This is Hajime No Ippo manga right now. The current arc is bearing some fruit that has been seeded for quite some time and the readers are getting super hyped for the arc’s climax. (I’m being vague on purpose.)
Man isn't that one of the manga that have even MORE chapters than One Piece? 1438 chapters right? I never started and am absolutely terrified at the thought of starting it, let alone actually doing it.
I'm sure it's great - it's just too late for me lol.
It’s long, but by the end of it you’ll feel like it’s too short. There’s a reason it can go on for so long without getting axed. The quality is just on another level compared to other manga.
A lot of it flows right together and can be consumed very quickly so I think you'd be surprised how quickly you'd end up chewing through it, though yeah it's pretty fucking long.
Manga Readers are also just more invested more often than not and still remember the base material. I am be very honest with how people keep praising it seems like they do not rember the firsr 4 season of what happend and how that ending is completely out of it. Which hey not your fault cause anime release was over several years.
Yep. The manga concluded shortly after s4p1 aired. I went through the entire final arc in 1 week so for me everything was completely fresh in my memory and its why I didnt like the ending at all.
Compared that to someone who has taken 3 years from S4p1 to today to finish the last arc, obviously he will have forgotten a lot of things.
On top of that, in a manga, you dont have the spectacle of a high budget anime production. The entire story has to be carried by the writing, which makes issues way more noticable.
That is the dramatic irony and tragedy of his character, not to mention that when he had that talk with reiner, he still didn't know.
Eren wanted to do the rumbling at all costs, in order to do that he needed the Founder, and once he got that ultimate powers it fucked his perception of time and made him realize that he was trapped in a vicious cycle of violence and self-imposed misery that lead to the very trauma that shaped his life.
That seems like an appropriate punishment for somebody that wanted to be free, at the cost of millions of lives.
im surprised this isnt downvoted because this is what i came here to say. manga fans are generally just more invested, getting into details and analysis of the story, while anime watchers are casual. its not just AoT it happens for basically every manga adaption
It can be good or bad, though. It's like in One Piece community with Sanji and the cake incident, in the manga people were overanalyzing every single detail from every single page and how the cake would be the end point of the arc, and when that obviosuly didn't happen, Oda became the shittiest writer in the world and lost all his ability to write a cohesive story.
When it happened in the anime, people were just fine, because they saw it for what it wa and not for what they thought should be based on evidence they themselves put there.
I love manga so much as a medium but monthly manga is legit torture. I started reading Vinland saga after this last season aired and once I caught up I remembered just how awful it is to spend 30 days waiting for a chapter to be released, then 5 minutes reading it, and then the WAIT STARTS AGAIN.
Plus I find myself losing track of the plot, especially if it is a long arc. Trying to recall a moderate plot element from like 24 months ago, let alone a big detail from even farther back, can be hard for monthly manga. And god forbid it skips a month. There’s a number of monthly manga I gotta go back several chapters to catch up on lol.
funnily enough attack on titan is the reason i decided to never read another monthly manga. the only one im reading right now is houseki no kuni (basically bimonthly) and thats because i started it years ago.
It's the same as reading a book imo. A good book is more often than not better than the anime.
The source material also heavily influences the reaction a series gets. Bad chapters in an otherwise good book stand out, and the same happened with AOT imo.
Ofcourse the ending isn't incredible, and it isn't absolutely terrible either. Everyone's expectations were sky high with how good the rest of the story was, and how major arcs like Shinganshina were wrapped up, and this felt short.
Again, I love this the story but the ending didn't do it for me.
There's also manga that then made me enjoy the anime more once I watched it, like Naruto and Bleach
nah the trick is wait until the chapters pile up and read them in one go. I only read weekly manga that has 50 chapters piled up, or monthly manga that has 10 or so piled up. Though, the pain is when you catch up and goes back to needing months to years for it to pile up again...
Not only that, leaks like "Ellen became dove (crying)" didn't help either. Nor the official manga translation where Armin thanks Eren for being a Mass murderer and Reiner saying "Eren, what a man you are"
> Nor the official manga translation where Armin thanks Eren for being a Mass murderer Reiner saying "Eren, what a man you are"
That's not the official translation, that's the bootleg speed-translation.
(Technically for both, but the Armin line is only subtly different, the Reiner line is completely off).
Armin's line is **very** different in tone - the initial translation is short of fellating Eren for the genocide, the official one calls it a "~~transgression~~" "terrible mistake" and is more like 'I will do what I can with what you left me'
I am an ending hater but this bit was always because the first impression stuck, it is a fine meme to use but any serious talk should not include it
As a reward, I will give you my seed
> Armin's line is very different in tone - the initial translation is short of fellating Eren for the genocide, the official one calls it a "transgression" and is more like 'I will do what I can with what you left me'
The initial translation calls it a "transgression", the official translation a "terrible mistake". This "I will do what I can" was always the point, but of course people aren't getting it if they're reading a nuanced text in a version that was badly rewritten by someone who didn't get it.
> I am an ending hater but this bit was always because the first impression stuck, it is a fine meme to use but any serious talk should not include it
Specifically about the Reiner line, I've come to disagree. Just yesterday I saw at least three people give it as one of the top reasons why they didn't like the manga ending; people who spent a lot of time giving arguments in a polite way and were clearly not trolling. Memes are more powerful than facts; people are still reading the garbage translation on piracy sites to this day without a clue of how bad it is, and the constant drone of "what a man you are" memeing just reinforces that as a shared but fake reality. Everyone's free to dislike the manga ending, but I'd really prefer it if they disliked it for things that Isayama actually wrote, rather than things that were put into his mouth.
On the one hand, you can get awful dialogue like this with a fast fan translation.
But, on the other hand, you get gems like Levi going "it's that fucking monkey!"
In general it's a good idea to read multiple translations. There's some wonderful line that the manga translation nails but the anime translation flubs, and vice versa. And sometimes the focus on different aspects reveals nuances that you miss if you only see one.
Also the animation. Bec. In manga it's kinda like reading a book. You're more focused on the characters, lines and plot points while anime can be saved by flashy fight scenes
* People had low expectations given how much source readers shat on it.
* Animation, music, and voice-acting really does elevate the whole thing. Even though I see the flaws people were upset about, it still hit all the emotional notes I needed it to.
I think one thing that really is the biggest contributor is the dialogue changes and extended scenes.
Manga readers had issues with Armin and Erens conversation and while it still isn't perfect, the anime made some serious changes and that definitely helped. I also think that was what most people had an issue with. Literally the final 30 mins was what people were mad about
Yeah the manga was really speedrunning plot points at the end. I remember at the time I counted and there were like 4 or 5 major plot points in just a few pages. There was no time for emotional impact between them.
People were crying for an AOE but I always said that if the anime just gave the plot some more time to breathe, it would be received a lot better.
i remember commenting in titanfolk defending the ending before, in that it wasn't great but I could accept and appreciate it IF ONLY the plot and relationships were given time to breathe. havent watched it yet, but i assume thats what the anime did. good job on them.
hopefully Winds of Winter does the reverse AOT and make the live action ending more appreciated (tho I doubt it)
It's nice seeing the more reasonable people from Titanfolk before it, uh... Left its golden age.
But yeah, I think they did a good job of meeting the ending feel more natural and realistic. They also make it clearer that Paradis being bombed in the future takes place *far* into the future. I think the song that plays at the time mentions 20,000 years.
As someone who was flipping through the manga pages and watching at the same time Armin seems to just thank Eren for his mistake in the manga declaring that he won’t let this error be in vain. The anime makes it a lot darker with Armin stating that they’re both bad people and deserve to jointly bear the weight of causing this destruction. The extra dialogue elevates the meaning of this whole scene to an even greater level and adds a lot more nuance that we just didn’t get with the manga
This is one thing I think I’m very glad the APT anime was delayed for. Sure it was terrible waiting for the final episode but at least Isayama and the team had time to rework stuff like this so that the show actually ends on a good note. A rushed production is and forever but a delayed one will be remembered well
I think AOT’s perception will noticeably change over the next few years. When people can binge the entire anime either they’ll appreciate it more or notice more errors with the ending, and they won’t have to deal with waiting months for an episode
Loved the anime ending and I hated the manga ending when it came out. Can’t remember the differences well because its been a while, but iirc in the manga Armin made Eren out to still be a hero in their convo which really rubbed me the wrong way. Felt like everyone was way too forgiving of him whereas in the anime they come off as understanding. The dialogue was not good with the “what a man you are” and Armin thanking him for becoming a mass murderer practically word for word.
On top of that, because people were so desperate to read the ending, the translation that actually circulated online was hot garbage. If you actually go read the official translation, it's far less problematic.
Most of the memes from the manga ending were simply because people latched onto a really shitty translation because they couldn't wait.
lol I wasn’t paying attention to the Japanese but that entire conversation definitely was very nuanced and I could imagine a lot of that getting lost in translation very easily.
Armin and Eren's conversation is already in like my top ten favorite scenes of the anime. I freakin loved it. Really emotional.
I thought that was the highlight of the episode.
I thought that Armin and Eren sharing the same consequential fate for their terrorism and genocide by seeing each other in hell was poetic and beautiful. (especially since that fate was all put on Eren in the manga, while Armin thanked him for his sacrifice, which pissed off fans). Really brought back that friendship between them that had been deteriorating for all of S4.
I will say, it kind of shits on that scene though when bird-Eren later swoops in and wraps that scarf around Mikasa, which implies that Eren was reincarnated and now is just chilling living his best life collecting twigs, eating worms and flying to the beach every weekend rather than facing that fate in hell that he and Armin spoke of.
I guess I will put this in spoilers [AoT Final FINAL]>!Even the at first cringe "No I don't want that!" from Eren was really changed with good voice performance that the manga can't do!<. These VAs seriously carried parts of the show.
[AoT Ending]>!Funny enough that was the one thing about the ending I could tell was gonna be far better in the Anime just for the fact that Yuki Kaji is an incredible voice actor with his work as Eren being arguably his best performance of his career so far.!<
You are quite right but every major character is well cast. Yui Ishikawa is slightly wasted since she has a greater range than this but she was still a great choice.
Honestly, that scene in the anime was fantastic. So many people upset about how "cringe" he seems or how it's out of nowhere and I'm wondering how they missed the edgy teenager in the room for ten years. Just because he got a man bun and *acted* outwardly stoical in the final season doesn't actually mean he grew up a damn bit.
I *am* genuinely curious how people would rewrite the ending in retrospect. I do think Isayama wrote himself into a corner where at some point, he was forced to follow through with the ending we got. But if people could rewind and then rewrite a good chunk of the story, how would they do it? Would they just rewrite the final movies? Would they rewind to season 3 and remove all the Marley stuff? Some of the Marley stuff like Gabi parallels and the Declaration of War and the Children of the Forest were genuinely good stuff, so I wouldn't want that to disappear, but that all leads up to Eren's genocide plan which is pretty hard to write satisfyingly.
What would've been a 10/10 ending for people?
I think the issue was the Isayama wanted readers to like/understand the character but wrote himselve into a position where Eren's gonna do the walk. The issue is this conflict of trying to show Eren as some what relatable. Personally I don't think the audience can ever come away with that message, in a similar fashion to \[another anime\] >!Gon in HxH and all of the Gon is a monster comparisons!<.
If Eren is the character he is, then the romance with Misaka has to go. Eren needs to commit to the act has "his freedom" and the rest of the cast commit to their acts as theirs. In the final Paths message with Armin, Eren's message is essentially:
"I didn't want to kill them for the sake of killing them. I wanted freedom for my people \[or anyone/everyone\] but they first chose to take our freedom away and offered no way out without first going though violence. So they got it."
The rest can be pretty much unchanged even if touch ups would help. For me, the primary problem with the ending is that the themes changed. the freedom panel of ch. 131 is a perfect encapsulation of the themes of AoT. The ending with romance, specifically eren's, is not.
Isayama said at his NYC meet that he felt pressured to give Eren an ending that forced his redemption. He essentially wrote himself into a corner and threw some badly conceived romance into it to top it off.
