Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Attack on Titan The Final Season
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Covnam
 Posts: 3650 |
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Saw the flags, but it still hit me. RIP Sasha
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16935 |
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As I just said, yes for 24 hours at this point. The problem is we've had an increasing amount of reports that the spoilers are doing just that, spoiling things for people. Yes the episode was out but expecting everyone to have watched it immediately as it aired is just ridiculous. When it comes to such big events in the show it's just considerate to give people a 24 hour window to see the episode. Generally it takes roughly that long for the review to get up anyways in most cases. Your post was simply removed because there was nothing else to it beyond "RIP Sasha". Getting that riled up over it is really disproportionate to the issue man. So let's move on. As a reminder to all we've expected tags on source material all of the time, and that has not changed. We've had enough reports on that as well in this thread over the course of this season. |
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Turro
Posts: 75 Location: México |
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Great review this week James. I will look to read the novel you quoeted.
From this point things just get darker and darker. |
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Yuvelir
 Posts: 1558 |
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Oh damn I feel dumb, I didn't quite catch on a single one of those. I did notice that Yelena didn't try to lure Zeke but I guessed she was trying to avoid detection by giving up on someone who might be out of her league. As for Eren, I thought he was being arrogant and considering Levi the only one worthy of being an opponent lol. I also remember that line about saving Eren from "the lies of their father" but... was he already plotting all this back then? Because at the time he seemed more than willing to completely crush all of Paradis. As for the baseball, in hindsight it should have been obvious that the relative that gave that to him was his brother, specially after the last two episodes made it clear that he was not in direct contact with any of the Scouts. I initially assumed that it was a gift from either Cony or Jean. That's a pretty morbid joke from Zeke's part. {Mod Edit}: I edited your post. I made the rules and situation clear. Trying to poke at it with bait to keep the issue going is ill-advised. You can think whatever you want, but the rules are there and I made the reasoning why clear. End of discussion. ~ Psycho 101 |
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Doodleboy
Posts: 296 |
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There are some double-meanings I didn't catch the first time around when I read this part of the manga.
Namely, Eren's line of (paraphrasing) "Outside and inside the walls are the same.". He didn't just mean the people. There are still people who want to invade and commit genocide in his home. People are still being facing oppression and discrimination. A system of exploitation and hatred that is far harder to dismantle than the Titans. Whether oppression comes from Titans or from people, it's all the same. And facing this hopeless situation the only thing Eren can do is point across the ocean and say "Maybe if we kill everyone who is in our way, there will be a better world on the other side.". Which is you know, futile on the face of it. spoiler[Anyhow like I said earlier, I still unironically like Gabi. She is a critique of Eren Jaeger and his desire to murder the demonic other. Her murder of Sasha is very much the show saying "Feel that pain? Yes, this is what the attitude of Eren Jaeger gets you.". Not that I think Gabi is in the right here and yes some of the attitudes she spouts is genuinely awful. ] spoiler[Particularly her ignoring what Marley did to Eldia in the past, which is an attitude I don't have patience for in real-life. Attack on Titan feels like an exploration of this denialism and near-sightedness. Half the story is the characters trying to figure out their real history despite the people in power wanting to keep that quiet. Gabi's denial of what Marley did to Eldia because she didn't see it echos a lot of denialism that happens in real-life (although usually from people who have less trauma and are in more privileged positions than Gabi herself). ] spoiler[I think one of the more valuable themes that this series has is the necessity of knowing that history, especially the ugly parts, because ignoring it allows these atrocities to perpetuate, and it's only through seeing these power-structures clearly you can attempt to dismantle them. Even if the metaphor is a bit clunky and problematic at times. Honestly, I think the character that is the most hatable in Attack on Titan is Floch, as he turns pretty fascist here. There are some good directing choices here, namely, the shot of the Survey Corps faces as they beat up Gabi and Falco in revenge. Titan-like in their animalistic rage. ] |
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Stiles
 Posts: 105 |
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Gabi is just an awful character who only exists to be an Eren surrogate. Her only purpose is to engender a sense of empathy for the evil (Marley) faction. Shame they didn't kill her on the spot or chuck her off the airship, as she deserved.
