Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Attack on Titan The Final Season Part 3
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18274 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Agreed. This was the ending that the series had to have for the story to make sense overall, even down to the sequences of scenes shown during the credits. I especially liked the irony that the ultimate key to the end of the Titans was not just killing Eren, but that it specifically had to be Mikasa who did it. Only a situation that Ymir could identify with herself could convince her to end her two-millennia-long commitment. On the downside, I do also agree with the criticisms that the handling of Historia was a mess. Otherwise, though, this was the epic finale that an epic series deserved. |
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TheSleepyMonkey
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I don't agree with this bit at all. If anything, these are by far the best action storyboards the final season had, and both the scale and readability of the entire fight are very clear and consistent. |
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KitKat1721
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Great review as always under what I’m sure was not only a lot of pressure, but tougher circumstances than you imagined given the state of everything.
I agree that I think this finale was emotionally satisfying and felt right for the series as a whole. While I do have issues here and there - most are more overarching than touching on this finale specifically (I.e. Historia’s whole character progression after S3) or nitpick details (in a show full of grotesque imagery, Mikasa kissing Eren’s severed head was the one that was too much to take seriously). There are also a few elements I feel a bit torn on, like Ymir loving King Fritz and the parallels being made to Mikasa’s love for Eren but again, having contentious choices that make me want to discuss and dissect them fits this series. The mid/post-credits scene was fantastic imo - very sobering to an almost nihilistic degree, but also made the finale hit so much harder than it would have if the show ended on the more optimistic note it could have with Mikasa. |
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The Anime Binge-Watcher
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I think you're misinterpreting this moment. Remember, the point of the Paths is that Eren shares the memories of all past and future founding titans- including the one who started the assault on Paradis when he was a kid. He's not literally saying he's the one who killed his mom, he's saying that he now carries the previous Founder's memory of sending the titan away from Bertholt, resulting in it eating his mom instead, as if it were his own. |
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Everlasting Coconut
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But the Founding Titan didn't start the assault on Paradis. That was the Marleyans acting of their own accord. Frieda, the Founder when Eren was a kid, simply let it happen because she was bound by the vow renouncing war, but she didn't start it.
He is though? This is the actual quote: "I had no choice. That day, in that moment, Burrito had to stay alive. So I sent it (the Smiling Titan) toward my mom and not him." |
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The Anime Binge-Watcher
Posts: 96 |
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[quote="Everlasting Coconut"]
He says it like that because he's literally sharing mindspace with the person who did it. From his perspective he did it, because he is simultaneously all Paths users at once, past and future. Just like that one scene back in S3P2 where the guy who passed the powers down to Grisha had a moment where he talked like he knew Mikasa and Armin. |
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Everlasting Coconut
Posts: 302 |
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Again, I'm not sure where you're getting that Frieda (or any of the previous Founders for that matter) had anything to do with the attack on Paradis or anything that happened that day. Heck, even if they wanted to use their powers to initiate the attack, they couldn't, since the purpose of the vow renouncing war was to maintain peace for as long as possible. |
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a_Bear_in_Bearcave
Posts: 521 Location: Poland |
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So, I guess beside some few changes in the most cringey lines, the ending is just as awful as in the manga? Than again it's not like anything major could even be changed without rewriting at least whole last season and probably more, the rot already set in back then.
The whole killing his own mother is the worst example of bad writing, since it wasn't even necessary to the overarching plot and its ending, it was just to add another example of Eren being "forced" to do something horrible he claimed he hated but had no choice, at the cost of his main character theme and some of his most important scenes, that were rendered pointless by this reveal. Time travel is hard to get right, and many writers fail at this theme, but this was one of worst example of such failure, because all it did was try to convince me that annoying, rush and dumb genocidal boy had no choice but to genocide with tears 80% of the world for the sake for his friends, who didn't even want it and fought against it, losing few more friends in the process, being forced to kill their comrades, and leaving their land to be ruled by fascist junta, while having to live among strangers, who realistically would want to kill them even more for being part of the race and friends of the guy who committed such unspeakable evil, but author wanted to make them get the good end, to make Eren's choice between genocide or no genocide seem somehow reasonable. Such a touching story of a guy who committed genocide for the sake of friendships, while everyone decent tried to stop his dumb genocidal ass, but by author's fiat he just couldn't stop and we all should feel story for his manufactured tragedy. In real life, you don't get to say that some sort of genocide couldn't be avoided because god-level-powerful mind-broken victim of abuse wanted to see you make out with her self-insert. Historia and Ymir were both badly misused as well. Historia could solve the problem on her own, but it would not be convenient for author, so she was pushed aside and saddled with kid out of nowhere. Ymir was turned into some weird girl obsessed only with her rapist and abuser, so her only role was arbitrarily forcing Eren to only choose paths ending with tragic kiss scene, so she could get her self-inserting voyeur kink on and leave the story forever. AoT always was awful when it comes to romance, so making it part of the ending just made it farcical, especially with Eren-Mikasa pairing having the blandest and most wooden relationship in the series (I'm not even classifying the Ymir thing as relationship, it was just dumb plot device to make her into another plot device and nothing else), finishing with that awful incel-y request. The only good thing about the ending was how all those Eren-worshiping genocide supporters had to deal with their hero being shown to be dumb angry brat he always was. Eren for me was always one of the most annoying part of the AoT, so the fact that ending arc focused on his grudge turned out awful is not really surprising though. |
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Seif
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I really wanted to like it but it just felt like a mess.