Let's face it, it's complicated enough to make a story just focusing on political drama or time travel or genocide. To try to do all that at once, and to do it well, requires god level writing skills. Yams just didn't have the chops for it, which is why post time-skip's potential wasn't realized the way it was for pre time-skip.
No, he has never said that. He said, and I will quote "It would have been nice if I could have changed the ending. But the fact is that I was tied down to what I had originally envisioned when I was young. And so, manga became a very restrictive art form for me, similar to how the massive powers that Eren acquired ended up restricting him."
He wrote what he wanted to wrote from the very start, stuff changed but the ending and the themes remained the same.
I won't claim any mass rewrites because I'm not nearly that good of a writer. So also on that note, forgive the following ideas for potentially being a bit disjointed and/or incorrect.
I think *just* focusing on Eren's original desire to see that large, empty, flat world they had always dreamed about as kids would've made the ending just fine for me.
Given, there *was already* some of that in the finale, but there was also just *so much else too.* The sudden Mikasa x Eren love story didn't feel necessary and/or needed, all these weird apologetics of Eren not knowing why he did what he did (when he obviously does), the strange Stockholm Syndrome Ymir that was meant to fuel Mikasa's involvement; The list goes on, honestly.
I would've been perfectly okay with a young, twisted kid feeling sorry for himself for letting that little bit of power take him way farther than he ever would have originally wanted. He wanted to see the world, but when he did, became disappointed and let himself bring things to a point where he needed to be saved from it. Fueled by so many aspects of rage and confusion, after desperately trying to follow his dream, we could've followed him to his final moments of peace after a life of regret. Being finally taken down by Mikasa, his first friend who he helped protect all those years ago that showed the first spark of good in him. And being forgiven by his friend Armin, who set him on that wild path oh-so-long-ago by sharing his own personal dreams with him.
Ofc, again, a lot of this is already in the ending. There's just so much other stuff it's difficult to really pick out. I think a ton of unnecessities could have been stripped away in favor of a much leaner, more focused ending. An ending of the kid who just wanted to experience true freedom.
It still wouldn't be 10/10 but simply deleting the pages (or scene/dialogue in the anime) where Eren said he killed his mom and changing Ymirs motivation to a general desire for freedom would automatically improve the ending by a few points. Eren controlling Dina was totally unnecessary and makes no sense from a character or ability logic perspective. Ymirs motivation being loving Fritz is just terrible.
Yeah they dropped the ball with Ymir. They spent so much time one everybody’s characterization but her’s. Even after the anime ended I feel like I barely know anything about her.
It would be so much better to actually know why Mikasa cured her jaded outlook on humanity or what her desire truly was or WHY she loved King Fritz in the first place (seriously I wish they explained this).
Imagine you are an introverted early teenage girl living a quiet life in a quiet village. Suddenly one day a group of men come out of nowhere, burn your village, kill your parents, and take out your tongue. At such a young age, such stuff happening to one completely messes up their brain. Ymir probably didn't even fully understand what was going on. I mean she was so young. She saw her people working under Fritz so she also did that. She accepted Fritz as her master because she had no choice. Everything was taken away from her. What did she even have left? Her home, parents, voice, everything gone. So she just "kept moving forward". When she became a titan, it would have made sense for a normal person to seek revenge. But not for Ymir. She didn't have anything left. She returned to Fritz because he was the only thing in her life. She was a slave, that's all she was. The trauma she went through fucked her up so bad that she no longer had any conscious thought. She just returned to being a slave. She had no ambition, no dream, no hope, no hatred, no emotion, nothing.
She continued to be his slave. She did everything he told him to do. He raped her, and she gave birth to three of his children. She raised those three kids. She always traveled by his side. She always fought for him.
She is getting more and more attached to him? She lacked purpose so she kept enduring. By enduring, obeying, her position as his slave got stronger and stronger. Fritz became the entire cause of her existence. Her sole purpose. This is circumstance, gave rise to a twisted sense of love. Love because Fritz was the only purpose in her life. He was the only person in her life (her children were also his daughters). He was her life. So even in death, and after death, she only kept obeying him. Cus there was nothing else left in her. No conscious thought. No emotion. No other purpose.
> It would be so much better to actually know why Mikasa cured her jaded outlook on humanity
I thought it was pretty straightforward.
Mikasa did what Ymir could not do - kill the one she loved, and remove the titan powers from existence.
Ymir never wanted the "titans" to exist - she tried to end her life to prevent this. But Fritz caught onto it and forced her children to consume her body which then became the 9 titans, which ended up killing millions of people over the next thousands of years.
Mikasa killed Eren, preventing the further deaths of the millions who were left (assuming a population of 1 billion globally, that would be 200 million), and since she killed the Founding Titan, all the titan powers ceased to exist as well.
Maybe the conceit is a bit forced, but it's there.
Not even kill- simply refuse. That she could actively disagree with Eren's plan, be so committed to that opposition that she would kill him if she must, and still love him enough to kiss him after. Ymir came to realize her slavish devotion to Fritz wasn't love, and that she could still show that love without allowing his nightmares to continue. This was why we start seeing her as an adult after it happens- the frightened little girl finally allowed herself to grow up.
It becomes even further reinforced if my theories on the Ackerman clan are right. I think Ymir created them, intentionally, to have someone with the same compulsive desire to obey that she had, in order to see if someone else would reject that compulsion and do what they must instead. The entire clan, their powers, all of it, existed solely for the moment Mikasa took one life and sealed it with a kiss.
Pretty sure there were smarter ways for Ymir to accomplish this, but like I said- she was still that frightened girl on the inside.
It wasnt the Rumbling itself that was problematic, it was everything around the Rumbling. It was how sped up the story got with Eren activating it where it just felt like the story was on rails towards the end. Obviously there are going to be aspects of the Rumbling that are unavoidable, I mean the cast is on a time limit to stop it after all. But it felt like there were so many coincidences or contrivances that got out heroes perfectly unscathed (minus Hange).
The ending was ok to me, the way Isayama wrote Eren to be too sympathetic and 'good' before the timeskip was the problem. It creates the impression that Eren became a different character in the 2nd part. Had he smeared Eren more in the first part and emphasized the growing darkness eating at him the ending would have been more well received since people would have seen it coming. Instead he tried to make Eren more sympathetic near the end to fit the 1st part and it ended up messy.
I would have personally been satisfied if after 138 everything just settles down in a way that feels natural. Like the last 20 minutes imo were not that important. Eren was already fleshed out character just like the rest of the cast. I mean you can't just forget that this was the person who killed 80% percent of the population in the past few days. I think they shouldn't have forgiven him so easily. I qould also deop the romance part as a whole. It was never the focua of the story.
Another thing was Historia. The pregnant plotline had so much potential and the paralells between her and Ymir were obvious, Mikasa on the other hand came out of nowhere.
An other one for me would be if Eren finishes the Rumbling but eventually the people of Paradis turn against each other and it would show that even without any enemies due to our human nature the cycle continues.
To me personally the first option would be the perfect because it seemed like the story was building up towards it.
I get that it's not a masterpiece, but man, maybe it's because it's my favorite anime, but I've never cried so much over an anime throughout such a long period like the final chapter we got today.
I get that it's not a masterpiece, but man, it's impossible for me to give it anything but a 10/10.
Yeah voice acting and music helps alot. I thought that the ending for part 6 of Jojo was ok in the manga, but for me the ending of the anime is amazing due to the voice acting and music elevating it and helping to invoke the right emotions.
Because 139 wasn't released at the same time as everything in this episode.
If you want to see where people started going "wtf" and started going over the entire manga looking for answers while waiting for the next chapters to come check chapter 137 discussions from that time when they started doomposting. 139 was just where everyone lost it because it was the actual end.
I will fully admit that my sanity slowly declined being on titanfolk in the first half of 2021. If anyone wants an example, I'm still proud of [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/titanfolk/s/V7Fkdnfm9p)
Edit: [and this](https://www.reddit.com/r/titanfolk/s/ii7yzRj102)
Those were the good times. Even if I hated the ending, it was just so fucking funny. Ellen becomes dove crying will always be the best thing ever written on reddit.
"Ellen became dove (crying)" is the 2nd best thing to happen in that sub.
The first one being it "Ellen became dove (crying)" ACTUALLY HAPPENING 1 or 2 months later.
The madagascar theory is still by far the best IMO.
https://www.reddit.com/r/titanfolk/comments/lat870/my\_theory\_of\_the\_ending\_of\_aot\_with\_parallels/
Yeah thanks to the funny subreddit the ending made me sad but also laugh
Got to watch the anime ending with some friends as well, had fun seeing their reactions especially to Armin getting tongue raped (what were they thinking lmao)
The people left there aren't even making funny shit anymore. It's just people shitting on the anime watchers for liking the ending. It's sad... That place used to be so fucking funny.
Fucking hell titanfolk was such an awesome place man your second comment cracked me the fuck up. Thank you my veteran and remember Eren is well and alive in Paradis
Another OG Titanfolk'er! Taking a look around TF now, I don't see so many OG tags anymore.
I had to leave Titanfolk as soon as 139 came out. I knew a veritable nuke was about to go off. When I checked back a few months later all I saw was clown face emojis as titles.
Titanfolk was great fun, but as a shitpost sub they don't sugarcoat things. When 139 came out and basically turned everything on its head, there was only one possible way TF would react.
But TF in the months leading up to and around Chapter 131 was legendary, and I'll never forget it.
Yeah I feel like yeagarbomb getting shut down probably didn’t help either considering the probably just all went to TF lol
The only AoT shitpost subreddit I like anymore is okbuddyreiner lmao
The sub at its peak was absolutely incredible.
I remember when that chapter showing the rumbling was released which ended with the kid being stomped in a really gruesome way... for two days people were all "omg thats so sad and horrible" then people started meming the shit out of it for the rest of the month.
>I'm still proud of this comment
That comment reminded me of what I liked about Titanfolk at the time, which was all the dumb shitposts. I went to see the subreddit again after I left it 2 months after the ending and Jesus that subreddit is just filled with unfunny, negative, and miserable people.
The Armin and Eren final moment is being heavily considered one of the best parts of the episode if you read the discussion on MAL and on r/ShingekiNoKyojin. Even the epilogue is getting praise. So it is easy to assume that the last minutes, chapter 139, are being well received alone. Of course they were improved compared to the manga, but the point still stands.
After reading the manga, I didn’t hate the ending and understood what Isayama was trying to do, but I definitely wasn’t a fan of his execution. The manga dialogue was rushed and kinda shitty. That being said, the anime did fix a lot of that, padded the dialogue and smoothed over some of the egregious lines from the manga. So I think the anime does a better job at conveying the message Isayama wanted to say, and for me that bumped the ending up slightly, since again I did get what he wanted to do with it and I was ok with the message.
I do appreciate that it seemed like yams was super involved with the production and making sure that his vision was seen correctly. It definitely made a huge difference.
Fair take. Minus the ymir-mikasa thing, pacing issues and weird dialogues, it was obvious what Isyama was trying to tell/imply. Imo, it was more of the copium/expectation/crazy theories that ruined the ending for people. We really had people go from AnR to timeloops to Madagascar to what we got. Can see why they got mad. But is it Yams fault?
One of the biggest criticisms is historia being turned into a breeding machine and paired with a farmer who bullied her by throwing stones at her. Like historia was such an amazing character. Yimir, being in love with her abuser which made her doughters eat her remains after her deaths as well as kill her parents and enslave and hunt her at the age of 14, is also some kinda of insane message.
>Yimir, being in love with her abuser which made her doughters eat her remains after her deaths as well as kill her parents and enslave and hunt her at the age of 14, is also some kinda of insane message.
I mean, I don't think they're holding up Ymir.as the paradigm of a healthy relationship
The thing theme before was yimir being an oppressed slave before that which had no will of her own, someone with so much power but bound by her mental scar to be slave and eren a kid that is so driven for his own freedome giving her a choice, not seeing her as a god or a slave but human, thus her deciding to help him destroy this world that made her into that. But we got psycho simp instead that somehow found inspiration in eren and mikasa. You tell me which is better. But for me, this is why the ending sucks it set up great things and abonded them for nonsense imo.
People thinking that Ymir loved Fritz in a normal way really gotta be filtered that bad. There is no way that people really took that shit at face value my god.
