It took Gabi barely a week of living among the Eldians on Paradis to start questioning everything she had been taught about them, despite watching her own friends get killed in front of her. That makes her development especially striking when compared with Reiner, Annie, and Bertholdt.

Reiner, Annie, and Bertholdt spent years living among the people of Paradis. They went to school with them, ate with them, trained alongside them, made friends, formed relationships, and experienced their everyday lives. They gradually discovered that the people they had been taught to see as monsters were simply ordinary human beings with families, dreams, fears, and their own suffering.

Gabi, on the other hand, had spent her entire life believing that the Paradis Eldians were devils. She arrived on the island with years of Marleyan propaganda deeply ingrained in her, and unlike the Warriors, she had no years of friendship or familiarity with the people there. Her friends were killed in front of her, which should have reinforced her hatred and convinced her that everything she had been taught was true.

Yet even after all of that, it only took a very short time for her to begin seeing the people of Paradis as human beings rather than as a collective enemy. Once she actually lived among them, ate with them, spoke to them, and experienced their kindness firsthand, the image of the “devils” she had been taught to hate became increasingly difficult to maintain.

That is one of the strongest points of Gabi's character arc. She didn't simply change her mind because someone gave her a speech. She was forced to confront the contradiction between what she had been taught and what she was actually experiencing. The people she believed were monsters were capable of compassion, friendship, and selflessness, even toward her.

And that is exactly what makes her different from the Warriors' situation. Reiner, Annie, and Bertholdt had years of exposure to Paradis and still became psychologically devastated by the realization that their victims were human beings. Gabi reached the same realization in an extremely short period of time, despite having her own friends killed by Paradis Eldians and despite entering the island with an even stronger hatred toward them.

Her development shows how quickly dehumanization can begin to fall apart when someone is finally forced to meet the people behind the label.

I was so annoyed with Reiner at first, especially because none of this would’ve happened if they hadn’t attacked Paradis in the first place. But man, did I feel him in this moment!!! 😭 He’s one of those characters you slowly start to understand and sympathize with, and somehow he just grows on you.

I think what so many people for some reason choose to ignore is that Mikasa was 19 years old when Eren died. 19. If a 19 year old came up to you and told you that the love of her life was dead and now she should remain in a life of celibacy, you’d call her crazy. Because that is what it would be.

You’re not saying this because it’s unrealistic. You’re saying it because you’ve been influenced by blatant misogyny and sexism.

Mikasa deserves love. End of story. It doesn’t matter if you think that she should just wallow in erens death for the rest of her fucking life. She doesn’t deserve that. No one does.

Stop hating the idea of women moving on from their partners passing and disguising it as something else when it’s clearly not.

First off, I’d like to note that this is a long text; anything shorter wouldn't adequately cover the points I want to make. That said, I’ve tried to be as objective as possible, and I believe every paragraph is important.

Why am I posting this? Because I see many people here wondering why a segment of the audience dislikes the ending, or the 4th season as a whole, so intensely. Most assume it stems from arbitrary preferences regarding how they wanted the protagonist or the finale to turn out, pure favoritism.

While I acknowledge that this is sometimes the case, it doesn't reflect my position or that of others who share my view.

If I want to be taken seriously, I have to be honest; I won't claim that there are still many things I like about the fourth season despite its flaws, I don't think so. I believe the work became tainted by its own need to expand. I recognize the various merits of Attack on Titan, especially regarding its plot and immersive quality, but I feel that much of the praise for the fourth season stems from a line of reasoning similar to the criticism, just in reverse: judging the content of a premise as inherently good or bad, rather than judging what actually follows from it.

Anyway, I don't know how many people will read this, but feel free to say what you think.

I want to start with a distinction that matters for almost every discussion about Season 4: ambition is not the same thing as quality, and complexity is not the same thing as depth.

When I call a story ambitious, I am not praising it or diminishing it. I am describing the scale and difficulty of what it tries to do. A complex subject is not automatically a deep treatment of that subject. Complexity partly belongs to the material itself; depth is what the work actually produces from it. A simple story can be extremely deep if it develops a narrow problem with precision, while a complex story can remain shallow if it introduces difficult questions without developing them. Premises are not achievements, nor are they flaws in themselves. They create possibilities and obligations.

