Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Attack on Princess
Dec 15, 2008

To yolo rolls! The cause and solution to all problems!

Conspiratiorist posted:

The steam was Annie's blood though.

It's both of their blood. There's a splash of blood when Annie thumbs Reiner into her fist, but there isn't a scratch on him when he escapes. From the position he was in when she grabbed him, his shoulder would've been dislocated if not torn off.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Captain Invictus
Apr 5, 2005

Try reading some manga!


Clever Betty

MOVIE MAJICK posted:

If real life was an animes would you guys rather be in this world or one punch man's world?
Aot's world suuuuuuucks to live in, so one punch man 100%

Also I and I'm sure a lot of other manga readers really appreciate the speculation of where the plot might go from anime only folks so feel free to keep speculating, it's great stuff :tipshat:

Mordaedil
Oct 25, 2007

Oh wow, cool. Good job.
So?
Grimey Drawer
Also for "things that you missed in first viewing" the ranking of the cadets;


Besides Mikasa, the top spots are all Titan shifters. Ymir is down the ranks to protect Historia.

Terper
Jun 26, 2012


Oh Marco. You were the best of us.

Conspiratiorist
Nov 12, 2015

17th Separate Kryvyi Rih Tank Brigade named after Konstantin Pestushko
Look to my coming on the first light of the fifth sixth some day

Mordaedil posted:

Also for "things that you missed in first viewing" the ranking of the cadets;


Besides Mikasa, the top spots are all Titan shifters. Ymir is down the ranks to protect Historia.

It's nice that the main cast aren't the characters the protagonist 'happened' to make friends with, but rather the few idiots that followed him into the Survey Corps. And their continued survival, in the face of the high attrition rate, is then justified by a) said idiots being at the top of their graduating class (top 10 out of 200) and thus implied to be fairly competent, and b) being treated as new recruits and thus kept away from the highest risk action. And Armin, who just has the devil's own luck.

The shifter trio being in said top 10 also make sense, given they were actual spies looking to embed themselves deep in the military (which for the MP necessitates being in the ranking 10), and then Reiner and Bert naturally follow Eren into the Survey Corps after it turns out he's a shifter. Even everyone's closeness to Reiner and Bert for the drama is justified, with them being literally that one guy who everyone liked and looked up to, and his awkward best friend that was always with him. And they're all in the same (Southern) Division because their cover story was coming from a town that got overrun soon after the Shiganshina breach.

Ymir plus Historia are the only outliers here in their presence among the cast being seemingly coincidental.

Maera Sior
Jan 5, 2012

Sylphid posted:

Reiner just cut a message into her hand, right? Even after watching the reveal episode in S2, that's what I always assumed it was.

That answer bugs me, because...How? How do you carve a message like that with giant swords? Even if he had a knife, his other arm was trapped.

MOVIE MAJICK
Jan 4, 2012

by Pragmatica
Perhaps titans can hear using their skin

Irony Be My Shield
Jul 29, 2012

Just jabbing at her hand in a particular direction might have been enough for Annie to get the message.

MOVIE MAJICK
Jan 4, 2012

by Pragmatica
Okay so after refinishing season 1 is it supposed to be obvious that the reason Eren is having trouble transforming is that he is a dark place, and not because of some mental block? Each time he fails its because he is underground and he never fails when there is sunlight. This, along with the scenes with flowers, makes me believe that the titans are foreshadowed to be plants. Lets think about the similarities. Titans need sunlight to grow and be active. Titans and plants both dont need to eat to survive. They are both, mostly, mindless things. You can built walls using them.

I'm also beginning to think that the titan crisis was by design at first to get humanity to stop bickering and unite under a common threat.

BrainDance
May 8, 2007

Disco all night long!

MOVIE MAJICK posted:

If real life was an animes would you guys rather be in this world or one punch man's world?

Who would ever pick Attack on Titan's world? It's like the closest to a real hell on Earth that I can remember being in a show for a very long time. Even in anime worlds where people get blown up and poo poo all the time from giant energy explosions or something, at least they've usually got decently normal lives. Everyone's life in Attack on Titan is absolute poo poo because of their circumstances. It'd be complete terror 24/7, and the amount of PTSD the survivors would have...

