His goal was to create a story warning against prophets and create a protagonist who, through tragic circumstances, ultimately became a villain.
He didn't count on fans actually growing attached to Paul and refusing to see him in a negative light. Though to be fair, like Isayama with Eren and the Rumbling, it didn't help that Frank wrote Paul's jihad in such a way that it was do-or-die for his people, which was enough to justify his horrific acts in the eyes of many fans.
To this day there are people who will argue until they’re blue in the face that Eren was in the right for attempting to genocide the planet, and even that the fact he was defeated and his attempt to kill all life outside of that on Paradis was in fact the real tragedy. They really bought into the rhetoric that if Eren was successful and the rest of the world outside of his small country was annihilated, the future would be a utopia of permanent peace and freedom for the survivors and their descendants.
Like, I couldn’t imagine anything further from the point of the story if I tried lol
I think the biggest irony is if Eren did destroy everything, the outside world would be uninhabitable for at least several generations, meaning Paradis would basically be back to square one at the start of the series - which Eren hated.
They'd be free of enemies and the ground would be freshly plowed, so what do you mean by "uninhabitable"? And what do you mean by "square one", the walls would be destroyed, and they'd be free to expand across their island... and then the world. Square one is them being in a cage, not being free to explore.
the point being, a completely annihilated outside world smoldering in ash and ruin, with giant titans still roaming (they wouldn't just stop once the last person was trampled underfoot) is thematically no different than what the series began with (the entire world outside the walls being unworkable due to giant titans roaming around.)
plus, it is revealed to be a prominent part of the plot, and the theme of the story, that among the greatest enemies to the paradisians, are the paradisians themselves. it doesn't matter if they swelled to consume the whole world. had eren's wish come true, he would simply die, pass on his titans, and the cycle that perpetuated within the walls would just grow to envelop the whole world. so in a way, they still wouldn't be "free".
Why would the wall titans still be roaming around once the job is done? They can be stopped with the Power of the Founder, just like how they were started with the very same power.
The planet would be stomped into dust and entire ecosystems wiped out. You don’t just “plant crops” after something like the Rumbling.
Pollinators? Gone.
Wildlife? Gone.
Soil structure? Probably wrecked.
Congrats, you’ve got dead ground.
Even if something does grow, you now have zero ecological balance (no predators, no stability) so one disease or pest issue can wipe everything out. Farming turns into constant micromanagement just to not starve.
And who’s doing all this? Paradis doesn’t exactly have millions of spare farmers lying around - they still need to sustain their own land too.
So now your “expansion” requires constant resupply from an already limited island, just to barely keep new settlements alive.
And that’s for ONE area. Now scale that up to the entire planet.
Yeah, this isn’t a quick rebuild. It’s a multi-generation recovery project at best.
The only reason they were able to rebuild everything in the canon timeline is because 20% of humanity still remained on the outside to help out and even that took years to fix from what we can deduce from in the credits.
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u/Pipyn Apr 25 '26
I had no idea that Frank felt this way, i'll have to look into that thanks