I can’t believe it’s over. I started reading this series in between parts of the final season. Was I prepared for any of the final volumes? Absolutely not. I'm going to get esoteric in this review, so my TLDR is that it was very, very good. Imperfect, structurally a lil' messy, but always aware of the larger picture. Eren Yeager is a tragically flawed character—beautiful in many ways—but his conquest for freedom is limited by the fact that he doesn't truly know what freedom will look like when he finds it. Many of the volumes blurred together so I didn’t review anything while I was reading, but I’ve now seen all of Isayama’s epic, so here goes. I’m touching on the whole thing, not just the final volume. I’m not tagging any spoilers, so it’s at your own risk, Scouts!

Notes on Freedom

"I wonder… why can’t we notice until we’ve lost it already? The feeling. Not of profit and loss… but only of respect for others."

One of the earliest commentaries I remember reading about Attack on Titan was that it had a shrewd grasp on the hopelessness of the youngest generation. What it means to look into a future that’s bleak and ravaged by violence, no upward mobility through rigid class structures and scorching mainland conflict. Throughout the series, the word 'freedom' is used unreservedly, sometimes to the extent that it's unclear if any of the Scouts know what they mean by it. I'm reminded of a quote from James Baldwin that Maggie Nelson references in her book [b:On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint|56269292|On Freedom Four Songs of Care and Constraint|Maggie Nelson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1614089793l/56269292._SX50_.jpg|87473435]:

"I have met only a very few people - and most of these were not Americans - who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear... We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster."

Freedom in the Eldian and Marleyan landscapes certainly means an escape from the titans, but there’s also a preoccupation with the ideals of heaven or paradise (they did name the island Paradis, after all.) I’m not sure that at any point the characters have delineated understandings of what sort of freedom they’re fighting for. In the final arc, Armin asks Eren: "What part of you is free?" This question is never answered, possibly because Eren doesn't know the answer for himself. For Eren, freedom is closer to a construct that means he isn’t under the surveillance of any greater authority. He was imprisoned again and again by the MPs and the Scouts because they believed his titan powers to pose an immediate threat to civilization. Most importantly, Eren tells himself he’s free—as if telling himself that is freedom in itself—but he’s not free.

From early on, Eren sees freedom as something inherent, given at birth and lost along the way. The inability to govern one’s own destiny is the greatest weakness to him—evident when he tells Mikasa he hates her because she isn’t free. Mikasa, as the one person who’s been by his side from the beginning, has saved him time and again from his own recklessness. The most pivotal moment to Eren’s character is the death of his mother, eaten by a titan in front of his eyes as a young boy. Without this one event, he might not be hellbent on achieving an impossible goal of freedom. He views his freedom as something stolen from him, cruelly and without reason. His conquest for freedom stems from a self-hatred, that his freedom was deprived from him and by his ultimate War on Paradis, even though he claims an autonomy and total freedom, he’s no different from the young boy who has lost some irretrievable and doesn’t know how to cope with the loss. It’s just that by the end, he’s learned how to weaponise his insecurities.

As a last point on freedom, it’s important to note that many of the discussions of freedom in this series point to freedom as either: (1) something held at birth and slowly lost over time; or (2) something gained, often through a destructive show of violence. I think a more appropriate framework to view freedom is that it is a constant act of defending liberties both personal and national. Freedom isn’t a place you reach. Once ‘free,’ however that’s defined, freedom has to be continually defended. In that way, freedom is temporary. It can persist, but only if it’s something that is always fought for.

Notes on Violence and Its Absence

"If we’d just talked to each other at the start, we wouldn’t be killing each other like this.

In the beginning, this story was so simple. Back when it was just a bunch of kids flying around and slashing titans. I would’ve been fine with it going down that road, but the fact that it escalated into such a nuanced take on caste systems and class dynamics means there’s no easy way to talk about this series. A centrepiece for this manga, though, occurs in Chapter 127 when Reiner reveals that Marco Bott’s last words were: “We haven’t even talked this out yet.” Marley and Eldia have entered into such violent ends based on assumptions and prejudice without trying to talk out a peace treaty. As I’m thinking about this, I remember British MP Jo Cox who said: “The thing that surprises me time and time again… is that we are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.” That some Eldian and Marleyan soldiers are able to unite forces and see past the limitations of their nationalistic beliefs speaks volumes. There is a moment where this realisation dawns even on Gabi (who if I had to hear say ‘island devils’, I would’ve run headfirst into Wall Rose). There is a moment of reckoning for Gabi and a few others where they come to terms with the truth that there are no devils, only people. This also brings to mind what Eren says to Ymir while in the Path: “You’re not a slave. You’re not a god either. You’re just a human being.”