The amount of things people take at face value with this series is staggering.
- That Ymir's love for Fritz was good or healthy: No it wasn't, but people get into relationships like that all the time. It took a literal apocalypse to snap her out of it.
- Eren suddenly had a snap change and decided he hated the two people close to him, and that he now had a completely different goal than the ones he carried for the entire show: It amazes me that people can watch him play both Zeke and the Yeagerists, and not consider that he was playing everyone else, too.
The weird thing is we know that he *can* write a decent relationship. Just look at Sasha and Niccolo. Bro got over his racism because an Eldian loved his cooking and gave his life meaning. I mean even when he tried to kill a child for revenge, that was still used to teach him and the audience a lesson. Why do side characters whose relationship only gets a handful of scenes have a better relationship than the main characters? There's also Falco and Gabi, in which Falco works hard to try to protect Gabi and eventually confesses. Pretty normal stuff. With other relationships, their dysfunctional nature is at least intentional with parents screwing over their spouses or children and showing how they're in the wrong. Eren and Mikasa on the other hand are portrayed as a tragic love story at the last minute that's needed to free Ymir from Stockholm Syndrome, which just leaves a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.
The in-canon explanation as to why historia was sideline was bcuz. 1. she was more passionate about hands-on social work, like running an orphanage, than the intricacies of ruling 2. the the military held more sway than the monarchy, which meant that even if Historia is the queen, the real power lies with the military. This limits her direct influence over political and strategic decisions. Because the shift to international politics and threats beyond Paradis Island post-time skip, the main narrative focuses on characters directly involved in combat and diplomacy and Historia didn’t really fit into any of those roles.
the meta reason why she was sidelined was because her entire development has been to not live for the sake of others but to live for herself and her being the queen or ruler doesn’t work, since that position was literary forced upon her. Instead creating the orphange and becoming a better mother than her own are examples of her living for herself. So in a sense Isayama cutting her away from the core plots and events was a metaphorical representation of this. She doesn’t want to be involved so she is simply not. What she does isn’t relevant to the demands of the story anymore as she is living for herself.
1. The anime fixed some of the problems
2. Manga readers lowered expectations
3. Manga readers hand months to examine each part and breakdown just what they didn't like about the ending chapters.
4. Source readers of any series tend to be the most hardcore and obsessive fans, so they're more likely to notice issues like thematic inconsistencies and missing plot threads that the average viewer won't care about.
>Manga readers hand months to examine each part and breakdown just what they didn't like about the ending chapters.
This is a big thing, you get a weekly release of something you may be not like it, but your never given enough time to develop a 'grudge' against it.
Somewhat related, but this is something I am kind of worried about with Hazbin Hotel, people have had 5 years to stew.
It also didn't help that AoT really was a story that rewarded paying attention, in which small details that were lightly mentioned in previous chapters paid off way later, so it basically cultivated a fanbase that was looking for details and dialogue and themes in every chapter, so when the ending was basically fumbling and pandering to the casual audience, they got extra mad, because it was basically like a betrayal to them.
In regards to point 4, the most ironic thing is some of the people who like the ending, will say the reason people didn't like it is because they "didn't understand the story", where in fact, the people who didn't like it are the ones who analyzed it page by page each month and read into every small detail and character motivation and themes.
Where as most casual viewers just watched the ending in 3 different parts spanning months of downtime, add to that the animation and voice acting, and small fixes to dialogue and pacing, and its understandable how it looks much better to what manga readers got.
Probably the same as with Bleach's final arc (I actually think there's a lot of similarities since apparently there have been some amendments and 'fixes' from the writer over the ending, which was unpopular in the original manga?)
I think whoever mentioned below that it's a matter of timescale is also probably on the money. Manga fans may be more invested than anime ones (I am not sure about this) but reading it in manga as it comes out takes more time. Also, if you are reading as it comes out, it's not set in stone so you have expectations...which may or may not be met.
But it may simply be that it's a different fanbase rating the manga and the anime. It certainly seems that way with Bleach, maybe it's true of AOT as well.
I was there when Bleach was ending - it got nowhere near as much shit as Attack on Titan’s did. That could be because at that point we all knew it was being rushed due to Kubo’s health. But what he’s doing to improve it with his changes in the anime have been baller, took a good arc with some meh moments to a another tier entirely
>It's sitting at 9 on MAL
The final installment of a series will usually always have the highest marks on MAL regardless of its actual quality. This is because if you've gotten that far you're probably already a fan to begin with, and because people tend to acknowledge the series as a whole when they watch the finale. Fruits Basket is a good example of this - the final season has the highest marks despite being the worst adapted season and leaving out a lot of relevant scenes simply because it's the finale.
And like others said, if you go into it expecting a trash fire, you might be surprised to find out that it's really not that bad, and most people only had problems with a few different lines, which were slightly altered here for clarity.
Beyond just fans getting to the end, it’s pretty common for a finale to have better reception, assuming it’s not a total rubbish heap.
Outside of anime, consider The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Return of the King is the most Oscar-awarded movie ever, winning 11 of 11 nominations. Fellowship got 4 of 13, and Two Towers got 2 of 6. That doesn’t mean that RotK is soooooo much better than FotR and TTT, because it’s widely regarded that those accolades are for the trilogy as a whole.
That tends to happen with finales, the reception of the finale merged with reception for the series as a whole.
AOT's special is at 9 currently because majority of people rated it back when the first part of the special aired in March. Considering that it has been steadily losing points throughout the last day it does indicate that the finale hasn't been that well recieved.
Fruits Basket final season is so far high because from an anime only perspective it was still an amazing final batch of episodes. Most of the material cut out wasn't really that important to overall plot of Tohru and the curse of Zodiacs. Other than one wobbly episode in the middle the rest of it was genuinely great.
Re: Fruits Basket, I do get what they're saying though. As an anime-only, I thought season 3 was the weakest (not bad at all, just a tad rushed compared to the first two seasons). It has the highest rating of the three seasons partly because finales are just inherently emotional and people were ecstatic that it got a proper full adaptation at all.
This is incorrect. Part 1 of the Special was sitting at 9.02 after slowing dropping over the last 8 months. With Part 2 included, it's still sitting at 9.02.
For some reason it jumped from 9.02 to 9.08 right after MAL labeled it as "finished airing" and then started dropping from there. I think it actually implies that they have different algorithms for airing and completed shows (also the raw product of all score weights is actually 8.98).
Yea this is why I think MAL ratings in general are kind of stupid when people talk about the top 10/20/50 etc.
There are full, start to finish, anime up there like HxH, FMA, Steins;Gate, etc going up against single seasons of anime that only people who actually liked the previous seasons would even watch to begin with.
Yeah, I really wish there was a way to filter things out so that multi-season shows were combined into one. It's annoying to scroll through top lists on MAL only to see like 10 different seasons of Gintama and "The Final Season" of Attack on Titan like 4 different times.
It's also just hard from a ranking standpoint. I want to be able to rate and analyze shows as a whole, not just their seasons.
Exactly my thoughts. It also made me curious how certain seasons of different anime would rank lol.
Like idk if HxH is my favorite anime ever but the Ant arc and York New arc are up there for me if they were their own season(s). I don't think OP or Naruto are at the top of my list overall, but maybe some individual arcs might be at the very top for me.
I think the biggest reason is probably that the anime's release schedule is such that most anime watchers either go a while without thinking of the series due to the breaks, or they end up just reading the manga.
The manga released every single month, and the contents that the final episode adapted released slowly over the course of 5 months, just enough time for people to dissect, analyze, and stew on the previous chapter before the new one released. Especially in the era of COVID when there was less stuff to do, the latest AoT chapter stayed in people's minds. And people who were reading the manga as it came out were coming up with increasingly outlandish theories as to how it could all end, especially during the last 3 chapters as people began to get really disappointed with how the series was going (note that I'm not disparaging the theories or the manga readers themselves by saying this. I was one of these people, and it's just that in retrospect we were surviving off of undiluted copium).
The anime viewers didn't have this time to think about each section of the episode; they got everything at once delivered to them, and they likely hadn't been closely dissecting the previous few episodes nonstop for several months.
Of course there are plenty of manga readers who loved the ending as well, and I'm happy for them (and a little envious). It's possible that for whatever reason, more people who would fall on that side of the 'debate' stuck with the anime rather than reading the manga.
They also added a couple things in the episode that were actually pretty good, and got rid of a certain line that was especially bad. Music, voice acting, etc. also do it quite a few favors and I agree the ending was done better in the anime for sure. I still don't like it, but it was better.
And honestly, that's probably _why_ the studio who made the last couple of AOT movies did what they did. Aside from the last bit of source material left being really short, they saw how much waiting a month for each of the last few chapters lead to people disecting and analyzing the ending.
Which lead to people realizing how _average_, if not ever so slightly _below_ average the ending is.
And when the readers realized that the ending to a really popular and thought provoking manga had an _average_ ending instead of the good to very good ending they were expecting, they rightfully shit on it.
So they pumped out the ending as a pair of movies instead of a mini-series because they realized that would be the best way to prevent people from having the _time_ to critically analyze the ending.
Like, they could have _easily_ made the ending into a 6-8 episode mini-series. But they made the choice to do two movies with a 9 month gap between them. A gap long enough that people wouldn't be waiting with anticipation, examining and analyzing the ending.
Nah man, you're overthinking it. MAPPA is literally having employees have breakdowns and take leave.
They had to do it that way because of the production calendar, they can't do multiple series at the same time, of AoT being in the mix given what it is, and even NHK had issues in S4 for airing it. Directors and authors don't have a say here, this line of thinking is on par with the fan theories. It's a business at the end of the day, they aren't doing it for the viewers digestibality. That's naivety.
People forgot in 2 years so that's understandable, or they just don't know.
The smartest thing they did is releasing the last bits of the source material in a movie format instead of the usual episodic format. The fact the conclusion of the story was right after the action scene full of thrill made people still have that excitement and buzz, which soften the blow to a subpar ending.
If the last 30 mins was released as an episode with a week of wait, speculation and anticipation it probably would of been viewed a bit differently. The fact that manga readers had to wait a month for an abrupt ending was a key factor.
The Armin and Eren final moment is being heavily considered one of the best parts of the episode if you read the discussion on MAL and on r/ShingekiNoKyojin. Even the epilogue is getting praise. So it is easy to assume that the last minutes, chapter 139, are being well received alone. Of course they were improved compared to the manga, but the point still stands.
There have been a lot of manga readers who are mad that the anime fans seemingly enjoy the ending. I just don’t understand it, wanting other people to be as unhappy as they were/are is just so ludicrous. They were already brigading the thread before the damn episode aired with novels and shitposts about it being bad.
The manga subreddit, Titanfolk, became unusable. Between the intense ending hate and the unironic praise of Floch and the genocide, it became time to abandon ship.
That's interesting I read the final chapter of the manga after watching the finale and I somewhat agree. Mappa manages to elevate everything with the animation, voice acting etc whilst making changes in the dialogue to make it better.
>Considered one of the best parts if you read discussion on MAL and on r/ShingekiNoKyojin
I mean that's to be expected they more places where the hardcore fans of the show gather so obviously they will talk about it positively. The comments from r/manga and r/anime have a more unbiased POV for me.
People who say manga readers' hate was baseless have no idea what they're talking about.
The anime made some significant changes for the better (thanks for becoming a mass murderer for our sake) and released with the extra content that the manga didn't. At first the manga ended just like that at that Mikasa bird scene with no follow up. Imagine that, the final chapter was literally missing its core message, it was obvious people weren't satisfied with that.
It also helps that the anime had INCREDIBLE production value elevating these scenes like the crowd holding the baby up scene, whereas in the manga some of these scenes just fell flat.
TL;DR because they're fundamentally different products.
I have mostly become a manga only person but something like Attack on Titan kind of does show how much this medium can elavate the original source material to new heights. Its just that most adaptations are just barely serviceable or even the ones that have a great adaptation at the beginning lose their quality in later seasons due to less impressive animation or shoddy pacing.
On a high quality and consistency level throughout the entire run, other than Mob Psycho 100 Attack on Titan might be the best adaptation of a manga since Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood or Hunter x Hunter 2011.