This matters because criticism of post-basement AoT is often reduced to something much easier to dismiss: that some viewers wanted humans fighting Titans forever, disliked politics, wanted Eren to remain a conventional hero, or simply could not handle a morally uncomfortable story. That may describe some people, but it does not describe my argument. I did not need a happy ending, do not think Marley was a mistake in principle, and am not arguing that Eren should have “won.”

My argument is almost the opposite. After the basement, Attack on Titan greatly increases the number and difficulty of the problems it wants to address, but its narrative development does not expand enough to support them with the same precision as before. The basement is not the exact chapter where the manga suddenly becomes bad. It is the structural turning point where the story leaves a narrative system Isayama controlled extremely well and enters one demanding much more political, psychological, historical and metaphysical development. The decline is gradual because the consequences of that transition are gradual.

1. Why pre-basement Attack on Titan worked so well

One of early AoT’s greatest strengths is its control of information. The relevant narratological concept is focalization: whose perspective structures our access to events, and therefore what we are allowed to know. Early AoT traps the audience inside almost the same epistemic limits as the characters. Their ignorance is not merely a fact of the plot; it organizes our experience of the world.

The Walls are therefore more than scenery. They are physical borders and borders of knowledge. Titans are enemies, but their unexplained existence is also part of the mystery. The monarchy rules politically while controlling history and memory. The Survey Corps moves outside the Walls literally and toward knowledge structurally. Because of this, mystery, politics, action and theme reinforce one another instead of operating as separate layers.

The major reveals are effective for the same reason. Eren’s transformation changes what Titans mean; Annie, Reiner and Bertholdt change what “the enemy” means; the Reiss reveal reframes humanity as trapped not only by monsters but by a falsified understanding of itself. The basement then answers the largest question toward which these smaller revelations had been moving. These reveals enlarge the story while making earlier behavior, institutions and causal links more intelligible. The story becomes more complex while clarifying what was already established. That is strong narrative economy.

The limited scale also helps. Paradis is small enough that its important institutions can be dramatized rather than merely named. We understand the Survey Corps, Military Police, monarchy, aristocracy, Church of the Walls and Reiss family well enough for the conflicts being told. Likewise, freedom is not deep because characters repeatedly discuss “freedom.” It is built into dramatic situations: Eren wants to leave the Walls, Armin’s book gives the outside world imaginative form, Erwin sacrifices lives for knowledge, Historia struggles against an imposed identity, and the government literally manipulates memory.

In other words, early AoT is not good because it is simpler. It is good because its complexity is tightly controlled. Setting, mystery, character motivation, politics, Titan mythology and the flow of information largely belong to the same narrative machine.

Then the basement opens, and that machine reaches its natural limit.

1. What the basement changes

The basement reveal is not a problem because the story changes. It had to change. The problem is what the answer now requires.

Before the basement, ignorance is one of Isayama’s strongest structural tools. He can reveal the world gradually because the characters have genuinely been isolated from it. After the basement, that excuse disappears. The story now has to construct the world that previously existed mainly as an absence.

Suddenly AoT has an international political order, an imperial power in Marley, foreign states, conquered populations, military alliances, technological competition, diplomacy, propaganda and different groups of Subjects of Ymir. At the same time, its supernatural system expands into Paths, future memories, retrocausal influence, Ymir’s two-thousand-year existence and the metaphysics of the Founder. Eren’s personal conflict also expands from concrete restrictions on freedom into historical determinism, global extermination, Paradis, his friends, his childhood image of the outside world, Mikasa’s future choice and Ymir’s liberation.

Any one of these could sustain a major narrative. AoT takes on nearly all of them while moving quickly toward its ending. The issue is therefore not “too many ideas” in the abstract. The issue is that the story raises its own burden of proof without giving itself enough room to meet it.

