I'm reconsidering the "full EVA" trajectory I was predicting earlier.
On one hand, the world is trashed, nearly the entire main cast is dead, and Ymir has been popping in and out as an observer like she was Rei Ayanami in NGE+EoE. The only people who could attest to the bravery of those who stopped the Rumbling have been almost entirely Titanized or killed by said Titans. I considered that perhaps something happens with Mikasa at the center of it that leads Ymir to fashion Paradise (the P A T H S realm, I mean) into something that resembles her ideal world, which makes the known last panel part of a kinda happy ending where most of the characters we've come to know get what they want in an (actual) world that was created for just that.
On the other hand, something like that rubs the wrong way (but doesn't necessarily clash) with the messaging that we've gotten from especially Eren and Willy, which is that it's justifiable to want to fight to live because they were born into the world. Also it kind of reminds me of one of the endings to
NieR: Automata.
The alternative is that that doesn't happen, which means that the last panel would almost certainly be Mikasa sadly looking back at that memory of the alternate timeline as she finishes either listening to Eren's last words transmitted to her or going through some last words of her own that wraps up the central themes of the story. I can't call that a happy ending, because I can't predict what would lead to that point.
The Rumbling was aborted and there's not enough people to sway the world into not taking Eldia as the world's enemy yet again. If it happens that all hatred becomes concentrated on Eren, seeing as-- as far as I know right now-- that wasn't his goal, it's disrespectful to the fact that the Rumbling was the accumulation of the world's hatred being unleashed back onto its progenitors. In that case, barring a successful Lelouch gambit, they're hated by the rest of the world and are literally traitors to Eldia, and they either have to blend in with the crowd to avoid execution (in which case they're not free, so that's likely not it at all) or they get executed and Mikasa gets a vision that's that last panel as she dies... but juxtaposition makes that line far more copacetic to Zeke's beliefs, and he was already defeated in the battle of ideologies. Even if she were to die of old age
or lover's seppuku and she sees that last panel, same deal.
I'm guessing I'm trying to say that I'm distinctly unsure if we're going to get any massive retcon as the culmination of the narrative thus far, either in a clean or modified time loop. But I also have no idea where else they could go with this with 50 more pages.
also that kiss panel is aging far better in my mind than it has the right to and i have no idea why that's happening
Attack on Titan seems to just continue the tradition of a needlessly aspie protagonist.
Here, I think it's less "autistic" and more "quintessentially Japanese" (i.e. extremely reserved to the Western eye), though IIRC Isayama recounts having an isolated childhood on account of weighing much less than his peers, so it might be both. You'd be right if Mikasa's affections were as heavy-handed as they would be from a harem member in literally any other shounen-- take your pick-- but they're not and any ship fuel is rather ambiguous on top of being few and far in-between.
Seeing that smile on the last panel that pretty much confirms it. It'd be funny if the Deus Ex Machina is Ymir having time manipulation ability and turns back time to that scene where Eren asked Mikasa what is he to her, but this time Mikasa confessed. Boom, problem solved. No need for genocide. Eren stops being homicidal incel virgin retard, the end.
Oh, it'll be "the end", alright. Eren becomes a broken man who doesn't save his people, as all their friends look for them while the extinction of their people looms over them.
Mikasa will have become the prime example for a generation of how a woman can profoundly derail a man on his purpose-- getting a demonically determined man teetering on the edge of committing genocide as a response to having total war declared on them by the world for the sake of his people to run away
with her like a total wuss, consigning his people to certain extermination. She'd be like Yoko Ono but on an existential scale-- instead of causing the breaking up of the Beatles, she'll be causing the breaking up of the bones of everyone in her entire country by air raid bombs.