Structure and Pacing
I would expect any serialised story to be less than perfectly-woven. The endgame isn't always clear from the beginning, throughlines can take a while to see develop... in all, I wouldn’t have blamed Isayama for a messy story structure in an epic that spanned a publication history of over ten years. The run, though, is tightly woven and remarkably self-aware of its trajectory. My largest issues with Attack on Titan involve its pacing. Looking at the series run, there is a narrative back-and-forth that isn't always the most fluid. Even in the beginning of the story, the manga puts the Training Corp sequence as a flashback while the anime reworked the scenes to be in linear time with the story. As the series progresses, the structuring tends to not get better as we see backstories and origins, or the strange and liminal plane of the Path, which complicates the overall story pacing. Add in a litany of those military strategy conversations—it didn’t always feel like Isayama had an endgame and he was taking us there. Several times, it felt like we were going down detours mostly headed in the right direction, or hearing ideas firing off until one of them stuck. The structure was never perfect. Yet, it's impressive how connected this story is, that in amidst the epic storytelling, there is both cohesion and momentum at the same time. The only plot element that I hated was Zeke’s spinal fluid wine. Come at me if you want, but I’ve seen dumb plot devices before and that was just… bad.

The Ending: Towards The Tree on That Hill
It's immeasurably difficult for epics to stick their landing, and I didn't expect to have this series have a graceful finale that tied together every loose strand and offered a graceful resolution. I knew as soon as Scouts were fighting titans on the back of a giant electric centipede skeleton a million miles in the air. The War for Paradis arc is bonkers and like so many others, I've been nostalgic for the early arcs where the story was still shrouded in mystery. The titans were a bizarre anomaly and not a catalyst for racial disparities in a caste system. There's something comforting about when the Scouts are together early on, a blissful ignorance of what violent futures they're about to enter into. The ending, while not a washout like in other fantasy epics, is more concerned with Eren and how the countries move towards freedom in his wake, rather than a decent ending for anyone that surrounded him. It doesn’t do right by all of its characters, and that is its central fault.

Closest to Eren, of course, was Mikasa, who throughout the run was written as strong in combat and whose allegiances meant something to her. It’s disappointing to see her relationship to Eren relegated to weary romance at the end. Reducing their connection to love and Eren’s desire to be remembered diminishes the nuance of Mikasa’s character, and while the last scene on the hill is lovely, it doesn’t repair Isayama’s sudden misunderstanding of Mikasa’s character in the last two chapters.

Everyone else Eren surrounded himself with—Levi, Jean, Connie, Armin—are written to just exist at the end, but after so many years spent with these Scouts, there needed to be something more. Not just a group of peace ambassadors, but where do their lives go from here? Does Connie still go back to Ragako? Levi is in a wheelchair when we last see him; does he ever get his health back? A well-placed potato to make us remember Sasha one last time. Simply put, what’s on the other side of peace? Ambassadorship is a decent place to land, but there’s more to these characters we’ll never see. For so much time spent with an ensemble, the end seems to forget most of the denouement rests on Eren and how everyone remembers him. It’s more or less a peaceful ending that fails to hold the depth it thinks it does. It’s an okay ending but whenever we actually get the ending to the anime, I hope the ending is reworked into something that feels more finalised.

Is the ending too quick to rush into peace? After 139 chapters (one short of 140 which in numerology symbolises freedom and self-actualisation), Marleyan citizens realise how they’ve fallen into prejudice and maybe now that the titans are gone, there’s no need to war any longer. Yet, it feels presumptive to think that after centuries of violence, both sides will suddenly be okay. And still, this is all I want, for both sides to be okay. There’s something meaningful about seeing everyone grow up. When the series started, they were kids enlisted into a war more massive than what they could understand. Throughout it, we see Eren trying to grapple with himself—the illustrious want for freedom, for revenge, to bury his memories. Isayama constantly denies us a redemptive arc and I think that’s what’s so painful. That we constantly want to bring Eren back from the edge and we can’t. He wants a more magnificent world than the one he's in. And at the end, is freedom more important than love? The two might be the same thing.