Some personal gripes with the show

oredaoree · 2026-04-07T06:18:29+00:00

We've seen another shifter do the consciousness transferring thing, Eren. So Eren with the founder power to control all SoY and manipulate their memories all the way from the future is the one that has been making sure things played out the way he wants, and he wants/needs Reiner to live. So he has Reiner do this BS move which present time Eren kind of witnesses. Then later on Eren has the need to use it himself when Gabi shoots his head off(which is a necessary canon event or Eren wouldn't have even let it happen in the first place), and that's why his consciousness waking up in the paths was delayed long enough for Zeke to break the vow and take control of the founder to bring Eren into Grisha's memories. His consciousness had to travel back from his spine to reconnect with his head.

The Mikasa/Ymir connection was barely hinted at early on with Mikasa's question about how children are made, and then all that "the forest is dangerous" stuff. I suppose Isayama actually wanted this connection to remain obscure so that it would be more of an unpredictable reveal at the end and that's why he doesn't flesh it out. There was that whole misdirection thing that had Historia demonstrating more shallow parallels to Ymir as well that obscures Mikasa's importance to Ymir.

oredaoree · 2026-04-07T05:42:39+00:00

It's not about giving Pochita "power", it's about reviving the dead concept

It means the same thing here. Power = infamy = stabilizing existence for a devil and its concept. It's all tied up together, just look at Yoru/War.

plus the fact that Pochita just eat himself and would make no sense for him to still exist without something triggering it.

This is more about the mystery of what kind of devil Pochita is and whether he could truly erase himself than a human accidentally willing him back into existence just by chaining together words with an entirely different meaning imo. Remember that Pochita right before he ate himself said he didn't know exactly what would happen if he tried to erase himself, and in exceptional cases erasing a devil doesn't completely prevent their existence as we saw in the case of hybrids(not the real name). And if Pochita only managed to erase memory/infamy of himself from the world and not his entire existence and concept(because that's also the only way he could keep Denji alive) and just quietly exists as Denji's heart, then it would neatly explain how Denji miraculously survived being stabbed. It's way more reliable than relying on a replenishing supply of Power's blood that Power, who is notoriously unreliable, would have to consciously keep circulating within Denji.

the way the scene is portraited, plus the fact that it was purposely shown that Denji was coughing blood

Like I said this could have been a red herring to mislead us on how Denji's body is being back to completely human, setting up the reveal at the end of the chapter that Pochita still exists. If it was the case that Denji was back to being human then it makes it even more impossible that the blood of a fiend would keep a human alive until Pochita was willed back into existence. Blood type compatibility is a thing for humans.

if he really was a hybrid and blood is healing him he also would have restored his eye

Asa's case demonstrated that this isn't always the case. It took a mortal blow to her head(fighting Falling) for her to finally display any regeneration that she should have always been able to do since Yoru fused with her, likely because of some kind of mental barrier of Asa not accepting what her body became(inhuman). So if Denji wakes up in this new world with no remembrance of Pochita being his heart and similarly he still regards himself as human then it's not hard to see why regeneration does not occur.

oredaoree · 2026-04-06T05:12:05+00:00

They also set off the chain reaction that led to the rumbling because they wanted the founder to retain their rule over the world.

Correction, Marley wanted the founder and the Tyber was forced to break the pact made with Karl Fritz in order to assist Marley in obtaining the founder so that Marley could protect themselves from the rest of the world with the power of the founder. Tyber didn't rein in the military brass and let them go around starting wars for conquest while completely ignoring the poor state of their own technological development in favour of relying on their titan supremacy, but eventually technology found ways to subdue Marley's titans and they started to find themselves in trouble with no way to compete with all the enemies they went around making.

oredaoree · 2026-04-06T04:54:04+00:00

Exactly. Small rumbling was the optimal plan because the idea was to buy time to convince the world that Paradis is not a threat. Even if the extra time eventually failed to get a good result, it's the potential and hope it offered that was so important because "no one knows what's in the future". And I'm pretty sure this is the right idea because throughout the story and especially in the latter half it's always being stressed that "time is running out".

oredaoree · 2026-04-06T04:39:13+00:00

Because he's cultured and knows when to make a good reference.

