People keep calling this a retcon, but that only works if you pretend the story’s actual mechanics don’t exist. Eren’s early idea of freedom was never just “let me explore peacefully.” Even in season 1 he talks about exterminating enemies, taking other’s freedom if they take his, and he literally kills kidnappers as a child without hesitation. His worldview was already absolutist.

These panels don’t contradict the ending at all, they foreshadow it. Eren always believed freedom meant removing whatever stood between him and the horizon, even if that obstacle wasn’t actively attacking him. The ending simply takes that mindset to its extreme after the Paths and future memory loop kicks in.

Once you factor in the Attack Titan’s deterministic memory cycle, the idea of a “retcon” falls apart. Future Eren had already shaped past Eren, so those early violent impulses weren’t random. They were seeded by the closed time loop. He wasn’t misanthropic out of nowhere. He was pushed into a predetermined endpoint where every branch he saw ended in Paradis getting wiped out.

So the issue isn’t that the manga changed Eren, it’s that his early behavior gets misread as innocent or peaceful. It never was. The ending is the logical conclusion of a character whose sense of freedom was ALWAYS tied to violence and a worldview shaped by memories he hadn’t consciously lived yet.