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aspoonofsugar · 5 years

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Hello! What are your thoughts on the latest chapter of AoT ?

Hello anon!

It happened what I thought it would aka Eren freeing Ymir and the Rumbling starting, so my general thoughts have not changed that much since the ones I had on chapter 121.

What this chapter added to the previous ones is Ymir’s backstory which touches on many concepts we have already met in the manga.

Ymir is a character who shares her main flaw with Historia like the chapter reminds us:

Frieda’s thesis is that since the world is full of suffering people should be kind with each other. This is also what society should ideally be about. However, the chapter presents a very different truth. Society and humans are the ones who end up creating much of the pain and suffering and Ymir’s story is in a sense the embodyment of this.

Ymir sacrifices herself for others’ sake, but it is precisely because of this that she ends up being used by others and suffers. At the same time her situation doesn’t change no matter how much power she obtains and how much her status rises.

As a matter of fact her backsory makes clear that it is not the lack of strength the reason why she doesn’t change her own situation:

Ironically, she is a character without a spine who is literally given one (and titan powers are said to be somehow connected with one’s will), but she still spends all her life as a slave despite having all the power and ability to free herself and to do what she wants.

In short, Ymir proves once and for all what the series has already made plenty clear aka that it is not through becoming stronger physically that a person becomes free. There needs to be an inner change.

At the same time, I would like to highlight two other and hopefully more interesting points.

Once again, we are back to this line. King Fritz tells Ymir that she was born to be a slave, while Carla (and Eren completes her statement in the Return to Shiganshina arc) says that a person is perfect and free for the sole reason of being born.

It is obvious that these two philosophies are in opposition. Eren in this chapter conveys to Ymir his mother’s thoughts:

Ymir is a human and as a human she was not born for any particular reason. She was not born to be a monster, a slave or a God. There is no hidden meaning in her birth and so no specific destiny she must fulfill. She can choose. This is the beauty of Carla’s vision of the world. Her son does not have to be special or to prove that he is worthy. He can just be human and in this way free.

The same goes for Ymir and for Historia before and after her:

Eren is back at telling traumatized girls that they can just be people.

However, what about Eren himself?

As I have already mentioned when commenting chapter 121 Eren’s powers seem to enforce a vision of the world which is deterministic and impossible to change:

In short, Eren might go around trying to free individuals he sees suffering because of the weight of their fate, but he himself seems to accept a pre-determined future (even if we must first discover what he has seen and what he wants to do in reguards to it) and a specific role.

After all, Eren is called both a devil and a God and is dehumanized both by allies and enemies alike. However, he seems to have accepted it and he has actually encouraged such a behaviour by cutting ties with people who are genuinely trying to understand him and to help him. Hange, Mikasa, Armin and even Zeke all tried to communicate with him, but he has shut everyone down.

In short, it is as if Eren can clearly see that it is wrong to dehumanize others by giving them roles they don’t want to fulfill, but he accepts that such a thing is done to him.

I would like to highlight that this is not the first time something like this happens:

The whole point of Historia and Eren’s parallelism in the Uprising is exactly this. Eren thinks that it is alright for Historia to be a normal girl, but he is horrified when he turns out to be a normal person himself.

Eren overcomes the situation thanks to his loved ones’ encouragement and later on he seems to have accepted his mother’s point of view after talking with Shadis. I wonder if right now he has somehow gone back to his old habit. If it is so, I would not be surprised if in the end someone were to tell him what Carla did and what he himself told Ymir aka that he is just a human being.

This is the only moment in her life Ymir was ever told that she was free. However, “freedom” here means that she is banned from her own community and forced to live in the forest alone waiting to be hunted (in a sense she is “sent to Paradis” before this term was invented).

In short, Ymir is given a pretty definite choice between being a slave in society and being free in the nature.

This idea of freedom as a reality without social restrictions or bonds seems to me a little bit too simplicistic and it is ironic because it reminds me of the world inhabited by titans our protagonists were determined to fight in the beginning of the series.

So what does the series want to convey? That the world dominated by natural forces which was seen as an obstacle in the beginning is actually better than human society? Or maybe there is an alternative the story must still explore?

What is sure is that this chapter seems to put a lot of focus on this opposition:

Eren says that he wants to destroy this world where individuals use each other and after Ymir wakes up and starts crying out of what is probably anger the rumbling starts. An angry and destructive reaction seems right when it comes to Ymir after all what she went through. However, an obvious question arises. What comes after the destruction?

This chapter underlines once again that society is wrong and that humans are the real monsters and Eren seems determined to destroy such a world. His feelings resonate with Ymir who accepts to help him.

However, the necessity of a change and to fight to obtain said change is an incomplete answer. It is incomplete because it does not consider the necessity of building something new and the positive things which are born by human connections (let’s also highlight that this is ironic also withint the chapter itself because in the end what gets through Ymir is not Eren shouting about changing the world and destruction, but he calmly telling her that she has been waiting for someone to help her hence it is his ability to establish a connection).

Eren reminds me of this definition of anarchism offered in Psycho Pass:

In the series this conversation continues by highlighting that a certain character fits only the first part of the definition. In short, this character was focused only on the destructive part and not on the constructive one. I would not be surprised if Eren were the same.

Eren and Ymir in this chapter seem to both grasp that there is something wrong with the way things are currently and are both trying to change that, but their wish for change asks for massive destruction (at least it is framed this way so far).

Basically, we come back to what I have written in the meta linked above:

In other words there is no doubt that what Eren is doing will be fundamental to change the current corrupted system, but at the same time I think his pov needs to be integrated. I think Eren is missing a piece of the puzzle and that someone else should give it to him.

Eren is a person who has decided to rebel to the way things are right now, but in this way he has started assuming some behaviours similar to the ones he is supposedly against. At the same time, his rightous anger at the world needs to be integrated with something else which is more constructive, but for this to happen other characters need to wake up as well and to open their eyes to what is really happening.

Thank you for the ask!

#snk #snk 122 #snk meta #asksfullofsugar #anonymous

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