Taking advantage of the final season’s update, I spent a day binge-watching “Attack on Titan” in one go.
The Wall and the Lies#
Language is a tool for constructing the world. It shaped Eren’s worldview. During the century of stable life, people’s fear of the Titans, their reverence for the walls, and their ignorance of the outside world were all constructed through language.
This world built by language shattered the moment his mother died. He had once hoped to step outside the walls to see the world beyond. But fate never arrives as one hopes. His mother was devoured by a Titan, and that Titan turned out to be his father’s former wife, one of the origins of everything. The sense of destiny is suffocating.
The hand of fate pushed him onto the path of revenge, which formed his early, simplistic understanding of the world: to exterminate the Titans and seek revenge was his destiny. As the story progressed, he discovered that his understanding of the world was wrong. These Titans were also humans, even his own people—individuals persecuted in another world. They too had their own stories and their own sorrows.
In the final season, the director chose to present a complex and real world before Eren, forcing him to make a choice. His subsequent confrontations with his comrades and his struggle with his own inner goals are what moved me deeply.
Right and Wrong#
From Eren’s perspective at different stages, we see the disorder and chaos of the world, the opposition between right and wrong, and the clash of values, which profoundly mirrors the complexity of the real world. Viewed from historical and religious angles, this transformation of right and wrong is also an inevitable part of human civilization’s development.
From the “right” of eliminating enemies in the early stages to the “wrong” of destroying the world in the final season, Eren’s inner world underwent a tremendous change—one that even his former comrades could not understand, leading them to oppose him. Looking at history, it feels like glimpsing into the mind of a powerful figure.
Reincarnation#
The most memorable image in the entire story for me is the scene of Eren sleeping under the tree and the final scene of his burial. It carries a sense of East Asian Buddhist reincarnation. In the end, Eren becomes a mark in time, witnessing the changes of human civilization.
💡 Thank you for reading! Feel free to share this article or write to me to exchange thoughts.
The RSS address of this site has been updated. Please resubscribe, dear readers!