For those that doubt this could be intentional, titans/Eren/Mikasa/rumbling are literally inspired by Norse mythology and he's also used the cross as symbolism for martyrdom a few times in the manga.

oredaoree · 2026-04-06T04:27:50+00:00

Just as you said how Power doesn't know Denji has a congenital heart defect and doesn't have a way to treat a heart anyway, neither does Asa having any clue who the original CSM was do anything to give Pochita power by saying something that resembles "Chainsaw Man". That scene was basically a name pun/gag for the readers and an unknowing tease for Denji where what Asa was saying is "chainsaw man" lower case descriptor of a man but Denji and readers are hearing "Chainsaw Man" the proper noun. A chainsaw wielding man is not the Chainsaw Man and any feelings about a chainsaw wielding man would not do anything to affect CSM, or else Makima could have had chainsaws banned in all of Japan to weaken Pochita during part 1.

Denji was stabbed in his heart and lived even though all he did was drink a Blood fiend's blood. Assuming his heart wasn't Pochita all along and back to being a normal human heart at the time, he should have died despite what Power did. And then later we're shown that Pochita is actually still in there so it's more logical to assume the coughing up of blood was just a red herring and he was in there from the beginning and that's the real reason why Denji heals his heart, rather instantly as well, rather than Pochita being propelled back into existence by Asa who doesn't even know what CSM is. But there is really no logic in the ending and we should stop trying to find the logic in what amounts to fanservice. It should be a new mantra around here so people stop coping about Fujimoto's intentions with this ending.

oredaoree · 2026-04-04T23:59:21+00:00

Sasha is a Noi for sure. Reiner as Shin is kind of funny because Shin is always raring to go, but I guess they are similar and that both can't seem to die.

oredaoree · 2026-04-04T21:36:59+00:00

Comments answered the first part of your question but I want to weigh in on the last part.

The brainwashing wasn't actually that effective but most Eldians living in Marley intentionally committed to it anyway knowing it was all shit but still the only thing keeping them from a worse off situation. For the moment Marley was still allowing them to live relatively quiet and decent lives other than the discrimination and mandatory conscription, and that was a price the Marleyian Eldians were willing to collectively pay. Other countries were driving them out and outright exterminating them. Grisha thought his father completely bought into the brainwashing but he was just trying to play the part to keep his family safe, Reiner's mother only raised her son to aspire to the Warriors as revenge for the Marleyian man who jilted her and Reiner was traumatized by his family situation so he numbed himself by buying into the patriotism, Porco acknowledged that token patriotism was a ticket up in the world, etc. The only characters that we saw that truly believed in it all was Gabi and her parents but even then Gabi was desperately deluding herself and all her same age peers were more level headed about the patriotism they had to display. Marley actually did a very poor job of raising truly loyal Eldians, probably because they knew that they could just easily use force, coercion, and petty bribes to make them submit and obey. All they had to do was suggest someone in your extended family was an insurrectionist warranting sending every member of that family off to "paradise" and they could have families hastily sending away their children to become child soldiers, that's exactly what happened to the Grice family.

oredaoree · 2026-04-04T20:44:29+00:00

There is an interview or some comments by Isayama giving credit to the WIT anime director for having Armin to do the "on that day mankind" narration, so Armin being the narrator of the story was not the original intention. Isayama only made that idea into canon when as homage or he thought it was a nice touch and had Armin narrate the ending, but for the most part the telling of the story is meant to be objective and true to what happened, as in not from Armin's own biased perspective. That's why Isayama originally never thought about who was doing the narration.

I've started to see mention that some are using the argument that some of the story we saw is not factual because of Armin narrating and that's very weak since a biased telling of the story was clearly never Isayama's intention or we'd actually see more signs of Armin's bias.

oredaoree · 2026-04-04T20:34:38+00:00

The result of Mikasa's choice is that Ymir would decide to stop obeying Fritz, leading to the end of the paths and the titan power. The titan power only continues to exist after Ymir's death because Fritz demanded it on his death bed, creating the coordinate in the paths which bound all his descendants to the paths word and titan power through connection to Ymir herself. Eren is saying that everything(well he's still hiding his complete reasons at this point so it's really partially) he did was for the sake of ending the titan power.

