Board Thread:Manga/@comment-27321453-20180708204808/@comment-35822279-20180711023548

Fire Eater wrote: Freeman1378 wrote: Just some further thoughts on this chapter and who should have died in The Battle Of Liberio:

- I think that Eren's plan is to goad the world into throwing its entire military weight at Paradis so he can effectively end the conflict right now by destroying them with the wall titans thus causing the enemies of Paradis to surrender as there militaries will be devastated beyond repair and they will be scared into submission.

- Kiyomi seems to be a manipulative capitalist type who only desires the resources of Paradis which is somewhat surprising as I thought Isayama would treat her country like the Eagles in the LOTR in a daft blaze of nationalism. So even though the alliance itself was incredibly easy to see coming it's nice to see Isayama treat the situation with a sense of realism and it makes her undeniably more interesting than the one note goody two shoes that popped up a few chapters ago.

- Honestly I'm actually pleasantly surprised that I'm not alone on the Zeke hate train as I think he is a daft mix of Itachi (Naruto) and MIB/Ford (Westworld) as he is basically a beat for beat ripoff of the former (if again he is being genuine) mixed with the constant mystery boxes of the latter characters and unfortunately he doesn't have much dramatic weight to swing around in the story as either he has a woefully unearned "I was good along motivation!" which is frankly terrible (Not every character deserves redemption or to be a secretly good person something that Westworld and GOT wisely understood with the MIB and Joffery respectively) or he's going to be there to inject drama into a conflict that clearly needs some which is marginally better than the other option but still not great as it means that he still has no character outside of being a never ending mystery box.

- My final thoughts on the Battle Of Liberio is that I think that Sasha still should have died but in a more organic fashion during the battle and that Connie and Mikasa also should have croaked in this fight. My suggestion is Connie gets swapped with the no name who gets swatted by Porco, Sasha sacrifices herself to destroy Pieck's Panzer Unit/avenge Connie, and Gabi shoots Mikasa on the blimp this way the Battle truly had significant losses rather than just a no name given an important power and the highly manipulative death of Sasha. In regards to the idea that Pieck replace Sasha death in this conflict I don't think she's a big enough character to elicit a real response from the audience and I think it would be the Marley equivalent of a Mike or Nanaba dying where she has a character but also doesn't really factor into the plot past being a good soldier. Manipulative. Spot on.

Not much to be argued against here, I've had no idea how to feel about everything past the line "Humanity never really perished". The pacing has become erratic and I really don't know if this jumping back and fourth between Marley and the actual timeskip has really been a productive decision at all, or even a necessary one. This could not have been told in a more chronological order with the same outcome? And the stakes of the Liberio battle......Freeman has some excellent points here, though I couldn't be more firm in my belief that Sasha's end couldn't be more inappropriately timed. Almost feels like a throwaway, and I think we've seen enough people reduced to throwaways, which is seriously the thing that bugs me worse than anything else.

Hansond makes a good point of Pieck, why is she still a player in this anyway? What WOULD happen if a shifter died with no inheritor eaten before that happened? And how would this affect Marley? It's not as if Pieck really is monumentally better than Mrs. Tybur when it comes to the newly-identified shifters and the extremely limited insight we've thus far been lent into either of their characters. The War Hammer btw was quite an impressive letdown, I think most of us expected that thing to leave half of the Marley capital up in flames. Plus Armin's purpose in the battle ends after blowing up a harbor. With the Colossus, he could've left the Marley war machine even more crippled beyond repair by hitting other potential targets. And what happened to the division of troops on the train rushing to Liberio?

After all these impressive critiques I'd say the merits of the Marley arc indeed need to be reevaluated. The anime does not want to follow this one word for word, page by page, in this exact sequence. That'll be chaotic. I have been scathing with my criticism of these last few chapters but to be honest I actually loved 80-90% of the Marley arc. The start of the arc was one of the coolest battles in the entire series with so many incredible moments (the Titan air strike, Pieck's panzer unit, and everything to do with Porco's Jaw Titan) that I find those chapters some of my favourites to re-read and I can't wait to see them animated in the anime. I also loved that we got so much time to experience the Warrior's perspective on life as I got introduced to the series last year while season 2 was airing and I always found RBA to be incredibly interesting as they were strangely enough some of the most human characters to me. The deep dive into Reiner's psyche was also great as it felt like one of the times in this series were I truly understood someone completely (their motivations, actions, fears, and desires) and I found the tragedy of it all to be some of the manga's best character work to date. Also Willy and Magath are fantastic characters as I found them to be excellent subversions of my expectations especially Magath who I had pegged as a evil nazi type but ended up being incredibly complex (specifically the moment when he intially objected to the festival plan). For me things started going downhill with chapter 102 with that strange stilted fight scene between Tybur/Mikasa (it was like watching a 5 year old trying to clumsly catch a butterfly in a bugcatching net) where Eren's just chilling on a building observing them and no one's shooting at him. After this the rest of the fight just went to smoothly from there on out with Tybur/Pieck being neutralized quickly, Zeke throwing out some real cringers ("I am totally not sketchy!" might as well of been an actual line of dialogue), and Gabi saying "i'm going to kill Eren Yeager!" 30 plus time in 4 chapters and then bolting out a door was really tiresome. I have to say I completely agree with you on the last 2 chapters as I feel like they would have worked better as chapter 91 and 92 respectively as they would have been more exciting and organic as things happening in the here and now rather than as clunky flashbacks.