In my region, we had
a skirmish with Canada in 1856 over some pigs.
Could this be a reference to that? It's seems like such a minor historical footnote, but it does have a Japanese Wikipedia entry.
In the War of 1812, the British and Canada raided and burned down the American Capitol. Like, people get over shit.
It doesn't help the worldbuilding said that the Eldians oppressed the world 100 years ago, but it's stupid because of how there was never anything shown about how Eldia had oppressed the world beyond just Marley. This could've been fixed if there was a chapter showing how the Eldian empire operated in the world. The thing with Marley though is that they only got in power because King Cuck was perfectly okay with the Marleyans becoming an empire yet he did not see how bad that would be for the world at large. It doesn't help that Eren literally got the world pissed at him because he was baited to commit terrorism that just made Marley look sympathetic to the world (and it didn't help Eren literally went to Marley without telling anyone until the last minute so he essentially dragged the scouts in who more likely wanted to be more diplomatic). It's even stupider because in the speech baiting Eren there were even moments where some of the world leaders were like "Why is the Island a threat again?"
The irony of it is if that the world was absolute shit due to King Cuck wanted to make the walls a paradise yet just made the world at large see remnants of Nazi Germany pulling North Korea tier shit if it was actually competent.
I do apologize for making a bigger deal out of King Cuck but their existence literally ruins the story more than anything else because he is such a fucking retard and it didn't help Eren made some absolutely retarded moves.
Ok, I'm going to go over some things. Now, personally, as a storyteller, I believe that there are two main ways to do storytelling: Character Driven and Plot Driven. And they're sort of like oil and vinegar with a salad. Sometimes you add one, sometimes you add the other, but if you add both, you have to be very careful because they don't mix very well and you'll end up with a shitty meal. This is going to be long and autistic, so feel free to not read it.
From Characters to Plot:
Characters
Attack on Titan was originally a character based story. Pretty much for years. We learned of the characters, their struggles, their demeanor, how they changed in battle, how they worked through their struggles. The plot was extremely simplistic, even in terms of the political stuff, which even Isayama admits was a mistake and is corrected by the anime.
The focus on the characters puts extremely slow revelations on the world OUTSIDE the walls. We learn about their living conditions, their society, their hierarchy, things like that. The characters are experiencing the same mysteries we are. Why are there these giant walls? Who are these titans? The reason a lot of people fell in love with Attack on Titan was the characters and their life behind the walls. Their situation was as mysterious to them as it was to us. And best of all, we learn about it from when they're kids, when they can ask questions or its ok not to know something.
Stories oftentimes do this, you have your one character who is the 'stranger in a strange land' so to speak so you don't have to tell the audience something an experienced character would already know. This is problematic in movies where there are NO new characters. Like for example, 'The Big Short'. Pretty much all the characters know all these terms and what exactly is going on, so to get around this, the story breaks the fourth wall with a narrator and entertaining segues.
So we learn as they do. We get to know them, how their relationships form, etc. There's a little political stuff, but its things that we can grasp. Its a society with limited resources and those on the top want to keep themselves in charge. Fine. But...we start to encounter trouble. Enter the Uprising Arc.
The Uprising Arc is bad because it instantly turns into a plot focused mess with the exception of the brilliant addition of Kenny which saves it. I'd argue the largest problem with the Uprising Arc occurs with the Founding Titan. Now, from this point, the story is still salvageable.
The Founding Titan
Functionally, the founding Titan is not a character. His motivations are "I hate myself and so I will torture these people to death". The question is: Why? He's not portrayed as a sociopath. He's this benevolent sort of dictator who wants no conflict, even when conflict comes to his door. And when people ask him why he doesn't do anything when everything gets fucked, he just gives this glassy-eyed stare and he implies something horrible will happen.
Its a J.J. Abram's mystery box. The problem is, we're compounding mysteries now and its getting overly complex. We're still in the dark about the Titans and we're just getting used to their abilities and now we get introduced to this living God whose mind can somehow subsume everyone it inhabits. And is so full of self hatred he is willing to let innocent people suffer and die from horrific fates, to prevent something ominous that we really don't know about.
