The impossible problem of reviewing the ending of Attack on Titan is that there's way too goddamn much to talk about.
How could there not be? After ten years and close to a hundred episodes, after almost single-handedly jump-starting anime's mainstream takeover back when the first episode dropped in 2013, after so many twists and reversals that completely flip your perspective on what kind of show you're ever watching, Attack on Titan has become, fittingly enough, one of the most colossal media properties on the planet. It's a story that bursts at the seams with ideas and messages and Things Worth Talking About, and far from putting a nice neat bow on things, the ending somehow only explodes further outward with discussion-worthy topics. I can pick out at least four separate moments just from the final 30 minutes that could support an entire thesis paper all on their own. I could talk about its portrayal of fascism and genocide, its ultimate statement on the nature of war, its portrayal of trauma bonds, its observations on the cyclical nature of generational violence, whether or not it's ultimately hopeful or cynical, how the characters' final choices echo all the way back to their first appearances... and I still wouldn't cover everything meaningful there is to talk about in this two-part two-and-a-half-hour showstopper finale. I could spend all week writing analyses of Attack on Titan's ending and there would still be more to cover. Even trying to figure out how to tackle this monstrosity feels as overwhelming as staring up at the Colossal Titan itself.
But perhaps that's only fitting. Over the years, Attack on Titan has remained one of the boldest, bravest, most staggeringly ambitious properties to ever come out of anime, swinging for the fences as relentlessly as the Beast Titan's rocky barrages of death, never taking the easy way out of an impossible question or desperate situation. It's survived a sea-chance in the landscape of the medium that it itself helped usher in, gone through so many permutations of genre and form and production, yet never once lost its luster. From the first sight of Eren's home being destroyed to the final, haunting shots of this finale, Attack on Titan has been one of the most important anime of all time. So of course its finale would demand just as much of us as the rest of the show. Of course it wouldn't be satisfied if it didn't go out with one last jaw-dropper outing that blew everything you thought you knew out of the water. Of course it would close out its domination of the anime sphere just as inescapable and undeniable as when it first stomped on our screens 10 years ago. After the incredible journey it's taken us on, I wouldn't expect anything less.
Still, I've got to try and say something. This is the end of one of anime's defining properties, the epic conclusion to a story that stands head and shoulders above all its contemporaries. I can't let that occasion pass without commemorating the way it chose to close things out. Just know that this review in no way captures the full extent of my thoughts on the finale, in no way portrays all the countless whirling ideas it inspires in me. There will be time in the future, perhaps, to explore all its nuances in more depth, to give proper space and weight to the thousand component parts making up this massive whole.
For now, though?
For now, I simply want to celebrate the end of one of my favorite anime series of all time.
For brevity's sake, I won't spend too much time on the first two hours of breathless action that make up the majority of these two super-long episodes. There are far more interesting things to talk about in the final act, and I simply don't have time to dig into anything more. All I'll say is that this final battle was Attack on Titan operating at the absolute peak of its powers, and it was truly something to behold. For all the chaos that's historically plagued this series' production, Wit and Mappa alike, this was an absolute masterpiece of a climactic showdown. Stunning action fit to stand with all the series' most iconic moments, heartwrenching grief and tragedy in the face of armageddon, characters barely escaping death and facing down the apocalypse with all their strength, refusing to yield against impossible odds no matter how many walls stand in their way. I can't count the number of times I cheered in delirious glee or broke down in tears from the sheer majesty of it all. As spectacle, as mission statement, as payoff for ten years of escalating action and human drama, it's an unimpeachable triumph.
And then we reach the denoument. The battle ends, the day is saved, the war is over, the bloodshed has stopped, the centuries of pain and suffering the world has endured finally takes a long, haggard breath of fresh air. The Rumbling has been stopped. Eren has been defeated. Peace, at long last, has prevailed.
And then the show throws one more curveball.
Ever since the manga ended, I've been hearing how much manga readers hated it. I've seen every insult under the sun slung its way, seen it called the worst ending of all time, an insult to the series and everyone who loved it. But I've always had my doubts. Considering how Loudly Wrong so many of these people were about many other things, how many of their criticisms seemed to boil down to being annoyed at Eren not being venerated as a gigachad and treated like the deranged psychopath he actually was, I had a sneaking suspicion the hate was overblown nonsense. And while I've heard the adaptation changes a few lines here and there to maybe make some of the final scenes less clunky, if the finale I watched in the show was anything like the finale in the manga, then I can only conclude my skepticism was right. Far from destroying the story or insulting the fanbase, this ending is one of the single most audacious and ambitious ways I've ever seen a mainstream anime conclude. It's an ending that could only come from a creative spirit dedicated not just to writing a cool story, but creative capital-a Art(tm). And long after the Twitter salt of the moment has faded, it will linger in my mind as the punctuation mark that seals this series' legacy until the end of time.
It's maddeningly hard to discuss why without spoilers, but I'll do my best. In short, Eren's plan actually kind of ends up succeeding... in a way that only reveals how pointless it was to begin with. The world is left irreparably scarred by the Rumbling in ways that we are told and shown, in no uncertain terms, will only ensure the cycle of violence will continue long after the concept of Titans themselves have faded from memory. The best way I can describe it is a dark subversion of Lelouch's famous gambit from the finale of Code Geass. In that show, Lelouch took all the world's evil upon himself to give the world a common enemy, sacrificing his own life to unite the warring nations in a desire to defeat him. Here, Eren does much the same thing... but it only leaves the world more broken and insecure than when he started. All the madness he inflicted, all the carnage he wrought, and in the end, all he accomplished was guaranteeing an uncertain, unstable peace that we have no way of knowing how long it lasted before things once again fell to ruin.
