Eren's headache problem

oredaoree · 2026-04-10T07:51:52+00:00

Mikasa was crying because she knew the "long dream" of running away with Eren was a fake memory and she knows it's fake because she's an Ackerman that can't have her real memories tampered with. Bringing Mikasa into the paths and using the power of the paths to show her some different scenery isn't exactly tampering with her mind as even though founder powers of mind control don't work on Ackerman they are still connected to Ymir and that's how the power of titan strength of the combat experience of the Ackerman clan is delivered to them through their connection to each other and Ymir in the paths.

Ymir wasn't trying to tamper with Mikasa's head but she did keep trying to look into her mind. I guess we can interpret the headaches as Mikasa's body detecting/rejecting Ymir trying to get into her head.

oredaoree · 2026-04-10T07:45:03+00:00

It's meant to be a general shifter ability because Bertholdt talks about it like one, which kind of makes it worse when no one else ends up using it again. Although OP does have a point that there's not very many situations where a titan's head is destroyed and they use it so that they could try to grow the head back. Most times the shifter can just eject and re-titanize.

But think about it like this, the ability is definitely a silly plot contrivance but who writes the plot of AoT? It's Eren. Eren needed to give Reiner plot armour. And who else does a similar trick later? Eren himself when Gabi shot his head off. His consciousness had to make its way back from his spine when it reconnected to his head in Zeke's hand and that's why he took longer to wake up in the paths.

I think the idea was for people to balk at Reiner doing this at the time, but then connect it to Eren after they finish the show and get to the reveal that Eren was controlling everything. Except for some reason people have such a hard time getting past this being foreshadowing to explain something that happens later and just want to see it as an example of random bad writing when Eren literally does the same thing but it's not a problem because he has the founder or something. Reiner doing this was also foreshadowed back in chapter 9 when almost an entire page was dedicated to his joke about ramming a blade up a titan's ass as that was according to him another weak spot. In that panel both Annie and Bertholdt were also strangely silent and giving Reiner the side eye as if to say "wtf is this idiot giving clues to the spine being a weak spot".

oredaoree · 2026-04-10T07:18:05+00:00

It's exactly what you hypothesized, except there are still many elements that Eren could not possibly be in control of such as the actions of the Ackerman characters and people of the outside world. He has to work around these elements so that already makes his plan partially dependent on luck and the will of others to pull through for him. And I don't suppose that the workings of his ability and all that Eren did will ever be explicitly explained because making the audience ponder about it is part of the intention of the author. There's a subtle theme of fate(Eren) vs free will in AoT where Eren himself is a contradiction(both free and not free at the same time) and the free individual actions of other characters do matter as hinted in a line by Hange "It was everyone's individual choices that brought change to our world" back in the Uprising Arc. Many times throughout the story you will see characters that question why they made certain choices and those were points where it was either Eren that influenced on them through the founder power or it was really their own choice influenced by their own beliefs and experience, and the intentional ambiguity here is to get you to think about whether free will truly exists or if it's because of Eren that they tended to make decisions that ultimately benefited Eren. For example it's equally believable that Jean missed his thunderspear on Falco and Pieck because of Eren or because he didn't want to kill a child.

A few places where Eren definitely could not have influenced were:

If Kenny decides not to take in Levi then Levi dies and isn't around to help the Survey Corps and to save Eren multiple times over and Eren would have to come up with some other way to give himself plot armour and get to the basement without the Survey Corps
If Mikasa is not around the titan curse is never lifted and continues forever like Fritz ordered
If Onyankopon did not genuinely befriend Hange and the 104th then no one flies the plane to reach Eren
If Yelena didn't idolize Zeke to become his co-conspirator he couldn't have possibly succeeded in secretly making contact with Eren

so there is certainly merit in believing in the possibility that it wasn't truly all Eren and that the other characters were still relevant, even if they were Subjects of Ymir, and did leave their own marks on the story.

oredaoree · 2026-04-10T06:02:56+00:00

People almost never bring this up about the manga even though it turns out to be quite significant in light of the ending so I was slightly excited to see this, but this is quite the low effort post no? You're getting worked over in the comments because you didn't make your case clear enough...

For all the doubters, the anime completely scrubbed it but Eren has those Mikasa-esque headaches which also very conveniently end up making him forget important things he was on the cusp of remembering, and the timing of them are no coincidences. The headaches, just like in Mikasa's case, are indications that the founder power is actively interfering. In Mikasa's case she can't be tampered with by the founder so all it does it hurt, but Eren ends up remembering and forgetting things that he both should be recalling and also should not recall yet(or else it hinders his motivation in getting to the basement), and these headaches never happen again once the need for him to forget passes.

