SnK 87 Thoughts

Grisha’s journal: Boy howdy did I fuck up.

Grisha: Do it the same, BUT BETTER!

I’m always grateful when November chapters don’t give me much to talk about. It makes getting to my NaNoWriMo word count for the day that much easier. (Dear past me: You were wrong and I hate you.)



This is a chapter full of horror and tragedy, but it doesn’t reveal much that people didn’t already guess. Dina is the Smiley Titan and nommed her husband’s new wife in front of his children, Eldians are the only people capable of becoming titans, Eren and Mikasa are serving time while Eren’s memories eat him alive (in case we were getting bored with the titans trying it), and Kruger’s the Owl.

That last one is the closest to a surprise, and from the way Kruger reveals himself, I’m guessing that the real informative part of the Owl’s identity hasn’t happened yet.

Most of this chapter is just… this is what happened to Grisha. This is where the Restorationists’ dreams ended. These are the sort of people who raised Zeke and RAB. This is how a man outside the walls ached when confronted with the truth of Paradis.

This is how a revolution dies.

As far as reasons for genocide go, on the surface, “you people are the only ones that can turn into man-eating abominations with no cognizance,” is not the worst reason.

Then you add “when we feed you spinal fluid from other monsters,” and you just have to sigh and wonder if there has ever been a time when humans weren’t responsible for their own worst enemies.

“You’re an abomination because if you ever happened to extract spinal fluid from a thing big enough to eat you/a human that can turn into a thing big enough to eat you, you will then become big enough to eat people!

“If you ever do anything wrong, we’re going to prove it to you so hard!”

It’s astounding how little effort it would have taken the Marleyans to just not care. Surprisingly few people ever have a reason to ingest spinal fluid.

Then you think about how much easier the prejudice against Eldians makes it to pick out the best of the crop for your Warriors, and yes, that sound you hear is the bell ringing for the discovery of how much less walled society seems to suck now.

Their government slaughtered thousands of people based on classism.

So much better.

On the topic of the Owl, we don’t have a whole lot to really work with. I’d say he comes across as a far more genuine ally of the Restorationists when Marleyans are trying to torture his identity out of Eldians, and when he’s guarding the secret of Dina’s presumably royal blood, but if you go through everything he’s done…

The Owl kills the Sergeant Major.

The Sergeant Major kills Grisha’s little sister.

The circumstances haven’t changed much.

Kruger stands by, watching, as the Sergeant Major laughs at abusing Eldians–

–and keeps Grisha safe.

There’s an entire row of people kneeling before the sand dunes of Paradis. One by one, they’re thrown in, with one person given the mercy of being bait while the rest are transformed into monsters that crave their friend’s flesh.

Kruger kills the Sergeant Major. He destroys the one boat waiting in Paradis’ docks. In all likelihood, he’s going to kill the rest of the Marleyan forces left by this last wall.

He does all of this only once Grisha is the last one left.

He doesn’t save Dina Fritz, the woman the Owl sent to the Restorationists as a symbol of hope and a member of the Eldians’ royal family.

He doesn’t save Grisha’s friend Grice.

He doesn’t save Grisha’s little sister.

He watches all of the death and suffering happening directly in front of his eyes, and only chooses to do something about it when precisely one life can be helped by it.

The Owl chooses to protect Grisha.

He doesn’t lift a finger to save the little girl about to be tortured to death. Instead, he punishes her brother, and sits with him to watch the blimp. And years later, the Owl tells his Restorationists to look Grisha up and tell him exactly what happened to his little sister.

And when they finally meet again, the same thing happens.

He stands by Grisha while all of his loved ones are destroyed.

Only this time, he explicitly chooses to save Grisha. In the starting carnage that he stands by, watching, he refuses to kill him, and for no known reason. He doesn’t say a single line of interrogative script. He just lets Grisha live.



Not Dina Fritz, whose identity he values enough to keep quiet around people he’s about to murder.

Grisha Yeager. A random Eldian doctor.