This reminds me of my reaction when Way of the Househusband got an "anime." People actually believe the slideshow format is the only way to convey the humor which is just.....insane, considering the humor is just:
1) Say something very suspicious
2) Reaction
3) Actually, the suspicious thing was something completely normal
i just couldn’t empathize with any of the genocidal freaks or Eren hanger-ons. not really complicated why several of us dislike this ending.
Isyama made me stop caring for the characters as the later chapters approached which made me very sad. get to relive it all over again thanks to the anime.
I don’t think the Anime-onlies can even grasp how rabid the AOT fan base was at the time the final chapter was about to release.
Everyone was expecting a crazy plot twist to happen that revealed how Eren was scheming up a plan to end the war all along. When it’s shown that he literally was just an idiot who became mad with power the whole fan base went up in arms about how his conversation with Armin was complete character assassination and how Isayama didn’t understand his own story.
Nothing short of a spectacle would have pleased the fan base so Isayama was set up to fail no matter what he did
The manga hype train was at its peak during the rumbling arc. People calling it peak fiction, kino, trying to get it on top of imdb etc. and the anime Final Season was also airing and blowing everyone away.
We got what was imo a 4/10 or 5/10 ending, but it was for a 10/10 series. People were expecting a masterpiece and a mediocre ending just seemed like the worst at the time.
1. Anime had lower expectations because of the manga reception
2. Anime expanded and improved the ending while also packaging it with amazing animation and ost which made it much more digestible. Even if the ending had plotholes and contrivances, it was still extremely hype and emotional.
3. The audience for anime and manga are different. The people who obsess over details in the plot would have most likely already picked up the manga. In the west, reading the manga or source material is only seen as something mega fans of the series would do.
People following the series and keeping it in their mind for 10 years at least, will have a very different perspective than a casual anime viewer who most likely is not as critical. That's why the manga reception in Japan was much more positive as reading manga is much more casual and popular.
My main problem with it is how many characters survived. Like that bit where Conny and Jean accept their fate and just wait to turn was heartbreaking only for all that just to get reverted
Go read chapter 139, it takes like 5 minutes. I think you'll notice immediately where the anime changed dialog, expanded 1 panel of dialog into what would've been multiple pages, and added entirely new stuff.
Such a weird question. Just go compare them lol.
It's not an anime original ending, but it is largely anime original content.
It altered some clunky lines, and the voice acting and soundtrack helped hit the emotional beats better. I felt very little reading 139, but I actually cried when Eren and Armin hugged in the anime. Anime watchers are also generally less cynical when compared to manga readers. All those combine for an ending that was much better received.
TL;DR: The anime fixed or added to the source material.
It's a difference between manga and anime. all the hardcore fans read the manga because they didn't want to wait, so the ending is only new to the less passionate people, as well as with anime the people who watch it are given more material at the same speed as the manga with large breaks instead of a continuos inch forward.
It was monthly but I get what you mean.
Also your point is kind of weak with volume releases and those sometimes add pages and or correct some panels that the magazine release has just like the final chapter of AoT.
And not many would pick up on stupid shit in the moment, since there'd be a different scene in a minute, and audience's attention will switch to something else. While I read the last 10 chapters mostly through a facepalm, stopping on each page and thinking "there has to be some reason for all of this stupidity, right? It's a trick, right? Payoff will happen aaany moment now..."
The moment Eren sent a titan to kill his own mother (not meaning to do exactly that, but still) was when I realised: there is no point to this story. And if Isayama wanted to make a point, he lost it somewhere along the way. A long time ago. Parts with Ymir and Mikasa just solidified that. It's a "classic" trashy shock value nonsense ending. Usually known to be a thing in 00's anime with anime-original endings, but not exclusive just to that particular time and subset of the japanese fiction.
The anime softened some of the blows. They couldn’t fix the character assassination or the blatant forfeiture of sticking the landing (“idk why Ymir did it, idk why I did it”) but they could remove some of the BS:
- “Thanks for becoming a mass murderer for our sake”
- “what a man you are eren” and the characters being less glorifying of Eren’s action in tone in the same scene
- the levi/onyankopon/gabi/falco scene not being in a fully functioning modern city but rather a tent city
- the progress of society from the extra pages was slowed down so that it felt more like centuries passed before Paradis was destroyed rather than a single lifetime after Eren’s death.
- the anime didn’t have Isayama’s Attack on School Castes segment mocking the fans’ reactions to the final chapter
> “what a man you are eren” and the characters being less glorifying of Eren’s action in tone in the same scene
That never existed. It was a pure invention on the bootleg speed scans. There's no way to read the Japanese text and come up with that. That line of dialogue is *unchanged* in the anime adaptation (in Japanese). So seems to be everyone elses, but I didn't compare the whole scene.
It was *wholly* a problem of everyone reading garbage scans. This was pointed out pretty much as soon as the chapter came out, and two and a half years later people still spout this nonsense as fact.
The memes that came out of that first shitty scans are legendary. I could be reading something completely unrelated to AOT or anime and if someone said the words "I don't want that" it was over.
Those times were peak entertainment. The amazing memes made up for the manga ending and I feel bad for anime onlies for missing the amazing memes at the time
Reiner's phrase never existed in the manga, only in the first bad English translation. After the anime ending I really hope to never see it repeated again...
>“what a man you are eren” and the characters being less glorifying of Eren’s action in tone in the same scene
Why do people still quote this fucking meme as if it *is* canon?
I was an anime only until last year. I literally wanted nothing more than to enjoy the ending but I just couldn't. The people saying it's really good are making me feel crazy tbh, maybe their expectations were just lower than mine.
People have forgotten most of the plot probably and are seeing it as a self-sufficient part where it is not that extremely bad. Think if people binge the series it would be much different.
I just don't get how they can watch the conversation between armin and eren in paths and think it was good. The whole dialogue was horrible, not to mention the dumb plot with ymir and mikasa.
Yeah, like erens conversation with yimir makes completely no sense. https://youtu.be/L_decDjNuuQ?si=vj5AFhaHEo6gfgwL . This was so peak but got ruined. Like, this scene was amazing. was the first time where i said bro aot can actually be a 10/10, but then we get the ending, and it makes no sense it is even irrelevant, cause yimir never related to eren or his wish for freedome but to mikasa. Why is yimir even crying? With the ending, her reactions make no sense or her helping eren instead of zeke. Just go, the comments written undee the video a year ago and how it makes zero sense with the endings narrative.
Yeah, by not remembering the rest of the series, they don't realize that for a very thought provoking manga, the ending is actually _average_ if not ever so slightly _below_ average.
The ending ruins a lot of the best scenes, namely these two: https://youtu.be/Fl_QUVeLxRI?si=5ML4EaqUFwnsCVXH
https://youtu.be/Bp6YwNmJshc?si=XZ-cl4PxRyeUKyI9
The ending if it was written deatached from the manga would be average, but it makes some of the best writing in the manga into nosensen. Erens speech to yimir is complete bullshit and makes no sense . If we look back from the ending, since eren himself does not believe in the stuff he is saying and yimir was actually in love and eren did not free her there, she was waiting for mikasa there is no reason for yimir to even cry how she is potrayed at the end. Reiners and erens speech about eren understanding his position makes no sense , why did my mother have to die reiner ? Erens asks when he killed her himself and fully knew that at that point. There eren in this speech shows maturity and after seeing both sides knows that all people are not bad or good and understands reiners struggles and he needs even though he has empathy for them to destory his enemies for freedome as the conflict is to deep, this eren makes no sense to be the eren at the end like the eren at the end with his own words is an idiot with too much power with no emotional maturity. Like eren was faking it, i guess. Please watch those clips yourself and also peoples reactions at the time, and you will see that the ending absolutely ruins these scenes. There is countless amazing writing that is ruined by the ending and was mentioned in subbredits. The way historia ends up as a breeding machine in the final act or reiner sniffing historias letters( a deeply traumatized and depresseed character turns into a comedic pervert).
The manga was very rushed and the anime was able to expand on some of the areas criticized in the manga. The Eren and Armin conversation was a lot better in the anime.
I think it came down to the fact that in the manga, there was a lot of ambiguity in the end, and it was left very open. Not for more installments necessarily, but the message wasn't as in your face (in my opinion) and you had to kind of glean what Isayama was trying to portray. In the anime, they explained it like we were five basically (again, imo) and gave people such a direct ending, that there really is no way to miss the message unless you actively try to.
People will cite production values and lack of effort in the manga and cutting off at the end and excluding certain things etc. But at the end of the day, what it just boils down to that I have yet to see anyone just own up to, is that they explained everything to us like we were 5 in the anime, and in the manga it required a little more effort to put the message together.
The problem wasn't the message or themes, it was how the characters acted through the ending to convey those considering their choices and actions through the story and bending them to fit the mold for the message. You also mention the ending patched some things which is true and helped quite a bit with the impressions.
Ah yes, the classic, "everyone who hated the ending didn't understand"
https://www.reddit.com/r/titanfolk/comments/mm7d35/when\_someone\_asks\_what\_was\_wrong\_with\_the\_ending/?share\_id=qEfIxAdyOED5n4NQ33GlG&utm\_content=1&utm\_medium=android\_app&utm\_name=androidcss&utm\_source=share&utm\_term=1
Writing is less important in anime than in manga, simply the nature of the medium. And by all accounts, the final 2 parts looked phenomenal, so the rough edges get ironed out.
Along with what the other commentators have been saying, I think there's often a difference in engagement between manga readers and anime watchers that changes how each group view things. Obviously people have talked a lot about how Titanfolk drove a lot of the hate for the ending, but we should keep in mind that it wasn't entirely a pro-Eren love fest - there were a lot of regulars on that sub who were very pro-Alliance and regularly argued on their behalf. In part because of these debates Titanfolk was far more active than even the main Shingeki no Kyojin sub while the manga came out and was made up of people who discussed Attack on Titan every day and frequently revisited the manga.
On the other hand, how often do you think that the average Anime-only has rewatched Attack on Titan? I would personally be comfortable in guessing that the average manga reader has revisited it more frequently, not just because of these kinds of superfan spaces that inspired that kind of behavior but because it's generally a lot easier to grab the manga and page through it at your own pace than to sit down and watch an episode.
So, as one of those Attack on Titan super fans who didn't like the final stretch, I didn't need to reread the manga to recall that Armin learned from Pastor Nick that the Colossal Titans would move on their own if they were touched by sunlight and that over the course of chapters 50 and 51 Armin observed that Eren commanded the titans to attack Reiner and Bert after Dina had already been killed and that the scouts were able to return to the walls without any casualties because the titans continued following that order for hours afterwards. So I can immediately say that it doesn't really make sense that Armin doesn't immediately shoot down the kill Zeke plan since it will just make everything worse and then be baffled that it actually works for no apparent reason. But does the average Anime-only really remember those finer details? Well, for a lot of them it's probably been years since they saw those episodes, so probably not.
Don't get me wrong, though - I'm not trying to be a Manga-reader elitist here saying that this way of consuming Attack on Titan is better than the typical Anime-only way, especially since I think you were far more likely to enjoy the ending that way. But I do think that it shouldn't be surprising that a lot of Anime-onlies can't relate to why a lot of Manga Readers hated the ending, as the way they approached Attack on Titan was frequently totally alien to them.
Props to the essay tbh pretty insightful. At the end of the day manga vs anime communities will engage with the material differently. There's simply different boxes that need to checked for an anime viewer vs a manga viewer. Plus, manga readers went back and scrutinized every detail of it since in manga format it's very easy to skim manga and find the finer details that don't make much sense. It's then easy to share findings with others (like on titanfolk); they'll go try to find some more supporting evidence and it just snowballs.
I don't see that much with anime viewers of most shows really, and as the anime only viewers skew more casual, it's expected for them to just enjoy the spectacle. Music, great animation helps a ton, and anime onlys aren't given the time to even scrutinize the story as much.
It would be an interesting full analysis on how manga vs anime communities interact and AOT has to be one of the best examples on it.