On the surface, it's a bitter, bleak ending that spits in the face of all our heroes' hard work. And yet, it's also the most strangely honest portrayal of humanity I've seen in a long time. What this finale gets right about Eren- what all those screaming fanboys were so pants-pissingly angry about- is that he's not some maniacal genius or machiavellan mastermind. In his own words, he's just a garden-variety idiot, an ordinary person with ordinary fallibility and biases and prejudices who was given far more power than he could handle. Right up to the end, he was a scared, lonely boy wearing the hollow shell of mature, stoic rage as a shield from the pain he could never process. He was weak. He was foolish. He was immature and scared and completely unequipped to handle the incredible responsibility of holding the world's fate in the palm of his hand.
Now you tell me: what end result could such a person achieve, if not this ugly, imperfect half-measure?
The truth is, violent individuals in our real world aren't grand schemers like Lelouch who always have the answers and make everyone dance in the palm of their hand. They're people like Eren; flawed, broken, consumed by hatred, making irrational decisions off imperfect assumptions and forcing everyone else to deal with the consequences. Eren doesn't fail because of character assassination, or because the mystical future sight be picked up from the Founding Titan told him so. He fails because no matter how many times he runs through the future in his head, his hatred leaves him incapable of seeing any path forward that doesn't involve annihilation. His fate was not set in stone by intangible destiny, but by his own inability to accept a peaceful path when his heart screamed endlessly for blood. This messy, transient, tenuous peace is the best that someone like him could hope to accomplish. It's a miracle he ended up with a result that good, and that's only because his friends were brave enough and strong enough to stop his hatred in its tracks before it could completely swallow the world whole.
But that messy, transient, tenuous result is what we're left with. All the chaos of the past ten years, and we're left not with closure, but uncertainty. How long will this hold out before the cycle of violence begins anew? How much peace did we earn through such miserable ends? What, if anything, can be done to ensure the next turn of the cycle doesn't end up like this? What better ways were there to keep this from happening in the first place?
What do you do when the answer you've been looking for only leaves you with more questions?
This ambiguity, in all its raw messiness, is the ultimate message of Attack on Titan. This is not a story where the heroes save the day and defeat hatred and save the world for good. This is a story where the heroes do the best they can and accomplish as much as they're able... and then leave us to reckon with the failures they left behind. It's not even really a nihilistic ending; as bleak as it seems on the surface, there are countless moments of hope and light that speak to humanity's desire for love over hatred. Like all the great tragedies of the world, it doesn't claim that humanity is irredeemable and we can never escape our flaws. Instead, it forces us to consider how easy it can be to fall short of our ideals, and how much pain and misery they leave in their wake. It shows us the consequences of giving in to hatred not as an inescapable fact of humanity, but as a warning of what we sacrifice when we lack the courage to prevent our darker instincts from directing our actions. It takes these characters and this world you've fallen in love with for a full decade and, rather than bidding them happily after after, asks you to carry the weight of their failures into your own life, a reminder for every single time you're tempted to let blind rage guide your own actions from now on. "This is what their lives have amounted to," the show says. "Don't let your own life go the same way."
I've watched a lot of anime over the years. Since I started getting into it back in 2017, I've tackled countless series and movies with all different kinds of endings. But I don't think I've ever seen one that so perfectly nailed this kind of hopeful, agonizing ambiguity. I don't think I've ever seen a show commit to an ending this uncompromising or pull it off so astoundingly, let alone in a series this long. And in an anime industry that more and more seeks to only pursue the safest, least threatening options, flattening this medium's remarkable creative potential with art that doesn't say anything or mean anything, the fact that this, of all ways, is how the most popular anime on the face of the planet chose to end its tale is nothing short of remarkable. Attack on Titan is a runaway success story of epic proportions, a single anime that arguably paved the way for the medium's increasing mainstream popularity. And it married that mainstream success with a story that dared to ask hard questions of its audience and send them home with a plea to see their own world a little deeper rather than half-ass a happy ending for easy closure. It's the rare mega-popular franchise that didn't have to sacrifice an inch of depth or complexity to appeal to the broadest common demoninator. And it accomplished all that while still being a never-ending thrill ride of sheer entertainment value the likes of which we may never see again.
It's easy to be cynical about anime once you've watched too much of it. Honestly, I find myself struggling a lot these days to keep the bad parts of this medium from swallowing my enjoyment of it. But in an anime landscape that too often settles for taking the path of least resistance, Attack on Titan is a soaring reminder of what it looks like to be brave. It's a series that never compromised on itself, never gave anything less than 100%, and never once lost its magic through all its ups and downs. It represents the overwhelming power that anime is capable of when it trusts its audience to follow it off the beaten path and face more challenging questions than whether Ultra-Instinct Goku can beat Gear 5 Luffy. It's an achievement as staggering and colossal as any of the titans within Isayama's pages. And this ending, in all its powerful uncertainty, only cements its legacy as one of the single greatest works of art ever produced by this medium, and one my my new personal top 10 anime of all time.
I wish I had time and space to keep talking. I wish I could go in-depth about the show's willingness to let Eren be truly pathetic in hilarious fashion. I wish I could write an essay about Mikasa and Ymir's parallels as women trapped by their irrational love for monstrous men and why that makes Mikasa's final choice so fucking impactful. I wish I could go into every last detail of that ending montage and all the implications it raises about the future of this world. But there will be time later to dig into the guts of this ending and truly pick it apart. There will be time aplenty to appreciate all the moments that make this show such a titan in its own right. For now, all I can say is this:
Thank you.
To Isayama, to all the voice actors, to all the staff at Wit and Mappa who were forced to work unreasonable schedules to bring this story to life, to every hand that touched this series and ensured its continued majesty all the way to the end... thank you. I dedicate my heart to you.
Attack on Titan is over.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
And I feel fine.
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