Board Thread:Manga/@comment-30064439-20161113032209/@comment-37787378-20190212185320

HanataSanchou wrote: You don't really get to tell me my opinion is invalid though....Isayama is the one who portrayed them as essentially being family, and my opinion that they DID develop that kind of bond in the time they've spent together isn't going to change. If you disagree then fine, but you don't have any authority to invalidate it. I disagree with your opinion that a year isn't a long enough time to develop that kind of bond with someone, and can cite several examples in manga/anime that would support my claim, but your opinion is still your opinion.

I will admit that I have studied the characters and just how much they've grown with the Marley Arc in much more depth since I made that initial comment, and that there's been a major paradigm shift in how Isayama has approached the Eren-Mikasa relationship. My perception of it at the time was based on limited information. There's been a deep rift driven between them however, and their relationship is more strained than it has ever been as a result of it. I've never doubted that the potential for romance was there....just that with the way things were at the time, it didn't seem to make a great deal of sense to me. I've said before I don't care who Eren gets with, I just want it to make sense. Even if it still feels like incest to me, if it comes about in a way that seems organic to their characters then who am I to complain. To me it's not organic if this "reunite and make up" you speak of doesn't include her getting over her natural instinct to try to protect him all the time. Eren has continued to grow, and acquired an absurd amount of power - something that he didn't have back in the old days. He now has the power to be the change that he's always spoken of, and is taking the steps he needs to to get there, even if it means becoming something he's never been before.....a murderer. How has Mikasa grown from the overprotective sister-like figure that always wants to watch over him? Some of her own personal philosophies have matured, and she's grown up in a lot of other ways, but her world still seems to really kinda revolve around Eren. As much of an asshole Eren was during that speech, he was right about A LOT. This will be a big moment for her in terms of how she moves forward with her feelings toward Eren, and the main thing I don't want to see Isayama do is turn her into a Sakura - as in Eren can do no wrong, she will carry this incredibly delusional idea that she can bring him back to his "former" self. If Isayama develops her more independently then I can def agree that the seeds for romance are there when they see how much the other has really grown. But if she's gonna spend the rest of the series chasing after Eren Naruto/Sakura-style, then I'm gonna puke. He's made Mikasa way too awesome of a character to dump her into that trope when it's all said and done.

I'm looking at it from a psychology perspective, they have no hints of familiar interaction towards one another. If they do, that's failure on the author. If anything is the baseline here is friendship. How many siblings have you seen hold hands like the way Mikasa did when he woke up? How many siblings have you seen almost kiss before death? Using the "I've seen it in other animes" isn't feasible enough for me because there is alot of incest in animes lol. This isn't incest, there is no evidence for this. There just isn't.

You cannot form an incestuous relationship with a child who does not share blood ties with you or hasn't spent their childhood from the age of a toddler until adolescence. This did not happen, this is how it happened. They started out as friends and Mikasa had a crush, her parents died. Eren's family took her in for a year and they left after the fall of their city. If that's incest to you, then you need to look at actual cases of incest in anime because this is far from it. By that logic, Bulma and Goku potentially hooking up are considered incest. It's not.

As for your other disagreements, fine, to each their own. But that doesn't kill stories. If romance isn't that big a factor to you, you ain't gonna care anyway. The truth is, based on how he designed the two characters, their fates revolve around eachother. We can't change that, no matter how much we hate that result. He wrote it that way, he didn't have to.