The Ending of Attack on Titan

Hajime Iseyama, the author of "Attack on Titan", is hunched over his desk, storyboarding deep into the night. It's 2020. He is not concerned about having enough toilet paper or masks, but he is scribbling very intensely, very painfully, until he collapses, ink from Mikasa and Armin's faces splashing onto his. He exhales, with a mighty sigh that could shake the heavens,

"I don't know how to end this series."

He sits up straight very suddenly, like a wooden marionette, and pantomimes with his fingers,

"I can't let this genocidal maniac, Eren, have what he wants, but he's the fucking hero of the story. Boy oh boy, I really screwed the pooch on this one.

"Never mind the fact, for the moment, that Attack on Titan is influential on racial and nationalist politics. From a human perspective, yes, you can't justify killing millions upon millions of people. Never mind how it argues against our very existence, it argues against the idea of art, which is my bread and butter.

"But I spent the last however many chapters establishing an emotional reason to commit genocide, from the perspectives of a third-party outsider and Eren. A hero's journey is inherently an emotional journey. Golly gee, I am so fucked.

"This would all be fine if I didn't establish Eren as the primary catalyst for the plot. By a wide margin Eren has the most agency in the story; next to him is Levi, who is a badass, even though he doesn't think or say anything useful. I didn't take the time to have Armin or Mikasa have a generative thought of their own. Then again, that's what made the ramp-up so interesting: the fact that Eren is so active, highlights the other characters' passivity, and also the audience's unconscious bias towards the protagonist, which made a really cool twist where the theme of the story is about taking responsibility for your own actions and not being a bystander or a follower. Wow," he smacks himself on the cheek, "I can't believe I thought of that, and I can't believe I didn't think of an escape hatch while I was at it.

"I could have a downer ending where everyone just dies and the world just dies and everything devolves into madness, death and disease because war fucking sucks, but now that I'm like, I dunno, in my mid-30s, I got bread, and you have like fifteen year old kids dressing up as my characters because they love them, like actually love them and care about them and look up to them. I dunno man, I'm totally not feeling that idea.

"I mean, Christ, this series was based on Muv-Luv Alternative, some series a Western hack writer has never seen or heard of before. It's not a high-concept, arty series in the vein of Naoki Urasawa or Taiyō Matsumoto. It's an action series at its heart; I based the Titans' designs on wrestlers. I was entirely in rights to point out the glorification of violence in series just like this - I mean, how many shows are about war? do people even fucking know what war is like? it sucks ass - but I'm not so privileged to think I could end this like Grave of the Fireflies or Apocalypse Now.

"Well OK, there are two paths:

"The first is, I continue keeping Eren as the protagonist, developing some extremely secret motivation and goal of Eren's and not revealing it until the very end. But that would be immensely difficult to do and something that is counter to his current goals at its face and is still consistent with his current goals internally or logically. Though I have barely any wiggle room because, you know, genocide. Obviously the caveat of this is that Eren, who is the goddamn hero, has barely any screentime at the very end of my series, UNLESS I make up a new villain a la Kaguya or the Anti-Spirals, and God knows I'm not a complete hack just yet.

"The second is, I beef up Mikasa and Armin's roles in the story. They are now protagonists. I should have them do main character things in the story - you know, Armin helping Connie out through his moral dilemma with his mother was a good touch - and not, well, cry around and wait to hear Eren's motivation before taking action. I want Armin to be sensitive and not necessarily strong-willed - in a way, he's an audience stand-in and, more importantly, he's my stand-in - but that doesn't mean he can't take control of the narrative. For example, most of the suggestions from their little rag-tag band of heroes should come from Armin's mouth. Maybe Armin decides to make Eren his personal responsibility, and he struggles to do so at the end. I don't know. As for Mikasa, I have no idea, she's kinda fucked as a character because she's, like, super into Titan Hitler.

"There is a third option, which is to compromise between options one and two.

"Option three could work because it would confuse the audience enough to make them shut the fuck up.

"And we haven't even considered the fates of the secondary characters. People haven't stopped bitching to me what happened to Sasha. FUCK SASHA, SHE'S A MEME CHARACTER, I MADE HER EAT ONE POTATO IN THE BEGINNING AND NOW EVERYONE ON THE INTERNET IS MAD AT ME. Fuck her, I'm glad she's dead, her character was going nowhere, and that gave Jean and Connie some things to do.

"But man I really had no plan for Annie at all. I put her in that crystal for years, and fans were hyped up wondering what she would do when she left the crystal. She did nothing. I mean yeah she kicks some things, but I don't have a character arc for her.

"Then there are the two downer idiots, Reiner and Zeke. First off, I don't know why I keep bringing Zeke back into the story. I mean, I know why: if Zeke was just a prick and he died, that would be boring. The theme of the show is taking responsibility, and that's why I keep shuffling these two assholes along: they're going to pay for their crimes literally until the end of time. But good God, I really do not have a resolution to their whole 'life sucks, we should have never been born' shtick. Because, well, how do you handle that, in any series? You would think - it's too late to write this - but you would think that, the world literally ending, this would ignite a nobler side of either of them, and they would realize, upon human life being so casually destroyed, how precious and rare it actually is. In hindsight, that idea, that we realize the value of things too late, would handily solve Reiner, Zeke and Eren's character arcs:

