Aww thank you Anon, my birthday is March 11th so you were right on time with your message! ^3^
And don’t worry, I definitely agree that the current arc isn’t the last battle. The last battle/last arc will probably take place on the Island anyway, since all the huge titans that are within the Walls and that Eren might come to use are still relevant in my opinion, without mentioning Historia who most likely didn’t come with the rest of the Scouting Legion. 🙂
Besides, that’s also the reason Willy still went with his plan despite guessing that he would die: we will probably see a coalition between the different countries after the massacre that Eren started, in order to face the threat that he and Paradis Island just “proved” that they represent (knowing that Paradis’ only possible ally is Hizuru and even that isn’t certain at this point).
As for what you said about Marley, I think it was pretty much confirmed in a previous chapter…
that Marley relied so much on Titan shifters that they slowly lost the advance that they had gained on the rest of the world.
I agree with you that I think it’s the main reason the current battle was rather shown to be ironic so far. As the post I reblogged earlier explained, Marley might have 5 shifters and battle ships and blah blah, but the Scouting Legion has been fighting at a disadvantage from the very beginning. So, in that sense, it’s rather not surprising that they are most likely shown to be winning so far, because they constantly adapted to the threat they were fighting.
Though I find Magath at least more commendable than most of Marley’s commanding officers whom Eren previously killed, because he at least knew that it was highly time for Marley to stop dreaming about past glory and dominance and, well, he was right but I’m sure even he would have wanted to be proved right in a different way.
So yeah, Marley will need to change, in more ways and aspects than just this one in my opinion and the Eldians that are following them will need to change as well otherwise it won’t lead either nowhere. Maybe the first step to evolving will be to accept a truce with other countries they were enemies with until recently, because taking down Paradis and Eren will be “more important”. Not that I want them to win, personally, but at least that would show development for sure.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Anon and for the nice message! Please have a good week. :))
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…
There’s so much to say about ch100, I don’t think it can possibly fit into one post, but let’s start with… alright, maybe with Eren and Reiner and Willy Tybur and even a bit of Erwin Smith, and the persistent theme of moving forward and fighting on. Because it’s definitely a Thing, and it has rarely been more of a chilling Thing than in the latest chapter.
Back in a different life, when Reiner was a Marley spy in Paradis and Eren was a fired-up trainee determined to save the world, they had a conversation on what was a pretty bad day for each of them. Well, for Reiner every day in Paradis was some flavour of bad, just by virtue of, y’know, the guilt and the constant stress and the lying, but he’d also recently made the decision to launch Genocide, Take Two (ie, break the wall at Trost), and this was kind of weighing on his mind. Meanwhile, Eren kept failing at whatever exercises it was that trainees were supposed to do, and he got to the point of wondering this was it, ifhe’d never amount to anything more than fighting words.
And in desperation, he turned to Reiner for advice. Because Reiner was good at all this soldier stuff and also constantly looked like he had his shit together, which is retrospectively ironic as hell, but there we are. And Eren asked: what do I have to do? What do I have to change about myself in order to fulfil my goals and not die without having done a thing? And Reiner’s response–Reiner’s sincere, hard-won response–was: do what you have to.
And in a different story, this would be a message of determination and hope. You fight on, buddy! You do whatever you have to do and don’t give up! Have faith in yourself and put on foot in front of the other!
But in this story, in this context, the message comes out a lot darker. It comes out as: do whatever you have to do, no matter what it is, no matter what it does to you. Walk on. Keep moving forward, and don’t flinch at the seas of blood you leave in your wake.
Obviously, this advice landed on fertile soil, since Eren was already known for his drive and tenacity. Eren was that loudmouthed kid who proclaimed not to understand people who didn’t grab their destiny in their own hands and march onwards regardless of adversity. Eren stood out, even before the coordinate, even before the Attack Titan, because he didn’t fit in with society as a whole–because he refused to play by the rules the rest of society bound itself to, because he violently rejected any norms that would obstruct his way to the goal that he considered more important than anything else.
And yeah, from the very start of the story, this sort of ruthless drive wasn’t presented as an entirely positive thing. Or a comfortable thing. Eren, much like other people in this manga with a similar sort of determination to push forward, didn’t just come across as inspiring or visionary–he came across as really unsettling, too.
(Again: see also, Reiner explaining the importance of keeping your chin up and moving forward even as his moving forward involved the slaughter of countless people.)
And years later Eren, having stared into his fair share of deep abysses and now himself a spy in Marley, hears a down-the-dumps Falco echo the question he’d asked Reiner years earlier. Falco is also wondering what he has to do and what he has to change to reach his goals. And Eren’s response to it is very tellingly not to give the same advice Reiner once gave him–the same advice younger Eren would’ve given anyone, really.
