The new chapter's coming out in a few days, and I still don't think we'll see Levi or Hanji. I know I mentioned a few pages back that Levi surviving a blast that sent a guy into another dimension would make him even more OP af, but given the fact that Armin lived despite everything that happened to him, I feel like Levi surviving would almost be justified. Not excusing it, I'm just saying that having Levi not survive it would make Armin surviving even more cheap, and ridiculous. Think about it. He's Humanity's Strongest, and also an Ackerman. He's gotta be more durable than Armin, right?
Right?
What I'm saying is that this series has gotten to a point where I can't definitively say whether or not a man can survive an explosion that ripped apart space and time.
Part of me vainly hopes that Isayama is either going to nut-up, and just kill Levi, or is going for the long con and is gonna have him survive the initial blast only to die from infection or drowning.
I mean, I know it's not gonna happen, but I can dream.
Isayama doesn't have the fucking balls. His entire audience wants to fuck Levi and he's basically the only character holding the manga together.
He just got exploded because he needed to nerf him. He also needed a reason to take Levi out of action. The problem is there's really no one likeable left. The main cast has largely been ruined, including Eren whose motivation has been a mystery for literal years. He has given barely any hints. We JUST found Zekes motivation and he's been behaving like a metal gear solid villain, except without Kojima's loveable insanity. Kojima makes crazy, plot heavy shit but it has characters you like. What does AoT have? Protagonists who have entirely hidden goals from the audience for years, making no fucking sense. Their characterization is completely and utterly fucked.
He tried to force people to like the Nazis and all of them were basically roundly rejected. 90% of AoT fans focus on the main cast. Isyama likes spiting them for rejecting them.
I am going to laugh my ass off when he reintroduces Annie only to have her be cracked open and eaten by the Jaws Titan. AoT fans deserve it.
I feel like when you exclude the plot, this is what fundamentally ruined AoT. It broke its own world building. If you're going to have a story be taken at least even partially seriously, you need to have a consistent set of rules and guidelines for it to follow. You need to specify what your characters are. Are the they superhuman, or not? Are they just normal people? What are their limits? What can and can they not do? What is possible in this world, and what isn't?
These are extremely important things to keep in mind, and things that you can't just change out of nowhere. At least not without having some sort of foreshadowing, explanation, or other outside factor changing the status quo. And this is something Isayama just blatantly disregarded.
Here's the thing. Armin was just a normal human being. He wasn't a titan shifter. He wasn't an Ackerman. He was just a normal guy who happened to also be really smart. He didn't have any special powers. He wasn't a good fighter. Hell, he wasn't even all that durable prior to this. If anything, he was presumably less. Remember, this is the kid who somehow broke both his legs in fall despite only hitting the one.
What I'm getting at is Armin surviving all this shit is yet another event that utterly shattered both AoT's sense of reality, and its suspension of disbelief. Look, I can believe in giant humanoid creatures eating people. I can believe some people have the ability to shapeshift into these creatures, and that this ability also gives them other miscellaneous powers. I can believe in people zooming around on wildly impractical gas powered gear that would in all likelihood get them fucking killed in real life.
What I can't believe in is an established normal human being getting burnt literally to a crisp, falling at least forty feet, and surviving long enough for three situational dumbasses to squabble over the medicine in time to save him. Especially after other normal people in your series, including one of the main cast during this exact same time period, have died from things much, much less severe.
Isayama needs to remember that if he wants to have a "serious", and "realistic", and "grimdark", and all that bullshit series, he's got to be consistent with it. It has to follow an established status quo that can't just immediately be thrown out the window the moment he writes himself into a corner, or just gets bored.
Something that the author of Jojo, for all of his series' utter insanity, manages to do just fine.
Isayma has done this tons of times. It's all about breaking the rules of his world. Thunder Spears too. Their explosions have always been inconsistent. Nor does it make any fucking sense for Levi to be perfectly comfortable next to a live explosive. If anything, it'd be an empty shell, the trigger letting Levi know if he was pulling anything and then just insta kill him.
The characters are as smart or as stupid as Isayama needs them to be. There's no internal consistency and at this point all the characters are just vehicles. They exist solely to move forward an incomprehensible plot that he continues to hide for pretty much no reason.
If you think about it, JoJo has a lot of rules but they're all simple:
Stands are a measure of your strength of will and psychology. The stronger this is, the stronger the Stand.
If your Stand dies, you die.
You cannot have more than one Stand.
You can be born with a Stand or acquire one.
Stands can be used by anything living. Stands without an owner are rare.
The stronger the Stand, the less its range.
The weaker the Stand, the longer its range.
Weak stands can become stronger as the owner moves closer.
Even if you kill a Stand far from its user, the user still dies.
You can eliminate a Stand by killing it or its user.
Only a Stand can kill a Stand, but a Stand can kill a human.
Non-Stand users cannot see Stands with the exception of powerful ones which can be objects or even a humanoid Stand.
Stand's sentience is varied and reflects the nature of the Stand and the subconscious of the user.
Stands are attracted to each other and Stand users will eventually meet each other, no matter the distance. This plays into Jojo's themes of fate and will.
Part 6 suffered because Araki was at his lowest creatively, ending a series that ran since the 80s and the ending was basically incomprehensible and you had to interpret it yourself (most people interpret it as a good end, as pure nihilism is not Jojo's style and does not fit with any of the manga or anime. Though even for Jojo it is unquestionably brutal). It makes me wonder how the anime is going to tackle it, since part 6 is the least liked of JoJo in Japan and the Anime is basically fan service.
Sorry I ended up talking Jojo, but it's got more heart, style, substance, story than AoT.
I was happy when Armin didn't die initially, but it felt off. I think thats when the series started to lose its edge and become meh. Armin getting roasted was enough, but the fall after being roasted and him still being alive was too much.
Isamaya needs to go back to storytelling 101.
This implies he knows how the fuck to tell a story and characterization by keeping the main protagonist and antagonist's plans hidden for years and making nobody likeable.
