Yeah... The Ending of “Attack on Titan” Kinda Sucked

This much is no secret – quite a lot of people aren't all that happy with how Attack on Titan ended. I try to measure my words when speaking in such general terms but I think that's a fair assessment. The community appears divided, with some people absolutely hating it and arguing it ruined an otherwise stellar work, other people are absolutely loving it and finding in it some kind of deeper meaning, and others still, perhaps more reasonably, are working to find a good middle ground between the aspects they enjoyed and the aspects they didn't enjoy. I for one would like to say I'm part of that third category, but then again I really don't know, and that is because my relationship with this story has been one of love-hate ever since the summer of 2013 when I first came across it. Good times... Anyway, I obviously wouldn't say that the ending completely ruined the show's otherwise great writing because, at the risk of completely burning all bridges before I even build them, thus forcing me to become an island devil myself, I was never a huge fan before the actual ending. However, having said that, the ending does appear to be at least underwhelming and at most completely disappointing, which did come at a shock to a lot of people, but if I'm honest, as the story drew to a close without tying all that many loose threads, I felt that a disappointing ending was simply inevitable.

In my opinion, the main reason for that is pacing. AOT was always very dynamic about its rhythm, which was at times a strength but other times a definitive weakness. Personally I would have much preferred to see a slower pace at the beginning so that the story could shift gears and go faster and faster until it reached the very end. Without that it just constantly ebbs and flows, at times appearing to give unnecessary and very boring buildup, while other times it gives too much development in too little time. That's what appears to have happened in the last few chapters. It's certainly not an unusual thing though, and it strikes me as a nightmare to have a story ongoing for this long, which definitely places Isayama in the same conversation as the late Kentarō Miura and George R. R. Martin but with the added bonus that at the very least Isayama's work is now complete. Still, I don't think the comparisons, aside from some similar overall themes, are unwarranted. It's one thing to work on a project for quite a while on your own, allowing it to grow and change as you also grow and change, allowing it to take form whilst also retaining the freedom to retcon events and details without any witnesses. But when the work is being published as you go along, and when it has so many fans scrutinizing every little detail, the situation becomes far different...

As I read the last few chapters of AOT I thought of George R. R. Martin and, as an idea of his popped into my head, I wondered if the same might have happened to Isayama. The idea was that early on in writing A Song of Ice and Fire, obviously the work that is of relevance here, George enjoyed going online to see what people were saying about it. Sooner rather than later, due to the enigmatic nature of the story, people started coming up with their own intricate theories, and while most were dead wrong, George admitted that some people did in fact get it right. That creates a problem to the author – do you keep going with your original plan anyway even if someone has figured it out, or do you deliberately make changes in order to outsmart and surprise your readers? As the creator god of your story you have the freedom to do so, you have absolute freedom to do whatever you want, right? Well, yes, but also no... You can in fact do whatever you want in the sense that any word you write will end up on the page, but you also can't break your own rules, you can't contradict yourself without betraying, not so much yourself, but your own story. At a certain point the artist and the art split up and it becomes impossible to go back. And so George decided to carry on, eventually not consulting the messages boards whereon people posted their theories because, paraphrasing him, if you build up your story to hint that the butler did it but then you change it because someone guessed it, then you are ruining years of meticulous work... With AOT that is more or less what I believe happened, I think at some point Isayama felt like taking the story into a new direction perhaps because he consulted fan theories, some of which are heavily intricate, and tried the best he could to steer the ship, perhaps tied by his own constraints but also pressured by an urge to swiftly end the series and move on with his life.

That is understandable too, it takes huge stamina to stay with a project for a whopping twelve years... As time passes you might begin to see things differently and characters might find themselves in situations you no longer see a way out of, or even their world itself may have changed. It's possible that the pessimism of the story was gradually lost on Isayama and thus he wanted to give it a slightly more hopeful ending. It's not that much more hopeful but still, eighty percent of humanity dying a brutal death is better than one hundred percent of humanity dying an even more brutal death, I suppose... And that's another thing I wanna vent about as a little sidenote, because that eighty percent detail sounds downright bizarre, it sounds like something Neil Breen would say... Did Eren somehow count the people as he was killing them? Did the rumbling have settings to choose from and he chose the eighty percent setting? How do we know it's eighty percent and not eighty-one or eighty-two? I know titan powers are kinda random and convenient but does that mean the attack titan now gives its host some math powers? Really weird... But as I was saying, it could be that Isayama, as he matured, began to feel differently and wanted a whole new ending to his story. Thing is, that ending is all over the place and it's kinda only achieved by cheating the story by, one, seemingly giving Eren and the titans themselves new powers whenever convenient, and two, by retconning a ton of major events. And while the first issue just seems like a cheap move, the second one creates a whole lot of problems regarding continuity and free will. It's very much like, at the end of the day, none of it mattered at all...

In general I'm very inclined to dislike time travel in any work of fiction. It might work a tad better in science fiction specifically but I still find it just leads to weird paradoxes and inconsistencies, no matter what plot devices and self-imposed limitations are set in place by the storyteller. In the case of this story it's a bit further aggravated due to the fact that the genre isn't science fiction at all. Though it does reveal the titans to be part of a military experiment, it is for the most part fantasy, with the true origin of the titans being revealed as something of a deal with God, or the Devil, that their founder Ymir made. Thing is, I think this character, aside from the extremely bizarre bond she has with king Fritz, which I don't even wanna get into, takes up a very paradoxical role in the story. In other words, I think she either shouldn't have been introduced at all, or she should have been developed way more. Instead we are left with a kind of halfway point where we are given her backstory through a magical device system that doesn't seem to apply to any other humans in this story... It's as if Isayama had plans to expand the scope all throughout, to have his characters venture out into a massive world in which all nations have their own conflicts, but instead what we got was this seemingly insignificant conflict actually being the absolute most important thing to ever happen in the whole wide world. In a word, the scope of the story was always a mess, and thus it was inevitable that some plot threads would have been dropped, much like it happened with the ending of Game of Thrones, I regret to say... It's as if the story was only now beginning as the island was opened up to a new world and was partaking in politics, only for none of it to matter and for us readers to not even get a proper glimpse of any other nation. It's like, make up your mind, Isayama. Should I become invested in these new nations and political intrigue, or should I skim through those pages because Eren is gonna kill everyone anyway?...

So I think that leaves Attack on Titan in a weird place of trying to do a bit of everything and, with only one hundred and thirty-nine chapters, it ends up coming up a bit short on many of them. This ending was just the culmination of it all. The story always shifts between the survival and post-apocalyptic themes, military and technological settings, crime and political intrigue, fantasy and mysticism, and then it goes to the complete end of the world. It's way too jarring and if it leaves you nostalgic for the simpler times, the times when characters were hopeful and naive, the times when an open field or a forest full of tall trees were scary places, then that could be a bad sign regarding the story's slowly deteriorating quality... Then as to all the plot points left unresolved, screw it I guess. But to be honest it don't affect me all that much for a simple reason, and that reason is that even in a story with multiple characters and plot threads you can always identify the main one and thus conclude that all other threads are less important, which in turn means that as you go through the story and you see it nearing the end, you can guess that if something wasn't all that developed till then it's because it don't matter... And to steal from, not an Isayama character but a George R. R. Martin one – if you believed all the little details in this story were going to have a satisfying ending amidst a mystical giant apocalypse, then you weren't paying attention.

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Paulo Seabra

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