User blog comment:San&Ashitaka/Ending ( everyone dead plan off, welcome bittersweet!! )/@comment-12642484-20131227184007

This is old news. However I heard of a little different version of this. Before writing Attack on Titan, Isayama was an introvert and kind of a pessimist. He planned to kill off Sasha when she fought in her home village. But somehow the fans brough some kind of "light" into his life which changed his mentality quite a bit, leading to him planing to make the ending a bit more "neutral" instead of "dark".