Attack on Titan Manga Meta – Chapter 128 Review

[Warning: Contains spoilers] 

I breathed a deep sigh of relief over this chapter; it was such a loud and conspicuous sigh I’m pretty sure it was heard the world over. None of our beloved characters died! Yey! Another month of them living, whew!

Now on to the meat of things.

This is my favorite panel in the chapter. I totally agree with Kiyomi here. She says that eliminating everyone outside of the island won’t bring peace, because the surviving people will simply continue killing each other.

From a rationalist perspective, humans are innately aggressive beings with political motivations. The great philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that man desires to dominate other human beings, so there is no security of survival. Anthony Storr, a psychiatrist, wrote that our physio-chemical system responds to threat thereby producing violent behaviour, especially when there is frustration. Robert Ardrey, a playwright and anthropologist, wrote that human beings, in order to satisfy needs for identity, security and release from boredom, engage in war.

In other words, we are born violent. As Hobbes is famous for saying, the state of nature is every man against every man.

Here Yelena remarks to Levi that violence really can’t be taken away from human beings. Levi, raised by an infamous assassin and going on to live a life steeped in violence, understands this more than anyone.

So there really is no hope for humans: we are violent by nature. It doesn’t matter whether there are billions of us or only two left on the planet. We will still fight each other to the death. What despicable creatures we homo sapiens are! One of the things I love about the Attack on Titan manga is that it portrays humanity in all its loathsome ignominy.

I’ve written about it in my fanfic Between a Rock and a Hard Place, published on 24 March 2020, before this manga chapter came out. In Chapter 5 of my story, Armin and Jean discuss the never-ending conflict that hounds them, and come to the conclusion that even if Eren did indeed destroy the world, there won’t be peace, the conflict will go on because they’ll simply fight amongst themselves. 

The Fascist is on a Roll

Every story needs a villain and Floch is really in his element: drunk on power, the ultimate ruthless, cruel dictator. Who’d have thought that the kid complaining about Eren and Jean making a racket in the mess hall will turn into this trigger-happy asshole tyrant? 

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Floch is now the face of fascism: nationalism carried to the extreme. Fascists believe that some human beings, race-wise, are better than others. He wants not only all Eldians but also Kiyomi and other non-Eldians to put themselves in the service of his organization (a fascist state in the making) so that they, the Eldian Empire, can engage in perpetual warfare to impose their dominion on the world. He wants Eldians to take the largest possible share of life’s rewards. In this manner Floch represents the characteristics of a fascist state: absolute discipline and strict hierarchy of power (with him at the pinnacle, of course), militarism, and glorification of the leader (supposedly Eren, but really, Floch wants his own large piece of the pie) carried to the ultimate extreme.

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” - Lord Acton

How the core 104th and the remaining veterans will end Floch’s fascist aspirations will be the ultimate test of Isayama’s skills as a mangaka. Will Isayama take the easy road? The easy road is an arcade game-inspired solution where the player triumphs when he kills all his enemies, you know, the simple video game where the goal is to frantically shoot everyone in sight, requiring very little complex thinking, puzzle solving, or strategy skills. This is the simplistic solution preferred by everyone cheering on Eren to simply destroy every single living soul outside of Paradis. Very straightforward resolution to a complicated problem, but the favored outcome by middle-school kids who are unable to comprehend that the intricately characterized, defty constructed, multi-layered AoT universe is not an arcade game. It’s better than that, or at least, that’s what I like to believe.

Floch might kill the core 104th (except for Mikasa, of course, as she’s pretty much invincible) but if he does then I hope he’ll die in Eren’s hands. I believe he doesn’t understand Eren’s true motivation for destroying the world: the fact that he wants to protect his friends, his chosen family. He’s said they are the most important in the world to him, more than anyone. The people Eren considers most precious to him are: Historia, Mikasa, Armin, Jean and Connie. So when we have Floch ordering his gang to kill them…well WTF. Is Eren going to forgive him for that? Will Eren let him get away with it? I don’t think so.

Or maybe that’s the lesson in this manga, the end game: Eren destroys the world to protect his friends, his family, but it turns out that they all die in the hands of the self-appointed Eren spokesperson, Floch. How’s that for a big slap in the face? 

I don’t want it to end that way, of course. Eren’s heart is still in the right place; that’s the hope I want to cling to until the very end of the manga. He’s not destroying the world because he hates it, he’s destroying the world because the world hates his friends and family. All he ever wants to do is keep them alive, give them a happy life. He may be morally wrong in his method of attaining this peace, but there’s still hope that he (along with Historia) has a less drastic, less genocidal plan in place.

Or maybe not.

Not Your Fault

At last, Magat has come to his senses, finally said what he knew all along. There are plenty of despicable Marleyans in the world but Magat isn’t one of them. He’s one of the better ones, the one with a conscience.

Blaming Eldians and Paradis for the world’s problems has run its course. The world refusing to give Paradis a chance to negotiate for peace has made Eren snap and brought them to this Armageddon-like situation. And as Magat says in the above panel, none of the 104th are to blame for the root cause of the conflict in the first place. Reiner, Bertholdt and Annie were literally brainwashed kids when tasked with destroying the walls. Eren, Mikasa, Armin, Jean and Connie weren’t even born when their ancestors wrought havoc in the world. How long should children shoulder the blame for the sins of their ancestors? 

