Board Thread:Manga/@comment-27321453-20190908104148/@comment-37493549-20190923215458

Neetaku wrote: Well, if the timeline of AOT really is operating on a fixed timeline, then Eren theoretically could just stop now and the Rumbling would still happen. The fact that he has seen the Rumbling happen in the future means that, if everything is fixed in the timeline and can't be changed, there's literally nothing anyone can do to stop the Rumbling from happening. Whatever is done from here on out will be what always needed to happen for the Rumbling to start. If he 'stopped', whatever that means, then the rumbling in the future he saw in the first place involved him 'stopping' all along. That's the definition of seeing the future. If he saw something that didn't end up happening, then what he saw WASN'T the future by definition. And since he can ONLY see the future, (not hypothetical could-have-been situations that aren't the future), then by definition that can't happen.

Another way to explain it: If Eren had the motivations to choose to 'stop', then the future that results from him 'stopping' is the one he would have seen in the first place. But he DOESN'T have the motivation to 'stop'.

Such suggestions about 'well if he does X then the future would be different to the one he saw' are nonsense because if he thought doing X was a good idea, he WOULD have done it and the future he saw in the first place would have been the one resulting from him doing X.

IDK how to explain this idea any more clearly. People seem to think of 'the future' as some kind disconnected event (like a movie) when in reality it's something created by the all the choices people have already made in the past.

I think why people aren't getting this is because they're overexposed to the 'alternate timeline' version of time travel that they've seen in stuff like Back to the Future and Avengers Endgame. There are no alternate timelines in Attack on Titan.