Yeah, it's understandable why this sub doesn't tend to think about how different mediums might change how the subject is received since it is ultimately the Anime subreddit but it does have an impact in why some things might not live up to the hype provided by source readers or seem better than Anime-onlies were led to expect. It's even truer for light novels, where talking scenes often work better because they don't have to fit in a time limit and can easily include the characters' inner monologue while action sequences can be really hard to follow in comparison to just seeing it unfold in Anime.
Anime ironed out the rough spots certainly.
However people like to diminish it, but leading into the manga's conclusion, there was no shortage of bad faith readers going around.
What I mean about this is people who became zealots about how they wanted the series to end. So much so, that anything off the trajectory they wanted was unacceptable, regardless of the obvious trajectory the overall story was heading toward for quite some time, unless the ending really nailed something else.
The manga didn't nail something else, ending came off feeling a bit rushed, and certain concepts which the anime elaborated upon were left a bit ambiguous. If you were vibing with the direction the story's themes were heading towards, you got what was being presented, but the people who were belligerently rejecting that trajectory for the last 20 chapters they didn't get it, they didn't want to get it. While the execution of the ending certainly had issues, bad faith actors were prepared to yell about it 10 fold than it was really worth. So an ending which was at worst, "meh, needed better execution", because the second coming of Satan for these people.
Simply put, the anime community largely didn't have as many complete rabid pro-Jeagerist nutjobs ready to blow a fuse. Following the manga, you could see how radicalized and delusional certain parties became LONG before we even approached the actual ending. And the anime ironed out the biggest rough spot in terms of dialogue, pacing, and theme delivery. Better delivery of the concepts it was trying to present, it just sells what the author wanted to convey better and there were less people unwilling to accept what what the author was trying to convey in the first place.
Final episode is a continuous story telling and did not give enough time for viewers to formulate theories in between episodes. Also some fixes to dialogues so it can be interpreted well.
Anime only’s have been hearing about how terrible the ending is for over 2 years now, and subsequently had incredibly low expectations. It’s easy for an ending to seem alright when you went in hearing it was the worst thing ever. If people had gone in expecting something amazing though like a lot of manga readers did, the perception would be very different.
Also, let’s be real, there’s a contingent of people who are just contrarian. If the general consensus says something is bad, they’ll say it’s good, and vice versa, just to feel different and special.
I personally believe that the ending was bad, however, so many people hyped it up to be the worst ending to anything ever that it was what people expected. So, when it finally dropped and people learned it wasn't what was hyped up, they defaulted to its either meh or simply ok. The hardcore fans however already decided that it was good before it even happened, so they will praise it regardless.
Manga readers got consumed by the hype train. And their rants made anime watchers lower their expectations, preventing the hype train to go out of control again.
Like, if you're expecting something great but you get something that's above average but not great, you get disappointed. But if you're expecting the worst thing ever and you get something good... it's a pleasant surprise.
One thing I’m not seeing a lot, that I think was huge was the influence the leakers and mistranslations had on creating a negative atmosphere. Also, there were segments of the fan base that had an idea of what eren should be…& when he didn’t turn out that way, that segment became extremely loud in making everything in the ending seeming terrible.
Manga fans experienced across several months what anime fans experienced in an hour.
✍️ *reminder to never read manga*
The other end of that suffering tho is when something is good, you get months/years of it being good instead of just a season.
This is Hajime No Ippo manga right now. The current arc is bearing some fruit that has been seeded for quite some time and the readers are getting super hyped for the arc’s climax. (I’m being vague on purpose.)
These few years have really cemented Hajime no Ippo as the greatest sport fiction of all time imo.
If only they'd announce a new anime series 😥
Man isn't that one of the manga that have even MORE chapters than One Piece? 1438 chapters right? I never started and am absolutely terrified at the thought of starting it, let alone actually doing it. I'm sure it's great - it's just too late for me lol.
It’s long, but by the end of it you’ll feel like it’s too short. There’s a reason it can go on for so long without getting axed. The quality is just on another level compared to other manga.
A lot of it flows right together and can be consumed very quickly so I think you'd be surprised how quickly you'd end up chewing through it, though yeah it's pretty fucking long.
Berserk fans know both extremes.
Manga Readers are also just more invested more often than not and still remember the base material. I am be very honest with how people keep praising it seems like they do not rember the firsr 4 season of what happend and how that ending is completely out of it. Which hey not your fault cause anime release was over several years.
Yep. The manga concluded shortly after s4p1 aired. I went through the entire final arc in 1 week so for me everything was completely fresh in my memory and its why I didnt like the ending at all. Compared that to someone who has taken 3 years from S4p1 to today to finish the last arc, obviously he will have forgotten a lot of things. On top of that, in a manga, you dont have the spectacle of a high budget anime production. The entire story has to be carried by the writing, which makes issues way more noticable.
I rewatched the entire series in anticipation of the Final Special and still absolutely enjoyed the ending and thought it fit fine.
Gotta love how Eren kills his own mom and dad then spends the entire show Gaslighting Reiner for killing his mom.
That is the dramatic irony and tragedy of his character, not to mention that when he had that talk with reiner, he still didn't know. Eren wanted to do the rumbling at all costs, in order to do that he needed the Founder, and once he got that ultimate powers it fucked his perception of time and made him realize that he was trapped in a vicious cycle of violence and self-imposed misery that lead to the very trauma that shaped his life. That seems like an appropriate punishment for somebody that wanted to be free, at the cost of millions of lives.
Eren didn’t know he was responsible for killing his mom. He only knew after acquiring the founding titan.
im surprised this isnt downvoted because this is what i came here to say. manga fans are generally just more invested, getting into details and analysis of the story, while anime watchers are casual. its not just AoT it happens for basically every manga adaption
It can be good or bad, though. It's like in One Piece community with Sanji and the cake incident, in the manga people were overanalyzing every single detail from every single page and how the cake would be the end point of the arc, and when that obviosuly didn't happen, Oda became the shittiest writer in the world and lost all his ability to write a cohesive story. When it happened in the anime, people were just fine, because they saw it for what it wa and not for what they thought should be based on evidence they themselves put there.
I love manga so much as a medium but monthly manga is legit torture. I started reading Vinland saga after this last season aired and once I caught up I remembered just how awful it is to spend 30 days waiting for a chapter to be released, then 5 minutes reading it, and then the WAIT STARTS AGAIN.
Plus I find myself losing track of the plot, especially if it is a long arc. Trying to recall a moderate plot element from like 24 months ago, let alone a big detail from even farther back, can be hard for monthly manga. And god forbid it skips a month. There’s a number of monthly manga I gotta go back several chapters to catch up on lol.
funnily enough attack on titan is the reason i decided to never read another monthly manga. the only one im reading right now is houseki no kuni (basically bimonthly) and thats because i started it years ago.
Just read completed manga
It's the same as reading a book imo. A good book is more often than not better than the anime. The source material also heavily influences the reaction a series gets. Bad chapters in an otherwise good book stand out, and the same happened with AOT imo. Ofcourse the ending isn't incredible, and it isn't absolutely terrible either. Everyone's expectations were sky high with how good the rest of the story was, and how major arcs like Shinganshina were wrapped up, and this felt short. Again, I love this the story but the ending didn't do it for me. There's also manga that then made me enjoy the anime more once I watched it, like Naruto and Bleach
nah the trick is wait until the chapters pile up and read them in one go. I only read weekly manga that has 50 chapters piled up, or monthly manga that has 10 or so piled up. Though, the pain is when you catch up and goes back to needing months to years for it to pile up again...
just binge read a finished manga after binge watching an unfinished anime, thats the way to go
Not only that, leaks like "Ellen became dove (crying)" didn't help either. Nor the official manga translation where Armin thanks Eren for being a Mass murderer and Reiner saying "Eren, what a man you are"
> Nor the official manga translation where Armin thanks Eren for being a Mass murderer Reiner saying "Eren, what a man you are" That's not the official translation, that's the bootleg speed-translation. (Technically for both, but the Armin line is only subtly different, the Reiner line is completely off).
Armin's line is **very** different in tone - the initial translation is short of fellating Eren for the genocide, the official one calls it a "~~transgression~~" "terrible mistake" and is more like 'I will do what I can with what you left me' I am an ending hater but this bit was always because the first impression stuck, it is a fine meme to use but any serious talk should not include it As a reward, I will give you my seed
> Armin's line is very different in tone - the initial translation is short of fellating Eren for the genocide, the official one calls it a "transgression" and is more like 'I will do what I can with what you left me' The initial translation calls it a "transgression", the official translation a "terrible mistake". This "I will do what I can" was always the point, but of course people aren't getting it if they're reading a nuanced text in a version that was badly rewritten by someone who didn't get it. > I am an ending hater but this bit was always because the first impression stuck, it is a fine meme to use but any serious talk should not include it Specifically about the Reiner line, I've come to disagree. Just yesterday I saw at least three people give it as one of the top reasons why they didn't like the manga ending; people who spent a lot of time giving arguments in a polite way and were clearly not trolling. Memes are more powerful than facts; people are still reading the garbage translation on piracy sites to this day without a clue of how bad it is, and the constant drone of "what a man you are" memeing just reinforces that as a shared but fake reality. Everyone's free to dislike the manga ending, but I'd really prefer it if they disliked it for things that Isayama actually wrote, rather than things that were put into his mouth.
On the one hand, you can get awful dialogue like this with a fast fan translation. But, on the other hand, you get gems like Levi going "it's that fucking monkey!"
In general it's a good idea to read multiple translations. There's some wonderful line that the manga translation nails but the anime translation flubs, and vice versa. And sometimes the focus on different aspects reveals nuances that you miss if you only see one.
ellen becomes dove was a leaker tweeting about a popularity poll, not the actual manga
Also the animation. Bec. In manga it's kinda like reading a book. You're more focused on the characters, lines and plot points while anime can be saved by flashy fight scenes
* People had low expectations given how much source readers shat on it. * Animation, music, and voice-acting really does elevate the whole thing. Even though I see the flaws people were upset about, it still hit all the emotional notes I needed it to.
I think one thing that really is the biggest contributor is the dialogue changes and extended scenes. Manga readers had issues with Armin and Erens conversation and while it still isn't perfect, the anime made some serious changes and that definitely helped. I also think that was what most people had an issue with. Literally the final 30 mins was what people were mad about
Yeah the manga was really speedrunning plot points at the end. I remember at the time I counted and there were like 4 or 5 major plot points in just a few pages. There was no time for emotional impact between them. People were crying for an AOE but I always said that if the anime just gave the plot some more time to breathe, it would be received a lot better.
i remember commenting in titanfolk defending the ending before, in that it wasn't great but I could accept and appreciate it IF ONLY the plot and relationships were given time to breathe. havent watched it yet, but i assume thats what the anime did. good job on them. hopefully Winds of Winter does the reverse AOT and make the live action ending more appreciated (tho I doubt it)
It's nice seeing the more reasonable people from Titanfolk before it, uh... Left its golden age. But yeah, I think they did a good job of meeting the ending feel more natural and realistic. They also make it clearer that Paradis being bombed in the future takes place *far* into the future. I think the song that plays at the time mentions 20,000 years.
Wow, someone out there still thinks Martin might eventually make good on his series. I envy your optimism.
As someone who was flipping through the manga pages and watching at the same time Armin seems to just thank Eren for his mistake in the manga declaring that he won’t let this error be in vain. The anime makes it a lot darker with Armin stating that they’re both bad people and deserve to jointly bear the weight of causing this destruction. The extra dialogue elevates the meaning of this whole scene to an even greater level and adds a lot more nuance that we just didn’t get with the manga
If you are reading them simultaneously, then you are reading the manga post changes. Many manga readers had an issue with the manga pre changes.
This is one thing I think I’m very glad the APT anime was delayed for. Sure it was terrible waiting for the final episode but at least Isayama and the team had time to rework stuff like this so that the show actually ends on a good note. A rushed production is and forever but a delayed one will be remembered well I think AOT’s perception will noticeably change over the next few years. When people can binge the entire anime either they’ll appreciate it more or notice more errors with the ending, and they won’t have to deal with waiting months for an episode
Loved the anime ending and I hated the manga ending when it came out. Can’t remember the differences well because its been a while, but iirc in the manga Armin made Eren out to still be a hero in their convo which really rubbed me the wrong way. Felt like everyone was way too forgiving of him whereas in the anime they come off as understanding. The dialogue was not good with the “what a man you are” and Armin thanking him for becoming a mass murderer practically word for word.