Instead, Eren philosophically muses (Eren! philosophically!! muses!!!) on the nature of whatever it is that puts people on the path of moving relentlessly on, pushing themselves along even when it brings them pain. Even when it lands them in hell. Most people, Eren says, don’t walk into this hell voluntarily. It’s other people forcing them, or the environment they grew up in. Except then he makes a significant caveat:
And this is Eren who’s outgrown his childish grandstanding. He’s no longer the kid who threw himself into every fight and shouted gleefully about freedom. Where younger Eren could literally not see how marching towards his goal could be anything other than the best, most reasonable choice, this adult version of him knows what it costs. He knows that the freedom he seeks too often comes at the price of someone’s death, and he also knows that this won’t stop him. And he acknowledges that this is hell, and also that this hell is his choice.
He is that part of humanity that always strides forward, no matter the cost.
And let me say, again, that in another manga this would be an inspirational example of determination defeating all obstacles, but here it comes with a hefty dose of terrifying and depressing. And it’s not even given as a pure heroic trait; merely an extraordinary one. There are people who will inexorably move ahead, and in so doing they will change the world, for better or worse.
This isn’t about him at all, but it’s hard not to bring up Erwin in this context. Because he is another one of these outstanding, forward-striding individuals who provoked a lot of debate for the choices he made and what they cost other people. Erwin, who was the engineer of humanity’s march ahead, who embodied all the valour and the steadfastness of the Survey Corps, was also convinced he’d go to hell for everything he’d done. And he kept marching on, but this was hell for him; it was never as clear as towards the end, when we saw him weighed down by guilt, questioning his own motives, his own choices.
And in ch100, we’ve got another person determined to change the world, no matter what it costs him or others: Willy Tybur.
I’m not going to launch into a full-on discussion of Willy Tybur here, because, let’s face it, dude will derail this post and make it all about himself, and we can’t have that. But painting it in very broad strokes: Willy Tybur didn’t have to do anything of what he’s been doing in the past few chapters. Nothing required him to. If anything, the Tybur family inaction was the expected thing. The ruthless plans, the conspiracy, the potential sacrifice of his own life–these were all on Willy Tybur, as a thing he actively chose, as a thing he felt he absolutely, undeniably had to do.
I will eat my hat and everyone else’s if Willy echoing Eren’s determined words from years and years ago isn’t meant to imply parallels between them and what keeps them moving forward. Or, rather, the fact that it’s their very natures that set them on this course they will inexorably, ruthlessly follow.
And I’m guessing Eren didn’t see this coming from Willy, hence his surprised expression when he hears it. Eren thought, probably, that Willy was doing this out of pure hatred for Walldians, or… something else along these lines. But then he hears Willy echo the feelings that lie in his own heart, and his response to this is a sad, understanding smile.
It seems to me that Eren is thinking: very well, so it is like that. I understand this. And I cannot change it, and I cannot change his mind and I will not let it change my own actions that will follow, and we’re still set on a collision course that will kill one or both of us, and a lot of other people besides. But I understand what’s driving the person leading the charge from the other side, and it’s the same thing that’s driving me. And maybe it has to be like this. Because:
And he understands that the other side does too. He says this much to Reiner, acknowledging their similarities. And judging by his face, he feels no anger towards Willy as he prepares to kill him. He’s just doing what he has to do. Whatever he has to do. All in the service of that goal that still, after all this time, after all the blood shed in its name, is the most important thing in Eren’s life.
Well, well, well, there were definitely things to enjoy about this month’s chapter.
(Not that, y’know, there weren’t things to enjoy in the last two, which I haven’t commented on in any fashion. I have no idea where time goes. I blink, and it’s next chapter time already. Uncanny.)
Anyway, Eren! This very calm, in-control dude is a far cry from the temperamental teenager he’d once been. And, man, Eren got cold in the intervening years. Like, how chillingly amazing was this part:
“Sit down, Reiner.”
So good! And this is some brutal bargaining. How much is it Eren bluffing? Maybe all of it! But looking at him from the outside, we can’t be sure, and of course we’re seeing what Reiner sees. Except Reiner is also seeing his worst nightmares come walking into his life, having acquired extra bite and flavour.
His face! His many faces! All of his faces are, very justifiably, this face:
Poor Falco is increasingly getting the feeling that this is Way Above His Paygrade, but sadly there’s no parkouring out of this awkward situation. Soon he’ll be making exquisite faces of his own. It’s an educational night for everybody, including us.
