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The time, my friends, has come. It has been a long and perilous journey, with many hardships, including having to swap ps4 controllers while watching. Hours and hours of catching up on all of the previous seasons, along with the surprisingly impressive OADs, have brought me to this point. It is with great pleasure that I announce the weekly Attack on Titan final season coverage.
In order to fully immerse myself in Attack on Titan over the next couple of months, I will be covering three or four episodes until I finish what has been released. Then, once the last of the final season begins airing, I’ll be doing a final post wrapping up the series along with another post of some kind to finish my coverage.
Rediscovering Attack on Titan this year has been some of the most fun I have had with anime in a while. Not to say that I have been particularly bored with anime, far from it in fact. However, AOT in particular has been one of my main points of enjoyment. With that being said, let’s talk about the final season.
The opening episodes place us sometime in the future, where Reiner has successfully returned home and is helping the Marleyians fight against a nearby middle-eastern nation. In order to accomplish this feat, the country continues to rely on the power of the titans held by the Eldians and their descendants. He has started looking after the next candidates to host the armored titan, of which a young girl named Gabi seems to be the most promising.
However, these opening episodes are, for the most part, viewed from the perspective of Falco, another of the armored titan candidates and the younger brother of Colt, the successor to the beast titan legacy. Falco, in a lot of ways, seems to be a mirror to Eren Jeager: a young upstart who wants to help his family, blood-related or not, by putting himself through immense self-sacrifice. In his case, his most immediate motivation seems to be protecting Gabi, who he has a crush on.
Zeke has also resurfaced as a relevant character. His standing within the Marleyian army has given him enough power to engage on a mission to secure the founding titan. His reasoning for this, which the other top brass seem to agree with, is that the rest of the world has caught up to Marley in terms of military strength and that the founding titan will be needed in order to reassert dominance.
What I like about this series so far is not necessarily the characters, however, although they certainly are good. Rather, what makes this season so intriguing is how the scale of its politics has jumped from the island outside of Marley to basically the entire world. The perspective has shifted from those trapped inside the wall to the ones who banished them, to begin with.
The parallel between the two groups of Eldians still exists, though. One group is trapped behind the wall due to the titans, and the other is trapped behind the walls of internment. Both are suffering at the hands of Marley, just in different ways.
The change in animation styles has definitely thrown me for a loop. Character designs among the Eldians look pretty similar to the point it was hard to tell characters apart at times during the first two episodes or so. Still, despite being lukewarm on the change initially, I have come to appreciate it. In the context of the story being told, the change in style certainly makes some sense. Although, I do maintain that the series would have looked fine even in its previous look.
Overall, the direction Attack on Titan has taken is an exciting one. So many questions are yet to be answered, and it is clear that many unnamed forces are still at play, driving the series’ world in ways that maybe do not make any immediate sense. Will the oppression of the Eldians finally come to an end? probably not yet at least since we are not even a quarter of the way through, but whatever happens is sure to be a good time.
Have you started the final season of Attack on Titan yet? Are you still behind? Let me know in the comments, but please leave out any spoilers.
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