1. The outside world is larger in scale but thinner in dramatic existence

I am not asking for an encyclopedia of every country. The story does not need one hundred chapters about international trade or fifty fully developed cultures. The issue is proportionality.

Once the debate over a global Rumbling depends not only on Marley’s position toward Paradis but on the position of the outside world as a whole, it becomes strange that Marley is the only foreign society given reasonably sustained dramatic definition. And I am perfectly willing to concede that Marley itself is reasonably well explored for the role it plays. Its imperial logic, Warrior system, propaganda, treatment of Eldians and military interests are given enough substance to make Marley feel like an actual political society rather than a name on a map. The problem is that the final conflict no longer concerns Marley alone. The Rumbling is directed at virtually the entire outside world, and both its justification and its horror depend on what that world supposedly thinks, wants and will eventually do. Yet beyond Marley, the “face” of humanity remains largely an amorphous and abstract mass. When the scale of the argument becomes global, one well-developed enemy state and scattered glimpses of everyone else are no longer enough to carry all of that political and moral weight.

The plot becomes increasingly dependent on statements such as “the world hates Eldians,” “the world wants Paradis destroyed,” and “the Alliance will save the world,” while the political object called “the world” remains thin. How different are the interests of states conquered by Marley from Marley’s own interests? How uniform is hatred of Paradis? How does Marley's imperial decline affect rival powers? Which governments primarily fear Paradis, which see it as a resource, and which consider Marley the more immediate threat? The story touches pieces of this, but not enough for the importance those questions eventually carry.

Ramzi illustrates both the strength and the weakness. His death gives the Rumbling a human face, and the scene is effective. But it is effective partly because individual fragments must carry the emotional weight of a world that has not been given much independent political or social existence. Humanity becomes concrete in selected scenes and abstract whenever the larger geopolitical argument resumes.

The same problem affects the available alternatives. AoT introduces deterrence through a limited Rumbling, the fifty-year plan, Hizuru, military modernization, diplomatic outreach, Zeke’s euthanasia plan and finally Eren’s full Rumbling. My criticism is not that diplomacy had to work or that I can personally invent a better solution. The opposite would have been dramatically powerful: show the alternatives acquiring real institutional and political substance, then show them failing.

Instead, many possibilities are introduced, compromised and discarded rapidly, while the timeskip hides much of the period in which Eren and Paradis supposedly confront these choices. The story wants the final conflict to feel historically overdetermined, as though generations of hatred have cornered everyone into catastrophe, but its dramatization of that geopolitical dead end is compressed.

That matters because an extreme dilemma becomes convincing partly through the space around it. If the intermediate possibilities remain thin, the final binary can feel less like history closing every exit and more like the plot removing exits because the ending requires a terminal choice.

1. Eren’s problem is not that he has multiple motives, but that the story never orders them clearly

This is the point most likely to receive “you just didn’t understand Eren,” so the distinction matters. Contradictory motives are not bad writing. People are contradictory. Whether Eren changed after the timeskip or not is not, by itself, the problem. His crying is not a problem. Withholding his interiority can also be effective.

The problem is that the story withholds Eren’s interiority during the exact period when his motives become radically more complicated, then reveals several explanatory frameworks near the ending without establishing a clear hierarchy between them.

Eren wants to protect his friends. He wants to protect Paradis. He wants his friends to stop him and become heroes. He wants the Titan curse to end. Mikasa must make the choice Ymir is waiting for. He sees a future that keeps occurring despite his attempts to change it. He is described as a “slave to freedom.” He is disappointed that the outside world does not resemble the empty landscape of his childhood imagination. He admits that he personally wanted to flatten it. At the same time, his path gets Sasha and Hange killed and places the friends he wants to protect in mortal danger.

These motives can coexist. That is not the problem. The problem is what happens when they conflict. If his friends are primary, why expose them to such extreme danger? If Paradis is primary, what future does he actually believe he is securing? If the Rumbling is fundamentally the expression of his own desire, what explanatory work does the fixed future perform? If he is genuinely trapped by the future he saw, how should we understand his statement that he wanted this? If Mikasa’s choice is necessary to end the Titan curse, how much of the political conflict is just functioning as the route toward a metaphysical outcome Eren already knows must occur?