Irony Be My Shield
Jul 29, 2012

Also the government is really lovely and allows its poor citizens to die.

e: sorry thought I was in UKMT

Kerning Chameleon
Apr 8, 2015

by Cyrano4747

Irony Be My Shield posted:

Also the government is really lovely and allows its poor citizens to die.

e: sorry thought I was in UKMT

This thread is far more optimistic about the future of mankind than UKMT.

MOVIE MAJICK
Jan 4, 2012

by Pragmatica

BrainDance posted:

Who would ever pick Attack on Titan's world? It's like the closest to a real hell on Earth that I can remember being in a show for a very long time. Even in anime worlds where people get blown up and poo poo all the time from giant energy explosions or something, at least they've usually got decently normal lives. Everyone's life in Attack on Titan is absolute poo poo because of their circumstances. It'd be complete terror 24/7, and the amount of PTSD the survivors would have...

Well in AoTs world you have at least some idea of what's going on. The threat is well known. Also there's a chance you get to use 3DM gear.

Okay maybe a better question is whether you would want to be a C grade hero, faced with all the dangers this presents, being obligated to face down on cosmic horrors. Or, would you rather be in the scouts with sweet 3dm gear and hanging with captain Levi?

BrainDance
May 8, 2007

Disco all night long!

Ok that's fair. I was coming at the question with the (statistically more likely) assumption that I'm just some potato farming scrub in wherever village, or one of a million randoms crammed in the urban areas. So, no 3dmg, but no super hero powers in opm's world, just the ability to run as fast as I can when poo poo happens.

Aumanor
Nov 9, 2012

MOVIE MAJICK posted:

Okay so after refinishing season 1 is it supposed to be obvious that the reason Eren is having trouble transforming is that he is a dark place, and not because of some mental block? Each time he fails its because he is underground and he never fails when there is sunlight. This, along with the scenes with flowers, makes me believe that the titans are foreshadowed to be plants. Lets think about the similarities. Titans need sunlight to grow and be active. Titans and plants both dont need to eat to survive. They are both, mostly, mindless things. You can built walls using them.

I'm also beginning to think that the titan crisis was by design at first to get humanity to stop bickering and unite under a common threat.

Ymir had no problems transforming at night, Reiner was planning to wait in that giant forest until night before transforming and running away, and in the manga's version of the second Annie fight Eren gets over his doubts and tranforms into a titan as soon as he sees that Armin and Mikasa are about to sacrifice themselves so that he can run away, while still in the tunnel, so yeah, it's very much a case of mental block. There have been no real hints so far that the darkness affects titan shifters in any way.

DaveKap
Feb 5, 2006

Pickle: Inspected.



Mordaedil posted:

There's a ton, like Reiner has smoke coming off of him after he saves Armin and poo poo like that.
Doesn't everyone who gets blood on them have smoke coming off of them because the blood evaporates like all titan blood and dead bodies do?

ATP_Power
Jun 12, 2010

This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.


Catalina posted:


Isayama has also said that a specific request for the anime was to make Eren's character more useless, and that he himself didn't fully realize Eren's complete character until after he had seen the anime and heard Yūki Kaji act as his voice, as Eren was the main character and more of a "slave to the story".


That's true, but I still think that the anime's adaptation undercuts this narrative more than the manga version. In the show, Eren's rage gives him the strength to spook Annie into running, and Mikasa is perfectly positioned to finish her.

Meanwhile in the comic, Eren loses convincingly to Annie and the fight is more about his internal conflict fighting her, and the emotional impact of her reveal, and she is only overcome because of Eren working with his comrades.

I think the theme of individual power being overcome by the power of the many sacrificing and working together is a major theme of the series. The way the anime handled the fight undercut that theme, and was more concerned about the spectacle of meat mecha than the emotional impact of Eren and friends being forced to reckon with the fact that their comrade is a murderer and traitor to everything they believe in.

All things considered it's a minor critique, but because the show has done such a good job generally, it stands out more.

MOVIE MAJICK
Jan 4, 2012

by Pragmatica

ATP_Power posted:

That's true, but I still think that the anime's adaptation undercuts this narrative more than the manga version. In the show, Eren's rage gives him the strength to spook Annie into running, and Mikasa is perfectly positioned to finish her.

