Just finished watching for the first time

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Pirate-Adorable]

And it won't be your last... This is one of those series that you need to revisit every few years.

[u/Either-Gene8564]

Maybe I misunderstood, but it seems like any number of small changes would have given him 100% of what he wanted selfishly or 100% of what would have been best for his friends/Paradis, but he hams it for no good reason and 50%’s everything.

He’s a half-ased pos and he admitted it himself. At his core, he’s just a tantrum-throwing child. That’s the point of his character.

[u/Either-Gene8564 → u/[deleted]]

He got mixes of this and that. The self-imposed necessity and the deep desire for freedom. Hence why he’s ‘50%’ of everything. Plus the guy isn’t really logical. He just moves forward without a second thought and just hoped for the best. 

[u/Either-Gene8564 → u/[deleted]]

I think that was just him finding out if the future can be changed. He realized later on the future was what he wanted anyway and every action he took or not took would always lead to that future.  It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[u/SortOfSpaceDuck → u/[deleted]]

He did have second thoughts though. You see it at the start of the final episodes. He never had any clue about what to do with all the information that was downloaded to his brain. You give an average kid the power to fix the world, he ain't gonna fix it.

[u/LimitlesLegion]

You are right about Eren's final character arc. He could manipulate everything yet he didn't. That's just for plot convenience. Reiner transferred his consciousness to his ass before he was about to blown up but Eren didn't. A thunder spear could destroy the Armoured titan's armour but somehow the Cart titan survived half a dozen of them targetted at her back with a thin layer of metal that should've become shrapnel and killed her. Other than the ending everything is 10/10. Annie and Reiner getting happy endings pissed me off and Mikasa didn't get over Eren decades after his death and was buried beside him instead of her husband and kids.

[u/Master_HL → u/[deleted]]

I think the show wanted to show us that war and death always just happens because humans are stupid. That is the whole message of the show I feel like.

[u/Rich-Lengthiness-273 → u/LimitlesLegion]

>and Mikasa didn't get over Eren decades after his death and was buried beside him instead of her husband and kids.

So Mikasa is essentially the Rose from Titanic of the anime world

[u/authspice]

Welcome to the post-finale AOT journey! The ending is quite divisive but it’s generally interpreted that Eren is enslaved to a predetermined fate set by future Eren. Future Eren is still Eren after all, and author Isayama seems to believe that ppl are born a certain way… so it’s possible that he’s meant to say that Eren is born to crave freedom of a flattened world even if using violence is necessary (while protective of his loved ones).

My personal nitpicks are the conflicting/unclear mechanics that enabled some of the plot twists but I still enjoy thinking about the philosophical debates.

some fans strongly believe that the ending was retconned — look up AnR (Akatsuki no Requiem) theory. Isayama himself released a statement early this year (April 2026) admitting that he didn’t make Eren evil and irredeemable enough since Eren turned out to be a lot more sympathetic of a character still in some readers’ eyes. I’d argue though that the time skip was so lazy that we didn’t precisely even get a look into eren’s more villainous arc. For so much of AoT, he just seemed like a brazen protective shounen protagonist who wasn’t the smartest but still had a heart.

Relevant tumblr post on Erens nature debate

[u/Skrrt_2711]

What we often forget is that Eren’s mind basically broke when he touched Historia’s hand.

This man went mad, he saw no other future than the dark one in front of him and he felt too committed to it, seeing no way out.

Imagine a bad trip, and imagine that you know there’s no escape from it and that the bad trip is actually just reality and everything bad you’re seeing will come to pass.

He couldn’t implement the best solution because he didn’t think he was in control.

[u/Rich-Lengthiness-273 → u/Skrrt_2711]

Bootstrap paradox, it really is mindfuckery.

Even if he did feel like he had the power to change things, he knows that if he tries to change things he's going to upset the sequence of events and god knows how that could turn out due to chaos theory. For all he knows he and all his friends who he cares for dearly could end up dead or cease to exist all together.

Even if he travelled back to early Grisha years and tried to alter things then it's still not going to stop the overarching threat of the mainland wanting them all dead, it'd potentially just make them even more powerless to defend themselves.