I was just going by the picture book of the Korean raws when I found them dropped. Saw a bunch of talky scenes with Armin, which was a big red flag for a final exposition dump, followed by everyone getting turned from titans back to humans and presumably the ghosts of Eldians showing up in the titan fog, followed by stuff like Armin with Annie, Levi getting pushed around by Gabi and Falco, etc. Then I saw the Mikasa scene and started laughing at implied birderen because it is such a tired cliche. Everyone outside of Mikasa got a reasonably happy ending for themselves in the span of like half a chapter after an exposition dump.
And then we get to the actual translations:
- The stuff with making Ymir accept the awful shit Fritz did to her and give her freedom somehow by manipulating Mikasa into killing Eren
- Eren forgetting why he killed 80% of the world (seems to be implying Ymir was controlling him through the Founding Titan power, but that leads to other problems)
- The Yaegerists won and Paradis is a militaristic dictatorship, so so much for freedom and getting along with what apparently remains of the world. I'm sure they are going to buy that the Island Devils can't turn into Titans anymore and make peace after the story claims most of their civilizations have been smeared on the ground. But look, Armin got with Annie, awwwww
- EREN KILLED HIS MOM instead of letting Berthold get eaten, which leads into
- Eren was never free and is implied to have been controlled by Ymir since he touched Historia's hand due to time paradox bullshit that shouldn't be introduced in the last chapter of a story. It's no different from some of the awful fan ideas to have Ymir show him that paths could let his consciousness travel back in time and make a bad ending just be a dream that he would wake up to again in some eternal return in the first chapter.
- This also makes the Mikasa stuff more infuriating because even if he was manipulated after getting the Founding Titan and touching Historia, he still acted cold to her for years of their lives. She would have banged him 20x a night at any time if he showed the slightest interest. His rejection of her obvious brocon intentions was the butt of jokes for years.
- I'm guessing the true intention is to imply that Ymir (or future Eren, although that doesn't explain the memory at the tree) manipulated Eren's (and likely all the Ackerman's through the Attack Titan's power to setup for future events) entire lives just to make Mikasa kill Eren so Ymir feels better about being treated like a slave by Fritz, which is a incomprehensible motivation that never gets a solid answer or conclusion. Just show Ymir fading out with a smile or something if you want to go the route that all of AoT was a therapy session. And don't introduce a giant worm thing (which starts acting as its own agent) that just vanishes as well.
- TBH, I never liked the Attack Titan's inheritance of future memories. For a series that was focused on freedom, having an ability that implies determinism is completely dumb. Combine that with the Founding Titan being able to affect the past and it becomes a mess, especially because Isayama said a lot of the series wasn't planned originally.
- How absurd it is that 80% of the 1920s-like world got destroyed in a day or so by slow moving stomping
- The rest of the world should be much more advanced than Paradis and already had heavy anti-Titan weaponry (implied to be bombs to counter the Colossal Titan) nearly ready to go, so Paradis and Eren's friends should realistically be fucked anyway even with the main crew getting happy endings
- Chekov's baby with Historia - not sure why that was inserted into the story so much aside from a Lost-style bait for something Isayama had half-baked and never followed through on.
I was expecting an actual downer ending with most of the team getting killed to stop Eren from destroying the world (which reasonably should still be mostly intact by the final fight), but with Historia leading a genuinely peaceful coalition using their sacrifices to prove that Eldians are not all monsters. Kind of a Code Geass-type ending where Eren made the focus on him rather than Eldians, which was set up in that convo he had with Pixis early in the series where Pixis paraphrases Reagan's famous UN "alien invasion" speech.
this is even worse of an ending than Lost
