12 Days of Anime Teachers--#10: Keith Shadis

Sometimes, it’s the teacher who needs to learn from the student.

(A/N: This post contains spoilers for the Attack on Titan manga. Please do not read if you are not caught up!)

When I drafted a list of anime teachers that I wanted to cover earlier this year, Keith Shadis made the list for the sole reason that I knew the he would be in the Junior High anime adaptation. But when I thought about it a little more, I realized that the parody position isn’t nearly as interesting to talk about as the chapter in the main series where Shadis reveals the truth about what he knows, and how he tried to stop Eren from becoming a soldier.

I talk about this a lot in my post on Chapters 70 and 71 where this was revealed—even going so far as to poke fun at him by photoshopping a fedora on his head—but even though it’s easy to read this through a depressing lens (see: “I’m not special”), I’d like to bring up again the way that Eren proves Shadis’s mindset wrong in one fell swoop.

At that point, Eren wasn’t special either, and Shadis’s first instinct is to crush the fight out of him. He thought he was saving Eren, but in reality he was just holding him back due to his own past grudges. But Eren shows him that being ordinary and being special aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive states of being.

What is really comes down to is your mindset. Are you going to just give up, or will you keep fighting even if you’re not sure if you’re up to the task? Even though Shadis’s story was used as a piece for Eren’s character development, it was a very important one.

Especially since the reveal came after this heartbreaking bit

So even if Shadis is resigned to stay in the background from here on out, what Eren has accomplished what Shadis gave up on long before Eren’s shifting powers were revealed. Hmm… Maybe Eren was the teacher in the end!

Screenshots are from Funimation.com and Crunchyroll.com. Please support official simulcasts.

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