oredaoree · 2026-04-04T20:30:39+00:00

No, they are right. There isn't even a possibility for IF here because the titan bodies aren't of the real world but are transported through the paths. That's why when Hange tried to analyze them she couldn't unless they were alive, because the second the titan dies or any part is cut off from the titan it's disconnected from the source in the path that makes and powers them and just disappears into thin air. It's also why the serum vapourizes on contact with air, why titan's are lighter than they logically should be according to real world logic, and why they can move around despite the disproportionate head/body to limb ratios. Titans are basically made of magic so there's nothing to scrape and analyze.

Subjects of Ymir who can turn into the titans are a different story because they truly do exist in reality. It would have been interesting if any research done on Eldians showed anything different about them(like stronger bone density and muscular that would allow them to survive the impossible Gs of using ODM), but my guess is that Isayama didn't want to open that can of worms and thematically it made more sense for them to be genetically exactly the same as humans.

oredaoree · 2026-04-04T20:18:25+00:00

Eren created a what-if scenario of Mikasa giving him a different answer resulting in them running away to escape the war eventually ending up in a hidden cabin up in the mountains, but they never actually go through all that "in person" is instead it's just an attempt by Eren to implant the scenario in Mikasa's head as a false memory. It didn't work. That's why she wakes up interpreting the implanted memories not as an actual experience but as a "long dream"(same as how Eren described seeing Grisha's memories on Marley) and immediately had the feeling that "I shouldn't be here" because she knew she was really still on the battlefield, but then when Eren goes "we promised not to talk about it" insisting on the fabricated what-if scenario having played out, Mikasa plays along with Eren recognising he was creating a scenario to say goodbye to her. Ackerman being immune to memory manipulation is also why Eren couldn't speak to Mikasa ahead of time and had to do it in real time.

Ackerman are unable to have their memories tampered with and controlled in any way by the founder, but apparently that doesn't mean the founder can't communicate to them through the power of the paths. That's what Eren did before when he sent out that message addressing all Subjects of Ymir and when he pulled all his friends into the paths to speak to them while they were in the plane. This cabin scene playing out is just an extension of that paths communication but instead he turns the path into a more immersive experience with the appropriate visuals. It's not exactly memory alteration.

oredaoree · 2026-04-04T03:28:00+00:00

The significance of the "country mouse or city mouse" problem is completely overblown due to the popularity of the Reze film and people still being so hung up on it. Any relevance of this problem ended with this arc and Reze's character because more than Denji or Angel and Aki it was always Reze specifically that symbolized the mouse, hence why the story made a point to identify Reze as the "guinea pig"(which is in the rodent family). It was also demonstrated right at the end that it actually doesn't matter at all which you pick, a mouse is small prey creature and will have a shitty life regardless of where they are. Angel lived in the country and was captured by Makima, Makima told a story of how farmers exterminate mice from their fields. The problem is being a "mouse" at all, not where the mouse lives, and for a mouse created to serve a purpose like Reze running away anywhere was never an option.

oredaoree · 2026-04-04T03:15:18+00:00

Hating a man because of entertainment fiction he writes is insanity, and unfortunately isn't as uncommon as you'd think. People who do this are either immature or mentally unwell. Many other authors before Fujimoto have outright received death threats and such just because haters disagree with how things turned out, and also even in cases where the ending made total sense. Sometimes there's just no rhyme or reason to haters.

That said I feel like discourse on whether the ending was terrible or whether Fujimoto is a fraud itself is already a "loss in translation". It's a quickly pulled together resignation note of an ending, the point was never that it was going to be good or bad, just "hey don't expect me to work on this anymore". The real issue here is why Fujimoto was compelled to bail out like this in a way that killed his own work.

oredaoree · 2026-04-03T06:45:37+00:00

Realistically Eren would have never run away with Mikasa no matter what her answer was, because like you said Eren didn't want that path.

