I find it fascinating that going outside the walls and seeing the world is such a powerful motivator to Eren, it trumps practically everything else.

Even as a kid, during a time of peace, he insists that life inside the walls is not real life; the people are cattle, insects inside a jar, but not humans living free.

Later, going outside the walls is the only impetus that jolts him out of his titan trance in the Trost district. Armin tries to explain how dire the situation is, how they are all going to die unless Eren does something, tries to appeal to Eren’s desire to avenge his mother… but the outside world is the one argument that makes an impact on Eren.

When Armin asks him why he’s so keen to go out there given how terrible life outside the walls is, Eren gives only one answer: it is because he was born in this world. He wants to be free and he can’t stay caged up.

Eren is an anomaly. Other people within the walls find his single-minded determination to be bizarre or even creepy, when in fact he shows strange, almost preternatural awareness of the situation. His words will be echoed by someone who knows what is actually going on inside the walls:

Slaves, cattle… whatever the people inside the walls are, they’re not free. They just don’t know about it. Eren, however, is different: he feels it on some visceral level, and feels it so strongly that life inside the walls is intolerable to him. At age ten, he is ready to go out and fight titans and die, just as long as he’s not doomed to the same phantom existence as the rest. Just as long as he’d not living the lie the others are.

It is notable that his father—the mysterious Grisha, a titan shifter in possession of many of this world’s secrets—seems least bewildered by Eren’s desire to leave the walls. Is it a coincidence that it’s Grisha’s son who exhibits this attitude? Is the desire for freedom inherent to Eren as a person, or is it something he has by virtue of his connection to Grisha?

Eren’s drive to kill titans, his occasional bloodthirsty ruthlessness, his need to leave the walls and his irrepressible desire for freedom, his dreams that he can’t remember… Something set him apart even before Grisha injected him with titan serum, before he got the coordinate. I wonder why or what that was.