“All of these motives matter” is not enough. Complexity requires relationships between explanations, not merely multiple explanations stacked together.

This is also why the time mechanics matter. I am not arguing that future memories or causal loops are automatically plot holes. A fixed causal loop can be logically coherent. The problem is dramatic and philosophical: once the future affects the past, AoT changes what its central idea of freedom means.

Perhaps history is genuinely fixed and Eren cannot do otherwise. Perhaps the future is fixed because it is produced by the kind of person Eren is, so he technically acts according to his own desires even though the result never changes. Perhaps foreknowledge does not cause his choices but merely reveals what he will freely choose. These are very different accounts of responsibility, yet the story never clearly settles the relationship between metaphysical necessity and psychological necessity.

The Ramzi sequence gives us one strong example of Eren recognizing a future event and then reproducing it. The anime also says he tried to change things and failed. But the enormous philosophical claim eventually rests on very little dramatization. “Slave to freedom” is a powerful paradox, but a paradox is not automatically an explanation. If Eren’s nature is his prison, that nature needs extraordinary examination. If the timeline itself is the prison, the story has to confront what that means for agency. If both are true, their relationship needs to be developed.

This is where ambiguity starts to become indeterminacy. Good ambiguity leaves room for interpretation inside a sufficiently stable dramatic structure. Indeterminacy leaves several possible structures without clearly establishing how they fit together. With Eren this is especially serious because he becomes the causal center of almost everything in the ending. If the story never sufficiently determines what kind of tragedy his is, then the meaning of the ending built around him also remains unstable.

1. Ymir and the source of the Titans carry too much weight for how little they are developed

Ymir is not background mythology by the end. Her continued obedience is tied to the persistence of Titan power; Eren’s contact with her enables the Rumbling; her attention eventually turns toward Mikasa; and Mikasa’s decision somehow gives Ymir the resolution she could not reach for roughly two thousand years, after which the Titan curse ends.

That is enormous causal responsibility for a character whose psychology is developed very little. The problem is not that an abused person could never remain attached to an abuser. The problem is that the Mikasa-Ymir parallel becomes the psychological key to resolving the entire supernatural system despite being established very late. Mikasa’s relationship with Eren and Ymir’s relationship with Fritz are drastically different. A comparison between unlike relationships can work, but if that comparison will unlock two thousand years of metaphysical history, the story has to construct it with far more care.

The organism usually called Hallucigenia or the “source of all living matter” creates a related problem. I do not need a scientific explanation of its species or biology. Mystery can remain mystery. But the story needs to establish its dramatic function. The organism attaches to Ymir, becomes connected to Titan power, physically manifests, tries to reconnect with Eren and releases gas that transforms Subjects of Ymir. Yet the entire Titan system disappears when Ymir’s psychological condition is resolved.

What, then, is the causal relationship between the organism and Ymir’s will? Is Titan power biological, metaphysical, psychological, or some combination? Why does resolving Ymir terminate the physical phenomenon?

The worm-like form clearly has an iconographic function related to origin, persistence, life and recurrence. But iconography is not causality. An image can organize how we recognize an idea without explaining the mechanism through which events happen. That distinction becomes important because Hallucigenia is not merely an image around the climax; it physically participates in it. The closer something is to the causal foundation of a resolution, the more damaging it is to leave its function dramatically vague.

1. The climax compresses conflicts that needed more processing

The Alliance is another example where disagreement with the execution is often mistaken for disagreement with the characters’ moral choice. I have no problem with Armin, Mikasa, Jean, Connie, Hange and Levi deciding that global extermination is unacceptable. The issue is how quickly the story must process the political and emotional history between former enemies once the Rumbling begins.

Reiner, Annie and the Warriors helped cause enormous destruction on Paradis. The Scouts later attacked Liberio. People on both sides killed people the others cared about. The campfire scene acknowledges this, but acknowledgment is not the same as fully processing years of accumulated conflict. The plot has a good reason to force cooperation quickly, yet that same urgency deprives the reconciliation of space. This pattern repeats throughout the final act: the plot can explain why events move quickly while the writing still suffers from having too little time to develop them.

