Board Thread:Manga/@comment-27321453-20190908104148/@comment-1327106-20190924045939

Neetaku wrote:

Well, if the timeline of AOT really is operating on a fixed timeline, then Eren theoretically could just stop now and the Rumbling would still happen. The fact that he has seen the Rumbling happen in the future means that, if everything is fixed in the timeline and can't be changed, there's literally nothing anyone can do to stop the Rumbling from happening. Whatever is done from here on out will be what always needed to happen for the Rumbling to start.

That's pretty much what I figure. But we don't know everything. Heck, Eren does not know everything either. And Grisha, when he asked Zeke to stop Eren, may not have been aware to what degree the timeline is fixed. (Though I find it interesting that despite wanting Eren to be stopped, he still gives both the Attack Titan and the Founding Titan to 12-year-old Eren, indicating an acceptance that some of these things have to happen otherwise adult Eren could never give him visions of the future in the first place.)

In other fixed timeline stories, where characters are actively trying to prevent a future (as opposed to Eren's ensuring a future), usually their efforts to change the future ends up leading to it, possibly in an indirect manner. Eren could sit on his ass and the future he's foreseen will happen, but there are probably other things he wants to do that require him to act.

We haven't seen Eren's full vision of what's going to happen, but we do know he's missing some details. If, perhaps, those missing details include the survival of his friends, he's more likely to approach the future in a way his friends will survive. Anything he doesn't know is not set in stone from his perspective, so why not try for the best outcome?

And even if he does the Rumbling we don't know how he's going to use it. It probably won't (for dramatic purposes) be a "hey, let's get some Titans moving as a show of force," but it's possible he could do that without actually having them go out and destroy nations. Heck, maybe he uses them specifically to drive away Marley and then the Titans come back home so that all the fighting stops and both sides can come to the negotiation table like civilized people. If he can control them, there's no reason he needs to make them go homicidal maniac on the rest of the world just because he woke them up.