How could Falco change his entire form after it's been established? A dream and a bit of spinal fluid? No other titan has shown to have this level of alteration to their form. Why did killing Zeke stop the rumbling? Ymir had already disregarded the royal bloodline decree when she sided with Eren. If he DID need Zeke after all then the battle was lost as soon as he was killed, right? Why did Eren need to kill his mom? What purpose does that serve in the plot? Either time is a closed loop and it already happened so he wouldn't need to change anything, or he did need to interfere in the events to ensure it did happen but that undermines the entire idea that he was locked into the outcome? Furthermore, how would he be able to control Dina if he only had the power of the Coordinate after eating Grisha and the power to control it after merging with Zeke? If the power is retroactive then why was there any titan obstacles for his goals in the first place? The problem with "The Future Told Me" is the same as it was in Avengers or Jacen Solo. It's too much of a blank check to do whatever because "it was the only way." I hate it. |
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Minos_Kurumada
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Well: - Yeah, that's the explanation, by using the special properties of the Beast Titan fluid he transformed into a half beast. - You need physical contact with a member of the loyal family to have access to the coordinate, the fact that Ymir broke the Pacifist Mandate doesn't change that. -The mom part was to give his dad and himself as a kid a motivation in the form of vengeance, also, his mom served as a distraction since while the titan eat her they escaped. -Yes, the power its retroactive, that's why the guy who gives Grisha the Attack Titan says that everything its to save Mikasa and Armin, Eren was controlling him and, quite sure, he controlled every Attack Titan user from the begining to make sure he was never catched. I agree with the final part though, the ending was fine, but, it needed a couple of extra chapters depicting the consequences of "Doing otherwise". |
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tintor2
 Posts: 1921 |
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I think the ending of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle was kindergarten level of understanding when compared to this level of time traveling.
So basically Eren forced Ymir to give him the power to create the Rumbling just to make her change her mind when Mikasa kills him. Mikasa killing Eren motivates Ymir to kill the King, erasing all the Titans in the process since she doesn't want her bloodline to continue, right? Am I missing something |
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Kirki
Posts: 296 |
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They changed a bit Eren and Armin's conversation from when Armin asks the 'why', and that was at least one thing saved from this mess. Most of the reviewer's praises are based on that added part. But the rest is as it was with all of its problems.
Love ends up as quite a tricky subject to tackle, possibly the trickiest. Everyone has very different versions and opinions on what love is and how they experience it. Using 'love' to solve all of your narrative issues in a politics and military driven story... meh. If I wanted to see a 'it was all about love after all' kind of solution, I'd choose to watch Sailor Moon or something. I understand the reasoning (we fight because of love, we sacrifice, etc) but the way it was handled here (=break a curse through love), just no. And the main reason it doesn't work is how bad Eren and Mikasa were, both as people and as a couple. Eren was a psychotic maniac who stomped on people because he didn't know how else to use the level of power that fell into his hands, as he confesses in the anime added content, and Mikasa was always a girl who only had eyes for her love interest and based her entire life choices around that. Both of those personalities are completely real and human, and they were well written, but it still doesn't make either of them likeable. I think seeing Mikasa past this with a new family and acquiring the happiness so much blood had been spilt for would at least drive the point home and save her character ark a bit, but the anime left this possibility even more vague than the manga did and that was my personal biggest disappointment in this installment. The only thing I genuinely liked in this finale was the shot about Ymir dreaming of making the choice of tending to her daughters instead of sacrificing her life for a scumbag. I don't think this was in the manga. This has a great message in it and explains a lot of the suffering everybody went through. All in alll... meh. Very disappointing of a series of such caliber to end in meh. |
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Jadress
 Posts: 807 Location: Seattle. It purdy and nerdy! |
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Logged in just to say, I've loved reading James' review of this series, and this review was just fantastic- fitting for the end. AoT has always been both an amazing, epic spectacle, and a bit of a mess all at once, and I feel that James' reviews leave me with a more clear understanding of some of the themes tangled up in the messy bits.
