This is what makes the tragedy of Eren Yeager. This show is ultimately about the way adults hang onto and obsess over old conflicts and continue to spread hatred, passing it on to children. This season doubles down on these themes and, even if at times they feel too in-your-face, it may be necessary to make sure the audience fully gets it. Gabi is the vessel through which the show conveys its ultimate message about the cost of war and how children are the ones who suffer the most in continuing cycles of violence. After being introduced as a clear parallel to Eren, then an irredeemable monster who killed a beloved character, it quickly became clear that Gabi was one of the most important players in Attack on Titan. Meanwhile, Connie has a crisis of faith after suffering one heartbreak and betrayal after another, as he sees himself becoming a murderous traitor to the Yeagerists that he initially saw Reiner and Bertolt as back in Season 2.Īs if deepening the original characters wasn't enough, this final (not really, but let's just roll with it) season also gives us one of the most despicable, hateful, punchable douchebag villains in all of anime - Floch, and a character destined to be misunderstood and debated for years to come, Gabi. For Jean, this means realizing that he is no longer the kid who desperately wanted to get a cozy office job in the interior, safe from danger, but is instead someone who continuously chooses to do what's right, and the true successor to Erwin Smith as the leader of the group. Indeed, this season we spend more time not just with Mikasa and Armin, but with Jean and Connie too as the characters struggle to come to terms with the people they thought they'd be, and the people they became throughout the course of the show. Attack on Titan makes the brilliant choice of distancing us from him and focusing instead on how the other characters react to Eren's actions. Rather than follow him through this whole ordeal, we spend half of the season without even seeing Eren, but he still casts such a large shadow that we consistently feel his presence even when he is literally hundreds of feet in the air as a terrifying whale Titan. Much of the season was devoted to reconciling Eren's actions with the kid we knew, and trying to understand what led him to activate the Rumbling, with revelations that recontextualized everything we thought we knew about the show. Eren has always been headstrong and brash, idealistic to the extreme even before we met him in Season 1 – we just went along with it because he is the protagonist and because his anger was directed at nameless Titans rather than men, women, and children. Instead, the murderous rage inside him has always been there. What makes his arc so satisfying is how clear the show is about it not being a sudden 180 Eren is no Daenerys.
After last season presented a cold, closed-off Eren, this season finally revealed his plan to annihilate every last human outside of Paradis Island. It has been Attack on Titan’s biggest accomplishment to see Eren get one of the best heel turns not just in anime, but in all of fiction since Walter White. At the center of this, of course, is Eren Yeager himself.
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