SnK 86 Thoughts

AND LO, DID THE SAGA OF BAD PARENTING CONTINUE.



You know that saying about how the grass is always greener?

I feel like this series invites a variant:

More of the grass can always be on fire.

It isn’t as cutely alliterative, but it feels deeply accurate.

So this is… a chapter. Reading it the first few times, the only thought that really occurred to me is that characters involved in world building shouldn’t be allowed to lie or be the objects of deception, and since then, I’ve gone from thinking that to wanting to sob it into a pillow.

This is one of those chapters that is just so dense that I don’t know where to begin. If you read a page, odds are you can spot a parallel that’s in need of words. Or a future titan.

(Hi, Moe Human!)



(By the way, any takers on the bet that the titan that ate Carla was Dina Fritz?)

I guess the best place to start would be the section where I’m pretty sure that the mythology introduced can be trusted. And bullet points, because then I don’t have to doublecheck a different window every five seconds.

What we’ve got from the Marelyan-approved history books:

Roughly 1850 years ago from our canon’s present, Ymir Fritz contracted with an incubator to become a magical girl.

Death happened, and that power was split nine ways, making for no doubt interesting meta for anyone who is familiar with the nine circles of hell.

(I am not.)

From there, the usual human consequences of people with power happened, and for 1700 years, Ymir Fritz’s people, known as Eldians, purged and oppressed every race without supernatural demigod powers.



This stops when the Marleyans manage to convince them that they should work harder at purging and oppressing each other.

Then the Marleyans come to be victorious, claim the power of seven of the nine, and get to work oppressing the remaining Eldians.

And only sometimes purging them.

By way of sending them to Paradis.

AKA Titan Island.

You know, that place where our entire story before now took place.

Because Team Wall Cult’s reaction to the whole civil war was to fuck off and take all their toys with them.

(*some of their toys)

(the remaining toys are teh vexed)



Okay then.

That is the part of the story that makes some kind of linear sense, and as all good histories are, it’s full of the sort of the behavior that consistently screws everyone over and yet hasn’t managed to be fully eradicated because humans are routinely awful.

It’s actually painful to look at everything that happens this chapter, because the horrible cruel world we’re familiar with has slightly less blades of grass set on fire, and those blades are starting to feel really damn essential to finding any kind of beauty anywhere.

…Just because it’s not a good aphorism doesn’t mean I can’t keep using it.



As said, there are way too many parallels in this story, and that’s even just counting the parts of this chapter that I’ve written an abridged summary for.

Instead of titans outside the walls, you have Eldians (who are the titans outside the walls, for added fun) actively using their power to lock humans into more metaphorical cages.

Instead of the Survey Corps overthrowing the corrupt seated government, you have Marleyans.

Who, in turn, make enemies of their own would-be freedom fighters in the abandoned Eldians, who are seeking to rethrone the proper royal line.

I hate this chapter so much.

So that’s the basic history of what’s happened to Grisha and his ilk. That’s the easy part of the story, and it does a great job of reminding us that humans really shouldn’t be trusted with any kind of power.

What comes next is Grisha’s personal history, and I don’t know if it makes me want to club him or me with a brick more.

The story of him and his sister is another familiar one: two young family members staring up at a symbol of freedom, one inspired and one daunted, and a desire to leave the walls ending with one torn to shreds by monsters.



Eren has never been more visible in Grisha than in this chapter. Grisha’s fury at the injustice, and at the people who put up with it, is visible and vocal as a child, and it carries over into his adult life. There’s thoughtless conclusion jumps that he makes with his heart, and a fullhearted belief in what he’s doing that fuels the bravest heroes and the worst villains.

You see shadows of the Survey Corps in every step of the Restorationists. People aren’t meant to live in cages. They have a right to freedom. Monsters don’t deserve power.

There are so many things that our heroes stand for mirrored in the fight of the Eldians. They fight instead of standing still. They refuse to be complacent. They have a vision of a world without fear and torment.

What the Eldians also have is a sense of entitlement.

When Grisha examines the historical documents The Owl presents them with, what he sees, despite not knowing much of the language, is a world enriched by his great ancestor. Not only are they not children of the Devil, they are children of God. They are chosen. They’re better than the wretches who would feed children to dogs for stepping out of place.

