Shingeki no Kyojin: The Final Season - Kanketsu-hen Episode 2 Discussion

I know a lot of people didn’t like it, but can you explain why? I enjoyed it and I’m just wondering what people would have preferred to happen. No hate at all just curious.

Wtf is this forum lol. How MAL end up becoming more toxic than Twitter/X ???

I love how people defending the piece of unko always start with "haters just didn't get the ending they wanted" or something, before going on about these amazing aspects of SnK S4, often praising precisely those things that made S4 a terrible, terribly animated and terribly drawn nonsensefest.

No, I don't care how things end, if it makes some basic sense, if it respects the characters, established logic and rules, etc. Nothing of sorts was done here, everything was thrown out of the window.

Forced unsympathetic bland characters we never got to know and who never really mattered replaced the main cast. People who used to matter didn't matter anymore, including Queen Historia - which doesn't make any sense. Suddenly Floch and his few men ruled the country, quite the upgrade from a scared novice whose biggest accomplishment was not dying to a random spray of projectiles. The empty husks the actual main characters left behind were weird, unintelligent, alienated... it was infuriating to watch. Mikasa was at least cast away most of the time, but poor Armin was made to say many out of character and very stupid things. I hated the new Armin.

Rules of the game were all gone, but that kinda started with Reiner moving his consciousness into his balls, and Colossal Titan's mandatory thermonuclear explosion when being summoned which never was a thing before. Still, S4 made things worse and worse. At the end, I was nearly praying for Reiner to finally die, his infinite plot armor was the second most annoying thing in S4. First being Gabi's entire existence and every single one of her appearances.

But the worst transgression of all was the lack of any logic to anything. The ending simply didn't make any sense. At one moment, it felt like watching a group of Jews escaping a concentration camp with a holy mission to help the Nazis exterminate all Jews. At another, it was like a very, very cheap and horribly written attempt to mimic Steins;Gate. The authors just kept throwing things into the pot, hoping that the result will be so unintelligible people will confuse this with being "deep", which is exactly what many did. Some probably did that out of sheer desperation, maybe deep down they know that their favorite show has been turned into a horrible sin against storytelling.

Anyways... it's objectively horrible. No one can praise this thing on objective terms. I don't blame those who like it, be it people who are extremely undemanding, or people who fake it till it's true. But at the very least, please stop saying this is the best anime ever. It's not. It's most definitely not.

I've just finished watching Overlord S1-S4. It has a much better and more consistent character design, far better worldbuilding, more robust lore, better writing, better dialogues, even the politics are done in a superior and very enjoyable way.

At the end of S3, the authors of SnK peaked, and they didn't know what to do next. S4 looks like someone else bought the show and finished using cheap newcomer writers with no experience. I would go into more detail and list all the objective flaws, but I'm sure someone else has done that already, multiple times, and those who still claim that S4 is the best thing ever will not change their mind anyway.

Mostly, I just wanted to ease my own disappointment. It could have been huge. It was not.

Just finished it after a 12-day binge from episode 1. As an entire series it was very up and down in terms of pacing and animation quality but the final series picked up a bit and the two specials finished the journey in excellent fashion. I've not read the manga so I don't know if the adaption followed it religiously or not but if the writer had this all in mind when he started page-1 then he's some sort of man genius.

Although I think we could have had maybe ⅔ the number of episodes this was a true epic complete with the tragic central character of Erin - the man who was a slave to freedom. From the moment he tore the walls down, Erin was doomed; in fact from the moment he was injected by his father he was doomed, and it was laid out here for all to see. Superbly done.

Even the epilogue flash-forward wasn't too bad. The boy walking into the tree bole was a bit corny but the scenes of warfare before that served to encapsulate the core message of the series - animals fight for their space in the world and humans are just another kind of animal. Like Erin, we talk about freedom but we can't escape our DNA (or, in his case, someone else's DNA :)).

Such a good series marred only by a terrible, terrible soundtrack with some of the worst theme music I've ever heard and patchy animation in places.

9/10

This Anime teaches you so much about life. The world that we live in is a cruel world, without happy endings. It rearlly questions the purpose of war and it's roots in humanity itself. Aslong as humans exists, hostility will exists. It also teachces you, that life is an endless cycle which will never change. History WILL repeat itself. Should you be a supporter of war because of that? Of course not. But this show really makes you think about life and us human beings.

10/10

Literally zero chance the author knew how they would end the series when they started writing it.

I think it's something all writers struggle with, to be clear. But the total nonsense that gets thrown in our face episode after episode in the latter half of the series is all the proof you need to know this thing was all over the place.

The introduction of new characters who serve no purpose or than to connect Point A to Point B for the audience. No development. No personality. Just a robot designed to get the story closer to the finish line by unoriginally and uncleverly tying up loose ends. Plus all the new titan powers that get dumped on us because the story could get to its resolution without more wild and crazy writing. More flash, less substance.

And don't forget that the only way a near total destruction of the world makes sense as the only way to save it is... if you quit using your brain. You completely shut your brain off. You ignore all logic and reasoning. Colossal titans can rumble forever. Never run out of power or energy lol. They also killed countless of their own people. They knew for years that titans were people, yet they kept killing them. They claim the founding titan can alter eldian bodies. Why not use that power to change them all back into humans? Nah, let's kill them instead.

It's just 💩 . The story was really fascinating in the early seasons. Then the writing went to complete trash for the final 1/2 to 2/3 of the series. Woof

@HagePotPotato I think it's established fairly early on that Erin is insane. When he stands on the shore and says he's going to kill everyone overseas he's not kidding, and that sets up what happens later on. So it doesn't have to make sense to us, it just has to be clear that Erin is a mad-man.

Given how early on we hear about is obsession, I think it's probable that the author had the basic shape of the ending in mind from the start. The details, I agree, became a bit muddled later on.

Manga is of course published serially; the writer doesn't get a chance to redraft very much. I think this is one big reason that endings are often weak - ideas which seemed great when you had them 5 or 10 years ago come back to haunt you when trying to tie everything up and it's just too late to fix it properly. And it seems to me that adaptations of manga rarely want to change early or mid-parts in order to make a better ending. When the endings get changed for the anime they don't often, IMO, actually fit together very well.

@therealnagora it was established early on? in the entire AOT series... or early on in the final season(s)? they don't make it to the shore until when, season 3 part 2 (maybe final season part 1)?

he's not "insane" early on in the series and doesn't want to kill "every" person early on. he is obsessed with killing titans which is a rather sane and logical goal

the story becomes convoluted and illogical af the longer it goes on. there is no chance the author knew "rumbling, murder 80% of the world's population" was how they were going to end the series. certainly they would've been able to better connect the dots from the earliest season(s) to the multi part final season than how they did had they known the end destination they were heading towards the whole time

and all that metaphysical bullshit about seeing the original ymir on some other spiritual plane. and ymir being the abused slave-wife of some horible person...yet she loves him and does his bidding for him and kills countless people? and the only reason that douche bag cares about her is because she found some magic tree with a magic hole underneath it with a magic lake underneath that which contained a giant swimming parasitic spinal cord that granted ymir titan powers. that was the author's idea for the origin story since the inception of AOT? hell, i'd rather the origin been left a mystery

creating a good, cogent ending to a lengthy story is difficult to do? i know. i said that. that doesn't change the fact that there's no way the author knew how to end it when they started the story. but i don't care if they knew or not. i only care that a story and it's conclusion are good, and aot is lacking in the conclusion department. it was a fantastic initial concept with a compelling plot (with mediocre characters). and then it just...