Meanwhile in the comic, Eren loses convincingly to Annie and the fight is more about his internal conflict fighting her, and the emotional impact of her reveal, and she is only overcome because of Eren working with his comrades.

I think the theme of individual power being overcome by the power of the many sacrificing and working together is a major theme of the series. The way the anime handled the fight undercut that theme, and was more concerned about the spectacle of meat mecha than the emotional impact of Eren and friends being forced to reckon with the fact that their comrade is a murderer and traitor to everything they believe in.

All things considered it's a minor critique, but because the show has done such a good job generally, it stands out more.

From what you said, it sounds like the manga's theme is the more played out in comic books/action shows - friendship for the win.

I think the anime's version focuses on themes of personhood. Its focused more on the social and ethical dimensions of what it means to be a human, Eren's use of rage and anger in the fight overcomes Annie's cold rationality. Which one is in fact more monstrous? I think there is something to be implied here about the relationship of emotions and one's humanity, that, in a way, calculated killing is the most dehumanizng than Eren's monsterous, emotional form. Annie - supported by her father - becoming the ethical ubermensch, beholden to noone, whose moral 'good' is only a relational property between individuals (" I'm glad I could be good to you Arwin") , is more monsterous and inhuman than the mindless titans or Eren's all-encompassing, generalizing rage. I think the show is trying to develop a conflict along these ideological lines of detached moral reasoning and more involved, first-person perspective on practical reasoning. Their fight can be seen as a conflict between these ideologies of personhood and I think Eren's victory, and the way he comes about this victory, is an endorsement of the latter ideology as being the more naturally human (not necessarily 'good', one thing I appreciate about this show is it steers clear from straightforward good versus evil narratives. I think it's more interested in playing with frameworks than moralizing.)


Speculation based on the S2 opening: I dont think we will literally have t-rex titans and whale titans. I think what is being shown in this scene with the animals is that monkey Titan is representative of a group that's like a force of nature. In the endtro it shows scenes of monkey titan leading titans out of the ocean, coming in like a storm. I think that in this world the titans are some corrective, balancing measure to humanity, the same way diseases and natural disasters are in ours. Maybe monkey titan is a mechanism of natural selection? Speaking which, does anyone know if anyone in the AoT world get sick?

MOVIE MAJICK fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Jun 21, 2017

Saagonsa
Dec 29, 2012

MOVIE MAJICK posted:

Speaking which, does anyone know if anyone in the AoT world get sick?

Grisha's backstory is that he was a doctor who cured a plague that was spreading through the walls. So yeah people can definitely get sick.

Catalina
May 20, 2008



ATP_Power posted:

That's true, but I still think that the anime's adaptation undercuts this narrative more than the manga version. In the show, Eren's rage gives him the strength to spook Annie into running, and Mikasa is perfectly positioned to finish her.

Meanwhile in the comic, Eren loses convincingly to Annie and the fight is more about his internal conflict fighting her, and the emotional impact of her reveal, and she is only overcome because of Eren working with his comrades.

I think the theme of individual power being overcome by the power of the many sacrificing and working together is a major theme of the series. The way the anime handled the fight undercut that theme, and was more concerned about the spectacle of meat mecha than the emotional impact of Eren and friends being forced to reckon with the fact that their comrade is a murderer and traitor to everything they believe in.

All things considered it's a minor critique, but because the show has done such a good job generally, it stands out more.

I think that's true, and you've articulated a lot of things about differences in the presentation of the Eren vs. Annie fight that I feel too. Aspects of Annie's character interactions with Eren getting cut in the anime adaption are one of the few criticisms I have on the anime adaption, and I'm always going to be a bit sour about it. Especially when there were scenes added to fit the 26 episode, plot twist of Eren "dying" in the 5th episode format, that were less interesting or inspired. (The, "No Pixis come back and play chess with meeeeeeeeeee!" being the most egregious example)

In general, I find the characters in the manga to be more mature, but a bit more flat and similar to each other; especially in this first half of the story. The anime ones are more interesting and varied, but they also have a lot of edge and maturity sanded off. Honestly at this point, I think I'm turning into a :goonsay: "Both are really good and have different parallels in strengths and weaknesses in character development and storytelling, you should read and watch them both if you want to be a true anime connoisseur and get the full experience."

