Last week, I’d thought we’d finally gotten past explaining everything obvious and fighting internal struggles over whether to fight or to keel over and die.
But nope! They were just saving all of last week’s exposition and whining to use as flashbacks in this episode!
We start by having everyone gather around a table and explain the plan. The plan which has already been executed. (Not that it would have been any less pointless had they explained before executing the plan.)
Then we cut to the tunnel Eren and friends are trapped in from last episode. Eren watched Annie transform into a titan and kill his friends with his own eyes. They are sitting in a cave waiting for her to crush them to death. And he doesn’t know whether they should fight her.
Dude, come on. This is just ridiculous.
The fight scenes were still awesome, as usual. Too bad we had to cut so much fighting to make room for flashbacks and emo Eren.
This author sure loves allocating a lot of time to his useless plots. After seven colored smokes, now we have a pointless conference/meeting of something which has passed, and failed. For analogy, it would be as if we are watching a flashback of the girls in GuP discussing their strategy for a game which they have won.
Seriously, what the hell?
Exactly. No one gives a crap about the colored smoke. Stop wasting everybody’s time.
Not wanting to kill the comrade you trained with through all sorts of adversity doesn’t make you an Emo. I’d say he was heartless if he just went, “Oh, Annie’s the Titan? Let’s kill the bitch!” There is going to be a severe shock caused by what he’s seeing and the person he thought he knew from those years of training. In order for him to take action, he had to discard everything he knew and give up his judgement on whether it was right or wrong to attack his comrade. Attacking Annie was easier for the others, I think, because they knew they would be unable to do her any real harm based on the last encounter.
What you say still holds during the meeting. But after Eren saw Annie turn into the Female Titan (while blasting a few of his comrades into gibs in the process)? I say the policy should be “kill first, ask questions later”. Also, is this the same guy who killed a man in cold blood when he was, like, 8?
One thing that must be said is that most of the content about Eren hesitating was filler inserted there to pad the episode so that it would end when it did. In the manga he does hesitate a bit (mostly subconsciously, when he can’t transform), but when he realizes Armin and Mikasa are going to risk their lives he doesn’t even wait for them to leave the tunnel and just transforms and proceeds to beat the shit out of Annie.
On another note, were they REALLY hoping to trap her in that tunnel? The same one that she smashed from the outside with her foot?
During the meeting, circumstantial evidence was provided and no one was certain that Annie was the Titan. The shock factor only came into play when all doubt was removed from his mind that Annie was indeed the Titan who murdered all those soldiers including his comrades in Levi’s squad.
Even though Eren did kill a man when he was a child, the man was an absolute stranger. That plus children are often capable of acts of innocent cruelty: i.e. unaware of the gravity of an action. So as he grew older, that Eren may no longer have remained.
As for trapping her below ground: they were supposed to get her to go even deeper where, presumably, she wouldn’t be able to move much. Plus titans somehow derive their energy from the sun and I’m not sure if Annie would have been able to transform completely cut off from the sun.
I guess. But this guy has no survival instinct whatsoever. Which makes no sense considering he’s a professional soldier. If someone’s about to stomp on you, you’d generally fight back or flee, and ask philosophical questions about whether to fight or not later.
Interesting to know they changed it so much from the manga. Seems to be all changes for the worse too. Why make Eren even more of a crybaby than he already is?
Even Mikasa was like, “Eren, are you fucking kidding me right now?”
Haha yes. Seeing her get pissed off at him was a small bright spot.
I agree that Eren isn’t the greatest character out there. Shingeki no Kyojin’s real problem though is the fact that it has only three main characters. So like it or not if you are watching Shingeki no Kyojin, a third of the time you are watching Eren.
About the meeting they had, I think it was shown to explain why they suspected Ani, and not to explain the actual operation.
It’s not that I hate Eren as a character. I only hate how they focus so much on the question of whether he ought to fight or not. They’ve been asking this question for 24 episodes, over and over, beating us on the head with it. And Eren hasn’t grown a single bit. He doesn’t seem to have found any resolve to fight despite the repeated questioning and despite finding the same answer over and over again every single episode. When are they ever going to let him learn something?
It’s like the author cant simply allow things to happen without having an in-depth explanation with footnotes and a glossary in case anyone missed out on some finer details. It is almost as if the author doesn’t trust his own audience to work out that things have got bad and something must be done about it, and feels it is necessary to add these constant group huddles and random, but unnecessary conversations every episode.
There is merit in such discussions, but only when they are used correctly, unfortunately Shingeki no Kyoujin seems to have them every time the scouting legion, or whoever it is comes up with a new plan. This is one of the main reasons that my interest in this series lessened after about five episodes, its just too full of inconsistencies and random plot holes, with no apparent direction.
It’s a good premise, but these sorts of problems have spoiled it for me.
Exactly. Stop explaining everything and treating the audience like a bunch of imbeciles.
But you can tell why they’re doing it. I mean, wasting time now so they have more content from the manga later on in the next season isn’t so bad. I guess?
Or they could just make one good season instead of two slow and painful ones.
I have a theory with regards to *why* we get hammered regularly with the rethorical question whether one should fight or not in Attack on Titan. In-world, that question makes no sense whatsoever. The last remains of mankind are threatened by brainless, naked, man-eating giants. Why shouldn’t one fight? There’s no doubt that Titans are a menace. There are no moral issues, because they aren’t thinking beings, so killing them isn’t something one should feel guilty over. They can’t be reasoned with either. Yes, one can be afraid of them, but besides isolated cases of panic, it is reasonable to see that it usually is about risking death in battle, or dying for sure later, so it’s not a hard choice. So why?
I’ve read somewhere that SnK in Japan is considered a militaristic and rather right-wing series, and that the Titans would actually be strawmen for the rising Chinese power. If that’s the case, then the meaning is a bit clearer: the author is simply screaming at his public “why won’t you fight? Your country is in danger, you have no other choice”. In fact, it matches the kind of world view such a person would have: the people is a mass of sheep, ruled mostly by fear and unable to see where their own good lies, the top rulers are corrupted and probably accomplices of the enemy in the name of some “greater good” that either makes no sense or is actually only their own, and only a handful of chosen ones have the guts to fight and incite the others to do so. Of course it misses completely the fact that the reason why most people usually opposes military action as the first option is not only that they’re (legitimately) afraid of it, but also that the “enemy” is not mindless man-eating giants but other people, who can be reasoned with using diplomacy.
Oh, wow, that was some interesting insight. Gives me a new way to look at the series. Thanks for that!
I like this idea. Would explain a lot. And it also makes for a hilariously unconvincing argument completely divorced from reality, like most right-wing thinking.
What’s most interesting about this episode is that more than half of it was anime-original material. In the manga, Eren transforms right after hearing Mikasa say how it’s a cruel world, and none of the action happened. Adding these extra scenes worked for some people (like me), but I can certainly see how it seems repetitive.
Well, I guess the action was a good thing, at the very least.