I would like these chapters better if I weren’t committed to writing posts about them, for the record. Because you look at all of what’s happened on both sides of Paradis, and suddenly the audience is in the same place every Scout has been since they joined: Look at how much we don’t know. Not just about the world beyond, but about the world we’re currently being introduced to.

Zeke’s status as a Warrior remains unchanged for years, regardless of his parents’ fates. It feels easy to look at that and say, “The Owl couldn’t have the Marleyans finding out that one of their Warriors is of royal blood.”

Except if Kruger had stuck the spinal fluid into Grisha when he was supposed to, Grisha never would have mentioned Dina’s status.

And that’s the nitpicky read on that; that is a tiny, tiny logical flaw next to the part where Kruger’s about to kill all of these people, or, at the very, very least, take away their transportation. Grisha could brag about his wife and kid’s blood all the live long day, and all of these people wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing about it.

So why does it matter that Grisha keeps his mouth shut?

Was Kruger still making his mind up about what to do?

If so, he’s obviously been around the Marleyans and their cruelty for years without anyone being suspicious of him. This one Sergeant Major, who he’s stood by knowing what he did to Fay, is suddenly too horrible to stand? That isn’t new information.

Whatever the motivation, Kruger (in all the two chapters he’s featured in) is consistent in his protection of Grisha at the expense of other people.

And in this case, it doesn’t even make sense.

If he wants the Marleyans to believe that only one of the Restorationists survived, he can’t go on a Titan rampage and kill all the messengers and the boat. If anyone survives, he’ll be outed. If he gets back by himself… hi friend, what the fuck happened to this boat?

Add in that we know Grisha gains Titan powers, the Owl is the fucking Rogue Titan fight me, and Kruger intros his performance with, “Watch and learn, Grisha,” and even the proposed theory above makes less sense.

This reads like he’s choosing his successor.

Grisha has his protection. Grisha has his instruction. Instruction that is relatively meaningless unless that power is going to be passed on.

I’m really not a conspiracy theory person. That makes it very frustrating when a conspiracy is probably unfolding directly in front of you.

If he’s going to cause all of this destruction, why does Kruger let the other Eldians be turned?

Is that a statement on his morality and failings, or a statement about Grisha?

He makes a fuss over Dina’s identity, but flash forward into the future, and Dina’s dead. Her son’s alive, but again, even if Grisha had screamed their importance to every person on the damn pier, they would also be dead by now.

What drives the decisions being made here?

Earning Grisha’s trust?

Again, look at all those dead Eldians Kruger could have saved to earn that trust.

Any group can keep a secret if they’re all dead, so why?

Is it important that Grisha believes his wife is important?

Why the hell does Grisha matter to Kruger so much?

What, did Kruger know that in a few decades Grisha would make it to the walls, have a kid, watch the fall of one of those walls, snap, murder someone else’s kids, get the Founding Titan powers back, and hand it off to his kid who would help lead a social revolution that could open the doors to a better world?

…

Seriously, did he? Future vision is not the weirdest thing this manga could go with. We’re starting to build some structure for Eren’s crying dreams from chapter 1, so why not have psychics exist?

For that matter, let’s go with that and say that Kruger is Grisha’s real father, and that’s why he cares so much (earning him a better parenting rank than he should have, because this manga), and his psychic powers have been passed down to Eren.

I have unlocked the secret of the plot.

On the subject of Eren, this chapter’s transition between Eren waking up in prison and the flashback filled me with cringing laughter.

Isayama is not the most graceful storyteller. For all that he has learned and improved, by golly, that was terrible. He lands five pages of interruption in the middle of his chapter to let us know that Eren’s memory walking is a trip.

It ruins the immersion, and doesn’t have much of value to make up for it. It isn’t like there won’t be something else traumatic for Eren to wake up screaming about at the end of this flashback series. It’s painfully unnecessary at this stage, to the point that I might be willing to think favorable things about my NaNoWriMo project.

…Okay, it isn’t actually that bad. I’m just looking at my empty space in the day and starting to panic. Also, if I can’t make hyperbolic fun of a comic book, I’m just doing life wrong.