Pyrotoad
Oct 24, 2010


Illegal Hen

Saagonsa posted:

Grisha's backstory is that he was a doctor who cured a plague that was spreading through the walls. So yeah people can definitely get sick.

I'm pretty sure plagues wipe out a significant chunk of the refugee population in the earliest part of the series, either after or before they sent a bunch of them off to fight titans just to thin the numbers out.

ATP_Power
Jun 12, 2010

This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.


MOVIE MAJICK posted:

From what you said, it sounds like the manga's theme is the more played out in comic books/action shows - friendship for the win.

I think the anime's version focuses on themes of personhood. Its focused more on the social and ethical dimensions of what it means to be a human, Eren's use of rage and anger in the fight overcomes Annie's cold rationality. Which one is in fact more monstrous? I think there is something to be implied here about the relationship of emotions and one's humanity, that, in a way, calculated killing is the most dehumanizng than Eren's monsterous, emotional form. Annie - supported by her father - becoming the ethical ubermensch, beholden to noone, whose moral 'good' is only a relational property between individuals (" I'm glad I could be good to you Arwin") , is more monsterous and inhuman than the mindless titans or Eren's all-encompassing, generalizing rage. I think the show is trying to develop a conflict along these ideological lines of detached moral reasoning and more involved, first-person perspective on practical reasoning. Their fight can be seen as a conflict between these ideologies of personhood and I think Eren's victory, and the way he comes about this victory, is an endorsement of the latter ideology as being the more naturally human (not necessarily 'good', one thing I appreciate about this show is it steers clear from straightforward good versus evil narratives. I think it's more interested in playing with frameworks than moralizing.)

I don't see it as being a matter of friendship for the win, but rather the conflict between the individual and the collective. The idea that regardless of who you are and what power you personally hold, there is only so much you can do as an individual.

Why did the shifter trio end up failing to capture Eren? There are a number of factors, but even the power of the titans couldn't overcome the collective efforts of the rest of his human comrades working together to thwart them. Eren spends a good chunk of time as a literal McGuffin, and when he acts alone he's mostly useless - every victory Eren's been a part of was only achieved because the Scouting Corps (not just his personal friends) were there to support him.

The themes of morality, ideology and the sins committed in the name of a cause are probably a bigger theme, (look at the mass expulsion of refugees after the fall of Wall Maria, or a character like Erwin, who has ordered hundreds if not thousands to certain death over his career, or the secrets that the Wall Priests keep.) But I don't think it's about the struggle of being Human or Inhuman, or embracing or rejecting emotion - but rather looking at the ideologies that drive us, and how they can drive us to do remarkable things, and how the perspective that you have influences whether or not you see them as a hero or a villain.

The Shifter trio were literally children when they destroyed the walls, what motivated them to do this? What drives them? If their hometown has more shifters, Eren's desire to kill every titan on the planet wouldn't sound like a good idea, it would sound a hell of a lot more like genocide. Reiner's speech before they take Eren gets to this, he has two conflicting ideologies in his head, the 'Warrior' and the 'Soldier' and the time he's spent away from his hometown has lead to his 'Warrior' ideology getting challenged by his living within the society he was sent to destroy and humanizing the 'enemy'.

What would you do to save your family, your town, your people? Do the ends justify the means? What sacrifices do you make, or force others to make to advance your goals?
Is Erwin a hero for advancing the cause of Humanity in leaving the walls, or a butcher who could only advance his cause by climbing over a pile of corpses?
Are Berthold and Reiner monsters for destroying the walls and dooming Humanity, or are they the warrior saviors of their hometown who sacrificed (or were forced to sacrifice) everything to destroy the enemy who lives behind the walls and secure the Coordinate for their people?