This is the question that in the real world, countries like Japan and Germany are faced with. If we think of other empires throughout human history (the early Roman Empire, the 13th-14th century Mongol Empire, the 17th-20th century British Empire, the 15th-19th century Spanish Empire and so on and so forth), every single one of them engaged in war, the unlimited use of violence in the service of the state, as a means to an end. All of them exercised the unrestrained use of force to attain a political goal, leaving untold death and destruction in their wake. Yet no one is really blaming these empires for all the current problems in the world. Japan and Germany, defeated in the last world war, are still taking blame and making amends, but that’s because less than a century has passed since the war and memories are still relatively fresh. 

In the case of the Eldian Empire, which ruled for two thousand years, we cannot even begin to imagine the extent of the mayhem they must have caused. But then, because history is always written by winners (in the AoT universe, the winner is Marley) we don’t know where the truth ends and where the lies begin. Was the Eldian Empire as evil as they are made? Or did the empire’s benevolence offset their violence? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. 

As Earthlings we have little in terms of historical frames of reference. The famous empires I mentioned previously only ruled for hundreds of years at most. Two thousand years is a very long time. The closest thing we have to such a lengthy rule is not state-based but religion-based, Christianity in particular. Putting aside my personal belief that organized religion is the root of all evil, I think we can mostly agree that while wars fought in the name of Christendom brought incalculable death and destruction to millions of people, the cultural and social contributions of Christianity to the betterment of humanity cannot be ignored. It was Christianity that put us in the Dark Ages, and Enlightenment that brought us out of it. But Enlightenment was made possible on the foundations brought by the economic prosperity acquired through the spoils of wars fought in the name of Christendom. So the ‘bad’ has led to the ‘good’, and the ‘good’ was predicated on the ‘bad.’

Applying this religion-based frame of reference to the AoT universe is tricky because we don’t seem to have what Samuel Huntington termed as the “Clash fo Civilizations.” A civilization is founded upon religion, history, culture and language. In Huntington’s thesis, the Western civilization (based on Christianity) will clash with non-Western civilizations, and this clash of cultures will be the main source of conflict in our post-WWII world. 

What is interesting in the AoT universe is that Marley (similar to a Roman empire in Earth history) and Eldia (similar to a Germanic empire in Earth history) are both “Western” when seen from the eyes of Earthlings. So basically we have two Western nations fighting for supremacy, for the authority to lead Western civilization against the rest of the world. The closest frame of reference we have as Earthlings are the early 19th century Napoleonic Wars, where we saw France vs the UK (usually) along with an assortment of other Western nations.

The One Who Saves the World

Going back to the AoT universe… Right now, despite their ageing technology, Marley reigns supreme thanks to their titan weapons of war. If Eren takes away the power of Eldians to titanize, both Marley and Paradis will be left completely defenseless. The rest of the world can then proceed to destroy them, and it would be the end of Western civilization as we know it.

But as long as Eldians can titanize there will be no peace in their world. For a true peace to come about Eren will have to remove this power, and Armin will have to come up with a way for them (Marley and Paradis both) to survive without this power. And this, my friends, is how Armin will save the world, as Eren declared on a roof at Shiganshina one fateful night.

I think Armin’s plan failing in this chapter is meant to fool us into believing that all is hopeless and that he has nothing else up his sleeve. But at the very end, when push truly comes to shove, I’m sure he’ll come up with something viable. Eren can see into the future; I doubt he meant it lightly (or merely out of desperation) when he made that claim to save Armin’s life in Shiganshina.

Speaking of which, I have vested interest in such an ending because my novela, War and Reminisces: The Jean Kirschtein Chronicles is predicated on it. It is a post-canon story but I want to make it as canon-compliant as possible, and this wish can only come true if the above ending happens.

Anyway, other things I found interesting in this chapter:

• Magat starts torturing Yelena for information, but Onyankopon and Hange stop him. Magat glances at Gabi, who looks down from her perch, horrified. Magat has a repentant look on his face. These two have a connection, as we have seen also in the previous chapter. What could it be?
  
• Jean, despite all that he has been through, still refuses to kill his marauding comrades, his old schoolmates. Will this aversion to killing be the end of him? Will he get the chance to kill Floch but refuses to do so, ending up with him being killed instead? Floch certainly won’t hesitate to kill him or any of the core 104th. Please don’t die, Jean! If Isayama kills him off I think I shall lose the will to live! xD
  
• Reiner flashes back to Eren in Marley saying that the two of them are similar, that they’re on the same boat, would have done the same things. He realizes that Eren was speaking for himself and not his friends. This prods Reiner to make an offer: he’ll let the core 104th off the hook, as long as they don’t keep him and Annie from fighting the Jaegerists. Armin doesn’t bite, prepares to get his hands dirty, but his plan fails. That’s because none of the core 104th are ready for the trade-off: in order to save the world, they would have to kill their own people. 
  
• But then we have poor Connie, only wanting to make his mum proud of him. He’s saved Armin’s life before, and he’s done it again. He’s gotten his hands dirty in a kill or be killed situation. I wonder, though, what his driving force is. Why is he bent on saving the world? On moral grounds? Out of guilt? Or was it plain friendship: wanting to save Armin’s life? I hope Connie doesn’t die. I hope he finds Zeke and feeds him to his mother so that she could return to normal, before Eren removes the titanization powers of Eldians. 
  
• Kiyomi shows Mikasa that she is also badass, and thus related to her in every way, not just in terms of race and hair color.

It was overall a ほっとした ‘hotto shita’ chapter. I’m just relieved my babies aren’t dead (yet).

Thank you so much for reading! Please consider sharing a thought or two in the comment section below. Your comments give me life and are a real source of encouragement. xoxo, hana

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