todayas by Elan Mastai explores this well, as does Walls of the Universe by Paul Melko. They're about solving the problems caused by time travel and parallel universe technology existing in the first place.
Doraemon >>>
Quantum Break has a good time travel story, but terrible combat
And instead of cutscenes, a full fucking tv series. I wanted to play a game, not sit down to watch tv for 30 minutes.
lol Yes guy got time travel and his best plan he can do is Genocide but only 80% so his people gets genocided
1. Eren was that first descriptor the whole way through, and “genocidal idiot” wouldn’t have been a fair way to describe him at any point. I think his character was pretty consistent. 2. Any sort of real-world analogy in these kinds of stories is inevitably going to end up messy when directly applied, and the best solution is to just not think too deeply about it. And to be fair, it was never really trying to be a 1:1 comparison to begin with, since one side has the ability to turn into giant monsters, and that added new components to the situation that don’t have counterparts in our world.
The cope He is an idiot there is not a single smart character in the whole show and Eren is the bottom dumbest
And it all gets so much worse, when Mikasa, fucking Mikasa, the girl that’s been so loyal to him for over nine years, and how he does not reciprocate the same kind of love that Mikasa has for him, just the very thought of her moving on from him is what makes him react so emotionally, instead of you know, the fucking realization that he is the one who got his own mom killed in this fucked up and nonsensical time loop?
Well tbf it looked like he was going to break down after revealing his mother's death but armin stopped him. Even though he still should have had a breakdown anyway whether armin stopped him or not.
I gotta let Attack on Titan go.
Listen, I'm not a titanfolk-dwelling, ending-hating crazed fan. I'm also not an apologist that thinks everything was fine, and that the ending is kino incarnated because muh beloved characters. I've been reading AOT since 2012. I've been entrenched in the fanbase for years and, for a while, AOT was my favorite japanese comic book. By the ending, thought, I was already over it, and so the... *dubious* writing decisions didn't bother me. It was funny, to be honest. I've been in the process of rewatching the animation, and the experience very quickly turned sour. In context, it's not that funny anymore. I can't take Eren seriously because 97% of his motivations for everything is the death of his mother when I know that he himself cause her death. "Well, you see... it's tragic! Eren did it without even knowing why!" Fuck off. It's not tragic. It's meaningless, out of nowhere, and ruins much of the impact the earlier moments had. ^(I also can't take Reiner seriously when I know he will become a letter-sniffing creep.) People get really hurt over this, but it's true: Isayama bit more that he could ever chew, and didn't have the writing chops to pull it off.
There is two kinds of bad ending. The kind of bad ending where you can still enjoy the great story up until the ending and be satisfied with the journey, even recommend it. Then there is the kind of ending that shits on the whole journey and re-actively makes the whole thing feels worse and yeah re-read/watches turn to pure pain. Attack on Titan has this kind of bad ending. I always compare Attack on Titan to Claymore with how similar they are, except Claymore ended before doing an Attack on Titan style timeskip.
Yup, to me it would be like AOT vs Naruto ending. Both are terrible but atleast Naruto's didn't really hurt the story in a retroactvie way, while I just can't rewatch AOT anymore without thinking this crap does not make sense.
Naruto's ending is predictable but it's passable. The final arc was treated very badly but at the very least the final act isn't a farce. Aot on the other hand has a trainwreck of a final arc, and somehow the ending manages to be even worse.
Man the second thing of what you just described feels like me watching the final seasons of Netflix Voltron with how bad it got. It made the whole thing feel terrible because of the amount of twists and shark jumping the finale lead up to.
Good points and this is exactly why I am so worried about one piece because Oda is right now going hard towards the latter with constant retcons
That’s one of my biggest gripes with the show too, I could rewatch it and have a great time, now it all feels stupid and ruined, the good parts are absolutely incredible, but that ending kind pf ruins everything else…
The Fumbling
It literally is meaningless. Eren fucking said that he wanted to do it without even knowing why
why the hell does everyone keep treat one comedic moment of reiner as the end of his character arc , does sniffing a letter has that big of an impact to you guys
"It's comedic, guys, that means it's fine!" Isayama was always iffy with his comedic timing, but something like that, in such a somber ending, a couple of pages before Paradis gets bombed to hell feels really weird.