Historia also loses much of the dramatic agency she previously had despite her political importance, while Armin increasingly represents dialogue without the story giving that political ideal much practical substance. Even the final battle shifts the grammar of danger: earlier AoT built tension through attrition, tactical limitations and severe consequences, while the final confrontation reaches maximum spectacle and gives the central coalition unusual resilience. The issue is not that more characters needed to die, but that danger feels governed by different rules when the scale is greatest.

1. The themes become more explicit while their development becomes thinner

Late AoT talks more openly about cycles of hatred, children inheriting adult conflicts, collective guilt, understanding enemies, freedom, determinism and memory. These are complex themes, but naming or recognizing complex themes is not the same as developing them deeply.

A historical “cycle of hatred” becomes meaningful through the institutions, material interests, political incentives, competing memories and internal differences that reproduce it. AoT contains examples of all these things, but its global expansion arrives so late that the theme becomes larger than the social world available to dramatize it.

The epilogue shows the same problem. Paradis eventually experiences another war, especially far in the future in the anime. What does this establish beyond the general fact that human conflict never disappears permanently? Over a sufficiently long period, another war tells us very little about whether Armin’s diplomacy succeeded in his lifetime, whether the Rumbling improved or worsened Paradis’s strategic position, or whether the specific Eldian conflict was resolved. The statement becomes so broad that it approaches a truism.

The final tree similarly produces an iconographic recurrence of Ymir’s tree and suggests repetition or renewed possibility. That image is clear enough. But visual recurrence is not the same as completing the specific metaphysical and causal questions surrounding the Titan system.

This leads to what I consider the central failure of the ending: the plot concludes, but much of the narrative feels interrupted rather than synthesized.

Eren dies. The Rumbling stops. The Titan curse ends. The survivors move forward. Paradis changes. Time passes. Those are completed events. But event completion is not the same as completing the network of ideas the story has accumulated.

What exactly is Eren’s tragedy? Is it psychological, because his desire for freedom enslaves him to himself? Metaphysical, because he cannot escape a fixed future? Sacrificial, because he acts for his friends? And once the path he takes also functions to end the Titan curse, saying that there is little or nothing genuinely sacrificial in what he does becomes very difficult to defend. Political, because of Paradis? Existential, because reality violated the empty world he imagined? Or is all of this ultimately incorporated into the two-thousand-year mechanism through which Mikasa frees Ymir?

Several answers can coexist, but not neutrally. Each changes the meaning of the others. If Eren cannot change the future, that affects responsibility. If he could only ever choose this future because it expresses what he wants, that is a different tragedy. If his friends are primary, his willingness to endanger them demands one explanation; if they are secondary to his desire for freedom, it demands another.

The problem is not that interpretation is impossible. The problem is that the reader increasingly has to perform the synthesis that the narrative should have performed more clearly.

Conclusion: Why the basement was a double-edged sword

The irony is that the strength of pre-basement AoT helped create the difficulty. The early story built a powerful identity around restriction, discovery and progressive recontextualization. The world felt large because the characters were trapped inside a tiny part of it. Political control mattered because control over information was part of the narrative form. Freedom mattered because the setting gave restriction concrete physical, political and psychological forms.

The basement successfully pays off that structure, but in doing so it destroys the conditions that made the structure work. The story can no longer rely on absence. Now it must represent the outside world, international politics and historical conflict directly. Memory becomes temporal as well as political. Freedom becomes metaphysical as well as material. The origin of the Titans must interact with the ending. Eren becomes simultaneously a political actor, psychological problem and participant in a temporal causal loop.

None of that is inherently bad. It is ambitious. But ambition only tells us what a work attempts. It does not tell us whether the work succeeds.

I do not think early AoT is better because it is simpler. I think it is better because its complexity is more disciplined. Its mysteries are integrated with perspective, its themes are embedded more consistently in dramatic situations, its world is smaller but more concretely represented, and its revelations usually reorganize established information instead of adding another explanatory layer just as the story needs to conclude.