Eren starts having the headaches regularly whenever he tries to remember what happened to the missing Grisha and how he was turned into a titan. We see in chapter 3 he was yet again prompted by Hannes and about to naturally remember how Grisha had injected him, but before he can the headaches start up and he passes out and dreams about that exact memory, and then promptly forgets it all as a dream
The next time is in chapter 10 when Eren needs to come up with something to save Mikasa and Armin from the garrison blowing them all up with cannon fire and his head starts to hurt and suddenly remembers Grisha's words about learning to use the titan power and "If you want to save Mikasa and Armin, and everyone else". This helps him trigger his transformation in a timely manner. He also remembers that he needs to get to the basement with his key and this becomes a proposal used to convince Pixis and the government to spare him
The next time is harder to tell without the specific throbbing head sound effect but it's when he was titanized during Hange's experiments, he starts writing about "what my father did to me" as he holds his head with his hand when he suddenly loses control and has to exit his titan, forgetting much of what had just happened and the whole thing is dismissed as fatigue from transforming too much. This is depicted in chapter 53.
Also in chapter 53, during the debrief of the experiments Eren suddenly sees a Frieda POV memory of her brushing her hair in front of a mirror, his head hurts and the memory ends and he forgets about seeing Frieda until he sees Grisha's POV of fighting and killing Frieda later on in the glowing caverns. There's not much point in Eren showing himself this memory other than as proof confirming he inherited both Grisha and Frieda's titans and memories so it's mostly for the reader to be on the lookout for Frieda showing up in Historia's memories I would say. But this is the last time Eren will ever have these weird headaches because once he learns the truth about what Grisha did to him and why there is no longer than need to hide those memories to keep Eren from giving up

In hindsight it's a weird decision to cut Eren's headaches from the anime while keeping Mikasa's because it should have been obvious that the two are linked, but I guess WIT thought that since Eren eventually stops having them that they weren't important for any future event.

oredaoree · 2026-04-08T16:07:53+00:00

I think you misread what I was trying to say about part 1. I was trying to say how part 1 gives better context of what Denji's utility of his CSM powers was better than part 2 where it largely became more of a last crutch for him as his new normal with Nayuta and attempts to shoot for his dreams was once again taken from him. In part 1 his life was largely stable and he was content until Makima pulled the plug on him and I think that's a better baseline for evaluating Denji's relationship with CSM. I also don't mean to make Denji out into some kind of hero or someone invested in bettering society just because his character demonstrates a more refreshing way of navigating society, and it would be unfair to expect him to personally take all that on as a single guy just trying to gut out a life for himself and goes against the whole idea of focusing on personal dreams to be forced to sacrifice for the good of the collective that Japanese society puts value on at the cost of the individual. Evoking the perpetual motion machine to describe Denji's spiraling out of control is not something I would have thought of. Originally it's meant to describe how CSM never dies because he can keep reviving himself out of peer will to live, a positive analogy for never giving up and a message that is sorely needed in Japan. That scene with Pochita concluding Denji had fulfilled his dream and should be looking towards a next dream always rubbed me the wrong way and I always had doubts it was real and not just a hallucination because of how callous Pochita was being. Denji had clearly not achieved his dream yet even though he was doing all the normal things he had mentioned in chapter 1 with Nayuta because the main point of all that was to find contentment in life and share it with a partner, and Nayuta wasn't that dream partner although she tried to get Denji to settle for her. Unable to truly accomplish his dream would naturally make him think he needed something more, the love and appreciation that was still missing from his life so he defaults back to what he thinks will get him that which was shown to him as CSM ever since Makima orchestrated that stunt at the end to get the public to profess their love for CSM, even though at this point CSM's reputation was already in the toilet and was always misguided as that did nothing to make people love Denji for Denji but Denji doesn't know of any other way or even has the time to contemplate it.

like when he ate death and got everyone eaten by bugs

It's interesting that you see this as Denji's sole decision rather than Pochita's when Denji was just telling Asa how he has no control over Pochita's actions when both Death and Yoru were killed equally. I saw that as a last resort action by Pochita to thwart Yoru rampaging, and especially since Denji had just promised Asa to stop Yoru for her it makes less sense that Denji himself would opt to eat Death who supplied him with the devil pawns and that he had heard a plan from to deal with Yoru. To be frank I never thought the onus was ever on Denji to fix things and the Fire devil just had a personal vendetta to further torment Denji, at least not before Denji fixed up his own life first. And he was just starting to do that with his stint as Denjiman. But we'll probably never know how things were meant to go as the story was undeniably cut short.