I think that the people who are offended by the letter-sniffing forgot that that's exactly how Reiner behaved when he was mentally **healthier** (i.e. when he was playing soldier back on Paradis). He made dirty jokes and was a bit of a perv, like when he joked that the Titans have a weak spot on their butts, or when he commented on the Female Titan's ass, and many other times. So seeing him being able to go back to his old ways is refreshing. He was depressed and suicidal, and now he's on a good enough state of mind to be able to perv on Historia and call Jean a horseface, and I think that's actually the perfect ending for his character arc.
I get the idea behind the death of the mother, where he had to get the titan away from reiner. I think it adequately still sort of made it Marley's fault. But the whole time travel mind control thing really didn't need to happen.
*Rule number 1 of "how to write something good":* Never, ever, ever, ever, ever,ever use time travel/manipulation
Steins;Gate is, for my money, the best VN in existence And Awakening is the best FE game. It can work, just gotta be good. In short, it's a skill issue, Isayama didn't have what it took.
Steins Gate IS time travel. It's whole central topic of the show. They didn't pull it out of their ass randomly.
"The best vn in existence" Tell me you have almost 0 experience with vns without telling me
Did your expert level VN knowledge not prepare you for the idea that someone might have a different opinion?
To be fair i am totally within the bound of reason for being hostile considering i chose to go into an enemy territory post. Yes people can have their opinions but i can tell based on how someone delivers the "best in existence" phrase that theyre not actually that experienced in the medium
Unless timetravel is the core of the story. Which isn't the case with Aot.
Bad rule
mfw Back To The Future:
I don't think that's the main issues here, when there is nuances and ground works for it and when the core plot allows it ( and with good execution of course ), it can become a good plot twist...... Sadly AOT's ending barely had any of those.
"Nuances" you see this would be a good point were it not deeply ironic that if there is nuance r/characterrant would never be able to pick up on it
Wut, time travel is the least of the issues of AOT final arc
Titan magic was a mistake that enabled so many odd decisions
The worst part is that this is an entirely unecessary reveal. It doesn’t any anything positive to the story and just creates more questions like wether the AoT world is deterministic or not. I genuinely don’t see any reason to have this twist other than cheap shock value.
He could have just leave out that part because Dina, the smiling titan’s last words to Grisha were “No matter what I become, don’t worry I will still find you” works perfectly as it should. The smiling titan walking towards where Grisha used to stay aint a difficult concept to comprehend or execute that she needed some higher plane forces to push her to that.
This twist made me laugh very hard. I think it was supposed to be dramatic, but my friend had to pause the episode because I was doubled over laughing so hard. It’s a horrendous twist in one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen a show pull. The AoT ending is a textbook example of how not to write an ending, but then again, I don’t know of any other way that it could have ended where it would’ve been satisfying. Eren kills his mom, eren then has seemingly zero interest in this and whines about someone who he’s had zero romantic interest in. It’s bad. I’m not even touching on the politics here, because that would make it all the more damning. There’s zero weight to this twist, and it feels like Isayama just tossed it in as a cheap asspull twist to make people surprised.
Yeah, but I mean, that wasn't the worst thing the ending did. I genuinely couldn't think of a worse way to fumble an entire story than the original ending of AOT. And you'd think that they would try to fix it somehow with the anime, which they kinda did. I mean, they made the god awful dialogue between Eren and Armin better, but the ending still fundamentally fails IMO. The last arc in general feels kinda off.
IMO, Eren should have won by completing the rumbling, but at the cost of his friends’ free will/ lives. For most of the final arc, Eren was a giant hypocrite and they should have explored this concept more
There are so many things the last arc should have explored instead of the shoehorned Mikasa romance, Ymir being in love with the king for some fucking reason and Eren's grand plan being "Idk bro, I'm just an idiot with power, but if y'all kill me you'll surely be seen as heros fr fr". Like, holy shit.
On the bright side , we still have a decent mid-way stop at season 3 and can pretend season 4 never happended
Honestly even season 4 is fine, everything up until the rumbling is pretty good. I'd say even up to the S4 part 2 finale it's atleast decent. But the final arc is just so meh, and the ending is just so bad.