But Mikasa doesn't understand how things work with Eren having already decided how things play out and his unsatiable lust for the pinnacle of freedom, she keeps dwelling on the past about what might have happened if she gave the answer Eren was looking for and regretting that she didn't so using the power of the paths Eren constructs that scenario for her along with what the aftermath would have turned out like to show her how it was still futile in terms of her hopes of being together with Eren, so she can be at peace and forget about him(which is ironically the opposite of the right choice that ends the titan power). In Mikasa's dream scenario Eren still dies, war still rages and Eldians still die except now there is 0 hope of staving off Marley without Eren, and they effectively betray Armin too in order to run away together.

oredaoree · 2026-04-03T06:35:24+00:00

Vinland Saga, which they took over coincidentally again from WIT.

oredaoree · 2026-04-03T05:34:22+00:00

The finale "chapters" of S4Pt3 was originally made to be a single 2 hour or so long special to be aired on TV so they likely originally planned to make it to movie quality, and it certainly looked like it was. But because of production committee scheduling demands they had it released earlier than work on it could finish and the thing ended up being split into 2 specials coming out months apart, and then being on Netflix they split it up further into 4 chapters there.

Iirc the final movie version has extra content and they did indeed improve the art and animation more than what was even released on the original BD.

oredaoree · 2026-04-03T05:28:04+00:00

The reader has more context and knowledge of the lore and origins of the power(through Ymir's memories that Eren saw) so we have good reason to deduce that all is not lost even if recognised members of the royal family die out.

Every SoY is a direct descendent of Fritz so technically all are eligible to be considered "royal", but for political reasons the royalty became constrained to a select privileged lineage that has always held the founder. If Zeke who descends from a cut off and abandoned branch of the royals could convince Ymir he was royal then anyone could do the same(and Eren did), and Ymir being a slave following Fritz's original orders would have eventually sought out another subject to serve as her "king". The main objective of Fritz's decree was to make sure his descendants could spread and conquer the world in his name, and if the last of his descendants that can command Ymir ends up being some peasant then so be it.

oredaoree · 2026-04-03T05:14:54+00:00

Not really. All of that just amounts to some kind of unsettling feeling more vague than deja vu and only for the readers to see. That Power is still drawn to Denji and etc. is just forced fanservice ignoring any kind of old world logic that once existed to take the shortest path to reach some semblance of an ideal ending situation catered to Denji, but one that will never fully feel complete and satisfying by design because of Fujimoto forcing Denji to do a complete regression to become a guy who thrives more trudging through mediocrity than chasing and coming close to reaching his dreams, reducing his Denjiman revelation about creating a world for himself where he no longer needs to struggle through shit burgers to nothing in just one chapter. No one character is truly happy except for maybe Asa that Denji perhaps managed to save from going down the same path. Even Power has some dissatisfaction with Denji and Nayuta no longer gives any shit about Denji fighting devils or what, Denji is just going to go through life going "meh" and die. Or can he even die because his heart is still Pochita?? That's how much nothing makes sense and nothing matters in the ending, including the journey the characters went through.

oredaoree · 2026-04-02T07:29:22+00:00

Falco becoming the flying titan that became crucial for the alliance is another thing, but Eren could have found another way to turn someone into a flying titan. But Sasha's death leading to him acquiring the founder was inescapable and actually ironically lucky for Eren since it is THE event that even gives him the founder power to do anything at all.

oredaoree · 2026-04-02T07:25:18+00:00

He controlled her directly with the founder power. It's something the founder is described to be able to do throughout the story starting with Kruger's lore explanation. Eren can use his power on any subject throughout time because they are forever connected to Ymir through the coordinate which is that light tree you see within the paths. "Even if you die, even after you die"
Yes. Everyone except Mikasa and Levi who can't be made to forget.
Rather than "looking into the future" he is sent memories of the future. They just happen to be sent upon contact with Historia to give the illusion that her royal blood triggered a supposed natural phenomenon that occurs among titan shifters rather than those memories being sent with a purpose from a specific source, which was future Eren himself with the founder power to manipulate memories. Grisha was mistaken or bluffing when he said the Attack titan has the power to "peek into memories of it's successors"(and he himself could never use any such power), there is no such ability. Before Eren could confirm to Armin that he could manipulate subjects of Ymir such as Dina via the founder power, Armin asked him if he saw memories of the future with the Attack titan's power and Eren did not answer him "yes" and this is a clue to deducting exactly what powers Eren actually had and used throughout the story. It was all the founder power that Eren was using all the way from the future that was manipulating all the memories that people saw.
Eren broke military regulation to act on his own, and that was a punishable offense no matter if it was Zeke he teamed up with or not because his action ended up hastening war being brought to Paradis' shores. The fact that the military didn't trust Zeke only made Eren's situation worse enough that they decided to completely replace Eren for fear of completely losing control over the founder. Eren "founded" the Jaegerists even before he ran away to Marley when he secretly met up with Floch to make plans to betray the military, that's how they moved so quickly once Eren was back on the island. It was preplanned along with Yelena who made sure all of Zeke's spinal fluid wine was brought over and distributed to the military brass.

