Board Thread:Manga/@comment-27321453-20200308161511/@comment-1327106-20200310044920

Elal08 wrote:

Well... I talk about Eren... Annie says "Are you able to kill Eren?" to everyone, but... the next chapter, Eren is here? Or not? When everyone to kill Eren? Or not? Whta is Eldian? What is Marleyan?

P.S.: I don't hate you.

I know you're responding to my post, but I have no idea what this has to do with Yelena. Was this directed at someone else?

Penguinluver1431 wrote:

And you're right, I still deny peace is possible. Because it's not. This team-up is a fantasy that will either fail and force them to realize that the world is governed by survival of the fittest, or it will completely destroy the writing quality of the narrative more than it already has (name ONE truly great chapter since the RtS arc, I dare you) since it would fall into the same trap as other Japanese manga...the power of friendship saving the world, or everyone being redeemable no matter how many hundreds of thousands they kill (and unlike the Warriors, Eren is justifiable in his actions).

What do you want for end game of this manga, if you think the the team-up is inheritantly designed to fail? Narratively Isayama is invested a lot in this happening. If everyone dies it would be a fairly bleak ending that the majority of the cast does not want (and thus probably unsatisfying for the majority of the readership). While I don't mind bleak personally, that's not predicated on the team-up failing.

For instance, the team-up success does not have to rely on the power of friendship to save the world. Eren could refuse to listen to Mikasa and Armin and become unredeemable in the eyes of the remaining protagonists. They'll kill him, the power of friendship will not prevail, and yet the world is spared.

Though that scenario is specifically about the friendship between Eren, Armin, and Mikasa failing, if you want the power of friendship to fail that's the one to break from a narrative standpoint since those are the three main characters.

Penguinluver1431 wrote:

Ever hear the phrase "Mercy is weakness, strength is truth"?

Nope. Probably because now that I look it up, it's a quote a TV show I've never heard of. The character is based on a real person, but the quote is fictional.

So if we're going fictional, I prefer the quote: "Mercy and compassion are virtues that only the strong are privileged to possess." And it's true, because you cannot grant mercy unless you are powerful enough to do so.

In the situation our cast is currently facing, Eren is the only character capable of granting a decent measure of mercy due to the amount of power he has. But if he fears the consequences of doing so, is he really strong?

Penguinluver1431 wrote: I can't tell you how many people I know, doesn't matter if they're anime-only or read the manga, who watched the basement reveal, learned the truth of the outside world, and ended up losing interest in the remainder of the series. Not all, of course, but plenty enough. A lot of people disliked the genre shift and the fact that we were suddenly supposed to view the Warriors as protagonists and were forced to go through nearly a year with only their perspective and hear nothing about the 104th.

This is a fair point, but the thing is, we already went through this with the Uprising arc. When it was being animated I saw posts up and down message boards where people said this was when Attack of Titan started to suck in the manga and they stopped reading. And I get that, because I've stopped reading/watching things if the genre shift was too much. So people being lost due to the outside world revelation is not surprising.

But this is also pretty normal for a long running series. Though people don't usually think about it when a series is popular, it typically loses readers over time. You will never have as many people read Volume 20 of a manga as those who read Volume 1. People will drop for any number of reasons. Their favorite character got killed. They didn't like the genre shift. There was one scene they found really disturbing and couldn't read anymore. They took a break and forgot to come back. And so on.

I don't think Isayama is worrying over those losses because overall the series is still selling at a good rate. We're close enough to the end that he pretty much can do what he wants and much of the remaining readership will be okay with it, which is reflected in this fan poll: https://snkpolls.tumblr.com/post/611225830675316736/snk-chapter-126-poll-results

One of the questions is "Regarding how the Avengers' mission and the ending will go, which is these is preferable/acceptable to you?" 1,465 responses and the #1 preferred answer is "I'm just on Isayama's wild ride, give me whatever." There are a lot of other options people are okay with too, including "They achieve nothing, all of them falling to Eren" (which a quarter of respondants were okay with), but the "whatever" response got more votes than anything else.