Musing Over Manga: Attack on Titan Chapters 70 & 71--Someone Special

If you’re in a position where you can relate to Serverus Snape, you may want to just cut your losses and move on.

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


Once again, sorry about the delay! The post for Chapter 70 was going along fine before the crunch period before Anime Expo set in, so I’m doing a double post again! The good news is that this is the start of a new arc, so there’s a lot more groundwork setting than there is action. However, there’s still a lot to unpack in these chapters, so let’s get started!


A lot of Chapter 70 deals with wrapping up the fallout from Chapters 69 and 68. Eren’s new power has been used to create a Titan guillotine near the gates, Historia started an orphanage with Levi's help, and the Scouts are suddenly the most popular military branch, with new volunteers coming in from the same class that walked away from Erwin’s recruitment speech.

I think I know who the cannon fodder for the next arc will be

Unsurprisingly, Marlo is one of these transfers. Surprisingly, Hitch did not go with him. The conversation that Marlo describes makes it pretty explicit why, even though he doesn’t get it. Sasha and Connie do though, which provides the most obvious nod about the nature of a relationship between two characters since Hannah and Franz. Speaking of them, maybe it’s for the best that Marlo and Hitch aren’t in the same branch…

I mean, look at how it turned out last time

While the story sets up possible death flags for the teenagers, the adults have something else on their mind—what to do with the serum that Kenny gave to Levi. When the beginning of the chapter had a panel of Levi helping Historia plan the orphanage, I assumed that he was doing okay despite the bombshell that Kenny had dropped on him regarding his family heritage in the last chapter. However, the Levi that is shown throughout most of the chapter is downcast, and when he does speak it seems like he’s waiting for someone to tell him what to do.

Even random side characters are noticing that something's off with him

Throughout the series, Levi has been shown as mission-oriented. Whatever he’s ordered to do, he’ll do it. Despite the whole “make the choice you’ll regret the least” thing, he doesn’t seem to trust his own judgment. And who can blame him? Every time things have deviated from the agreed plan and he’s had to make his own calls, people get killed and the situation gets worse. He has no clue what to do with the serum, so he’s looking for an explicit order—and gets nothing. How this will end depends entirely on him. For some reason, I keep thinking back to Kenny’s claim before he died that Levi is trying to play the hero. Maybe his possession of the serum will shed some light on that as well.


However, the biggest (pun not intended) moment of Chapter 70 was the reveal of the identity of the Ape Titan, or at least what he looks like. The design was technically revealed during the Attack on Titan exhibition as few months ago as “the mysterious character who holds the key to the story,” and they weren’t embellishing! The Ape Titan has provided tons of speculation since he was first revealed, and now there is conclusive proof that no, there is not yet another double-cross in the works. He’s a complete outsider to the walls and its politics. And perhaps that is why he is so dangerous.

The last time we saw Reiner, Bertoldt, and Ymir, they had made their way to Shiganshina, but what they wanted to accomplish there is anyone’s guess at the moment. The panels at the end of the chapter reveal that a lot has changed since that point—Ymir is nowhere to be seen, the Ape Titan states that they were trying to leave Shiganshina, and the Ape Titan isn’t on good terms with the remaining two Titan shifters.

How strong is he if he could break Reiner's armor?

It’s easy to conclude from this panel that they are enemies who fought each other with Reiner as the loser, but on second glance it’s a little more complicated than that. If they were enemies, then why didn’t Bertoldt shift for the fight? Why is he continuing to listen to the Ape Titan?


It sounds more like they had a disagreement. Way back when, Armin messed with Bertoldt by insinuating that they were torturing Annie. Here, the Ape Titan says that they can “save Annie later,” which means that they probably met up at Shinganshina but then wanted the Ape Titan to help them rescue her. The Ape Titan disagreed and pummeled Reiner into the ground. Somehow, the Ape Titan knows that Eren will come to Shiganshina, despite his demonstrated lack of knowledge of what goes on inside the walls from way back when he was introduced. In any case, the Scouting Legion will be walking straight towards one hell of a fight…


But what jumped out at me the most in Chapter 70—yes, even more than the Ape Titan—was Eren’s condition. He’s backed away from the heartbreaking “I should’ve never happened” statement, but with his nosebleeds and fatigue and well as his statements about it not being that big of a deal point towards Eren still not having a lot of respect for himself. It feels like he thinks that the only thing special about him is the fact that he has the coordinate…and Chapter 71 has a lot to say on what it means to be “special.”