Nothing could be as hilariously tone deaf as Reiner’s grand reveal, but really, if you removed Eren’s pages, the flashback’s flow doesn’t change at all. They’re just there for a brief moment, giving us some information about the present that could maybe wait, and then the flashback picks up exactly where it left off.

It is ridiculous. In a funny way, not a condemning way.

(Fix it anime or so help me)

Now that I’ve gone over all of that, I get to talk about the three pages of this chapter I care about!

(Three guesses why.)

(Take your time.)

(It’s easy, I promise.)





“If you walked up to someone and told them to become the ultimate ruler of humanity… not too many people would have the nerve to look you back in the eye… and say ‘sure.’“

–Levi, 56





“The next… role… I have to play is Queen? Fine. Leave it to me.”

–Historia Reiss, 56

“Okay… I understand.”

–Zeke Yeager, 87

This story is no stranger to recurring themes. Humans are monsters, bad parenting, cruel worlds, refusal to learn from past mistakes–I mean, take any given chapter, and you will find similarities to something that the story has covered before. When it’s not laziness (and of its many writing faults, I will usually not accuse this manga of that one), that can be the mark of a good story. No part of it is meant to live in isolation from the rest. What has come before is always relevant to what’s being dealt with now.

The Restorationists fail in their revolution. They put a weight on a child’s shoulders that never should have been there, and when he cracks, their cause is punished for it.

Grisha’s friend Grice asks how the hell Grisha raised a boy who would betray his parents. What could they have done to him to make everything come undone so completely and so fast?

Please. Grisha’s faults as a parent are clearly responsible, but how many Restorationists heard the idea of handing a seven-year-old over to their enemy and were all for it? No one stopped and told him it was a fucked up idea that would end poorly. They were all fine with it until it actually did end poorly. They, like Grisha, didn’t give a damn about Grisha’s son. They cared about their cause.

At the start of my post, I said that this was how a revolution dies.

The Survey Corps takes a teenage girl, hollowed out by depression and collapsing under the weight of her newly found importance, and tells her to buck up and deal with it.

She meets her father.

“I dare say I never once treated Zeke as Zeke. Only as ‘a child with royal blood’ or ‘the hope of the Eldia Restorationists.’“

–Grisha Yeager, 87



“But he decided to protect you, and just you. […] Why was that? ‘Cause his paternal instincts finally kicked in, and he decided to start lovin’ his daughter? Beep, wrong! He just needed your blood!!”

–Kenny Ackerman, 67



Zeke and Historia are never loved as themselves by their parents. They’re seen as tools for the cause their family is meant to serve.

In the end, they both reject that. Zeke turns his parents in, and Historia refuses to eat Eren.

But in Zeke’s story, he’s still a tool. He doesn’t have to bow to his parents’ cause, but the Marleyans still have their uses for him, and as we see in the present, they made the most of those.

Historia’s claim of autonomy sticks. She embraces life as her own person.

The revolution of Zeke’s parents, who disregard him and push him into a position that suits his bloodline but causes him horrible pain, ends when Zeke turns his back on them.

The Survey Corps coup could have ended very differently without Historia.

The Scouts force her to accept a role she wants to run screaming from–during the aftermath of her losing the one person who understood and loved her–and she immediately comes across her father, who’s willing to give her affection if she just does what he wants. He doesn’t care about the coup or his daughter, he cares about maintaining the Reiss family’s power.

In the end, neither the Survey Corps’ show of force, nor her father’s bought affection is enough for Historia.

She claims the role of Queen because she finds a use for it. She can do something. She can make a difference.



Throughout the coup, many people have that revelation. The Reeves family, run by a greedy businessman during the Trost era, has reformed, and invigorates the common people. Hange calls the journalists to action.

The Scouts’ coup starts with torture, secrets, threats, self interest, and a bunch of dead bodies.

It ends peacefully when people are given the information, freedom, and power to act on their own hearts, and they choose to do what is right.

That’s how a revolution lives.



Zeke never has that freedom.

The Restorationists are left to be monsters.

The Survey Corps, and the pieces of humanity they protect, rise up and try to be heroes.

And with that, now I have to go look at my word count and cry.