With such a noble cause, that makes the sacrifice of one of their own children seem like such a small thing.

When Wall Maria falls, the interior makes the decision to send thousands of people on a suicide mission, presenting it as an attempt to reclaim their land. Everyone knows that it’s going to end in death. Everyone knows that the loss of those thousands of lives will keep the people who remain alive.

Everyone knows it’s despicable.

For the sake of survival, they let it happen.

It isn’t a pretty chapter of walled history. It isn’t meant to be.

When Grisha offers up his son to monsters, he does it with fire in his soul. His records imply that he’s come to understand how wrong a decision like that was. As he puts it when he recalls his childhood, “I was foolish and ignorant… and the world was unfair and mad.”

Thoughts of foolishness return as he remembers the choice that leads to him and his wife being sent off to Paradis. Because he wants his son to fight his battles, Zeke is handed off into a world he can’t have been prepared for, under the care of the monstrous people Grisha wants to destroy, and surprise of surprise, it ends badly for everyone.

And in the time after writing this account, Grisha hands his second son a destructive power and a mission he won’t live to see concluded.

Eren’s older than Zeke was, and has the disposition Grisha would have wanted for his little warrior (without brainwashing, even), but this is the same decision that lands him and his loved ones on Paradis to begin with. This is the same decision that costs him one son.

This is the decision he repeats without hesitation.

Eren’s fine, all things considered. He doesn’t need Zeke to rescue him. He doesn’t always know how to handle what his power means, but he uses it based on his own heart, and he is cared for.

The end result hardly excuses what Grisha’s done.

Twice.

I was talking recently about the different presentation of dreams. They’re viewed as these wondrous, beautiful things–but they’re also poison that drives people to the point of obsession and destroys them.

Grisha believes in his path. He believes in restoring Eldia so much that he sees his young son as an opportunity, saying that he’s sure Zeke will one day lead them to victory on the day the kid is born.

He believes in his son.

Despite the betrayal, the next time, he also believes in his son.

Eren is his child. He will be great. He doesn’t need a living father. He doesn’t need instruction near at hand. He doesn’t need anything but the gifts his father is giving him.

Grisha dies because he believes in his child.

He very literally gives up his life for his son–so that that son can continue along their righteous path.

When Erwin learns to hide his dream away among his colleagues, it comes after watching his comrades die believing in the Survey Corps mission statement. He watches someone salute–offering their heart to humanity–while they’re being eaten alive.

The Scouts believe in their mission wholeheartedly. They believe in their comrades taken up the fight long after they’re gone. Their oath to offer up their lives for humanity is not made in jest.

Outside that one horrifying slaughter, the Survey Corps functions on volunteers. They don’t take it for granted that others believe in their mission. After years of it, they know more than anyone that the larger portions of humanity see their work as a barbaric waste of taxes. They make a choice to believe in a dream of freedom anyway. No one is unaware of the costs.

Grisha makes the choice for others.

We see Erwin wrestle with whether or not it’s truly best for humanity to have the old government overthrown. Are they corrupt? Absolutely. Are they the best choices to keep the people safe? …Maybe.

That “maybe” haunts Erwin’s decision, especially when he has to face that the value he places on his own life influences it. He tries to do his best for humanity, but at the end of the day, he can’t be sure that he has, and that matters.

In the case of Grisha, he is so enamored with what he’s trying to do that he doesn’t acknowledge the option not to participate. Zeke and Eren aren’t given a choice–they’re looked at through a fond, obsessive father’s eyes, and found capable of greatness. The need to ask for permission when he knows they can do it, and knows their cause is just, is barely a blip on Grisha’s radar.

Hell, even Annie’s father knows to beg for forgiveness, and actually gives a damn about seeing his daughter again.

THAT IS WHAT WE’RE CALLING SUPERIOR PARENTING AT THIS POINT.



There are so many parallels between all of the factions presented in this chapter, but what contrasts all of them is what makes our guys the heroes instead of another future villain.

…And so that’s the Grisha section of this.

Another thing that’s pretty easy to make sense of.

But we haven’t really dealt with the third faction of this merry, horrifying jaunt through the past, so the above point is still incomplete.

Team Paradis.

Dina Fritz also makes me want to reach for a brick. She is unhelpful and aggravating and why do I now have to care about the likelihood that our historical infodump chapter contains intentional inaccuracies.