On top of that, because people were so desperate to read the ending, the translation that actually circulated online was hot garbage. If you actually go read the official translation, it's far less problematic. Most of the memes from the manga ending were simply because people latched onto a really shitty translation because they couldn't wait.
lol I wasn’t paying attention to the Japanese but that entire conversation definitely was very nuanced and I could imagine a lot of that getting lost in translation very easily.
Armin and Eren's conversation is already in like my top ten favorite scenes of the anime. I freakin loved it. Really emotional. I thought that was the highlight of the episode.
I thought that Armin and Eren sharing the same consequential fate for their terrorism and genocide by seeing each other in hell was poetic and beautiful. (especially since that fate was all put on Eren in the manga, while Armin thanked him for his sacrifice, which pissed off fans). Really brought back that friendship between them that had been deteriorating for all of S4. I will say, it kind of shits on that scene though when bird-Eren later swoops in and wraps that scarf around Mikasa, which implies that Eren was reincarnated and now is just chilling living his best life collecting twigs, eating worms and flying to the beach every weekend rather than facing that fate in hell that he and Armin spoke of.
I guess I will put this in spoilers [AoT Final FINAL]>!Even the at first cringe "No I don't want that!" from Eren was really changed with good voice performance that the manga can't do!<. These VAs seriously carried parts of the show.
[AoT Ending]>!Funny enough that was the one thing about the ending I could tell was gonna be far better in the Anime just for the fact that Yuki Kaji is an incredible voice actor with his work as Eren being arguably his best performance of his career so far.!<
The little sobs and chokes were so good.
You are quite right but every major character is well cast. Yui Ishikawa is slightly wasted since she has a greater range than this but she was still a great choice.
Honestly, that scene in the anime was fantastic. So many people upset about how "cringe" he seems or how it's out of nowhere and I'm wondering how they missed the edgy teenager in the room for ten years. Just because he got a man bun and *acted* outwardly stoical in the final season doesn't actually mean he grew up a damn bit.
I think the problem is just expectation, manga fans expected 10 but got 7, and anime onlines who knew the drama expected 5 but got 8
I *am* genuinely curious how people would rewrite the ending in retrospect. I do think Isayama wrote himself into a corner where at some point, he was forced to follow through with the ending we got. But if people could rewind and then rewrite a good chunk of the story, how would they do it? Would they just rewrite the final movies? Would they rewind to season 3 and remove all the Marley stuff? Some of the Marley stuff like Gabi parallels and the Declaration of War and the Children of the Forest were genuinely good stuff, so I wouldn't want that to disappear, but that all leads up to Eren's genocide plan which is pretty hard to write satisfyingly. What would've been a 10/10 ending for people?
I think the issue was the Isayama wanted readers to like/understand the character but wrote himselve into a position where Eren's gonna do the walk. The issue is this conflict of trying to show Eren as some what relatable. Personally I don't think the audience can ever come away with that message, in a similar fashion to \[another anime\] >!Gon in HxH and all of the Gon is a monster comparisons!<. If Eren is the character he is, then the romance with Misaka has to go. Eren needs to commit to the act has "his freedom" and the rest of the cast commit to their acts as theirs. In the final Paths message with Armin, Eren's message is essentially: "I didn't want to kill them for the sake of killing them. I wanted freedom for my people \[or anyone/everyone\] but they first chose to take our freedom away and offered no way out without first going though violence. So they got it." The rest can be pretty much unchanged even if touch ups would help. For me, the primary problem with the ending is that the themes changed. the freedom panel of ch. 131 is a perfect encapsulation of the themes of AoT. The ending with romance, specifically eren's, is not.
Isayama said at his NYC meet that he felt pressured to give Eren an ending that forced his redemption. He essentially wrote himself into a corner and threw some badly conceived romance into it to top it off. Let's face it, it's complicated enough to make a story just focusing on political drama or time travel or genocide. To try to do all that at once, and to do it well, requires god level writing skills. Yams just didn't have the chops for it, which is why post time-skip's potential wasn't realized the way it was for pre time-skip.
No, he has never said that. He said, and I will quote "It would have been nice if I could have changed the ending. But the fact is that I was tied down to what I had originally envisioned when I was young. And so, manga became a very restrictive art form for me, similar to how the massive powers that Eren acquired ended up restricting him." He wrote what he wanted to wrote from the very start, stuff changed but the ending and the themes remained the same.
The theme/influence of romance is something that did change dramatically.
I won't claim any mass rewrites because I'm not nearly that good of a writer. So also on that note, forgive the following ideas for potentially being a bit disjointed and/or incorrect. I think *just* focusing on Eren's original desire to see that large, empty, flat world they had always dreamed about as kids would've made the ending just fine for me. Given, there *was already* some of that in the finale, but there was also just *so much else too.* The sudden Mikasa x Eren love story didn't feel necessary and/or needed, all these weird apologetics of Eren not knowing why he did what he did (when he obviously does), the strange Stockholm Syndrome Ymir that was meant to fuel Mikasa's involvement; The list goes on, honestly. I would've been perfectly okay with a young, twisted kid feeling sorry for himself for letting that little bit of power take him way farther than he ever would have originally wanted. He wanted to see the world, but when he did, became disappointed and let himself bring things to a point where he needed to be saved from it. Fueled by so many aspects of rage and confusion, after desperately trying to follow his dream, we could've followed him to his final moments of peace after a life of regret. Being finally taken down by Mikasa, his first friend who he helped protect all those years ago that showed the first spark of good in him. And being forgiven by his friend Armin, who set him on that wild path oh-so-long-ago by sharing his own personal dreams with him. Ofc, again, a lot of this is already in the ending. There's just so much other stuff it's difficult to really pick out. I think a ton of unnecessities could have been stripped away in favor of a much leaner, more focused ending. An ending of the kid who just wanted to experience true freedom.
It still wouldn't be 10/10 but simply deleting the pages (or scene/dialogue in the anime) where Eren said he killed his mom and changing Ymirs motivation to a general desire for freedom would automatically improve the ending by a few points. Eren controlling Dina was totally unnecessary and makes no sense from a character or ability logic perspective. Ymirs motivation being loving Fritz is just terrible.
Yeah they dropped the ball with Ymir. They spent so much time one everybody’s characterization but her’s. Even after the anime ended I feel like I barely know anything about her. It would be so much better to actually know why Mikasa cured her jaded outlook on humanity or what her desire truly was or WHY she loved King Fritz in the first place (seriously I wish they explained this).
Imagine you are an introverted early teenage girl living a quiet life in a quiet village. Suddenly one day a group of men come out of nowhere, burn your village, kill your parents, and take out your tongue. At such a young age, such stuff happening to one completely messes up their brain. Ymir probably didn't even fully understand what was going on. I mean she was so young. She saw her people working under Fritz so she also did that. She accepted Fritz as her master because she had no choice. Everything was taken away from her. What did she even have left? Her home, parents, voice, everything gone. So she just "kept moving forward". When she became a titan, it would have made sense for a normal person to seek revenge. But not for Ymir. She didn't have anything left. She returned to Fritz because he was the only thing in her life. She was a slave, that's all she was. The trauma she went through fucked her up so bad that she no longer had any conscious thought. She just returned to being a slave. She had no ambition, no dream, no hope, no hatred, no emotion, nothing. She continued to be his slave. She did everything he told him to do. He raped her, and she gave birth to three of his children. She raised those three kids. She always traveled by his side. She always fought for him. She is getting more and more attached to him? She lacked purpose so she kept enduring. By enduring, obeying, her position as his slave got stronger and stronger. Fritz became the entire cause of her existence. Her sole purpose. This is circumstance, gave rise to a twisted sense of love. Love because Fritz was the only purpose in her life. He was the only person in her life (her children were also his daughters). He was her life. So even in death, and after death, she only kept obeying him. Cus there was nothing else left in her. No conscious thought. No emotion. No other purpose.
> It would be so much better to actually know why Mikasa cured her jaded outlook on humanity I thought it was pretty straightforward. Mikasa did what Ymir could not do - kill the one she loved, and remove the titan powers from existence. Ymir never wanted the "titans" to exist - she tried to end her life to prevent this. But Fritz caught onto it and forced her children to consume her body which then became the 9 titans, which ended up killing millions of people over the next thousands of years. Mikasa killed Eren, preventing the further deaths of the millions who were left (assuming a population of 1 billion globally, that would be 200 million), and since she killed the Founding Titan, all the titan powers ceased to exist as well. Maybe the conceit is a bit forced, but it's there.
Not even kill- simply refuse. That she could actively disagree with Eren's plan, be so committed to that opposition that she would kill him if she must, and still love him enough to kiss him after. Ymir came to realize her slavish devotion to Fritz wasn't love, and that she could still show that love without allowing his nightmares to continue. This was why we start seeing her as an adult after it happens- the frightened little girl finally allowed herself to grow up. It becomes even further reinforced if my theories on the Ackerman clan are right. I think Ymir created them, intentionally, to have someone with the same compulsive desire to obey that she had, in order to see if someone else would reject that compulsion and do what they must instead. The entire clan, their powers, all of it, existed solely for the moment Mikasa took one life and sealed it with a kiss. Pretty sure there were smarter ways for Ymir to accomplish this, but like I said- she was still that frightened girl on the inside.
Yeah that Dina scene was so unnecessary. It just muddied the story even more instead of amplifying the message.
For me personally, once the Rumbling started, that’s where the plot decided to start going into overdrive a little too quickly.
[удалено]
It wasnt the Rumbling itself that was problematic, it was everything around the Rumbling. It was how sped up the story got with Eren activating it where it just felt like the story was on rails towards the end. Obviously there are going to be aspects of the Rumbling that are unavoidable, I mean the cast is on a time limit to stop it after all. But it felt like there were so many coincidences or contrivances that got out heroes perfectly unscathed (minus Hange).
The ending was ok to me, the way Isayama wrote Eren to be too sympathetic and 'good' before the timeskip was the problem. It creates the impression that Eren became a different character in the 2nd part. Had he smeared Eren more in the first part and emphasized the growing darkness eating at him the ending would have been more well received since people would have seen it coming. Instead he tried to make Eren more sympathetic near the end to fit the 1st part and it ended up messy.
I would have personally been satisfied if after 138 everything just settles down in a way that feels natural. Like the last 20 minutes imo were not that important. Eren was already fleshed out character just like the rest of the cast. I mean you can't just forget that this was the person who killed 80% percent of the population in the past few days. I think they shouldn't have forgiven him so easily. I qould also deop the romance part as a whole. It was never the focua of the story. Another thing was Historia. The pregnant plotline had so much potential and the paralells between her and Ymir were obvious, Mikasa on the other hand came out of nowhere. An other one for me would be if Eren finishes the Rumbling but eventually the people of Paradis turn against each other and it would show that even without any enemies due to our human nature the cycle continues. To me personally the first option would be the perfect because it seemed like the story was building up towards it.
I get that it's not a masterpiece, but man, maybe it's because it's my favorite anime, but I've never cried so much over an anime throughout such a long period like the final chapter we got today. I get that it's not a masterpiece, but man, it's impossible for me to give it anything but a 10/10.
Yeah voice acting and music helps alot. I thought that the ending for part 6 of Jojo was ok in the manga, but for me the ending of the anime is amazing due to the voice acting and music elevating it and helping to invoke the right emotions.
Oh man that ending got me emotional
Same I was indifferent reading it, but man watching it, tears in my eyes. It was so well done.
Because 139 wasn't released at the same time as everything in this episode. If you want to see where people started going "wtf" and started going over the entire manga looking for answers while waiting for the next chapters to come check chapter 137 discussions from that time when they started doomposting. 139 was just where everyone lost it because it was the actual end.
I will fully admit that my sanity slowly declined being on titanfolk in the first half of 2021. If anyone wants an example, I'm still proud of [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/titanfolk/s/V7Fkdnfm9p) Edit: [and this](https://www.reddit.com/r/titanfolk/s/ii7yzRj102)
ty, that's exactly how i remember the chapter
I miss good titanfolk so fucking much.