Now, maybe he's just that way. He hates himself so much he's lulled into a deep depression and just no longer cares and has long since abandoned any semblance of humanity. But for some reason, he's portrayed as almost being right. Its extremely strange. Motivations and context for him are so completely disjointed. He wants them to die peacefully in the sunset, yet he tortures them on a daily basis.
We don't know why Eldians are so bad. They had a war, yes, but what did they do? We don't know and never find out. Obviously, the Founding Titan's response is an incredibly reprehensible way to take care of some people who waged war and lost and wants to make them extinct. Since we don't know, we can't make any assumptions. If the story doesn't tell us, it technically doesn't exist. The only thing we know is Eldia had a war and they lost and now they've been banished. The only thing we can gain from this information is that the Founding Titan's response, without knowing what he knows, without knowing what the Eldians did, is completely disproportionate and hence, wrong.
Some people will say but 'maybe they set up rape camps!' and shit like that. But does the story tell us that? No. Therefore you just have to assume it was a normal war. I see this with a lot of bad writing and people who defend it, they make up these completely baseless assumptions. If its not told in the story by a reliable narrator or shown or mentioned, it does not exist.
Then we get to his power levels, which are off the scale and basically whatever Isayama wants them to be. Up until know, we've had Titans with very specific abilities. Annie's titan is able to armor herself up and call reinforcements. Reiner's Titan is
fucking useless a heavily armored wrecking ball. Eren's is agile and strong. Bhertolds Titan is huge and serves as a walking bomb almost. The Founding Titan: is sentient, as in it knows it is a titan, can control minds, can create a race of super people to serve him, knows the future. He can make super walls and big ass Titans. His ability list grows and grows.
Functionally, the Founding Titan is a plot device that Isayama uses whenever he needs to explain something away. Of course the problem is the founding titan just rips gigantic holes in the plot. Usually with characters like these, better authors typically either: 1) Incapacitate them, 2) Kill them or 3) Isolate them. They solve the one glaring problem that the protagonists/antagonists have and then get removed from the story to stop tearing holes in the plot. This isn't done.
If the founding Titan was utterly annihilated during the Uprising arc, I believe the story could have been saved. Like could never be used again annihilated. Tossed into the void. Eliminated. You get rid of his unexplainable powers, his dumb motivations and basically an asshole. Make him an unreliable narrator that told a completely false story.
You don't need him to be the teller of truth. Isayama has a lot of Norse Mythology built into AoT. Maybe he wasn't the founding Titan at all, maybe he was like Loki, the Titan of Lies, and his ability was to influence minds and that was just his nature. But for the story to be saved, the founding titan needs to die. And it doesn't. Since the founding Titan is never removed from the story, from this point on it becomes unsalvageable because it becomes the major McGuffin and is functionally fucking retarded.
PATHs
Oh boy, so here we go. Inserting time travel into your story is very risky, because things become extremely fucking complicated extremely fucking quickly. So what is it? Basically Isayama took Yggdrasil and kind of the Jewish Concept of Hell and fucking mashed them together in this weird fucking thing where time and space meet.
Honestly, I still can't tell you what it is really, as its only a side element to the story. Which again, is a problem. Like the Founding Titan, its anything Isayama wants it to be.
Is it a window into the past? Sure!
Is it not just a window into the past? Absolutely!
Can Eren do things that magically started the story? Very Cool!
PATHs obviously what the story should obviously revolve around. But it doesn't. I know I'm cutting PATHs short, but so does Isayama. There's no point in really diving into it because Isayama treats it like the founding Titan, he just does whatever he wants with it. There's no point in discussing something where there is no structure and it only serves for what the author wants to do at the time. Now, we come to the part where it fully abandons its characters.
The War Plot
Remember where we were learning about the world through the lenses of the characters? Their experiences and their relationships? The horror and mystery they had to go through? Yeah fuck all that its WWII ADVENTURE TIME.
Without the founding Titan's death and/or him being an unreliable narrator, finding the basement was when the story becomes completely unsalvageable. At this point the people of Marely are just unmitigated, delusional sadists. They're so comically evil it is utterly impossible to relate to them on any level. Because remember, all Eldia did was fight a war. And since we have no extra information, their actions are completely out of bounds with their behavior.