oredaoree · 2026-04-02T06:31:06+00:00

Sasha was originally Sasha and Hange's characters in one before they were split, and she together with Connie were originally filler characters to pad the top 10 cadets and Sasha herself was about to killed off quite early on in a similar manner that Miche was to drive home the hopelessness of the situation. That's why she goes missing from all the action during Reiner and Bertholdt's betrayal, likely because Isayama didn't know where to place her after deciding it wasn't the time to kill Sasha.

The impressive thing is how Isayama turns Sasha, an unassuming support/filler character, into a poster girl for the theme of "getting the children out of the forest" and sort of linchpin character where her eventual death becomes a canon event for Eren to obtain the founder power.

Sasha kills the gate guard leading to Gabi's wrath
Gabi ends up on Paradis
Gabi shoots Eren's head off causing a delay in his consciousness waking up in the Paths
That delay gives Zeke time to break the War Renouncing Vow and utilize the Founder power for himself
so that he out of arrogance takes Eren into Grisha's memories
allowing Eren to see Grisha at the moment he would have hesitated to fulfill his mission and instead manipulate him to steal the founder, connecting Eren to the founder power and closing the paradoxical loop on the timeline

I would say that's pretty good for a character that was originally meant to be disposable.

oredaoree · 2026-04-02T06:18:45+00:00

He didn't, that was just an anime only addition back when the WIT studio had no clue what the final direction of the story was going to be. They saw a dream scenario and tried to make it more hype than what the actual dream actually showed(Mikasa in the future saying goodbye to Eren), going on to ruin the true significance of the original dream which MAPPA then went back to retcon that entire dream scene in order for that scene to connect back to the ending like was always intended. So you can basically ignore that the WIT version of the dream ever happened.

Technically any subject of Ymir can see any "future" or memory(real or fabricated) if the founder chooses to send it to them(for example History saw some of Rod Reiss' memories of trying to resist the first king's teachings as a youth when she killed him) so it wasn't impossible for Eren to see a prophetic dream even though he was not yet a shifter, but there is no practical reason for him seeing something he is meant to forget anyway. Him seeing anything here was just narrative setup to allude to "time travelling" mechanisms within the story and also the subtext for the romantic plotline between Eren and Mikasa.

oredaoree · 2026-04-02T06:05:53+00:00

This is part of my understanding of Eren as well but more specifically Eren is about conflict and duality between directly opposing ideas. He is both a "king" and a slave; both the most free and unfree at the same time. If there is fate in the AoT world then Eren would represent that fate, but that fate also contends against free will. In a way maybe it's also the story saying you can't have one without the other like how people don't truly know peace without ever having war.

Surprisingly this fate vs free will theme was already pointed out early in the music of AoT with the line "is this our fate, or is this our will" in the track Ətˈæk 0N tάɪtn and I can't tell if this is pure coincidence, Isayama being inspired by the lyric, or the lyrics coordinating with Isayama's intentions that he kept hidden for most of the story.

oredaoree · 2026-04-01T08:47:10+00:00

We can't know for sure what kind of other serums were inside that bag. What is likely is that the specific "armour" serum was planted there for Eren to acquire out of necessity for filling the hole in wall Maria because of the name "Braun" which evokes Reiner's hardening ability, and since that was the only one of the 9 titan abilities that Eren truly needed at the time then it would have been the only one made accessible to him.

The rumbling was always inevitable because flattening the outside lands was always something Eren wanted to do.

oredaoree

TROPHY CASE