I hate this chapter so.



Anyway, the information on the Founding Titan is pretty plainly accurate. It can control other titans. Simple, way OP, and something every single person wants.

Also fairly reliable is the way that the First King departed from the mainland.

He believed in locking everyone away and refusing to fight, and so that’s what he did. There’s also no reason not to believe that the walls are his safety measure and threat against future interference from anyone on the mainland.

All of that is fine, and naturally interesting because the First King is so far the only person in this whole story seeking some kind of peace.

…By way of completely ditching his responsibilities of mind-controlling all of the other upstart Eldian Titans, but it is fascinating that the remaining Fritz family holds the First King in disdain for abdicating his position of holding his threat of power over the other eight Titan families.

It’s also very possible that the First King was an idiot, and a child could guess how that would go over and what would happen to his people, but hey, a dogged pursuit of peace above all else instead of victory is still a take that’s cool to see in this world.

From the way it sounds, the First King’s beliefs ran no differently than the Restorationists’, in that they were obsessive and near-sided, but he went the route of sheltering his people whether they liked it or not over worrying about taking a side in the fight.

And you see that passed on within the walls, even without the literal things that are being passed on. Complacency is everywhere, and Eren’s comparison to livestock is astoundingly apt. In a way, they were almost like the First King’s pets. He hid them away, stole their memories, and made sure that they would have nothing to fear as long as they didn’t stray past his borders.

It’s awful, like much of the things happening in that generation, but fuck it, at this point, it’s the closest to less awful there is, so yeah, go Team Walls.

“These… pitiful days… we’ve been made to suffer… all started when the King turned away from conflict.”

So the people left to suffer the consequences, naturally, choose the opposite, and they fight, and it makes them do their own horrible things in the name of seeking justice.

Yay.

Before dealing with why, precisely, Dina Fritz fills me with hate, let’s go back to the contrasting behaviors of all the horrible people outside the walls and the less horrible people inside the walls.

The people inside the walls, having been bred into complacency, have recently learned to fight. They descend from a people who had peace forced upon them, and for a long, long time, everyone was okay with that and the fear of the world outside.

Now, they’re changing. They’re taking control of their own fates.

The Restorationists fight. The First King sought complacent peace.

Our main cast fights for freedom. Yes, the have clear enemies. They have obvious antagonistic forces to deal with.

But rather than winning a victory over other people, what our guys are really after is being free to go outside. Their ultimate fight is a philosophical engagement that other mortal groups just happen to get in the way of.

In the end, that’s going to be the sustainable battle, because it isn’t really about victory over others, it’s about a victory for their own selves. Going to war for love of something instead of hate.

That’s splitting hairs a bit, but the fact remains that as a group, the Survey Corps currently exists as this world’s longest-standing organization not poisoned by their own cause.

They just die.

Back to how much I hate this chapter.

It’s a small thing, really.

It’s the name.

Fritz.

The name of the placeholder royal family within the walls.

You know. The fake king.

I hate this fucking chapter.

Presumably, they don’t have Ymir Fritz’s name wrong.

In the meantime, the Reiss family is documented to be the true royal bloodline of the walls, inheritors of the Founding Titan.

Zeke specifically says that King Reiss (despite Historia being the first Reiss to claim the royal title) took away the walled people’s memories.

The Marleyan history books and Dina Fritz say that King Fritz is the one who ran off to the island. Additionally, it is stated to be the royal family’s duty to present the Founding Titan, so this isn’t a case of there being multiple royal bloodlines feuding once they got to the walls. There is one (1) royal family tasked with guarding the Founding Titan.

Past arcs say that family is the Reiss family.

Past arcs also say that no one in the Reiss family has actually used the power of the Founding Titan since the walls went up.

Zeke, a Marley Warrior, refers to King Reiss, not King Fritz.

If you wanted to make a case for the idea that the Reiss family stole the Fritz family’s power, and was subsequently cursed to inherit his philosophy instead of doing anything useful with it, you could.

If you wanted to make a case for the Fritz line in Marley being lied to about their family’s history, you could also do that.

The more obvious option seems to be that no one told the mainland Fritzes that they aren’t really royalty, and history has been further jumbled by the Reiss willingness to not claim credit for their blood.