At last, we get proper facts about what happened 100 years ago. Facts that match what we already know, and plug some gaps where we weren’t sure (ie, what was the whole deal with the great titan war). And, man. That was a nice callback:
I’ve always wondered what Uri meant when he said this:
So this was it. This is what Uri and Frieda’s stares into the distance meant. In their mind’s eye, they saw the king whose spirit they carried turning on his own empire, and they knew one day Marley would come knocking down the walls keeping them safe.
Presumably, when RBA destroyed Wall Maria, Frieda thought the day of reckoning had come. She wasn’t going to do anything but accept the destruction of her world.
Not so Grisha Yaeger. Not so Eren Yaeger, either, though he’s walked a much different path. And here was another fantastic, punchy frame:
“Someone has come to rise against King Fritz’s peaceful world.”
What a way to sum up the first 70-odd chapters of this story! We’ve watched our heroes bravely fight their way forward, plot and scheme and despair, uncover the great conspiracy that their country was, win against the overwhelming power of the oppressive government… and this is how history might remember it: a rebellion which did away with the peace.
The best thing is, it’s true from a certain point of view. The kings of the walls, powered by the founding titan, indeed posed no threat to the outside world. While our intrepid heroes–
Obviously, Willy Tybur is twisting the truth. Eren and co are fighting because they know Marley is coming for them, and Marley is coming for them. They’re reacting to the cycle of war, not casting the first stone; the only thing Willy could really fault them with is the refusal to lay down and die to make Marley’s life more comfortable. Willy is still lying, but he’s doing it beautifully, so kudos to him.
Meanwhile, Eren will be in your Marley, fighting… for his own freedom, and for the freedom of the Eldians he represents.
Hello and sorry for the slight delay, I just read it! 🙂
About 1) I do see why it made you think of Levi, it’s obvious that Kenny didn’t like what Annie implied about a father abandoning a woman and her child
and at the time of the scene with Annie, it had been a long time since he had last seen Levi.
About 2) I reblogged quite a good analysis of the whole scene between Falco and Eren but personally I don’t think think that Falco and Eren’s relationship will go sour, since there is this parallel between Grisha and “Grice” (someone from Falco’s family, surely a cousin or an uncle) and Falco is someone who’s not blinded by Marley’s actions and words.
He might be put in an awkward position once/when he finds out that Eren is the guy everyone is after though. xD
3) Gosh, don’t you worry, I’m confused as well about the Tybur/Teiber/Tyber/Taibar family. xDDD But I really think it’s exactly a mirroring situation to Paradis with the Reiss family.
As for what Willy is trying to achieve, Zeke kind of explained here:
The goal is to make sure that Paradis will be casted off as the only devil in the whole conflict between Eldia and Marley and that, by erasing it, Marley will be able to pose as a force to be reckoned with:
That’s why I think Zeke and Willy seem to be on the same side, at least for now, even if I still think that Zeke has his own agenda (but Willy probably does as well).
I’m personally looking forward to “the whole truth” that Willy will tell Marley and the world and if the consequences of that speech will be as they expected. It’s only then that the operation against Paradis Island will start in my opinion.
Thanks for your thoughts Anon! Please feel free to browse through my Snk theory tag, I reblogged a lot of good posts about the new chapter. 🙂
After a century of watching quietly while their people are slaughtered and persecuted, the Tyber family is back and ready for action. Why? According to Zeke they are going to help build support for a military attack to retrieve the Founding Titan.
The reality is that ulterior motives are everywhere. Zeke has a “zekret” and I suspect he isn’t alone. The reason Billy gives for his public appearance is much more benign.
“I’ve come here to see the Heros statue.”
There’s been much speculation that Heros was an Ackerman, and I believe rightly so. The parallels are there and no other human is capable of taking down a titan alone.
Part of the intel that Zeke brought back to Marley is that Ackermans exist. He tells Magath that there are at least two member of “the line once thought to exist only in legends told by the royal family.”
Which Royal Family?
When Zeke says “royal family”, I suspect he’s referring to the Tybers and not the Fritz/Reiss. If so, it means the Tyber family is uniquely interested in the Ackerman clan.
We know the Ackerman family was historically close to the crown. In chapter 65 Grandpa Ackerman told Kenny, “Our clan was the royal government’s sword and shield. We had a key role in insuring humanity’s survival”. In chapter 69, Uri apologizes for the Ackerman family persecution. Nowhere does it specifically say that the Fritz/Reiss family was the one the Ackerman clan supported. This chapter makes me wonder if perhaps the Ackermans were originally tied to the Tybers.
Marley needs another Heros. Perhaps the Tybers need another Ackerman. I believe Billy’s true reason for supporting this mission is somehow tied to Levi and Mikasa.
midnight-in-town 