E-flat
Jun 22, 2007

3-flat

MOVIE MAJICK posted:

I think the anime's version focuses on themes of personhood. Its focused more on the social and ethical dimensions of what it means to be a human, Eren's use of rage and anger in the fight overcomes Annie's cold rationality. Which one is in fact more monstrous? I think there is something to be implied here about the relationship of emotions and one's humanity, that, in a way, calculated killing is the most dehumanizng than Eren's monsterous, emotional form. Annie - supported by her father - becoming the ethical ubermensch, beholden to noone, whose moral 'good' is only a relational property between individuals (" I'm glad I could be good to you Arwin") , is more monsterous and inhuman than the mindless titans or Eren's all-encompassing, generalizing rage. I think the show is trying to develop a conflict along these ideological lines of detached moral reasoning and more involved, first-person perspective on practical reasoning. Their fight can be seen as a conflict between these ideologies of personhood and I think Eren's victory, and the way he comes about this victory, is an endorsement of the latter ideology as being the more naturally human (not necessarily 'good', one thing I appreciate about this show is it steers clear from straightforward good versus evil narratives. I think it's more interested in playing with frameworks than moralizing.)

I think you have a good idea here--Armin's character arc so far has been realizing you need to sacrifice parts of your humanity to succeed (see: his approval of Erwin's rather cold plan to draw out the suspected other titan shifter(s) sacrificing tons of survey corps members to do so, and his 'what would best emotionally destroy Bertolt' moment in this season), but I wonder about Annie's "cold rationality." Certainly, she tries to be like that, but... general sweatiness and lack of initiation aside, Bertolt was honestly the most 'successful' warrior in terms of keeping his emotions from interfering with their plan(s?). His biggest mistake was probably not re-injuring Ymir to be on the safe side and ensure she couldn't pull any shenanigans on their escape from the survey corps rescue, which she did. Reiner completely mentally dissociated, and Annie had her own moments of unnecessarily risking herself saving people during the Trost arc. In fact, in the flashback Reiner has where Marco's eaten, they're all there, so we can assume they all had a hand in killing him, or at least share responsibility. Reiner and Bertolt have wet eyes, but Annie is the one trembling, fiercely trying to hold back crying. And the one brokenly apologizing to some random dead mook in the aftermath of Trost. (At least I'm pretty sure that wasn't Marco.)

To be fair and to your point, Annie totally does completely remorselessly and brutally kill the survey corps members (really, swinging a guy by his 3DM gear like a toy?) as the female titan... well, those she didn't personally know. In her own way, she even tried to persuade Connie and Armin from joining the survey corps (whom she knew she'd have to slaughter her way through to get to Eren)--even Armin says as much during that scene. (In fact, I'd argue Armin being in the top ten isn't because he has "the devil's own luck," but because he's smart as hell. He picked up on all that 'foreshadowing' we missed and surmised Erwin's secret plan before we were told it, after all.) Because she couldn't kill Armin when she had the chance (twice!), and because she was glad that she could be a 'good person' to someone who was her enemy, she as herself says had failed as a warrior. Her using those terms "be a good person to you" is her just parroting Armin's line. If anything, Eren acts more how you describe: he unilaterally decides what's the right thing to do, such as calculatedly killing two grown men as a nine-year-old, for example, or that everyone--military and civilian leaders--should just shut up and put their trust in him and let him do everything, and Levi even says the monstrous thing about Eren isn't his titan powers but that no matter how you cage or try to suppress him Eren will never submit.

Annie's thing with Marlow--that dude in the MP who was like Eren, trying to go against the flow and act righteously to correct wrongs in the system--says a lot too. Well, I think the anime may have changed it a bit, but her gist was that people like those guys, who'd 'go against the flow' and fight corruption/whatever just cause they advocate are rare, special; that most people would just go with the flow, going along where they see injustice, put their personal well-being above 'doing the right thing.' She even says that she agrees with Marlowe that the latter are scum/trash, certainly not righteous, (herself included) but that isn't doing the latter 'what normal people do?' and says she just wants those too weak to do what is right, not what is easy (:v:) like her to be considered people too. That doesn't scream ethical ubermensch to me. (Annie's 'going with the flow' being, of course, whatever mission the warriors' hometown sent child soldiers warriors to do, which whatever it is/was, necessarily would involve killing a lot of people.)

