Musing Over Manga: Attack on Titan Chapter 62--Buried Memories

Eren, after this chapter, being kidnapped is the least of your problems.

(A/N: The post deals with spoilers for the entire manga and contains some graphic images. Please do not read unless you are caught up!)


You know, I was actually on track to get this post done the second week of October, but then midterms came and hit me in the face. So here we are again, on the countdown to the next chapter release and I'm still late as usual. I'm finding this pretty funny at this point. I wonder what will happen next month that will prevent me from getting the review out on time? Anyway, hopefully this post can at least serve as a refresher before the next chapter comes out, since there was a pretty big reveal this time! But I'll get into that part a little later. First, I want to talk a bit about the aftermath of the military coup.

 
While it's great that the military was able to remove the current monarch without any violent counter-revolution from the citizens, their problems are far from over. In that way, I can see why Erwin is expressing some regrets. Who can really say what was the best path to take? If Erwin had continued to follow orders and let the people under his command die, humanity would still have continued to survive in one way or another, no matter how small their numbers or self-serving they might be. However, the path that they're on now has no similar guarantee of survival. Morally it's the right choice, but in terms of survival, no one knows. Attack on Titan has shown time and again that taking the moral high ground isn't the best way to get results in this world. Erwin has gotten his hands dirty, but is turning against the predetermined path the way to end corruption in the government and move forward to stop the Titans once and for all?


However, Zackley is right too. Looking back and wondering whether or not he did the right thing doesn't do much for humanity right now. There's no taking it back. In my post on Chapter 61, I talked about how everything that was happening had been influenced by Erwin in some way; he had the entire situation under his control. Everything was set up to provoke the exact response that he wanted to get. There's even some implication in the way that the panels are framed that he wasn't just deliberately withholding information from Hanji. Now Erwin's statement about how he wanted Hanji as his replacement feels like it was a ploy to make Hanji desperate, since from Hanji's perspective that was the same as Erwin admitting that he expected to die. The number of levels Erwin was playing on to pull this off is incredible.

 
That said, the fact that Erwin can go this far and still admit that he might be wrong is a bit admirable. Immediately after Erwin states his misgivings, Zackley says that he was going to overthrow the government sooner or later anyway for the sole reason that he didn't like the people in power. There are similar motivations, but a big contrast here: Erwin is concerned that he might be leading humanity closer to extinction while Zackley is like, "LOL, did you see the looks on their faces?!" Erwin calls himself selfish, and that may be true, but it's a different kind of selfishness than what we see from Zackley. Zackley's motivations were truly personal, in my opinion. He had a grudge and wanted to watch those guys go down. Erwin is concerned with the bigger picture, and that makes all the difference between them, I think. Attack on Titan really likes to point out those fine differences in morality...

And as interesting as all of this is (or at least it is to me, since I know a lot of people are sick of it), I'm pretty sure that the political intrigue stuff will be moving to the backburner once again, considering where the rest of this chapter goes. We finally get at least a few answers, but just like previous explanations, for every question answered, at least three more pop up.

 
Continuing the trend of mentioning letters that have important info and then not discussing them until four chapters later, Hanji finally explains what was in the reports Erwin handed over before going on a detour to overthrow the government. The letter detailed an investigation of the Reiss family, and pointed out a few things that are pretty interesting given the current direction of the story and what we know so far.

First, we no longer have to refer to the girl from Historia's memories as "Geographica" anymore. Her name is Freida, and the info also confirms that she was Historia's half-sister. That does explain why she acted so sweet with her (although it's stated that she was friendly with everybody), although it still doesn't answer the question of why she erased Historia's memories. I guess that's a question for a future chapter. Anyway, after the wall fell, the family gathered in a chapel to pray, but were reportedly all killed by bandits except for Rod Reiss, Historia's father. Hanji points out that it's strange that bandits managed to destroy a stone building, and suspects that it had something to do with Titans instead. It's also their last lead on where the MPs may have taken Eren and Historia, and so they start heading there.

Levi being ignored by Hanji is hilarious to me

You have a weird definition of "okay"

And this is where things get murky.