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primalmaximus
Posts: 106 |
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Imagine if this last episode had stopped after the part where we saw that Mikasa and the rest of the gang lived long, happy lives with their kids and grandkids. Imagine if we didn't see that little epilogue at the end.
That's what manga readers who were reading the monthly releases got when serialization ended. And then imagine if, a couple months after the anime ended with Mikasa and the gang living happily, they announced that the Blu-Ray for the episode was coming out and that it had a special epilogue added to it that wasn't available in the original release. That epilogue being what we saw at the end, where several decades after Erin's death, the rest of the world had recovered and they attacked Paradise and bombed it to hell. Which showed us that you can never stop the cycle of war and conflict, only halt it for a brief period of time. And they announced that the special epilogue would only be available on the Blu-Ray and wouldn't be available anywhere else unless you decided to pirate it. That's what happened with the manga, it had a special epilogue chapter that was only added when the Tankoban came out. And the Tankoban didn't come out until months after the release of the final chapter during monthly serialization. So a lot of readers felt like that extra epilogue chapter served 2 purposes. To essentially be a cop out by changing the ending and to serve as extra incentive to get people to buy the volume because it contained the "true" ending. So, when you say that the ending wasn't as bad as you thought it would be based on how people say the manga ended, you're ignoring all of the context surrounding why people didn't like it. Last edited by primalmaximus on Mon Nov 06, 2023 8:35 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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NeverConvex
 Subscriber Posts: 2371 |
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The mix of fate/time travel/teleological take on evolution/Zeke's existential crisis/and even the constant references to 'freedom' all felt superficial and weirdly shoehorned into the show, to me. The fate/time travel bits being the worst parts; we're basically just told by Eren what his constraints are and aren't, with no deeper underlying mechanics or ties to the rest of the story. Feels like a bad case of "My finale will be insufficiently epic if I do not stuff it with references to every rarefied concept I can think of".
I thought the character arcs mostly worked, though (excepting the bizarre choice to have Eren murder his own mother, which a few other people have commented on), and that's probably more important. The weird pseudoscience I can mostly wave away as vibes and atmosphere; the character writing has to basically make sense or the story won't function at all. I wasn't even really bothered by the revelation that Ymir was in love with King Fritz; I mean, obviously not a healthy form of love, but some kind of twisted romantic Stockholm syndrome seems believable (though quite the thing to just drop on the viewers and expect us to believe without further evidence pointing to this, I guess). Mikasa being the one to kill Eren worked perfectly for me; anything else would not have worked at all. Ymir and Mikasa are sort of curiously juxtaposed; Mikasa finding her resolve to end Eren despite her love for him seems like it is meant to be contrasted with Ymir serving Fritz, essentially for all time, and in that respect it seems natural she would be the one Ymir finds another way in. On the other hand, Fritz brutalized Ymir viciously in ways we have no parallels for between Mikasa and Eren, and that difference makes it harder to read Mikasa's story as just a reflection of Ymir's with a different choice made. I could imagine Ymir watching Mikasa's tale and seeing enough parallels to grow from, though; a somewhat healthier love, but still faced with the choice of whether to bind herself to Eren's monstrous quest because she loves him, or to break free of it (and kill him; not sure that part has much parallel to Ymir and Fritz, though). The story doesn't really give us much of a window into what Ymir takes from this, but it feels like there's enough relevant material that it could have written something convincing. The fight artwork and choreography was pretty impressive, and the politic and military events largely seemed reasonable. Won't go down as one of my favorite finales ever, and for me, personally, the show as a whole never fully recovered from the coprophagic torture lows of a season or two ago, but I won't remember the show as ending on a weak note either. A satisfying enough conclusion to one of the most storied anime of the past decade, even if I'll always remember the show's start as its strongest writing.
I know exactly the moment you mean, and remember thinking exactly the same thing  The facial expression on Armin there, especially, was a really odd choice.
Last edited by NeverConvex on Tue Nov 07, 2023 10:01 am; edited 1 time in total |
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