Like I said, I think you're right with the general idea, the show's themes involve the concept of personhood, humanity, monstrosity, etc, but I think it's a conflict of ideology on a more general level, or at least within, rather than between any of the protagonists and antagonists. All struggle (or importantly, don't--and so far, it's those inside the walls who've been more successful throwing away their humanity) with those concepts. Annie is the one who looks horrified after being thrown into the church and realizing she's crushed people (or at least in the anime, acknowledged). Eren didn't give any shits about collateral damage during that fight in either version. But I'm not sure the fight can be seen as that conflict between the conflicting ideologies either, as Annie's desperation to escape during the entire fight was palpable. I'm honestly not sure if or for how long she intended to even still go after Eren after transforming; it's hard to tell where she moved in relation to where Eren's buried under the rubble. Rewatching those scenes, she turns in the right direction to be going after Eren after making sure Mikasa is out of the picture, but the next shot we see her walking we don't see the pile of rubble, and the smoke we see is from her building destruction that took out Mikasa, so she could conceivably have changed direction because Armin wasn't blocking her path, having gone to Eren's rubble. I honestly don't know if it's an anime oversight or if she had already walked by the rubble so it's not in view. v:v:v

holy poo poo this was long I'm sorry. Also, e;fb by someone more succinct aha.

Conspiratiorist
Nov 12, 2015

17th Separate Kryvyi Rih Tank Brigade named after Konstantin Pestushko
Look to my coming on the first light of the fifth sixth some day
Armin wasn't in the 104th top 10 lol.

The thing about his luck is that he's been an inch away from death in every single combat situation he's been in, and saved by the intercession of either Eren, Mikasa, or Annie sparing him.

Ryuujin
Sep 26, 2007
Dragon God
Wasn't Armin 12th, Ymir 11th and Krista 10th? With the assumption that Ymir held back so that Krista could be 10th? Not that Ymir or Armin would have had a choice of the Military Police anyway since they weren't in the top 10. If he is 12th then he is not bad, he isn't top 10 material but not necessarily bad. The thing is all this training didn't necessarily ready people for actually facing titans.

MOVIE MAJICK
Jan 4, 2012

by Pragmatica

Ryuujin posted:

The thing is all this training didn't necessarily ready people for actually facing titans.

I still think that some of this training was directed at the titan shifters (hand to hand combat) by shadowy figures in the military :tinfoil:

Ryuujin
Sep 26, 2007
Dragon God
After thinking on it again the hand to hand training may be less for the Survey group and more for the Garrison and Military Police groups, because they may have to deal with violent humans.

Philip Rivers
Mar 15, 2010

12 is incredibly good tho especially considering that Armin is awful in combat.

MOVIE MAJICK
Jan 4, 2012

by Pragmatica




Again, I havn't read the manga, just feel like the fight scenes between Annie and Eren, and their internal struggles within these clashes, fit well with the theme of personhood.

ATP_Power
Jun 12, 2010

This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.


MOVIE MAJICK posted:

Again, I havn't read the manga, just feel like the fight scenes between Annie and Eren, and their internal struggles within these clashes, fit well with the theme of personhood.

Yeah, we can all see different themes in a work of fiction. I'm just expanding on what I was trying to get at originally and building off of your frame to do so.

I'd also add that what I'm discussing is purely about what's been shown in the show, even if my reading is colored by knowing what's coming.

MOVIE MAJICK
Jan 4, 2012

by Pragmatica

ATP_Power posted:

Yeah, we can all see different themes in a work of fiction. I'm just expanding on what I was trying to get at originally and building off of your frame to do so.

I'd also add that what I'm discussing is purely about what's been shown in the show, even if my reading is colored by knowing what's coming.

Well if there was any difference between us it was that you thought the animes version of events was inconsistent with themes in the show. I was getting at a way to think of it as consistent.

I think what you mention about power - collective VS individual - , and right and wrong, is accurate, but also boring, so I don't have much else to say.

MOVIE MAJICK fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Jun 22, 2017

MOVIE MAJICK
Jan 4, 2012

by Pragmatica
So I feel like the reason Reiner revealed himself the way he did to Eren was because seeing monkey panicked him. Which if I'm right, makes me think the monkey is a major antoginist for both shifter people and humies. Reiner was sacred l.

E-flat
Jun 22, 2007

3-flat

ATP_Power posted:

Yeah, we can all see different themes in a work of fiction. I'm just expanding on what I was trying to get at originally and building off of your frame to do so.