I'm not sure what Reiss said to Historia, but she clearly trusts him and Kenny now. If they intend for her to eat Eren (which is the popular theory at the moment), Historia at least doesn't seem aware of that. She tells Eren to "hold out for a little longer," which suggests that they told Historia that they just want to recruit Eren to their cause, whatever that might be. However, even keeping that in mind, Historia has dropped her anger at her father pretty fast. I wonder if Reiss is just taking advantage of her loneliness and telling Historia what she wanted to hear. I mean, Historia has convinced herself that Ymir has abandoned her, and she's always wanted a real family. Whether or not what Reiss told her was true probably doesn't matter to Historia at this point. If it matched what she wished her father would say to her deep down, then she'll believe it.


That said, I'm convinced that Reiss is still keeping things from Historia, if not just completely inventing a story. When he tells her to touch Eren to trigger his memories, she's confused by it. This seems to confirm that the memory manipulation power runs through their bloodline, but it doesn't look like he told Historia about that just yet. Why?

Meanwhile, Eren has a completely different set of father issues

Then there's the memories themselves. The theory that Eren had eaten his father has made the rounds in the fandom over the last couple of months, and while it made sense, I hoped that it wouldn't end up being true. This is a whole new level of screwed up. If I were Eren, I'd repress those memories too.

Let's break this down a little bit, since there is a lot of information condensed into a few pages, and I've seen a ton of crazy theories based off of them. However, a lot of those theories seem to be coming from people not really paying attention to detail (read: OMFG TITANSTORIA!!!11!). First, the majority of the flashback seems to be from Grisha's perspective, with Eren's memories overlapping at the very end. It starts at the chapel, and since we know that Grisha left before the wall fell, it's possible that him going there had nothing to do with that. However, there's a pretty big detail in these first few flashback images that I haven't really seen discussed anywhere else:

Grisha turned into a Titan.


The initial response to the chapter had a lot of people yelling about how Historia had allegedly turned into a Titan, and some tried to scramble for an explanation as to how she got to the chapel and back, but they missed the fact that these shots were from the perspective of another Titan. We first see the Reiss family (sans Historia) turning around, and then an angry close up on Freida followed by the Titanstoria image. From this progression, I think it's pretty obvious that Titanstoria is Freida's Titan form. I'm much more interested by the large, veiny hand that's holding one of her arms in the picture, and the chunk that was ripped out of her shoulder. Freida was losing. We see the same hand on the next page, picking up one of the Reiss family members while Rod runs away (I'm pretty sure that's Rod, anyway). The image is looking down from a higher perspective, so we're clearly watching this scene from the viewpoint of a Titan. And since this is from Grisha's perspective...how did Grisha become a Titan?


Setting aside the chilling imagery (in case anyone forgot, this is a horror manga), the answer is right next to that panel, and on the following pages. Our first impression wasn't wrong: whatever Grisha injected into Eren is what made him a Titan. However, that's not the full story. We watch Eren turn into a Titan and eat his father, and then we see him in the aftermath, when he'd changed back. We know from Ymir that the only way to become a Titan shifter is to eat one. That means that the injection turns people into mindless Titans, not shifters. The shifting power is something more. For whatever reason, Grisha set this up so that Eren would have the Titan shifting power. He turned himself into a mindless Titan that would attack the Reiss family, eat them, and then get the power to change back. Then, he set it up so that Eren would only be able to eat him, and therefore give the power to his son.

Of course, this is assuming that all Grisha was after was the shifting power, which may or may not be the same thing as the "coordinate." Given what we know now, Freida was probably the only person in the Reiss family to hold it and the shifting power, since we don't see anyone else in the family turn into Titans. Grisha probably broke up what was supposed to be a well-kept secret for generations. I imagine Historia was just meant as a "backup" holder for it in case things went horribly wrong, which they have.


But why did it have to turn out this way? Why did Grisha need his son to have the power to transform into a Titan so badly that he couldn't stick around and explain calmly to his son what was going on instead of traumatizing him so badly? Or maybe he did, but Eren doesn't remember that either.

This manga is messed up.

New plan: Let's stop talking about how screwed up Eren's life is and start talking about how
Hanji's code name for Levi is "little guy"

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