That does not mean that all paths to the future are equal – the 50-year plan would not have put an end to Titans, and Zeke’s euthanasia plan distorts utilitarian ethics into just another form of oppression there are better and worse decisions that lead to more and less degrees of suffering, but no decision can ever be the final one.

A future in which war and geopolitical conflict will continue even without Titans. In the long view of history, all the events, from Grisha running beyond the wall to see the airships and the first breaking of Wall Maria to Erwin’s sacrifices, Paradis’ discovery of the outside world, and finally to the Battle of Heaven and Earth, it would all merely be a handful of chapters in the history textbooks of the future. But that’s also to say that, on the broadest scale, SNK is a story about futility, that it is a deliberate representation of the struggle to make one’s actions historically meaningful. Yes, if the metric is Paradis’ survival, maybe it was indeed all “pointless”. I think Isayama suddenly pulling back to such a long-term view of history to the scale of decades or even centuries into the future calls for a reorientation in attitude towards exactly what kind of story we have been reading. Eren’s 80% Rumbling, Armin’s diplomatic peace talks between the remnants of the Allied Nations and Paradis, and before that, the proposal of the 50-year plan and Zeke’s euthanasia plan… everything, to the very beginning to the Survey Corps’ dreams of some kind of freedom was it all for nothing? All that striving, that hope, that final promise bestowed upon Armin: was it all a pointless story? Even more radically, is the story suggesting that Eren might as well have continued the Rumbling to 100% of the earth? Was Zeke’s euthanasia plan the cruel but correct choice all along? What was the point of rejecting the 50-year plan if that had a greater chance of success at preventing this outcome? One objection that has emerged against this brief sequence of Paradis’ apparent destruction is that it renders the entire story to be “pointless”. The Long Defeatīut while on this topic of war, let’s linger a moment on the “cruelty” side and the consequence of this wordless construction and subsequent destruction of a city – the most bold and possibly controversial additional panels that are also my personal favourite additions. But such a relentlessly bleak and tonally flat ending sentiment would be firmly incongruous with the story’s recurrent conviction in the equal cruelty and beauty of the world – a conviction that I believe it has been faithful to all the way to its end. A culminating image symbolizing the persistence or resurgence of an era of war as the final panel would thus arguably be redundant and unnecessary.įurthermore, the chapter is entitled “Toward the Tree on That Hill.” If the tree were simply a symbol of war, by implication the chapter could equally be called ‘toward the endless cycle of war’. The cycle of war was already continuing in the decades or centuries before the child arrived at the tree.

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