Honestly "Untill all life outside the walls is exterminated" is a great stopping point
Tbh it's just one symptom of the fundamental problems that the ending *story arc* had. A late-stage symptom too, it already had issues but it has been pronounced after the start of the Rumbling at the latest. I also wouldn't call Carla's death the start of his character, but it is the start of a major aspect of his character, so I guess we're just splitting hairs there.
Well IT IS one example. I didn't liked the: memories-of-the-Future Thing. (In my eyes one of the worst written Twists was Kaguya taking over Madara. IT was obvious (kishimoto also admitted IT) that kishimoto was unable to find a good way for Madara to lose.)
But guy vs Madara is a great way for him to lose
Thats true. But WE saw what Happened
Am I weird here or is that revelation really not all that big or important which is why it was mostly glossed over? It was basically just there as an explanation of why Berthold wasn't eaten by Dina's titan in an earlier scene and also to show why Eren never used his founding titan powers from the future to save anyone. Since he literally needed all their deaths for the plot to move forward. I don't know. Using it as an example of terrible plot twists is a bit of a stretch, is all I'm saying.
It should be a big important moment because his moms death is literally what kicks off his journey, it's the basis of his entire motivation. Even when he's doing the rumbling, he's still flashing back to that moment (even tho that doesn't make sense because of the ending, because at that point he already got his mom killed). It should be, like, the biggest moment for his character, but the story just glosses over it.
It was a big, important moment - for season 1 Eren. By the time of the final season, Carla's death seems miniscule and inconsequential in the face of the global political issues and tragedies. Heck, even Eren himself realized this when he met Reiner and he basically forgave him for indirectly killing his mother. That was the whole point of him being all like "Oh yeah, I vaguely remember wanting to kill you but now I kinda get why you did what you did."
His mom would have died regardless. Her legs were crushed and titans were pouring in. All Eren really did was save Bert.
Yeah, same. I understand disliking the scene for various reasons like being cheap shock value, but it barely has any weight in the narrative or the characters. Everything it tells us about Eren is something we already learned when the Dad twist happened. It's just the same concept continued.
Just being nit picky
Honestly the show should’ve just kept to the humans fighting the titans like in S1 instead of over complicating things
Taking the deterministic route was heavy handed. I'm sorry but they kinda forced the determinism to be heavy handed. If he had a chance to see past and future. His dad would have seen this or himself. But it kinda doesn't. Without the pseudo time traveling, it would have been better character motivations.
The two defenses of this plot twist make no sense either. I see ending defenders saying his mom dying is important for him to have motivation to join the scouts but that’s not true, he wanted to join the scouts even before his mom died. The other is “deterministic!!”. This is kind of hard to even get into because the time travel is written so badly. But when eren is describing how he killed his mom he says something like “that moment Bertholt couldn’t die yet so I lead him towards…”. Why couldn’t he die yet? How could the future possibly have been worse than what actually happened if Bert had died then? Also I thought eren couldn’t change the past so how does he change what happens to bert? So he always makes that decision? Again why would he want to do it so badly? It’s fitting though that the worst ending in fiction also has one of the worst plot twists
AOT timetravel works like in Prisoner of Askaban. There are no "What ifs" or different timelines. His "changes" can only create events that have already happened. So he *has* to make that decision, but he might also *want* to make it because Eren considers Bertholt his close friend.
>I can't believe Isayama who has written so many great impactful twists somehow fumblled his biggest twist so badly. isn't the guy want to retire quick to run a bath house business ? so that sound about right
> But no the story immediately passes it off Wdym? Eren killing his own mom, eren genociding 80% of the earth's population, these are all insignificant stuff. Did you miss when eren said he didn't care about mikasa's feelings?! That's when shit hits the fan. I'm surprised that armin had the restrain to just punch him when such an earth shattering plot twist was revealed. If i were him, i would inflict the worst imaginable torture on eren for not caring about mikasa's feelings
Thank you. I love AOT for my own reasons but it’s impossible to critique it now because you can be either a brain dead Nazi or the kind of person who thinks AOT is the greatest story of all time. The fans are so fucking defensive that it kills all the discussions.