I love Levi trying to be polite

I had a feeling that the story would come back to Shadis eventually. His statement towards the beginning of the manga that referenced Eren’s mother was never clarified, and then he was noticeably left out of the Guidebook. That said, the Guidebook contains a lot of inaccurate information, but it still struck me as a weird omission since it still contained profiles on characters who had little to no information at all, such as Mikasa’s unnamed kidnappers. What was Shadis hiding?

Now we know. If you hadn’t made the connection before, Chapter 71 makes it explicit that Shadis was the commander of the scouts before Erwin. He’s in the opening scene of the series, and is the person who breaks down in front of the woman who only got her son’s arm back. I always assumed that Shadis snapped under the pressure after that moment as well as what followed after the walls fell (it’s heavily implied that he lead the suicide mission to retake the walls—the anime shows him in that role as well), but this backstory shows that there’s a little more to it than that.

*"Grisha was a Titan all along" theories intensify*

Grisha was Shadis’ inspiration. Despite Grisha’s sketchy past (“Oh hey, we found you outside the walls with amnesia, that’s not weird at all”), he’s the one who makes Shadis feel like his efforts are worth something, that someday he will be recognized.


The mistake that he makes is that then he feels that the world owes him something. He’s trying his best, so why don’t people respect him? Why doesn’t Carla notice him? Shadis fails to realize that these things have nothing to do with “becoming special” and everything to do with the fact that at its root, his behavior is selfish. He cared about his soldiers, but not enough to prioritize their lives enough that they could interfere with his results. He liked Carla, but the above panel strongly hints that he wanted her to come to him instead of working on building a relationship with her beyond that of friends.


I poked fun at Shadis at the top of this post, but the story that he told was pretty sad to me. It’s the story of someone who decided—not forced, decided—that he’s better off as just an observer than as someone “special,” hence the name of the chapter. Despite his complicated feelings about Grisha and Carla getting together, he can’t deny that Grisha was the one who made him feel like he was different, if only for a little while.


The resentment that he throws at Carla is very telling as well. Like I stated above, he felt like something was owed to him, that it was taken away from him, rather than admitting this his current situation was due to his own mistakes and miscommunication. One big parallel is the fact that he passed on the command to Erwin, believing him to be “special,” and not like him, completely unaware of the fact that Erwin has his own redemption to pursue, and possibly lost a love to someone else as well. However, as far as we know, Erwin has never verbalized this same kind of resentment towards Marie as Shadis did towards Carla. The fact that he needed her to validate his “special” status is a big hint that they never would’ve worked out anyway.


In contrast, Carla’s response is a powerful statement—you’re not special because of what kind of power you hold. People are special just by merit of living. However, I don’t think her meaning sunk in with Shadis until years later, when an otherwise ordinary boy proved him wrong.

I always thought that Jean had messed with Eren's belts, lol whoops

Over the last arc, I saw a lot of people complaining about Eren. “He gets kidnapped all the time so he’s worthless.” “Why is he the main character, he always screws up.” “If he wasn’t a Titan shifter, then he wouldn’t be special at all!”

All of that is why he’s the main character. The beginning of the series makes a big point that aside from his drive to kill the Titans, Eren doesn’t have that much going for him. He works his way up to the Top Ten in his class out of sheer effort. As evidenced by the belt incident above, Eren doesn’t care if the odds are against him; he’ll find a way.

And what if he gave up at any point before becoming a shifter? We know now that Titan shifter’s forms only work when they have a goal in mind—what if he’d given up when he was eaten towards the beginning of the series? Anyone else would have, and no one could have blamed him; when I watched the anime for the first time, I instantly wrote him off, thinking, “Wow, this show killed off the main character so early! How brutal is that?” But everyone was wrong. Even when there was no way out, Eren kept fighting. And that’s how he’s gotten this far.


Yes, he screws up. Yes, he doubts himself. But it wasn’t until that moment when the truth about his power was revealed that Eren began to doubt himself. And while he was able to recover from that, Chapter 70 shows that now he thinks that he’s only valuable because of his power. But as we saw with the Reiss family, that power wouldn’t be the same in anyone else’s hands. It’s useful because Eren has it, not the other way around. Hopefully hearing about his mother in this chapter will help him realize that.

Eren is special, and it has nothing to do with his Titan shifting. It’s because he’s a kid who’s just trying to do the right thing. It’s because he wants to see the outside world with his friends. It’s because he doesn’t want anyone else to go through the same things that he’s had to.

Eren is special because he was born into that world, and I think that someone like him is what that world needs if they’re going to defeat something as different—“special” in a different sense—as the Ape Titan.



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