So, we are given no reason to be attached to the people of Marley, except through maybe a scant handful. One being Gabi who is a fucking awful character. So we've got no reason to care about them, because they're fucking insane and bloodthirsty. We know that their children are willing to kill. So yeah, everyone is using child soldiers, but Paradis uses them out of pure necessity and the years of training needed on 3D maneuver gear. They're fighting gigantic, man-eating beasts and children are most agile when they're young. And they need to be. Its not out of anything more than pure survival. Marley does it because of brainwashing and indoctrination. It is not equivalent.
So Marley as a society is reprehensible. Eren only (and rightfully) views it as just a matter of time before they'll just genocide his entire people so he pulls off the equivalent of a Dresden to decapitate their leadership before. Is he an asshole for doing it solo? Sure. Does he do constant retarded shit? Yeah. But the first strike was not one of them.
From here it just degenerates into a mess of shit and filler and idiocy. Characters start becoming smaller and smaller and its just Eren leading the plot along. We don't know about the rest of the world. Again, if its not in the story, it doesn't exist. There's no given reason why we should care that Eren is blowing up a world we don't even know and have no attachment to. People don't work that way. We need emotional attachment to care about something. In psychology, we've got groups we care about. Our inner circle and it expands out. In stories its the same way. We care about the core characters and the island, but we're not given any reason to care about the wider world or Marley.
Is blowing up the world bad? Yeah. But should I really care if I know nothing about it? Nah. Its like in Star Trek: Generations where Captain Kirk dies for some random planet of people he never knew, or met or would have cared about. We can recognize the action as noble, but this is a story. We don't give a shit about some nameless faggots on some no name planet, we care about Kirk. Let them die.
Its the same here. The characters have all become withered shells of themselves. Marley is a comically evil society. The rest of the world we don't know about so we have no real attachment to them. What are the stakes? Destroying the world is bad. That's it. It is bad because it is morally bad. Not because we have any sort of story reason or emotional attachment to some other civilization that's never explained.
I cannot tell you how awful this is. We care about destroying Earth in movies, even if it doesn't show other countries, because we have attachments to those countries. We know people there. We can use our imagination and know what would happen to them if the world dies. We've all seen pictures of other countries, been to them, talked to people from them, all that shit. Even studied them. 'Saving Earth' is simplistic, but it also easily generates emotional attachment with no effort so it frees up room for action scenes or drama or whatever.
Saving the world here, means...what? We don't have any attachment to the wider world. We know almost absolutely nothing of worth about it. So in all honesty...who cares? In general it is an evil action, but in a story you need emotional attachment. The characters have degenerated so much, have been given so much less time to explore or have been just plain terrible, attachment has faded. We only know of two societies: Marley, comically evil and Eldia, who waged a war that pissed them off forever.
There's just no stakes for me in this story. Hanji dying made me shrug. All of her interesting traits were long since gone. Saving the world is just generalized, I'm not given any reason to care other than 'THAT'S BAD'. I'm sorry, in a story you need more than conventional morality for the audience to care. Stories are all about building emotional bridges and stakes. Marley is comically evil, so I don't care about them. That's the problem here. There's no stakes. I don't care about the world, because I don't know anything about it. The rest of the world could be cannabalistic rapists or in a constant state of war or just as hateful as Marley is. Since I don't know, I just can't be bothered to care. There's nothing to imagine either, as we're given no foundation. The only nation we know of is Marley, and it is legitimate that the rest of the world are just fucking hateful sadists because maybe that's just the wider world. In any event, its pure laziness.
Fundamentally, it doesn't matter if Eren or the Scouts win. If Eren wins, he sits upon a throne of bodies of people you don't care about. If the Scouts win, they save people you don't care about. The only way to salvage the story in my opinion is to retcon the enter fucking thing and have a super happy ending, because its the only thing that really makes sense to me. That's because it is the only action that has stakes: People aren't tortured, don't turn into Titans, there's no massive war, Eren doesn't go insane. The stakes are massively huge. And meta wise, you erase the fucking retarded plot. Which is probably the most important thing. I don't think Isayama will want to do a happy ending, but in my opinion its the only way to salvage the story.
Sorry this was so long, but I wanted to do a deep dive since the series is almost at a close.
. I doubt Gabi will face any consequences either.