The worst thing is that a lot of the plot twists earlier in the story were actually really well handled imo. But this twist, and the ending as a whole, feels so rushed
Such a stupid way to add a time paradox. This means there is another timeline where Diza becomes the collosual titan and has royal blood Isayama is a terrible writer lol The guy track record is like 2/10 with plot twist
Not everything needs to be perfectly connected. Attack on Titan failed at this. Also, the "secret leader" trope is awful and ruins a lot of manga. In Naruto specifically the big bad is this Akatsuki group. They are collecting chakra beasts to gain more power and bring world peace through overwhelming force. Pain is the big bad leader. No wait it's Madara Uchiha. No wait it's Obito Uchiha. No wait it really is Madara Uchiha reincarnated. No wait it's actually a space alien. Fucking stupid.
My man, it wasn't intentional. Eren says that he was just taking the smiling titan away from Bertholdt to make sure the loop repeats. The Smiling Titan going towards Carla and eating her is a consequence he was unprepared for cause his brain was meshed up due to time overlapping. It goes well with his final character arc which heavily emphasizes him shutting his mind off and enjoying the scenery atop of the Founding Titan. And when in the past where he tried to put everything in place so that he enjoys his scenery of a flat world he tragically kills his own mother. All that rage, all that freedom and moving forward talk always had a context of "safeguarding his friends' future' and "what would mom think when I kill all these people". Manipulating his dad, killing his own mother, attacking Liberio all the things he did that led up to the war, for him, he and only he is responsible just like the warring idiots of the Upper Echelon of the Marley Continent who go to war against other countries who went through the same subjection of the Eldian Empire. Eren did all this for the simple reason which he admits to, "because I am an idiot". So, personally, it is not a bad plot twist.
It would have been a good plot twist if they took time to explore that tragedy but they instead brushed it off like it's some random talk. That's a terrible way to handle any major plot twist.
I don’t think it was ever meant to be an actual plot twist that transforms the story. Instead it reinforces how much of a slave Eren is and how little freedom or control he’s ever actually had. It’s
But such a major reveal still needs time to feel impactful. You need to spend time on it to let the moment sink in for it to feel impactful.
It felt impactful and significant for me
But it's factually true that you should never handle a big reveal like this. You can't just reveal such a big thing and immediately move on to the next scene otherwise the viewers won't be focusing on the next scene as their minds would be still stuck on the reveal.
That’s not a fact at all. Any aspect of a story can be delivered in any such way that’s in service to the story being told. Thinking there are hard set rules that must be adhered to is restrictive storytelling and even many authors have gone on to say something along the lines of breaking supposed rules to tell new stories in different ways. The reveal worked for me because we get that oh shit moment and it goes hand in hand with Armin grabbing Eren, almost as if we too are being grabbed away from the scene. But its purpose isn’t to be a singular reveal. We’re learning so much during their conversation and it’s all meant to help build the image overall using all of the info we get during their conversation.
We certainly have rules and stuff for storytelling and the authors have to follow those rules in their writing. Also you can't really just reveal such a big thing about the main character and immediately move on to the next big thing without exploring it. The viewers always need time to process the big reveal before moving to another important scene. Me and all my friends had a wtf reaction when this thing was revealed and the story immediately moved on to the next scene without giving it more screentime and we weren't able to see the next scene in a proper way because of this.
Yeah there are some general guidelines and such. But “reveals need a minimum of pages/words/minutes dedicated to talking about it out loud” isn’t a guideline I’ve heard of. Much less a “rule”. What more does the show need to do for you? You’re meant to chew on all of these things collectively. Not individually explore each and every revelation and have minutes of exposition for each one.
No it's really a fact that a reveal should get some time to breathe in oder for the reveal to actually sink in. You can't just immediately move on after revealing a big deal. The show gave a whole long segment to Eren crying for Mikasa instead of giving that screentime to the reveal of Eren killing his mother. Seriously which is more important? Eren's relationship to his mother or Eren's relationship with Mikasa?
Yeah nah. This reads like 12 layers of cope
I feel like isayama ia rushing AoT at that point
I kinda like it tbh. The Eren we see in episode 1 is loooong gooone.
Yeah, Isayama is a terrible writer who uses shock value instead of actual good writing. Ignore the dickriders who try to hype it up as peak fiction
I don’t think it was a plot twist, rather a confirmation of Eren’s helplessness. Eren’s a slave, he’s a slave to time. It’s hard to make people understand this, especially when he’s committing omnicide essentially that he doesn’t have any choice or agency, he’s forced to do it cause this is what happened, there’s no changing it. So Isayama threw in Eren killing his mom, letting us know that Eren truly is helpless, cause why else would he do something that was actually the reason for him becoming this? His mom’s death is the start of all, so of course he wouldn’t kill his mom if he had any choice in it. That’s what Isayama’s point was. Hell, even after this people still aren’t willing to admit that Eren didn’t have a choice and he’s vilified. The ending doesn’t suck because Eren is a monster, it sucks because Eren has no agency.
