Attack on Titan’s ending isn’t supposed to feel good

polygon.com:

Watching the final episode of Attack on Titan in 2023 made me feel exactly like I did reading the final chapter of the manga two years ago. The primal screams of the voice actors, goosebump-inducing soundtrack of anime music god Hiroyuki Sawano, and mostly crisp animation of MAPPA — close to but not quite on the same level as Wit Studio’s work on the first and second seasons — all enhanced the experience. Still, the emotions they stirred up inside me were the same ones I felt scrolling through the manga on my laptop: fear, sadness, shame.

[Ed. note: This post discusses the end of the Attack on Titan anime and manga.]

Attack on Titan Final Season “The Final Chapters Special 2” picks up where “Special 1”left off, with the surviving members of Marley’s Warriors and Paradis’ Survey Corps teaming up to stop protagonist turned antagonist Eren Yeager from destroying the world. He’s already destroyed half of it and nearly succeeds at wiping out humanity in its entirety. Eren’s fate arrives in the form of his adopted sister, former companion, and forbidden lover, Mikasa, who, after a lifetime spent protecting her brother-boyfriend, finds it in her to finally cut off his already disembodied head. Eren dies, the curse of the Titans goes away, everyone embraces. Years later, Mikasa visits Eren’s grave under the tree where they slept as children, and where, with Eren waking up from an indecipherable nightmare, the anime originally began. Centuries after that, the tree is still there, and the world is once again engulfed in an all-consuming war.

The ending of the anime, like the manga before it, has generated mixed responses, with many of the complaints boiling down to the handling of Eren’s character. Once heavily disliked by the