He deserves to be fought back against by people motivated by LOL, RUNNING UP THE HILL AND LEAF BASEBALL.
Their motivation is "we've spent so long fighting for the sake of humanity and we're not really feeling genociding everyone outside of our island". The final conflict simplifies into the butting of heads between an idealism and cynicism that ultimately understand each other-- Eren doesn't really
want to genocide innocent men, women, and children, but they don't have power outside the Rumbling against the
rest of the world and they're out of time. The rest of the gang doesn't want to get slaughtered by the rest of the world, but they don't want to kill throngs of innocents to buy their peace.
Zeke is outplayed completely.
Not really. Zeke could have sacrificed himself at any time by emerging and making himself vulnerable to slaughter, and then the Founding Titan would lose its royalty proxy (like it ended up doing in this chapter). He just didn't
feel like it.
Then, maybe the higher ups or executives or Isayama himself never intended the 'Hitler wins' ending (making Eren go Hitler was fucking idiotic in the first place, but we're here now so whatever).
Why is it always that when we talk genocide, we talk Hitler? Why isn't it ever the Young Turks or the Belgians backing the Hutus, or even ancient near Eastern tribes declaring total war on hostile neighbors?
Try to talk and understand Eren? Lets be real, the cringe avengers and no one has basically tried to talk or reason with Eren for like a hundred plus chapters so that's not going to start.
They did. Eren even initiated. He literally-- not figuratively,
literally tells them to kill him or die.
And this requires Eren to do literally nothing about this. Which he does.
What does he do that doesn't rob them of their own freedom? If he wanted to tie up loose ends, he could have just prevented everyone else from using any of their powers, or brainwash them, or... really, with his power he could do just about anything to literally everyone fighting against him except the person who's the least willing to kill him and a near-cripple.
The writing is so utterly fucking terrible it really is mind boggling. What in the fuck do small moments and pointless activities mean in the scheme of things if you are being brutally fucking murdered by the rest of the world? When did Eren say those small moments were ultimately pointless, when what he's doing is trying to preserve them?
Effectively, everyone's trying to preserve them, but they're all fighting for different groups of people because the circumstances have forced them into extremes despite largely similar experiences and identical sympathies. Eren's cast his lot entirely with the in-group, and everyone else with the out-group. Eren's gone his way because he's most concerned about life and freedom and is basically aware that nobody figured out anything in the time prior to the Rumbling (imagine that time loop, geez...) and everyone else is ignorant about those future memories but regardless can't stomach the prospect of genociding entire civilizations even if it's the only thing they can do to ensure any kind of long-term peace.
The reason that I'm beside myself with the end of this chapter is because there's zero guarantee that anything will happen outside of them being summarily bombed to death by the rest of the world,
even though the world united in order to stop the threat of the Rumbling, and even though everyone at Fort Salta has been able to reconcile their differences in the face of Eren's equalizer. This reality is acknowledged in-story with even less available knowledge (like that facing an apocalyptic threat that imperils everyone equally could wipe away ethnic animus), and for the sake of the story, it would have been totally unsatisfying if everyone else either sat by while Eren stomped on everyone or struggled with decision paralysis for the entire arc. It also would have been unsatisfying in and of itself if Eren was allowed to proceed unimpeded, even at that point, because while the story was building up to the Rumbling, the Rumbling was clearly not meant as the final destination of the story. So, I'm okay with the "Cringe Avengers" as a means of facilitating a climax, their motivations are established
and challenged enough, and the climax was exciting enough that I forgot that Isayama, too, bears the Japanese inclination to fight against God reflected in so many of their modern works.
Thing is, I don't
like their position because it's clearly not viable in their world, and I sympathize with Eren more because he was the only one that came up with any solution to save their people.
As an aside, your derision of Zeke and Armin's confrontation actually helped me understand Zeke's turnaround better, in that I was able to realize that both parties agreed that the nihilism question ("life doesn't have intrinsic value, so what now?") was valid but approached it according to, respectively, their cynicism and optimism.
Look man, I love the Paradisers, but they're not worth genociding the entire world for.
Why not? Why
shouldn't they fight hard enough to assert that they have a right to live, especially in the face of the alternative which is just accepting being carpetbombed to annihilation by every other world power?
Especially not when there were a lot of other solutions available, and at least two of them that Eren himself actually knew about.
Which were...?
The story makes a point of showing that Eren is sick to his stomach at the prospect of wiping out all life on earth, but by virtue of his future memories, he knows that nobody's going to be able to do anything that allows him from not carrying out what was very much everyone's last resort from being taken. What he feels is his best path forward is further confirmed by what's happening in the present.
- They don't have the means of catching up technologically with the rest of the world before they get brought into conflict, especially when the rest of the world can much more easily mobilize at the drop of a hat and carpetbomb Paradis to annihilation. The issue there isn't that they pissed time away-- it's that they didn't have time.
- They couldn't broker peace diplomatically because not even the Eldians of other territories were willing to join the island Eldians in being the bottom of the world hierarchy.
- A partial Rumbling wouldn't scare anyone off, and would still result in throngs of deaths if it were to be even close to effective at doing what it sought out to do.
- Without any provocation beyond actions taken to preserve their lives (the capture of the Colossal, which could have only happened due to Marley sending their warriors to Paradis to claim the Founder again) or knowledge of Eren's whereabouts, Willy declares war on Paradis with the intention of having the entire rest of the world wipe them out because of the threat they face to the rest of the world because they're profoundly unsure if a non-royal Eldian is going to kick off the Rumbling.
- Hange kicks herself for the rest of her life because she was so incapable of figuring out a solution that didn't involve genocide that Eren went ahead with committing genocide, and her argument for why she wanted to stop the Rumbling ended up boiling down to her loyalty to her Survey Corps ideals and her inability to restrain those ideals to those in Paradis.
What
other options did they have? Even Zeke's castration plan wouldn't ensure that they wouldn't be promptly genocided afterwards.
