Board Thread:Manga/@comment-5774380-20160808233126/@comment-5774380-20160810152419

Tausendberg wrote:

I don't know guys, we're all talking about the implications of Bertolt but we still don't have any real conclusive proof of what exactly the Homelanders' agenda really is.

Just saying.

(My theory is that citizens of the homelanders are basically the source of all the mindless titans in the world, that they are bound to that awful duty in some way of sacrificing their own to be made into dumb dumbs for possibly the rest of eternity and the only way out of this cycle is to basically capture the coordinate and use that to remake the world order by reprogramming the titans. It's the only thing I can think of that could make the Homelanders feel justified doing what they have done.)

I see the opposite. I see many people taking for granted that Bertolt is in the right and that his ulterior motives are strong enough to justify a genocide, but I see nobody considering the possibility that maybe they are not, and that maybe when we learn those reasons we'll find out that he was never right after all.

My own theory is that the ancestors of the people within the Walls were monsters who did unthinkable atrocities to the people of the Hometown and subjected them to a number of experiments (kind of nazi concentration camp) which led to the creation of the Titans, but that experiment backfired and they were forced to protect themselves within the Walls. Maybe as a result of the experiments or the threat of the Titans or something else, the people of the Hometown is suffering and dying, and their only salvation is by retrieving the Coordinate.

That still leaves us with a main problem: it doesn't explain why it is necessary to kill the people within the Walls. They could retrieve the Coordinate and leave the rest of the people living in peace.
 * It cannot be for revenge because you cannot blame people for the sins of others. Those people were not the ones who did those atrocities to the Hometown, it were their ancestors. The current inhabitants of the Walls are innocents and don't even know their own past.
 * If it's strictly necessary to kill them, like some course that can only be lifted until the last descendant of the monsters is dead, that still means that you're massacring a whole innocent race in order to save your own, which is the intrinsically egoistic problem of which I talked in more detail here. That'd be a life or death situation, but still doesn't leaves you on a good light, because it means we have two innocent races, one prioritizing their own survival at the cost of the destruction of the other, and the Hometown are now on the side of the monsters, doing to the people within the Walls the same atrocities their ancestors did to them (and of which their descendants have no fault at all).

I don't know but it's very hard to imagine a reason strong enough to justify a genocide, and I don't really think that reason exists at all. If Isayama can come up with a convincing story, I will praise him as the greatest manga author in history.

Aggression25 wrote:

Where do you think he went after death? Heaven or Hell?

If we take into account the Christian Bible, he would certainly go to Hell. Christianity forbids killing in its Ten Commandments, demands the repentance of sins as condition to get the salvation of the soul, and advices that martyrdom is preferable over disobeying God's laws. Bertolt killed many people, close to his death accepted his sins rather than regret them, and prioritized his own goals over the lives of others, so by those standards he would go to Hell.

However, this is a religious issue and I don't think Christianity exists in the AoT universe, considering that the main religion is the Church of the Walls and they surely have very different laws.