User blog comment:Neetaku/A Rewrite of Attack on Titan/@comment-28958062-20180212211200/@comment-24407809-20180213043259

I totally agree, Isayama has missed a lot of opportunities from a character standpoint. Bertolt, Connie, and Sasha are some of the more prominent examples, but aside from that, I feel that he hasn't necessarily failed to exploit his characters' fullest potentials. From a writing standpoint, Annie has served her purpose, and served it well: she was the first hurdle that Eren had to overcome, introducing the idea that there were people close to Eren who were not everything they seemed. She also did a good job of alerting Eren and readers to the fact that there was more going on in the story than "good vs. evil". Annie introduced the idea that the Paradisians' enemies weren't some great evil, but were people with their own reservations and private reasons for doing what they did.

The same goes for Ymir. She tends to get built up by fans as some major character whose potential was squandered by an abrupt death, but if you go back and look at her character objectively, she was always meant to do 2 things: propel Historia's character forward, and act as a giant fakeout for readers. It's obvious that Isayama never intended to have some big grand destiny for Ymir, she was just an unfortunate person who was given a name that was too much for her to carry.

I completely agree with Bertolt, though. His character had a lot of potential, especially given his brief breakdown during the Uprising arc, but he ended up falling by the way-side because Isayama wanted to power up Armin.

That being said, the main point of this blog wasn't to fix shortcoming in the series, it was just to address a minor pet peeve of mine that I have had for a while. Even compared to characters like Bertolt, the 104th recruits were tragically underused. I understand that Isayama wanted to use them to build up a sense of danger in the story, and I even like the way that their deaths illustrate the more realistic outcome of what happens when you sign up to fight an unbeatable foe: you die. Quickly. But I still feel that there were enough members of the 104th for Isayama to kill off en masse at Trost, while still leaving a few (Thomas and Mina) to stick around a bit longer, so that when they eventually are killed off, their deaths have a bit more meaning to them.