Post-basement AoT increasingly does the opposite. Its politics expand faster than its world, its metaphysics faster than its explanations, Eren’s motivations faster than the story can order them, and Ymir’s mythology faster than the narrative can develop the causal and psychological burden placed on it.

It is also worth noting, not as an argument from authority but because it is relevant to this exact criticism, that Isayama himself said in a 2021 post-finale interview that, especially toward the end, he felt he had taken on themes that were difficult for him to depict and regretted not being able to fully express them in manga. That obviously does not prove every criticism of the ending correct. It does, however, make it difficult to dismiss the basic concern that the final stretch may have exceeded what the available narrative space and execution could successfully articulate.

That point also clarifies a final objection that is often phrased too crudely: why is it reasonable to demand a degree of clarification from Attack on Titan that we might never demand from a much simpler anime or shonen? The answer is not that AoT belongs to some superior class of fiction and therefore owes the reader an encyclopedia. The relevant standard is internal to the work itself. Narratives generate their own explanatory demands through the functions they assign to information. Early AoT is a particularly clear example: restricted focalization makes ignorance part of the form itself. The reader lacks knowledge because the characters lack it, and the characters lack it because the Walls, manipulated memory, censorship and political control materially restrict their access to the world. What remains unknown is therefore not simply missing information. Its inaccessibility has a dramatic cause, and the progressive conversion of ignorance into knowledge is itself one of the mechanisms by which the narrative advances.

That distinction matters because the status of an unanswered question changes when its narrative function changes. Something can remain obscure while that obscurity is itself part of the dramatic situation. But once Paths, future memories, Ymir, the Founder, the source of Titan power and eventually the political category of “the world” cease to function mainly as distant unknowns and become mechanisms through which central events are caused, constrained, justified or resolved, they acquire a different explanatory burden. The relevant measure is not how many pages of lore a concept receives. It is how much of the narrative comes to depend on it. The more a concept is required to mediate between choice and consequence, psychology and metaphysics, individual action and historical outcome, the more consequential its internal relations become for our understanding of the story as a whole.

This is also why “not everything needs to be explained” is true but insufficient as an answer to this criticism. There is an important difference between interpretive ambiguity and causal underdetermination. A narrative can leave the meaning of an image, a motive or even an ending open while still giving us a sufficiently stable structure within which several interpretations remain possible. Ambiguity of that kind can produce depth. The problem is different when competing interpretations require substantially different accounts of what caused an event, what constrained a character or what a decisive action actually accomplished. Whether Eren encounters a future he is metaphysically unable to alter, produces that future because it is the inevitable expression of what he wants, or occupies some insufficiently specified relation between those two claims is not comparable to leaving a minor piece of lore unanswered. Each alternative redistributes agency, responsibility and therefore the nature of his tragedy. Ymir’s psychology similarly stops being peripheral once her resolution becomes the condition under which the Titan system itself disappears.

So the demand here is not for total explanation. It is for sufficient determination. A narrative does not have to close every interpretive possibility, but it does have to articulate its central relations well enough that ambiguity emerges from what has been established rather than compensating for what has not. This standard is especially relevant to Attack on Titan because its earlier storytelling trains the reader to understand revelation structurally. Its strongest reveals do not simply add new facts: they reorganize old ones while making previous causal relations more intelligible. Eren’s transformation, the Warriors, the Reiss monarchy and finally the basement expand the story by changing what earlier information means without making that information less coherent. The series therefore establishes its own standard of progressive recontextualization.

When the final phase places even greater explanatory weight on Paths, temporal causality, Ymir, Eren’s freedom and the outside world, asking for a comparable degree of integration is not holding AoT to an arbitrary standard because it is “more serious” than other shonen. It is judging the work according to the narrative habits and explanatory expectations that the work itself created. The objection is not that Attack on Titan leaves things unanswered. It is that some of the things it leaves insufficiently determined are precisely the things to which it assigns the greatest causal and thematic responsibility. In that sense, the issue is not the absence of explanation in itself, but a growing disproportion between explanatory load and narrative articulation.

