snkception:

So I know everyone’s moved on to ch101 and attendant spoilers, but I’ve still got shit to say about ch100, and experience proves that if I don’t say it when I have it at the tip of my tongue, I will say it never. So! Now it is. And what I wanted to discuss was the politics of everything–Willy Tybur and internal Marley stuff and, most importantly, the fate of Eldians, their standing in the world and where Willy saw all of it heading.

In the previous few chapters, we’ve been told that Marley has been using Eldians and their titan abilities in order to impose their will on other countries. With titans at their disposal and canon fodder in the form of Eldians in trenches, Marley has risen to world hegemony with few actual Marleyans being harmed in the process. It’s those disposable Eldians who hurt and bleed and do the dirty work; Marleyans just enjoy the fruit of their labours.

The rest of the world is aware of this. However, rather than seeing Eldians as sad and oppressed by Marley, they see them as Marley’s terrifying, inhuman tools. An enemy soldier rescued by Eldian kids on the battlefield demands that they don’t touch him, lest they corrupt him with their devilry. And we have an account telling us that life for Eldians outside of Marley is even worse than the degrading treatment they get here:

So, the standing of Eldians in the world: not good. They’re hated by everyone and have literally no allies. 

And recently, the balance of power in the world has been shifting–but this too will not play out in the Eldians’ favour. In short: with Marley having recently lost the Colossus and the Female Titan and with technology advancing in other countries, winning wars is becoming increasingly more difficult for the glorious motherland. Already, weapons are emerging that can pose a threat to the Armoured Titan, and chances are Marley won’t be able to maintain its military supremacy much longer. 

For Marleyans, this means some navel-gazing about What Can Be Done, resulting in a decision–strongly advocated by Zeke–to fight Paradis so as to get the Coordinate back asap and thereby get a power-up that would carry them until they could catch up technologically.

For Eldians, the question is existential. If their usefulness to Marley is reaching an expiration date, what’s going to happen to them? If everyone hates them and nobody needs them–what’s their future?

This is a problem which troubles Willy Tybur as well, and that’s when we finally circle back to ch100.

The Tybur family has been to Marley what the Fritz/Reiss family has been to Paradis: holding a lot of power, and yet refraining from using it, just watching from above, untouchable. Until Willy, who, for all that he experiences inner angst about his place in the world as an Eldian and a Tybur, has a lot of feelings about moving forward and changing the world. Willy’s general feelings are: Marley is a mess; the Eldians are screwed; and both are the Tybur family’s fault, because they just stood by and let things deteriorate. Well, no more!

Willy hasn’t just gallivanted about the world and rubbed shoulders with the rich and powerful for his own personal enjoyment; he’s made a deliberate effort to befriend these people as an Eldian. So that at some later point in the future he could stand in front of them and say: I am Willy Tybur, someone you know and love; and Eldian blood runs in my veins, so if you see me as human, can’t you extend it to the other Eldians too?

Willy’s performance began long before he mounted the stage in Liberio. But what we saw up on the stage was the coup de grâce.

His plan, in a nutshell, was to get the world’s sympathy for Eldians everywhere by throwing the Paradisians under the bus. And that’s the central part: Willy doesn’t seem to hate the Paradisians, as such, or need them gone for ideological reasons. He didn’t go up on stage to advocate their demise. No, he went up there to advocate the other Eldians’ survival, and he saw Paradis’s demise as integral to that.

This is not what the Marleyan military brass believed him to be doing. Willy led them to think that the point of the exercise was to make a sales pitch on behalf of Marley to the rest of the world about how great it would be to get rid of Paradis. The actual content of his speech was news to everybody.

Well, I say everybody, but Willy did have allies in the know. One of them was Miss Kiyomi. Another, of course, was Magath.

Willy’s relationship with Magath reminded me, at times, of Erwin’s with Pixis, mostly because it featured a Terrifyingly Determined Person conspiring with an Experienced Military Commander Aware of the Shitty Things He’d Done and Wanting the Best for His Country. (Though naturally Willy is conspiring from a very different place than Erwin, and with very different goals.) Willy seemed to have picked Magath as the only one among the higher-ups who was both competent and in possession of a conscience, and basically tasked him with reorganizing the military. In their quaint code, it was referred to as “home expansion.”

In other words: a lot of the military brass is crap and needs removal, but there are good people doing good work; and according to those people, some Paradis spies have already crossed over and infiltrated Marley.

This changes things for Willy. It tells him that he’s very nearly too late–that Paradis might strike before Marley has mounted an attack. And it tells him also that his performance will be played on a knife’s edge: with that many prominent Marleyans gathered in one place, himself included, it’s the perfect time for the Paradis spies to act. Willy will not be the only one declaring war there.

The danger doesn’t stop him. Instead, what he says is: if you know the enemy’s plan, use it to your advantage.

Again that ruthless, efficient calculation. Paradis’s attack will be devastating, but so much the better–Willy and Magath can use it to get rid of the rotten parts of Marley’s military brass. Then Magath can build a better military from the ashes, with himself at the head.

(But many people will die, Magath argues, aghast. Yes, but most of them will be Eldians, so surely you can’t care too much, Willy says, face twisted. They’re devils, remember. You’ve sent so many of them to the slaughter. Don’t falter now, when their deaths might actually mean something for their future.)

And as for Willy himself? 

This is his way to use the coming attack to amplify his message. He wanted to present the world’s Eldians as sympathetic, and the Paradisians as the real threat. Well, now he’ll get to show the world how these evil Paradisians attack and kill defenceless other Eldians. The world will pity them as victims, instead of reviling them, and focus their hatred on Paradis alone. This way, once the dust of Paradis’s destruction has cleared, the rest of the Eldians might survive.

And Willy is willing to sacrifice a lot of lives for this, including his own. 

He doesn’t go into this with his spirit soaring and guns blazing. No, Willy’s final stand is a carefully calculated political stunt. It’s a PR move–the importance is in the picture he presents as he dies.

(And again, I’m reminded of Erwin here. 

Obviously I’m not equating them, but these parallels do seem deliberate.)

Anyway, Willy gets what he wants, in the end–or, at least, what he planned for. Eren attacks the defenceless audience, looking every inch the cruel enemy Willy has been selling him as, and starts the war. But I have a feeling that, for all of his plans and calculations, this war–and this story–won’t end the way Willy thinks…