"I could make the experience of Eren entering into godhood a process of stripping himself from his ego and individuality, such that he is not Eren Yeager anymore but greater-than-the-aggregate of every Eldian's desires - and, to clarify, not just the living ones, but every Eldian from the beginning of history to the end of time. Eren no longer experiences the past or the future; he is simultaneously everywhere at every time, which, ironically, makes him lose his freedom. The reality is, godhood is not true godhood because he is caught up in the restrictions of time and space. He no longer sees human beings as human beings, he even sees his own mother as chesspiece that must be knocked down, if only for the preservation of the future, which leads to himself. It's very Akira-like, come to think of it, with a mix of Roko's Basilisk. Eren becomes a slave to his God mentality. Which means the real antagonist, instead of Eren, would be just that, our human desire to conquer, our human desire to control, our human desire to eliminate suffering, by wielding total, complete and unquestioned power, and what Armin, Mikasa etc. really have to do is free Eren from becoming a god and destroying the Paths, which I guess is like Kaguya from Naruto so I guess I really am a hack.

"That's kinda the issue though: I kept pushing things closer and closer to the brink - kinda like the characters in my story - until I made it such that there cannot really be any individual, nuanced opinion about what's going on. When the world is ending as a result of another character becoming a God, there's almost no psychology involved anymore, you have to take one of the sides behind the chalk line. This is very different from a situation where someone may die, because, as human beings, we naturally think it's not going to be me who dies. There is no room for anyone else's character arcs in the face of total annihilation.

"Well, OK, let's pursue that idea for a second, that Eren is not the antagonist and the true villain is an idea, the violence inherent within ourselves and our need for security at absolute cost. Would that mean Ymir, the legendary founder of Eldia herself, would be the bad guy? Well I did this passive-aggressive thing where Ymir is not really the owner of her actions, she's actually in love with this huge asshole from a million years ago and she happened to find a magic space bug or whatever that gave her her powers. I and the audience of course think her own arc, realizing she is a person and she is free to make her own choices, is a beautifully-done story, but I don't think she needs to return back into the story. In fact, I think it's more poignant that she simply surrenders all of her powers to Eren, finally fading away into the dusts of time. If Ymir is Nietzsche's God, who suffers from loving humanity, then this fits rather well with the idea that God has truly died.

"So what is the space bug? That gives the Eldians their superpowers? Which, by the way, I also did a subversion of that: I treated the superpowers as a material resource, rather than a character attribute, so they're treated as technology that will fade over time, as things like tanks and planes and bombs get invented. Which comparison allowed me to nicely fold the story into the theme of violence perpetuating violence. Neat idea, but, again, I keep one-upping myself with these crazy-ass superpowers.

"How about the space bug is something that merely wants to preserve its own life? It is a parasite that thrives on human beings, allowing the host to thrive and prosper and spread its own children through the bodies of their children. Or it's more practical to just focus on the one bug, it's just one bug that does all the things, so we can constrain the focus of the story. But then that leads to the issue of, Can we deny this one bug its life? Probably most people would say yes, but since we're actually going through the pains of philosophically exploring this idea, the answer would be far more complex.

"A funny idea, funny to me because I'm a sick bastard, is that the bug hops from person to person: there's the initial shock of it latching onto Eren, but as Eren takes the heat for the crazy things he's doing, it moves onto other people because, understandly, Eren is going to get himself killed, along with the bug. Then you can have an ethical dilemma on who should possess all this power and what they should do with it. It's an interesting idea, but 1) it would take away from the overall action of the final arc, that of the Wall Titans trampling the world which is a nice reversal of the beginning of the story, and 2) it would mean much, much more story.

"Why am I trying to change the ending again, by the way? Oh: because I am trying to see if there is a way to fit in the secondary characters, because all I have them do is be sad and stuff.

"If anything could have been done, it would have been much, much earlier. How about this, how about we really fuck with the audience. I'm not sure where in the story this would happen, but it turns out The Rumbling is a simulation. It's 'real' because the powers of the Founder can basically make imagination into reality, but it doesn't actually happen; or, because the Founder's powers can be retroactive, timelines keep reverting. Eren traps the world in a kind of bubble, where the Marleyans and the Survey Corps try and believe they can stop The Rumbling, but fail, every single time. Who cares if this is the plot of that Tom Cruise movie, Edge of Tomorrow. The only issue with this idea is that the series will have to go on even longer.

"Fuck it! We can't go back! Once the Rumbling started, just as Eren said, we can't go back. At this point, it has to be black and white, no nuance. And if it's going to be that, and I can't have the characters stay on the side of genocide as there would be no story, I would prefer to please my fans and give them the denouement they want, because they're the ones who actually put the most investment into this goddamn shit. If anything, this is the most expensive lesson in not forcing end-of-the-world scenarios in writing."

He believes he has been freed from the curse of writing the series' ending. But only for this moment. When daylight breaks tomorrow, the cycle of doubt and fear resumes again. Just like the plot of "Attack on Titan", come to think of it. He already sees the online shitposters and trolls coming up the hill - Marleyans - with pitchforks and torches, yelling at him and his ending, and on the other side he sees the idiots - Yeagerists - approaching to meet the trolls stating "No bro, it was actually a really good ending after all." He knows this is all his fault, but did he, 2000 years ago, in his naive mind, know this would happen? That's the rub - Eren, err, Iseyama will always be responsible. This burden will never go away. Once and for all, etched into time forever, he is The Founder, of shitposts, of memes, of "at least 10 years".

Iseyama lets out a loud and long fart, and sighs.