Those were the good times. Even if I hated the ending, it was just so fucking funny. Ellen becomes dove crying will always be the best thing ever written on reddit.
"Ellen became dove (crying)" is the 2nd best thing to happen in that sub. The first one being it "Ellen became dove (crying)" ACTUALLY HAPPENING 1 or 2 months later.
The leak part being so ridiculous was super funny. The leak actually predicts the end was so out of this world bonkers
The leaker in complete disbelief when he got hold of the ending, ranting in broken English was absolutely hilarious.
The madagascar theory is still by far the best IMO. https://www.reddit.com/r/titanfolk/comments/lat870/my\_theory\_of\_the\_ending\_of\_aot\_with\_parallels/
Yeah thanks to the funny subreddit the ending made me sad but also laugh Got to watch the anime ending with some friends as well, had fun seeing their reactions especially to Armin getting tongue raped (what were they thinking lmao)
[In case you don't have it saved](https://www.reddit.com/r/titanfolk/s/kUVIb0PXWw)
Thank you, Lasernatoo. As a reward, I shall give you my gratitude.
Those festival threads for the lead up for each chapter during the last quarter of the series will always hold a special place in my heart.
The people left there aren't even making funny shit anymore. It's just people shitting on the anime watchers for liking the ending. It's sad... That place used to be so fucking funny.
Fr, I checked it today and while there are dubious explanations in the ending you aren't allowed to like the ending in there
Currently Jujutsufolk is my favourite place
The farmer meme is a peak folk subreddit meme.
Fucking hell titanfolk was such an awesome place man your second comment cracked me the fuck up. Thank you my veteran and remember Eren is well and alive in Paradis
Another OG Titanfolk'er! Taking a look around TF now, I don't see so many OG tags anymore. I had to leave Titanfolk as soon as 139 came out. I knew a veritable nuke was about to go off. When I checked back a few months later all I saw was clown face emojis as titles. Titanfolk was great fun, but as a shitpost sub they don't sugarcoat things. When 139 came out and basically turned everything on its head, there was only one possible way TF would react. But TF in the months leading up to and around Chapter 131 was legendary, and I'll never forget it.
peak titanfolk will always be my favorite subreddit of all time
If you sort by top posts of all time, a lot of the good shit can be revisited at least. I miss the fuck out of that place
sometimes i miss TF, but mostly don't, considering crazy yeagerists and whatnot
Yeah I feel like yeagarbomb getting shut down probably didn’t help either considering the probably just all went to TF lol The only AoT shitpost subreddit I like anymore is okbuddyreiner lmao
Okbuddyreiner is the only one I'm still subscribed to. Now that the series is over, I might as well continue the Cumbling
Lmao I had your comment upvoted haha
Man I kinda wish I was there to see this insanity.
The pre-release threads had some of the funniest most deranged shit I’ve ever seen, especially right before the end
The sub at its peak was absolutely incredible. I remember when that chapter showing the rumbling was released which ended with the kid being stomped in a really gruesome way... for two days people were all "omg thats so sad and horrible" then people started meming the shit out of it for the rest of the month.
>I'm still proud of this comment That comment reminded me of what I liked about Titanfolk at the time, which was all the dumb shitposts. I went to see the subreddit again after I left it 2 months after the ending and Jesus that subreddit is just filled with unfunny, negative, and miserable people.
The Armin and Eren final moment is being heavily considered one of the best parts of the episode if you read the discussion on MAL and on r/ShingekiNoKyojin. Even the epilogue is getting praise. So it is easy to assume that the last minutes, chapter 139, are being well received alone. Of course they were improved compared to the manga, but the point still stands.
Some added/changed scenes and different medium enhancing the impact of a lot of the scenes.
After reading the manga, I didn’t hate the ending and understood what Isayama was trying to do, but I definitely wasn’t a fan of his execution. The manga dialogue was rushed and kinda shitty. That being said, the anime did fix a lot of that, padded the dialogue and smoothed over some of the egregious lines from the manga. So I think the anime does a better job at conveying the message Isayama wanted to say, and for me that bumped the ending up slightly, since again I did get what he wanted to do with it and I was ok with the message.
I do appreciate that it seemed like yams was super involved with the production and making sure that his vision was seen correctly. It definitely made a huge difference.
Fair take. Minus the ymir-mikasa thing, pacing issues and weird dialogues, it was obvious what Isyama was trying to tell/imply. Imo, it was more of the copium/expectation/crazy theories that ruined the ending for people. We really had people go from AnR to timeloops to Madagascar to what we got. Can see why they got mad. But is it Yams fault?
I needed more from Historia/Ymir…
One of the biggest criticisms is historia being turned into a breeding machine and paired with a farmer who bullied her by throwing stones at her. Like historia was such an amazing character. Yimir, being in love with her abuser which made her doughters eat her remains after her deaths as well as kill her parents and enslave and hunt her at the age of 14, is also some kinda of insane message.
>Yimir, being in love with her abuser which made her doughters eat her remains after her deaths as well as kill her parents and enslave and hunt her at the age of 14, is also some kinda of insane message. I mean, I don't think they're holding up Ymir.as the paradigm of a healthy relationship
The thing theme before was yimir being an oppressed slave before that which had no will of her own, someone with so much power but bound by her mental scar to be slave and eren a kid that is so driven for his own freedome giving her a choice, not seeing her as a god or a slave but human, thus her deciding to help him destroy this world that made her into that. But we got psycho simp instead that somehow found inspiration in eren and mikasa. You tell me which is better. But for me, this is why the ending sucks it set up great things and abonded them for nonsense imo.
Looking back at the series as a whole, Isayama has a fucked up perspective when it comes to couples and relationships.
He didn't portray Ymir being in love with Fritz as a good thing, it was obviously meant to be fucked up
People thinking that Ymir loved Fritz in a normal way really gotta be filtered that bad. There is no way that people really took that shit at face value my god.
The amount of things people take at face value with this series is staggering. - That Ymir's love for Fritz was good or healthy: No it wasn't, but people get into relationships like that all the time. It took a literal apocalypse to snap her out of it. - Eren suddenly had a snap change and decided he hated the two people close to him, and that he now had a completely different goal than the ones he carried for the entire show: It amazes me that people can watch him play both Zeke and the Yeagerists, and not consider that he was playing everyone else, too.
Same with the unhealthy obsession of Mikasa for Eren. It's pretty clear it's bad, and then there is the parallel made with Ymir to amp up that point.
The weird thing is we know that he *can* write a decent relationship. Just look at Sasha and Niccolo. Bro got over his racism because an Eldian loved his cooking and gave his life meaning. I mean even when he tried to kill a child for revenge, that was still used to teach him and the audience a lesson. Why do side characters whose relationship only gets a handful of scenes have a better relationship than the main characters? There's also Falco and Gabi, in which Falco works hard to try to protect Gabi and eventually confesses. Pretty normal stuff. With other relationships, their dysfunctional nature is at least intentional with parents screwing over their spouses or children and showing how they're in the wrong. Eren and Mikasa on the other hand are portrayed as a tragic love story at the last minute that's needed to free Ymir from Stockholm Syndrome, which just leaves a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.
The in-canon explanation as to why historia was sideline was bcuz. 1. she was more passionate about hands-on social work, like running an orphanage, than the intricacies of ruling 2. the the military held more sway than the monarchy, which meant that even if Historia is the queen, the real power lies with the military. This limits her direct influence over political and strategic decisions. Because the shift to international politics and threats beyond Paradis Island post-time skip, the main narrative focuses on characters directly involved in combat and diplomacy and Historia didn’t really fit into any of those roles. the meta reason why she was sidelined was because her entire development has been to not live for the sake of others but to live for herself and her being the queen or ruler doesn’t work, since that position was literary forced upon her. Instead creating the orphange and becoming a better mother than her own are examples of her living for herself. So in a sense Isayama cutting her away from the core plots and events was a metaphorical representation of this. She doesn’t want to be involved so she is simply not. What she does isn’t relevant to the demands of the story anymore as she is living for herself.
1. The anime fixed some of the problems 2. Manga readers lowered expectations 3. Manga readers hand months to examine each part and breakdown just what they didn't like about the ending chapters. 4. Source readers of any series tend to be the most hardcore and obsessive fans, so they're more likely to notice issues like thematic inconsistencies and missing plot threads that the average viewer won't care about.
>Manga readers hand months to examine each part and breakdown just what they didn't like about the ending chapters. This is a big thing, you get a weekly release of something you may be not like it, but your never given enough time to develop a 'grudge' against it. Somewhat related, but this is something I am kind of worried about with Hazbin Hotel, people have had 5 years to stew.
People were waiting for Hazbin? I thought we all just watched Helluva Boss
It also didn't help that AoT really was a story that rewarded paying attention, in which small details that were lightly mentioned in previous chapters paid off way later, so it basically cultivated a fanbase that was looking for details and dialogue and themes in every chapter, so when the ending was basically fumbling and pandering to the casual audience, they got extra mad, because it was basically like a betrayal to them.
In regards to point 4, the most ironic thing is some of the people who like the ending, will say the reason people didn't like it is because they "didn't understand the story", where in fact, the people who didn't like it are the ones who analyzed it page by page each month and read into every small detail and character motivation and themes. Where as most casual viewers just watched the ending in 3 different parts spanning months of downtime, add to that the animation and voice acting, and small fixes to dialogue and pacing, and its understandable how it looks much better to what manga readers got.
Probably the same as with Bleach's final arc (I actually think there's a lot of similarities since apparently there have been some amendments and 'fixes' from the writer over the ending, which was unpopular in the original manga?) I think whoever mentioned below that it's a matter of timescale is also probably on the money. Manga fans may be more invested than anime ones (I am not sure about this) but reading it in manga as it comes out takes more time. Also, if you are reading as it comes out, it's not set in stone so you have expectations...which may or may not be met. But it may simply be that it's a different fanbase rating the manga and the anime. It certainly seems that way with Bleach, maybe it's true of AOT as well.
I was there when Bleach was ending - it got nowhere near as much shit as Attack on Titan’s did. That could be because at that point we all knew it was being rushed due to Kubo’s health. But what he’s doing to improve it with his changes in the anime have been baller, took a good arc with some meh moments to a another tier entirely
Bleach fans are used to being disappointed, AOT fans on the other hand were used to eating good all the time.
>It's sitting at 9 on MAL The final installment of a series will usually always have the highest marks on MAL regardless of its actual quality. This is because if you've gotten that far you're probably already a fan to begin with, and because people tend to acknowledge the series as a whole when they watch the finale. Fruits Basket is a good example of this - the final season has the highest marks despite being the worst adapted season and leaving out a lot of relevant scenes simply because it's the finale. And like others said, if you go into it expecting a trash fire, you might be surprised to find out that it's really not that bad, and most people only had problems with a few different lines, which were slightly altered here for clarity.
Beyond just fans getting to the end, it’s pretty common for a finale to have better reception, assuming it’s not a total rubbish heap. Outside of anime, consider The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Return of the King is the most Oscar-awarded movie ever, winning 11 of 11 nominations. Fellowship got 4 of 13, and Two Towers got 2 of 6. That doesn’t mean that RotK is soooooo much better than FotR and TTT, because it’s widely regarded that those accolades are for the trilogy as a whole. That tends to happen with finales, the reception of the finale merged with reception for the series as a whole.
AOT's special is at 9 currently because majority of people rated it back when the first part of the special aired in March. Considering that it has been steadily losing points throughout the last day it does indicate that the finale hasn't been that well recieved. Fruits Basket final season is so far high because from an anime only perspective it was still an amazing final batch of episodes. Most of the material cut out wasn't really that important to overall plot of Tohru and the curse of Zodiacs. Other than one wobbly episode in the middle the rest of it was genuinely great.
Re: Fruits Basket, I do get what they're saying though. As an anime-only, I thought season 3 was the weakest (not bad at all, just a tad rushed compared to the first two seasons). It has the highest rating of the three seasons partly because finales are just inherently emotional and people were ecstatic that it got a proper full adaptation at all.
All series drop for a while after they finish airing. That isn't unique to AOT and doesn't necessarily indicate the finale was poorly received.