I'd also add that what I'm discussing is purely about what's been shown in the show, even if my reading is colored by knowing what's coming.

I'd like to say same, but I do reference the manga, so I can't with clear conscience, although I do also only discuss things shown in the show, as an aside or because I wasn't 100% solid on how accurate/clear Annie's point was in her lil' monologue to the MPs were (at least re: the crunchyroll translation). My intent was to quibble with your characterization of Annie: I believe she held a substantial amount of sentiment for someone described as having 'cold rationality,' and that I felt the ideological dichotomy of 'cold, detached' and 'hot-blooded emotionality' is present but perhaps not symbolized by that particular fight. And that to my very limited understanding of ubermensch Eren probably fit that label more. No beef. v:shobon:v

Conspiratiorist posted:

Armin wasn't in the 104th top 10 lol.

The thing about his luck is that he's been an inch away from death in every single combat situation he's been in, and saved by the intercession of either Eren, Mikasa, or Annie sparing him.

I am also an idiot who cannot count and has poor reading comprehension, so there ya go :sweatdrop:

But hey, well, I mean there was that one time he uh... uh, well, yeah, what about that time in Trost with the Eren-boulder mission? He, uh.... was saved by Levi. Well, what about that moral victory he had against the bullies beating him up--oh wait, Eren interrupts that. Dammit, armin, you're not helping. ...Well, I guess if you don't consider Mikasa pulling Eren and Armin away from about-to-transform Annie as a combat situation yet, he doesn't need to get saved during that? Oh, oh, he's there as the reinforcements to mop up the remaining titans at utgard castle! I'm pretty sure he participated in that!

Ryuujin
Sep 26, 2007
Dragon God
Psh don't imply that Eren saved Armin from the bullies. It is always, oh hey there is Eren running in again to try and save Armin, and then oh poo poo its Mikasa! run!

Dogwood Fleet
Sep 14, 2013
So I'm finally starting to realize just how weird Eren and the circumstances surrounding him are.

First off, there's his temperament. Even as a child, he's a ball of rage that attacks bullies, stabs adults in cold blood, and if he'd physically been able he would have gone after the titans when they invaded the first time. At the beginning of the show he talks about the soldiers being too complacent and humans being cattle and being trapped within the walls. It's like he talks about it the way his parents would talk about it, but from what we saw of Carla I don't think it came from her. It feels like Grisha may have been pushing Eren to at least join the military without saying so.

Then there are his titan powers. He was injected with something, probably with something like what Ymir was injected with, but he's not just a titan, he's a titan who can control titan minds. Like Reiner said, he's the worst possible person. I don't think that's coincidence.

Then there's Grisha. We don't really see him react when Eren says he wants to join the scouts, but promises to show Eren the basement when he gets back. We, the anime viewers don't know what's in the basement other than it's a really big deal. Why would he show angry impulsive child Eren the basement? How long had he been planning on doing that? Their house must be on the outskirts of civilization for a reason- Grisha is a doctor who stopped an epidemic, he could probably have his family in the interior if he felt like it.

I think Eren was groomed for a long time to get the powers that he has and whatever will be found in the basement. I wonder how much Carla knew.




Also after rewatching the first bit of the first episode where the then leader of the scouts breaks down, I've got to wonder just how much of humanity's knowledge of titans comes from Hange specifically.


I'm going to have to switch over to the manga. I want to get to that basement.

MOVIE MAJICK
Jan 4, 2012

by Pragmatica
The basement has hundreds of vats full of Erens.

ATP_Power
Jun 12, 2010

This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.


Dogwood Fleet posted:

I'm going to have to switch over to the manga. I want to get to that basement.

It's good, and the manga is probably close to the endgame. Depending on the breaks the manga could be finished before season 3 of the show.

Zomborgon
Feb 19, 2014

I don't even want to see what happens if you gain CHIM outside of a pre-coded system.

Like any anime watcher, I really just want to go to the basement.

Phobophilia
Apr 26, 2008

by Hand Knit
...but im alreayd in a basement

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

ATP_Power
Jun 12, 2010

This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.


  • Locked thread