Board Thread:Manga/@comment-27321453-20181109001854/@comment-27125793-20181116022649

RuneLai wrote: The thing is, Eren is not being portrayed as a hero anymore. The military is upset that he's taken matters into his own hands and they're trying to salvage the mess before it gets even worse. The sympathetic characters are the people who don't like the direction Eren is taking. He left Armin and Mikasa behind, and that's probably he knows that what he's going to do is something they would never support.

Narratively, if Eren was considered in the right, his friends would be beside him, but they're not, which shows which direction the story is going.

They came and helped him during his unsanctioned attack on Liberio, so if he's refusing to count on them now, what he has planned is likely to be so unpleasant that he's not even bothering to ask them for help. I think that's the wrong way to look at things. No one is truly being portrayed as a hero in this series. Sure, there are characters with more heroic traits and characters with more villainous ones, but very few, if any, fall into either category. Everybody's pretty much a mixed bag. The Uprising Arc showed an inkling into that setting, and the good vs evil trope has been completely abandoned ever since the Marley Arc.

I don't think that, narratively, anyone is in the right at the moment. I don't even think Isayama is trying to go for that sentiment in the first place. Besides, the simple fact Eren's friends aren't with him would not be indication enough of him being in the wrong.

As for the 'unpleasantness' aspect, let's remember one Erwin Smith. Many fans of the manga consider him a hero, but he's the one that made the decision of having Eren fight Annie in the middle of Stohess, using his 'I believe it's in the benefit for humanity' or 'it was necessary' as excuses. He also used the excuse of not knowing who Annie's associates were to justify not informing higher-ups like Darius or Nile of her identity, despite the fact he knew that they infiltrated the Walls five years earlier, so anyone who was in longer was a safe bet. In other words, it was but an excuse to justify the SC's continued existence and hundreds of civilian men, women, and children paid the price for it, and the operation was for the most part a failure. Now, this isn't a bash on Erwin as a character; he is one of my favorites too, but I've never really considered him a hero. That didn't lessen my liking of him.

In any case, why is Eren's case different? He's going behind his superiors' backs, just like Erwin; his superiors are rather slow and reactionary, just like Erwin's were; he's using the mentality of the ends justify the means, just like Erwin did.

In my opinion, Attack on Titan is an exploration of people, how they're affected and shaped by the world around them, and what methods they're willing to use to meet their ends. It doesn't go out of its way to differentiate right and wrong, so much that it states observations on humanity itself through the characters' words and actions.