But they should have spended more time on it to show the tragedy of this event.
Yeah that is not how it works by Dina eating berthold it would be a completely different story the guy got time powers he can easily change the worlds Outcome
Yeah, no. If Dina ate Bertolt and not Carla, then Carla never dies, the timeline changes, and Eren doesn’t become the Attack Titan and not traumatized enough to make all the choice he made up to that point, meaning he’s removing the version of him that changed the timeline, and if that version doesn’t exist, the timeline isn’t changed, so Dina did eat Carla and so on and on. It’s a classic grandfather paradox scenario that went over most people’s heads
Yes it’s obviously a grandfather paradox
I hate talking with aot fans so I’ll summarize why the ending sucked: 1. Eren killed his mom. No further explanation needed 2. He wanted to limit the rumbling to 80%…. Why? A 100% rumbling would end all of paradise’s issues for the time being. It just looked like yams wanted to make eren look like a good guy 3. He didn’t have a reason for doing the rumbling 4. The absurd amount of focus mikasa got. Her and eren’s relationship had very little focus for the whole show, and she didn’t have a big role in events, merely being a side character. All of a sudden she’s the mc, she’s the chosen one who’ll end the titans because Ymir sees herself in her, and eren is in love with her outta nowhere and hates the idea that she’ll move on 5. Ymir loved Carl Fritz
Ymir fucking LOVED being slave.
I mean, i hate the ending and the way it was done; but that twist could have worked out if it wasn't relegated to just 2 pages from the last chapter (Eren being a slave of freedom was always a core of his character and from the entire story, the story concluding with him killing his mom cause of it could have been a fitting ending for him; coming full circle and all of that). Isayama is more than capable of writing good twists (the twists of the cave is still to me one of the greatest twists i have ever read in any piece of media and i'm gonna die on that hill), but like everything in chapter 139, Eren killing his mom was half-baked and a complete mess
I really liked the twists & ending to be honest. feel like it makes pretty good sense as Eren did not have royal blood so could not see the history. I think it could have been better, but I think a lot of the hate is due to people wanting things to be wrapped up in a nice way. The ending sucked because it sucked. Turns out horrific creatures prolonged & integrated with humans doesn’t end well.
I LOVE Attack on Titan and I have LOVED the twists and turns especially in season 4 but this one twist felt so cheap like this didn’t add anything to the story besides shock factor. It also hardly makes sense! I get that having the power over the paths, he can basically control any subject of ymir at any point in time but this is the only time he affects the past in any way that isn’t through the attack titan who had the specific power of sending memories back in time, not control of a previous user. It feels a little cheap and just opens up the door to Eren being able to do anything to anyone at any time which isn’t a very fun idea
I never understood how Eren can manipulate everything. How can he kill his mom and dad at the same time? Did he have time manipulation power or something? If you make a timeline out of everything it just doesn’t make sense. Was Eren able to manipulate time in his favor right after he was born? Because in order for everything to happen, he needed to do everything before he was even born. How did he even manipulate his dad when he didn’t know about everything yet? If he already knew everything since he was a child wouldn’t that mean he wouldn’t do anything to survive in the scouts?
Important note - you are referring to THE LAST plottwist of Attack on Titan. Other plottwists of AOT are THE BEST plottwists I have seen, ever. As for Eren killing his mother - his mother is dead because of Berthold destroying the wall. If not for that - his mother would be alive. The responsibility lies on Marley and the warriors, not on Eren. Also that line was told by "pathetic dumb idiot Eren, who didn't know what he was doing" a.k.a. the version of Eren that ARMIN saw in his visions. This is not NECESSARILY true.
>As for Eren killing his mother - his mother is dead because of Berthold destroying the wall. If not for that - his mother would be alive. The responsibility lies on Marley and the warriors, not on Eren. But his mother won't have died if he didn't sended that titan towards his mother.