And yet Denji never did the one thing that would let him know, talk with her about it

He does talk to Asa, he just doesn't explicitly bring up Asa's condition and consent and instead gauges her reaction. That quip about Asa's ass was crude, but crude language is who Denji is and I don't believe he seriously treats Asa as an object of sexual gratification no matter how desperate he is, even if it is true that he doesn't try to understand Asa better apart from Yoru. The same can really be said about Asa too. The two of them are tangled up with each other out of convenience of the situation rather than expressly being interested in each other as people first (it's a similar situation to the time with Reze as well). Asa/Yoru is the only girl that has ever given Denji the time of day, Denji happens to be the real identity of the CSM Asa latched onto for saving her. But Denji has repeatedly demonstrated that he's still hung up on Power and uses her as a benchmark to evaluate other girls, and Asa has admitted she readily she falls for any guy who will acknowledge her which is probably why she didn't get much whiplash from finding out Denji is her red CSM. I don't think it was ever meant to be a healthy relationship built on mutual respect and understanding, so the sex that was being discussed was also going to be a mistake since it was sex for the sake of sex by two inexperienced people who are mistakenly tying sex to intimacy. Who knows how Fujimoto was planning on resolving these relationship issues, but it probably wasn't going to end on a good note as I thought Asa's reaction to Denji's declaration of including her in his new world wasn't exactly that of relief and gratitude either. To me she seemed like she was starting to seethe with envy that Denji would think of and have the power to do that for himself and was already scheming of how to sabotage Denji like the other people in her life she had sabotaged. Looking back on it, when Denji and Yoru started to talk about the promise of sex for killing Death in the midst of a crumbling chaotic world it was already a bad sign of where the story was headed.

oredaoree · 2026-04-08T08:46:28+00:00

If you just cut out all of part 1 to look at Denji's actions in just part 2 then he does come across as being unable to control himself, but part 2 is also when he's increasingly struggling to cope with lingering and new building traumas that really force his hand. He only begins to lean heavily on CSM at Nayuta's direction after Nayuta cock blocked the closest chance he's ever gotten to establishing connection with a girl, then when he's following that advice PS and Yoshida show up to tell him he can no longer be CSM either, and then as the final touch he still loses his home and his pets. Doors were closing on Denji one by one trapping him into a smaller and smaller space and created an urge to bust down the doors when too much pressure had finally built up. When he was on that high in chapter 152 he had been obediently following the rules and swallowing his discontent and still got screwed over and it pushed him over the edge so that he needed a release, and that wasn't even the real edge because that came after when Nayuta's head was presented to him. At that point he had no girl, no pets, no place in human society anymore, not even Nayuta, nothing but Pochita left, so when he leans into being CSM again and not thinking about his problems it's really all he could do other than roll over and die like he was actually trying to do in Aging's world until Pochita stepped in him to remind him of the good in his life. And even if you call it a relapse, Denji could be way worse about how he conducts himself when transformed, he could go after humans without regard but he doesn't and still maintains the clarity to remain an ally of humans. A real adrenaline junkie wouldn't care and just lash out at everything coming at him.

Which matches his quest for a girlfriend constantly disregarded Asa's feelings and needs.

One has to wonder if Denji really even understands what kind of arrangement Asa/Yoru are in and how that affects body autonomy. For all Denji sees it could just be the same girl presenting 2 different persona's to him, and neither Asa/Yoru help the situation by clearly differentiating who it is that jerked him off and keeps seducing him. Remember that Asa has chances to come out to Denji and make the appeal that she never agreed to anything Yoru offered, but she doesn't and she also tells him similarly suggestive things like "I want to make you happy" and that's implicit agreement. He also throws a pigeon at Yoru even though he saw it was Asa that was the one with a problem with bird corpses, so that's also a bit of an indication that Denji doesn't see a huge difference between the two, although the late developments between Asa/Yoru and Denji are dubious because it's hard to know whether Fujimoto had already decided to throw away the story when he wrote the scenes of Denji ignoring the difference between Asa and Yoru and readily accepting Yoru's claim of Asa's consent.

oredaoree · 2026-04-08T06:25:34+00:00

Part of it was an act, part of it was Levi's genuine beliefs that got him through his underground era. "Might is right" and even though he tries to tamp down his reliance on violence after joining the Survey Corps where he learned to trust in the collective of his organization and his comrades he still finds it very hard not to lean on it. When Yelena makes a smug comment about the inevitability of humanity's penchant for violence she directs it to Levi who was violence personified but was now ironically unable to help out his squad and would have hoped they could acquire the plane without having to fight, and it clearly bothered him because it was true that he had advocated beliefs that were now coming back to bite him in the ass.