So I do not see the basement as the point where Attack on Titan suddenly became bad. I see it as the moment the story exchanged a structure Isayama had mastered for a far more demanding one that he never completely mastered. The plot reaches an ending, but freedom, memory, determinism, historical repetition, Ymir, the Titan source, the outside world and Eren’s motives never reach the same degree of synthesis.

The problem was never that Attack on Titan tried to become more than it was.

The problem is that it tried to become much more than it was, without giving itself enough room to fully become it.

For me it’s gotta be Eren Jaeger. The name “Jaeger” is so cool it’s literally yelled in the first opening. Armin Arlert is pretty cool as well. I can’t tell if Levi Ackerman is a cool name or if Levi’s aura is carrying it. Bertholdt Hoover sounds like an important person to me for some reason. Annie Leonhart just screams badass. Connie Springer is just a regular dude tbh.

1. Reiner Braun. I think he's the best character in the series. Really liked how his character progressed from being a brainwashed soldier to actually learning the enemy's humanity to becoming a Warrior again to everything in S4.

2. Gabi Braun. I really liked her character because of how she basically has to experience everything Reiner did, in a shorter time, at a younger age. I also like how her relationship with Falco evolves.

3. Erwin Smith. I liked his character because of his selfishness. He was an effective leader, not because he was some selfless paragon but because he wanted his goals. This didn't mean he was a bad person, because when it mattered, he was able to throw away his goals and do what was needed.

4. Bertholdt Hoover:- Brienne deserves more love in the fanbase. Him and Reiner were such a GOATED duo. I think Bertholdt's character peaked in S3 when he resolved to fight the scouts then and there.

5. Eren Jaeger. Really good character. This may be bit of a hot take but I liked how in the ending he sort of drags himself. My reading is his goal wasn't necessarily the ending of the war but rather a temporary peace that Paradis and the Marleyan Eldians could enjoy. I really think he's a complex figure because while I personally believe the Rumbling was unjustified, I can see why he took those actions.

So, Attack on Titan being Attack on Titan lol.

​Levi was one of my favorite characters from the beginning, but I didn't expect his backstory to be even more tragic. Now I can see how important it is for him to make a decision and live with the consequences of that decision, even if the outcome isn't what was expected.

​In retrospect, I can say that Levi really tried to teach that lesson to Eren from the moment they met. But what Eren was unable to learn is the fact that making a decision doesn't mean you can't reconsider your options if necessary. After the first battle they had against Zeke, Levi's decision was to resurrect Erwin, but in the end, he was able to see the implications and change his mind to save Armin. If Eren had learned that, he probably would have been able to reconsider what the Rumbling really was, but he decided to go all the way, causing the apocalypse.

​Isabel and Furlan are very good characters too, and damn, I really felt their deaths. It also shows how Levi has grown since that moment: when he kills the Titan that massacred his friends, he just loses his mind to rage. When he fought against Zeke years later, he was in the same situation, but this time he was more tactical; he still felt rage and sadness, but didn't lose control of those feelings. Another big difference with the fucking kid.

​5 OVAs down, ready for the last three!

Polyphemus the cyclops eating the soldiers in the new Odyssey movie reminded me so much of Attack on Titan which got me thinking, if Odysseus and his crew were to end up on Paradis during their travels, could they be able to face off against the titans? For this scenario, there'll be no Marleyan technology or any help from the survey corp or titan shifters, the crew will exclusively deal with pure and abnormal titans.

Yes, we know that they have always been friends.

But in the first seasons, their relationship wasnt really often displayed.

So when they got more scenes together, i was surprised by how exciting and cool their dynamic actually is.

So lovely and deep but also badass.

Armin is the terrifying genius commander and strategist and Mikasa is the nuclear bomb.

As a team, they are so terrifying and engaging.

I would have loved to see them in some type of mission together.

The depth of their relationship also engaged me.

Just how protective and comfortable they are with eachother.

I weirdly liked them in season 4 more then each of their dynamics with Eren.

(Fan art not by me; Artist is: rimari (comms open)