Especially because Zeke knows to refer to King Reiss. The Restorationists don’t exactly have the cleanest access to their own history, so if someone’s wrong, it makes sense for it to be the mainland Fritz family, with people higher up the food chain knowing about the Reiss family.



That’s my guess about the name discrepancy.

But the frustrating part is that the actual truth of the matter could very easily do whatever the hell it wants. Accepting the Reiss family as the legitimate bloodline and power behind the walls is very easy to do when they’ve got ritual sacrifices, giant glowy caverns, political clout, and a Titan.

A Titan they don’t use because of the First King’s philosophy.

A philosophy that Eldia never had an issue with before him.

Throughout this entire discussion of the Founding Titan, no one even bothers bringing up whether they have the correct blood to use it.

So what, is it not normally an issue, or have the Eldians lost so much of their history that they’re operating entirely on lies?

That’s the obvious answer. Easily.

Heck, that even clears up why the Marleyans asked for Eldian children. It isn’t just about not wanting to sacrifice their own brood; Eldians the only ones who can use the Titans, but don’t know which ones, and they can’t risk telling the Eldian people any of that. Once they’re indoctrinated Warriors, of course, they can know about the bloodline trouble, but until then, why add one more problem?

Adding to all of that, you have The Owl, who exists within the Marley government, so theoretically knows stuff that the common Eldians do not, but still sends them Dina Fritz, who obviously believes in the Restorationists and the Fritz version of history.

Though The Owl could very easily have been playing all of them for chumps, running a long con.

This probably looks like a lot of words about things that really don’t matter, and if they do, will be cleared up at some point, so putting it more neatly, the main point of concern is that someone has been lied to about their history, and history is what’s making the current world spin.

(It’s going to turn out that the next chapter is Grisha’s next book where he finds out the Reiss family is the real royal family and has a rage aneurysm.)

Hopefully, I’m overthinking this, and knowing that everyone in the chapter is wrong about their own history is just supposed to add to the tragedy, and it really is that simple.

But the fact is, these are the people who haven’t been subjected to wide-scale memory wiping, so there’s enough wiggle room to make me deeply resent Dina Fritz’s existence.

Other things, other things…

I think that about covers it. Obviously, this chapter says awful things about RAB and what they were put through, which is fun. Actually, I don’t think there’s a hard confirmation, but based on what we see in this chapter, and the dynamic of the three, it seems possible that Reiner and Bertolt were just normal Eldian children taken to be Warriors, while Annie’s father is a Restorationist.

“My dad was like you two… carried away with ideals that had nothing to do with reality…”

–17



Except unlike Grisha, he’s actually sorry.

Go Annie’s dad. In a, “you tried” star way.

Of course, I haven’t brought up Ymir yet. Either she’s 1900 years old, which is going to make certain tags fun, or some Eldian thought that naming their child Ymir in a Marleyan society didn’t count as child abuse.

Or something else. I’m leaning on it being something else, because with the timeline and personal history given, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for her to have been a titan for over sixty years when she was.



The last thing, then, would be the Titans.

Founding

Ape

Colossal

Armored

Female

Mule

Dancing

Rogue



But wait, there’s more! …Somewhere.

There are less Titans in the world than there were all those years ago–I think. Grisha was one when he ate the Founding power, so Eren got two for the price of one. Unless I’ve missed something obvious, which has been known to happen, we’ve only got one mystery guest left.

Technically still part of the last thing, the title of the first chapter comes back to me. I’m one of those boring people who finds it very hard to care about the implications of things like Eren’s dream in the first chapter. I also found it very hard to care about the title.

In my boring mind, “To You, 2,000 Years From Now” meant, “hey, I’m an author needing to title something, um. this will be read in the year 20xx, so just vaguely reference that in a way that looks cool.”

I’m only creative when I have to be.

Now, though, given what sort of timeline we were given in this chapter, I wonder if something significant is going to happen when the 2000th anniversary of Ymir Fritz being gifted the Titan power comes around.

I am way too not invested to really think about it, but this is the first time that a number about years has hit anywhere close to 2000.

I have no idea if that’s it, but this chapter has already stolen away more of my attention span than I thought possible, so hopefully I’m done.

Oh, wait.





…Now I’m done.