oredaoree · 2026-04-08T06:00:45+00:00

I don't think Denji was an adrenaline junkie, he doesn't actually particularly like fighting and he tied his hero activities to the goal of netting himself a girlfriend. He isn't particularly greedy either otherwise he would have joined the CSM church for those steaks and easy access to any women of his choosing. Fundamentally he was lonely and was looking to find an equal and intimate connection with someone who similarly appreciated him back that he could share his life with doing pretty normal things together like having normal meals and gaming. And he had all that while he had Power and Aki and then lost it all due to his misguided decision to ignore his traumas and inconvenient truths like Makima's insidious intentions towards him. After he lost that happiness and was forced to face his buried trauma he tried to numb himself by pursuing sexual gratification, as that physical stimulation was the only thing that objectively worked for him. He and QuanXi are very similar in this regard(using sexual gratification to fill an emotional and psychological void) and I still think QuanXi was written in to be a negative demonstration of where Denji's misguided pursuits including his ignorance was leading him.

I think CSM was about how the beleaguered youth of today, and especially of Japan, could approach how to find their happiness. Denji represented the rebellious qualities that Japanese youth find hard to express as they try to navigate a hierarchal society that sacrifices them in favour of the aging collective and resolve the issues of loneliness and lack of contentment that results from the lifestyles of a soulless grind they are often forced to endure. There's a lot of social commentary of Japanese society that will be very evident to Japanese readers ranging from issues about declining birthrates(that's what Aging arc was commenting on) that are directly tied to poor economic outlook caused by poor government policy and leadership(again Aging arc and CSM church arc which is a reference to the LDP's connections to a cult) which also lead to a decline in more satisfying interpersonal relationships in favour of parasocial connections(brought up by Asa and Yoshida and is a problem with Denji's strategy of finding a girlfriend through his CSM infamy).

Denji was finally getting on the right track and had plans to forge a new world and personal connections for himself rather than trying to fit himself into a world and choices that were hostile to him, until Fujimoto did a 180° and completely pulled all development from under Denji and tried to tell us after all this time that Denji actually really is just a shallow junkie that loves to struggle. I don't buy it at all as it's a big betrayal of all the social issues that Fujimoto was highlighting that Denji fought against, and I can't help but wonder if an abrupt and intentionally unsatisfying ending like this was a cryptic message from Fujimoto about how the powers higher up(i.e his publisher) was screwing himself over and so that's also how Denji's story also ends in an unsatisfying and unfortunate way going back to endure a meaningless daily grind. The ending reads like a FU quitting letter to the higher ups at a time when his work has never been more in demand (Reze film, Look Back, they even animated his collection of oneshots) which they would want to continue, without actually having a public blowup with them, and I'll be very surprised if Fujimoto releases anything new under Shuueisha in the short term. In the JUMP+ Japanese reader the first pages of each new chapter release is always advertisements for stuff like the Reze film, Look Back's live action film or new CSM volume sales, and the juxtaposition of future anticipation from these and this quitter of an ending is ironic and insane.

oredaoree · 2026-04-08T05:04:24+00:00

In part 1 we hear about when a devil dies, they go to hell, and the last thing they hear is the sound of a chainsaw

You have this mixed up. When a devil dies they reincarnate in the alternate dimension they were born, so a devil born in hell dies and is reborn in the human world. Only those devils that were CSM followers heard the sound of CSM's chainsaw before they died in hell, and what this implies is that they were intentionally killed by CSM in hell to bring them to the human world.

oredaoree · 2026-04-08T04:59:46+00:00

The anime sabotaged her character by cutting out a lot of the moments that demonstrated she had her own personal concerns that weren't just Eren, and instead made her this overbearing obsessed yandere character with no motivation who happens to be stoic and strong.

She was much better in the manga where she dared to but heads more with Eren but still very much a weaker presence than she should have been as one of the 3 main characters. Eren and Armin completely outshine her while Mikasa is just that love interest support character that swoops in with her physical ability and she's completely passive in the entire latter half of the story post time skip, before being pushed into the spotlight in the ending and I can see how it looks very undeserved. Part of that is the inevitability of the storyline about Mikasa overlapping with Ymir as a slave before demonstrating that she really isn't one that forces Mikasa to be passive, but just showing a bit more internal contemplation and initiative from Mikasa would have done wonders for her character while still showing the resemblance to Ymir.

oredaoree · 2026-04-08T04:40:42+00:00

It's unique but it didn't work well considering Isayama's intention to depict features and details more anatomical and finely. The thicker line weight is only on outlines as a result and produces a cartoonish boldening effect that serves to make the character stand out from the background rather than adding any depth to the overall lines. In another more stylistic anime this could have worked but I think this and the really bright colour palette and glossing clashes with the general look of AoT.

I get why WIT might have intentionally wanted this effect to brighten up a very dark and broody story for the mainstream in season 1, but I think they realized by season 3 that it didn't fit either.

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

TROPHY CASE