Board Thread:Manga/@comment-34196931-20200608155101/@comment-1327106-20200609052524

Razzylada wrote:

- Why would Annie still thinks she still might see her father in Liberio ? It is already destroyed !

It's not yet. Hange says "Even if we stopped Eren using the best methods possible, it would already be too late for Liberio." Since she uses "would," this means at the point she's saying it, Liberio still exists. It won't exist for much longer given the half of a day delay Kiyomi was talking about, but judging from Hange's reaction the original plan did not account for that. They expected to get out in time.

Notably, Annie is not around to hear this conversation, and Mikasa doesn't exactly elaborate about the change on plans, so Annie has no idea what's going on other than she needs to provide cover. It's reasonable for her to still think about going back to Liberio and finding her dad.

Anyway, my thoughts on the chapter:

I really don't like Isayama's sense of geographic scale. As in, I don't think he has any. Hange says the Titans will cover 600km in the half day it would take the engineers to prep the plane. Being generous and assuming the engineers only talking about waking hours, let's give the Titans a walking speed of 100km/hr (62 mph for American folks).

The state of California is about 1300km (or 800 miles) long. This is going north to south. So the Wall Titans could cover the entire state in a little over half a day. We can be generous and assume that there are enough Titans that they can stand shoulder to shoulder and cover the state west-east as they march from the southern border to the north. This means we have a line of Titans 400km (250 mi) wide. That's a long line of Titans!

However California is not the entire west coast of the North American continent. There's another 1100km (700 miles) to get to Canada. So that's a full day just to get from Mexico to Canada and we're only covering the United States. If we keep the 400km wide line of Titans, and assuming repositioning them takes no additional time, it would take them roughly ten sweeps going north to south, or ten full days, to wipe out just the United States (ignoring Alaska and Hawaii).

In a nutshell, Marley has to be on a small continent, roughly the size of Australia for them to be flattened in four days. It would still be a tragedy, but most of the world's population would still be intact. And I don't think this is the scale Isayama is picturing.

Ever since Hange started predicting Titan arrival times last chapter I can't help feeling that Isayama is playing fast and lose with time and distance because he actually doesn't have a good concept of how far away or how big anything is, which is why it keeps tripping my BS-detector.

Quick thoughts for the rest:


 * Don't like the weird double jaw thing on Falco's Jaw Titan. It's got beast jaws and then human jaws, which just looks strange to me.


 * Reiner protecting Annie was a nice moment. It doesn't strike me as something he would have done when he was trying to be a Marco replacement, nor something he would have done when he was a weaker kid.


 * Falco's not a very inspiring leader, even though he asks people to devote their hearts like Erwin. I'm not sure if Isayama was intentionally making him a pale echo, but he certainly felt like one.  I don't like the guy, but  I feel like it should have been presented as a more inspiring moment so we understand why all these nameless Yeagerist characters are following him.


 * The reinforcement train was not well handled. I get that it was foreshadowing that they had help in the form of Shadis, but the narrative whiplash from  "oh no, we have to stop it!" to "oh no, it blew up!" on a single page was pretty painful.  Isayama could have had a couple panels of a lone Yeagerist trying to draw a bead on someone from a good sniping position only to have him killed by a mysterious attacker and it would have served the same purpose without janking the reader around.


 * Gabi shooting Floch was great. Girl's got good aim.


 * Magath freeing Falco also great. Given his instructions for Pieck to hold him down, I have to wonder if Magath has actually cut open multiple Titan napes to free various Warriors following their first transformation. Dude's gotta have guts to do this every time a new Warrior gets a Titan.


 * Regarding the ending sacrifice, Magath dying was good. I bought it.  He realized he'd done horrible things by making soldiers out of children and the least he can do now is make sure those kids get to freedom and possibly save the world.  While someone else could have stayed behind, Magath decided he'd be the one to do it instead of sharing his plans.


 * On the other hand, Keith dying was dumb. I'm glad he found something worth fighting for again.  He's wearing the wings of freedom on his jacket in this chapter.  But the whole "yeah, I've been looking for a time to die" doesn't speak to me.  If he was actively holding off the Yeagerists so the room couldn't be breached, that would have been fine, but he was just hanging out.  I'm guessing he was there to serve as a parallel to Magath, being another older mentor figure, but it didn't work for me.