Marco was killed for less. |
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Minos_Kurumada
Posts: 1006 |
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Actually, that was part of the problem, the sound effect was "hehehehe"... which could be anything. |
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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If we need to use spoiler tags for both the most recent episode for 24 hours after it airs and manga details that haven’t been adapted yet, it would help if we label them.
Great episode and profound review! War is Cyclical Hell, indeed. The only point I’d argue with is that I didn’t get the impression that Jean or the higher ups really blamed Gabi. The higher ups seemed to explicitly blame Eren for Sasha’s death, and Jean seemed more frustrated and exhausted than angry. I won’t add to these quotes on war, but I want to repost them:
On Gabi and the story’s themes (manga spoilers)
On Gabi (manga spoilers) spoiler[ I really like her arc, her growing realization that “Island Devils” are just ordinary people. It wouldn’t work if she didn’t start out the completely buying into everything the Marley military taught her. But I think it does work, even if she’s not perfectly sympathetic by the end. ] On the story’s themes spoiler[ I *hope* you’re right and the moral will reinforce the idea that even the ugly parts of history must be remembered and taught. There’s another possibility that the story will claim that forcing kids to learn about past atrocities somehow implicated them and is oppressive and propagandistic in and if itself. Marley justifies it’s discrimination against Eldians by reminding them of how Eldia mistreated Marley, and Eren justifies his attack on Liberio in part by reminding Reiner (and telling Falco) how Reiner & company attacked Paradis. So far, the story seems to be saying that being kept ignorant of the past is problematic, but history can be weaponized, too. ] |
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Pipoko
Posts: 165 |
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I really appreciate AoT for expressing complex ideas in concise ways. I think this is one of the reasons it caught on so well that isn't cited much.
This chapter/episode shows the morally ambiguous nature of war just by making the cause of the big tragedy be several different parties with understandable human reactions (keeping in mind, human doesn't necessary mean morally good reaction). You don't need stuff like Evangelion's bloated prose to do this. Just recontextualise points of view through visual storytelling and parallels. And the moral ambiguity is interesting in the sense that several fractions lead to Sasha's death, but they can actually all be traced back to one place. Eren presumably did this because Marley had a plan to destroy Paradis within the next few years for resources. He retaliated before they could. The warriors attacking Paradis in turn did what they did because of Marley's brainwashing and their desperation to survive. Gabi did this because her friends died and also Marley's brainwashing. There are individual reasons for characters doing what they do here, but each problem can also be traced back to Marley and more specifically the oppressive system created by Marley. I think this is where the idea people keep proposing that there is no longer good or bad guys in this story comes from. There are characters that can't see beyond themselves because of brainwashing and the society they live in, characters that play into this oppressive system because of their circumstances. How can you be beyond any brainwashing if you're never given the opportunity to see outside of it? So the hate for Gabi is just really interesting to me because I think much of it comes from a similar place Gabi's character comes from. The inability to see different perspectives and complexities of the world. I think exploring this idea is basically probably the main point of this story. So hating Gabi seems like it's missing the point of the story to me. Well, not even hating, but not even looking at why she is doing what she is doing and understanding it. And much of that isn't her character's fault because while we as the audience are given perspective, Gabi (and the rest of the warriors) aren't and undoing that programming isn't very easy, either. But the good news is that it's much easier for children because they've spent much less time under this oppressive system than any of the older characters and they haven't had as much time to stew in it. We already see it with Falco even before any of this because someone from his family (Grice, who was working with Grisha) was sent to Paradis and logically he would be a little more cynical than the others. As said in my other posts, I think there isn't necessarily both sides-ing happening here narratively, as much as I think the big enemy is actually the oppressive system and all Eldians are victims of it and react to it in human ways. |
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Johan Eriksson 9003
Posts: 281 |
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It is kind of a surreal fandom experience when your favorite character dies and somehow the one who killed them worms their way into being your new favorite character.