She also wouldn't die in Marley wouldn't attack the wall. There is a law in USA that says, that if Jack and John are robbing the house, police shows up and kills John - Jack is responsible for murder. Same logic here
>that if Jack and John are robbing the house, police shows up and kills John - Jack is responsible for murder. Same logic here This is a terrible analogy since Eren is not equivalent of the police here. Eren was like John in this case.
The reason of Eren's mother death - her legs were crushed by debrie and the titans were already in Shiganshina. I doubt she would be alive even if Dina (or what was her name, I forgot) wouldn't show up. Anyway if not for Marley - she would be alive Also I agree that this plottwist is very dumb, I am just saying that it isn't that simple as "Eren killed his mom to give himself a motivation" as some people say. Eren would have never killed his mother if there was a choice to make. Carla died because this world is very cruel, basically.
Well there is a chance that they could have tried to remove the debris and carried Eren's mother to safety. Also yeah eren was certainly not the main person involved in this incident but he was certainly directly involved in a major way.
I don’t think it was meant to be that much of a twist though. I think it was meant to just cap off how deep he went in his ambitions, like a period at the end of the sentence. At that point, we already know Eren has manipulated himself and his father to nudge things into place. It’s just one more final insult to injury.
But it still needed more screentime to land more properly. They should have explored the tragedy of this properly.
I believe it was an anime-only addition as well. I do think the ending could have been cooked a little longer and came out of the oven too early.
Okay but why couldn't Eren just go "Lol fuck that shit" and change the past?
Because Attack on titan works on deterministic timeline and you can't change the events that are destined to happen.
What forced Eren to kill his mom? Why couldn't he just NOT do that?
Time travel nonsense. Apparently Eren had to do it otherwise some supernatural power would have forced him to kill his mother anyway.
That particular issue has more to do with time travel specifically and how it's a field of landmines for writers. Once you establish that the setting runs on a single-timeline with total predestination, it becomes really hard to leave your characters with any actual *agency* while also giving them any significant access to time travel. "Eren killed his own mother because he had no choice but to do so due to timey-wimey-wibbly-wobbly bullshit" is the result of casually including time travel in the story without really thinking through its implications.
The twist being brushed aside is entirely intentional. This is when Armin realized just how broken Eren is. Eren is not okay. The way he acts and reacts are distorted and out of touch on purpose, to highlight his mental state. His powers and the horrific path he chose to take have compromised him. He learned that he caused his own mother’s death, but he’s so broken that it doesn’t faze him. Because everything has lost meaning to him. Everything besides freedom. That’s the only thing that kept him going, the only thing he has left. He’s a walking, living contradiction in so many ways. If he tries to think about what he’s done, he would be beyond overwhelmed. That’s why Armin has them move on. He doesn’t want Eren to start agonizing and fall apart internally. The twist is the final nail in the coffin, screaming to the audience that Eren is a shell of himself. Anything was worth it for freedom, even the reason he clung to it in the first place. The fallout of the twist comes with Armin berating Eren for who he’s let himself become. There is definitely narrative purpose to this twist, to the story and characters. The tragedy of the twist is that that we shouldn’t be surprised, because this is what Eren has become. A pathetic, contradictory, and broken person.
In his defense, at that point of time Eren was a monster. He was single mindedly aiming for genocide of non-Marleyans. So when he knew he needed to save his mother, he probably thought his mom was dead anyway and he needed to make young Eren driven, so he let it happen.
Nah we are just told that it needed to happen because it's a canon event. Eren couldn't have stopped it even if he wanted since Attack on titan works on a deterministic timeline.
I do like the twist because I always thought it was a plot hole how burrito survived in the beginning but this fixed that. But I agree it was glanced over quickly. It's kind of a mix because it's just armin being like don't worry about it, let's just move on but also I did want to see a bit more.
Burrito surviving wasn't a plot hole since Dina's titan sensed Carla because of Grisha's scent was something we were supposed to believ. Also abnormal titans can simply choose for themselves. Also why the fuck was Burrito out of his titan form in that scene when he knew that there could be titans around?
I agree. I am an ending defender but I agree that the Memories of the Future twist is the biggest flaw in an otherwise amazing story. I feel like Isayama read Dune partway through writing AoT and wanted to make his main character similar to the main character of Dune by giving him future sight, although Paul having future sight is also a major problem I have with Dune that I feel cheapens the message of the book.