Musing Over Manga: Attack on Titan Chapter 55--Moral Gray

Watch it, Armin, you might start quoting The Dark Knight if you keep going down that path...

(A/N: The post deals with spoilers for the entire manga. Please do not read unless you are caught up! Also, be warned that this post contains images from a graphic torture scene.)


And I'm absurdly late again! Sorry about that. My excuse this time is that I was completely blindsided by finals. And then I got Bravely Default for my birthday, and I underestimated how crazy addictive that game is. Which is why this chapter analysis is out only a little bit before the next chapter. Ha. Ahahahaha...

 
But enough excuses! We're finally addressing some of the bigger questions in this chapter, and there's a lot to cover, starting with Pixis' breakdown of the flaws in Erwin's revolution plan. Most people inside the walls (or as Eren put it at the beginning of the series, the "sheep") are content with how things are currently run, despite how screwed up it is. The monarchy is a symbol of life before the walls, before Titans, and of mankind's resiliency. Overthrowing the king would only turn the public's opinion against the revolutionaries, rendering whatever they'd tried to achieve pointless. However, Erwin insists that they could remove the king from power without a fight via the next plot point bombshell at the end of the chapter: Historia is from the real royal bloodline, and could rule as queen.

"Queen" seems more fitting than "Goddess" to me

While this explains a lot about Historia's past, a lot of the questions I had last time still apply here. If they're not looking to change the system of government itself, what is the Scouting Legion trying to change? The goal at the moment seems to be to bring all of the government's secrets out into the open (more on that later), but what happens after that? Will Historia end up acting as a puppet leader with the Scouting Legion as the real rulers? I can't imagine that she'd like that, but I'm just randomly guessing here. There still aren't many details about what Erwin's long term plans are, although I'm sure he has them. This chapter made it clear that he's been thinking about this for a long time.


I've mentioned before that Erwin's character has been getting some much-needed backstory over the last couple chapters, but this one blows the rest away. It turns out that the Scouting Legion are not the first ones to figure out some of the secrets of the walls and the Titans, or at least not the first ones to speculate on them. Erwin reveals that his father was a teacher who was aware of the truth, or had at least put together the missing pieces in their history to make a good guess. As a kid, Erwin accidentally told the Military Police about his father's theories, resulting in an "accident" that caused his father's death.

As we know from the beginning of the series when Armin found the book about the outside world, all of this stuff is restricted by the government. That little detail had been bothering me lately with all of these conspiracy reveals, since governments only tend to resort to mass censorship and "accidents" when they really have something to hide, and I'm glad that this is being addressed. Anyway, all the recent developments over the last five chapters have given Erwin the evidence he's been looking for to prove that his father's theories were true, which explains what was up with his creepy smile from a few chapters back. Everything is falling into place for his big plan, which has likely been decades in the making.


But even taking into account the beginning of the previous chapter, I did not see this one coming. And while I'm confused as to how the government was able to pull that off on such a large scale, it does make a lot of sense when you consider some of the inconsistencies in this series. Despite all the problems the public has been going through, the backlash seems to be directed at the soldiers, not the government and their excess, something that I just thought was a result of the perspective of the story up until this point.

 
Also, the implication that the government was able to do it using the power of Titan shifters is equally interesting. Does that mean that the mystery woman is confirmed as a Titan shifter? Are there more of them that we don't know about that go around enforcing the government's control, and Eren just didn't get the memo?


Not to mention that Sannes confesses in the torture scene that the government was suppressing technology as well. That explains why we have a world where 3DMG and basic handguns exist, but everything else seems stuck in another era. So my new question is...why? Was "there are giant naked beings out there that want to eat you alive" not a good enough reason for people to want to settle inside the walls? What is so threatening about developing technology? Or, which I guess is the bigger question, what do the people in power stand to lose--aside from their positions and wealth, obviously--if they did let technology take its natural course? There's definitely an element of maintaining the status quo because it works for them, but it feels like something even more sinister is going on here.

(Sidebar: On a writing level, this also gives Isayama a great get-out-of-jail-free card; past and future inconsistencies can now by handwaved with "it's part of the conspiracy/memory manipulation/technology suppression, no further questions.")

 
But in the meantime, the younger characters are still grappling with the change in their objective and what it means, especially Armin. Their enemies aren't Titans anymore, they're up against people. And despite the surprise that he gets from the others after presenting his idea, that's exactly the kind of thing that they'll need to consider from here on out. There was a lot of buzz after this chapter was released claiming that Armin had become "evil," but that misses a lot of the underlying meaning here, including blatantly ignoring the line at the top of this post. A "bad" person wouldn't be self-aware enough to realize that they're falling down a slippery slope... It's very obvious who the "good guys" are and who we're supposed to root for, but all of the major characters are walking a very fine line here. Also, there's the fact that they are fifteen, something that a lot of people seem to forget.


This is paralleled with the adults, since in the same moment that the kids are having their conversation Hanji and Levi start Sannes' torture by doing the same thing to him as he did to Nick. The Scouting Legion is essentially the same as the Military Police in terms of actions now. They only have the slight moral high ground because of their larger goal to find out the truth behind the Titans and end the war for good. This has been an ongoing theme in this series--"are you willing to sacrifice your humanity" and all that--and I'm glad that it's becoming a more important element. It's one thing to face monsters straight out of uncanny valley, but it's another to look at someone whose done horrible things for what they believed was for the good of all, and realize that you're the same.

And with that in mind, you have to ask yourself, who are the real monsters?

Are you guys sure you haven't done this before

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