I genuinely don't get why people say Gabi is "made to be unlikable". Even if you don't find the little murder-gremlin persona endearing we get to see her perspective so clearly that I never could help but love her. She has all the righteous fury of Eren with a lot more personality to boot and her existence adds a lot more nuance to Eren himself. If anything she is designed to be likable to fully help us understand just how much more complicated this war became once it was no longer about the titans. And she is now in a prime position to learn that lesson herself, hopefully before she becomes like Eren is now. Honestly, considering all of her similarities with Eren and how he never got this much hate, I can't help but think sexism plays a pretty big role in the online hate for this character. |
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Kirki
Posts: 296 |
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Nah. Well at least not for most people. Eren has been the protagonist from the beginning, we went into his story blind, and spent 3 seasons on his journey. Eren has been annoying to many since the beginning of the show, but he never got much hatred because his first kills were against human traffickers and not a girl we've seen and been endeared to for 67 episodes. (Nobody hated Gabi when she killed unnamed soldiers) It's completely normal to dislike Gabi at this point of the story, but also completely normal to sympathize with her and understand her motivations. The fact that she works as Eren's mirror because of her temperament and her motivation for revenge, should make her an object of pity and not hatred, but anger is more than understandable as well. The reasons are not sexist, after all AoT as a series never differentiated between its male and female characters in any way. I am sure that someone who started the series at season 4 would have a completely different opinion on Gabi than most right now. That being said, some people do tend to take this too far with hating a fictional character. I wonder if they think that makes them funny or something. Boy, I have seen things that aren't healthy going around. I guess that being a big fanbase has its bad parts... {Mod edit}: I removed a comment of yours. We don't need flame bait insults that only rile people up and do not help the discussion. ~ Psycho 101 |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4082 |
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Hearing of Sasha's death as an unmarked spoiler ... years ago at this point.... was one of the things that turned me off of this series. The writer couldn't kill off a main character but it also couldn't have been a random mook so Sasha Blouse took the bullet... literally in this case.
For a series that has been feeding of off of "death is cheap" since the first episode, why did this one bother me over the rest? Because it's a death that didn't mean anything that was tried to turn into a death that meant something... even in this article, that's just embarrassing... when the death was just a storytelling device to build up a newer character. Advice to writers: Plot armor is best when it's invisible, not when it's ignored. |
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Yuvelir
Posts: 1558 |
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Not every death can be meaningful. That's the point. Her death was meaningless, unnecessary, an effect of a perpetuated war. |
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Nordhmmer
Posts: 1028 |
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Really? Sexism? Just trying to get a rise? Have you a passing familiarity with the source material the manga, or even the occasional online Q&As the author has with his fans? The fandom "hate" for Floch & Yelena is on the same level as that for Gabi. Most folks simply do not like fanatics,sexism plays no part. Gabi is disliked by a large portions of the fanbase,again, simply because most folks find her actions,and future actions, just not likable. |
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Minos_Kurumada
Posts: 1006 |
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Oh, this is a literary trick: When you include a new character and you want him to take a big part in your history you can be quite sure a chunk of the fanbase will hate him since he will be stealing camera from older characters. So, what you do? You make him unlikeable on purpose in order to control the hate, if you control the hate you create a character that people love to hate, "Absorb" the hate from other characters, can make the character grow on the areas the fanbase hate to make the character likeable, you can also make him sympathetic so people hate him yet understand him too. This is actually the trick that was used in Star Wars: Clone Wars to make Asoka likeable, the writer made her to be unlikeable on purpose in season 1, later, he developed the character and now she is a fan favorite. Right now, Gaby is a character that people love to hate or also a sympathetic antagonist since, at the end, she is just a brainwashed kid, she also absorbs hate from Falco. Isayama can keep her like that or develop her into a likeable character creating a great character arc from a fanatic to a proper individual as he wishes. |
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