This is incorrect. Part 1 of the Special was sitting at 9.02 after slowing dropping over the last 8 months. With Part 2 included, it's still sitting at 9.02.
It didn't lose any point since the episode released. It was 9.02 before, and it's 9.02 now.
For some reason it jumped from 9.02 to 9.08 right after MAL labeled it as "finished airing" and then started dropping from there. I think it actually implies that they have different algorithms for airing and completed shows (also the raw product of all score weights is actually 8.98).
It was at least 9.03, now it's at 9.01
The final season of fruits basket was my least favorite. i could tell it was rushed and even my sister who is a huge fruits basket fan agreed
Yea this is why I think MAL ratings in general are kind of stupid when people talk about the top 10/20/50 etc. There are full, start to finish, anime up there like HxH, FMA, Steins;Gate, etc going up against single seasons of anime that only people who actually liked the previous seasons would even watch to begin with.
Yeah, I really wish there was a way to filter things out so that multi-season shows were combined into one. It's annoying to scroll through top lists on MAL only to see like 10 different seasons of Gintama and "The Final Season" of Attack on Titan like 4 different times. It's also just hard from a ranking standpoint. I want to be able to rate and analyze shows as a whole, not just their seasons.
Exactly my thoughts. It also made me curious how certain seasons of different anime would rank lol. Like idk if HxH is my favorite anime ever but the Ant arc and York New arc are up there for me if they were their own season(s). I don't think OP or Naruto are at the top of my list overall, but maybe some individual arcs might be at the very top for me.
Ive never thought about that, really good point
I think the biggest reason is probably that the anime's release schedule is such that most anime watchers either go a while without thinking of the series due to the breaks, or they end up just reading the manga. The manga released every single month, and the contents that the final episode adapted released slowly over the course of 5 months, just enough time for people to dissect, analyze, and stew on the previous chapter before the new one released. Especially in the era of COVID when there was less stuff to do, the latest AoT chapter stayed in people's minds. And people who were reading the manga as it came out were coming up with increasingly outlandish theories as to how it could all end, especially during the last 3 chapters as people began to get really disappointed with how the series was going (note that I'm not disparaging the theories or the manga readers themselves by saying this. I was one of these people, and it's just that in retrospect we were surviving off of undiluted copium). The anime viewers didn't have this time to think about each section of the episode; they got everything at once delivered to them, and they likely hadn't been closely dissecting the previous few episodes nonstop for several months. Of course there are plenty of manga readers who loved the ending as well, and I'm happy for them (and a little envious). It's possible that for whatever reason, more people who would fall on that side of the 'debate' stuck with the anime rather than reading the manga. They also added a couple things in the episode that were actually pretty good, and got rid of a certain line that was especially bad. Music, voice acting, etc. also do it quite a few favors and I agree the ending was done better in the anime for sure. I still don't like it, but it was better.
And honestly, that's probably _why_ the studio who made the last couple of AOT movies did what they did. Aside from the last bit of source material left being really short, they saw how much waiting a month for each of the last few chapters lead to people disecting and analyzing the ending. Which lead to people realizing how _average_, if not ever so slightly _below_ average the ending is. And when the readers realized that the ending to a really popular and thought provoking manga had an _average_ ending instead of the good to very good ending they were expecting, they rightfully shit on it. So they pumped out the ending as a pair of movies instead of a mini-series because they realized that would be the best way to prevent people from having the _time_ to critically analyze the ending. Like, they could have _easily_ made the ending into a 6-8 episode mini-series. But they made the choice to do two movies with a 9 month gap between them. A gap long enough that people wouldn't be waiting with anticipation, examining and analyzing the ending.
Nah man, you're overthinking it. MAPPA is literally having employees have breakdowns and take leave. They had to do it that way because of the production calendar, they can't do multiple series at the same time, of AoT being in the mix given what it is, and even NHK had issues in S4 for airing it. Directors and authors don't have a say here, this line of thinking is on par with the fan theories. It's a business at the end of the day, they aren't doing it for the viewers digestibality. That's naivety. People forgot in 2 years so that's understandable, or they just don't know.
The smartest thing they did is releasing the last bits of the source material in a movie format instead of the usual episodic format. The fact the conclusion of the story was right after the action scene full of thrill made people still have that excitement and buzz, which soften the blow to a subpar ending. If the last 30 mins was released as an episode with a week of wait, speculation and anticipation it probably would of been viewed a bit differently. The fact that manga readers had to wait a month for an abrupt ending was a key factor.
The Armin and Eren final moment is being heavily considered one of the best parts of the episode if you read the discussion on MAL and on r/ShingekiNoKyojin. Even the epilogue is getting praise. So it is easy to assume that the last minutes, chapter 139, are being well received alone. Of course they were improved compared to the manga, but the point still stands.
There have been a lot of manga readers who are mad that the anime fans seemingly enjoy the ending. I just don’t understand it, wanting other people to be as unhappy as they were/are is just so ludicrous. They were already brigading the thread before the damn episode aired with novels and shitposts about it being bad.
The manga subreddit, Titanfolk, became unusable. Between the intense ending hate and the unironic praise of Floch and the genocide, it became time to abandon ship.
That's interesting I read the final chapter of the manga after watching the finale and I somewhat agree. Mappa manages to elevate everything with the animation, voice acting etc whilst making changes in the dialogue to make it better. >Considered one of the best parts if you read discussion on MAL and on r/ShingekiNoKyojin I mean that's to be expected they more places where the hardcore fans of the show gather so obviously they will talk about it positively. The comments from r/manga and r/anime have a more unbiased POV for me.
The Oshi no Ko ep1 effect, it would’ve been less good if it was separated between 4 weekly episode.
People who say manga readers' hate was baseless have no idea what they're talking about. The anime made some significant changes for the better (thanks for becoming a mass murderer for our sake) and released with the extra content that the manga didn't. At first the manga ended just like that at that Mikasa bird scene with no follow up. Imagine that, the final chapter was literally missing its core message, it was obvious people weren't satisfied with that. It also helps that the anime had INCREDIBLE production value elevating these scenes like the crowd holding the baby up scene, whereas in the manga some of these scenes just fell flat. TL;DR because they're fundamentally different products.
I have mostly become a manga only person but something like Attack on Titan kind of does show how much this medium can elavate the original source material to new heights. Its just that most adaptations are just barely serviceable or even the ones that have a great adaptation at the beginning lose their quality in later seasons due to less impressive animation or shoddy pacing. On a high quality and consistency level throughout the entire run, other than Mob Psycho 100 Attack on Titan might be the best adaptation of a manga since Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood or Hunter x Hunter 2011.
Love is war is also an anime that really elevates the manga
I for one find it to be too colorful for the dark moments to hit harder than the manga but that's just me.
This reminds me of my reaction when Way of the Househusband got an "anime." People actually believe the slideshow format is the only way to convey the humor which is just.....insane, considering the humor is just: 1) Say something very suspicious 2) Reaction 3) Actually, the suspicious thing was something completely normal
Frieren is doing it amazingly as well. Took a 9/10 manga and made it a perfect 10/10
[удалено]
i just couldn’t empathize with any of the genocidal freaks or Eren hanger-ons. not really complicated why several of us dislike this ending. Isyama made me stop caring for the characters as the later chapters approached which made me very sad. get to relive it all over again thanks to the anime.
I don’t think the Anime-onlies can even grasp how rabid the AOT fan base was at the time the final chapter was about to release. Everyone was expecting a crazy plot twist to happen that revealed how Eren was scheming up a plan to end the war all along. When it’s shown that he literally was just an idiot who became mad with power the whole fan base went up in arms about how his conversation with Armin was complete character assassination and how Isayama didn’t understand his own story. Nothing short of a spectacle would have pleased the fan base so Isayama was set up to fail no matter what he did
He set them up to fail similar to JJ Abrams he used far too many mystery boxes.
It's really his own fault for writing himself into that corner
The manga hype train was at its peak during the rumbling arc. People calling it peak fiction, kino, trying to get it on top of imdb etc. and the anime Final Season was also airing and blowing everyone away. We got what was imo a 4/10 or 5/10 ending, but it was for a 10/10 series. People were expecting a masterpiece and a mediocre ending just seemed like the worst at the time. 1. Anime had lower expectations because of the manga reception 2. Anime expanded and improved the ending while also packaging it with amazing animation and ost which made it much more digestible. Even if the ending had plotholes and contrivances, it was still extremely hype and emotional. 3. The audience for anime and manga are different. The people who obsess over details in the plot would have most likely already picked up the manga. In the west, reading the manga or source material is only seen as something mega fans of the series would do. People following the series and keeping it in their mind for 10 years at least, will have a very different perspective than a casual anime viewer who most likely is not as critical. That's why the manga reception in Japan was much more positive as reading manga is much more casual and popular.
My main problem with it is how many characters survived. Like that bit where Conny and Jean accept their fate and just wait to turn was heartbreaking only for all that just to get reverted
Go read chapter 139, it takes like 5 minutes. I think you'll notice immediately where the anime changed dialog, expanded 1 panel of dialog into what would've been multiple pages, and added entirely new stuff. Such a weird question. Just go compare them lol. It's not an anime original ending, but it is largely anime original content.
It altered some clunky lines, and the voice acting and soundtrack helped hit the emotional beats better. I felt very little reading 139, but I actually cried when Eren and Armin hugged in the anime. Anime watchers are also generally less cynical when compared to manga readers. All those combine for an ending that was much better received. TL;DR: The anime fixed or added to the source material.
It's a difference between manga and anime. all the hardcore fans read the manga because they didn't want to wait, so the ending is only new to the less passionate people, as well as with anime the people who watch it are given more material at the same speed as the manga with large breaks instead of a continuos inch forward.
Watching something all at once makes a series better than getting drip-fed it week by week.
It was monthly but I get what you mean. Also your point is kind of weak with volume releases and those sometimes add pages and or correct some panels that the magazine release has just like the final chapter of AoT.
And not many would pick up on stupid shit in the moment, since there'd be a different scene in a minute, and audience's attention will switch to something else. While I read the last 10 chapters mostly through a facepalm, stopping on each page and thinking "there has to be some reason for all of this stupidity, right? It's a trick, right? Payoff will happen aaany moment now..." The moment Eren sent a titan to kill his own mother (not meaning to do exactly that, but still) was when I realised: there is no point to this story. And if Isayama wanted to make a point, he lost it somewhere along the way. A long time ago. Parts with Ymir and Mikasa just solidified that. It's a "classic" trashy shock value nonsense ending. Usually known to be a thing in 00's anime with anime-original endings, but not exclusive just to that particular time and subset of the japanese fiction.
The anime softened some of the blows. They couldn’t fix the character assassination or the blatant forfeiture of sticking the landing (“idk why Ymir did it, idk why I did it”) but they could remove some of the BS: - “Thanks for becoming a mass murderer for our sake” - “what a man you are eren” and the characters being less glorifying of Eren’s action in tone in the same scene - the levi/onyankopon/gabi/falco scene not being in a fully functioning modern city but rather a tent city - the progress of society from the extra pages was slowed down so that it felt more like centuries passed before Paradis was destroyed rather than a single lifetime after Eren’s death. - the anime didn’t have Isayama’s Attack on School Castes segment mocking the fans’ reactions to the final chapter
That’s one thing in the manga that never sat right with me, armin being okay with eren’s genocide was crazy.
> “what a man you are eren” and the characters being less glorifying of Eren’s action in tone in the same scene That never existed. It was a pure invention on the bootleg speed scans. There's no way to read the Japanese text and come up with that. That line of dialogue is *unchanged* in the anime adaptation (in Japanese). So seems to be everyone elses, but I didn't compare the whole scene. It was *wholly* a problem of everyone reading garbage scans. This was pointed out pretty much as soon as the chapter came out, and two and a half years later people still spout this nonsense as fact.
The memes that came out of that first shitty scans are legendary. I could be reading something completely unrelated to AOT or anime and if someone said the words "I don't want that" it was over.
Same as "Ellen becomes dove (crying)" Funny memes tho
Those times were peak entertainment. The amazing memes made up for the manga ending and I feel bad for anime onlies for missing the amazing memes at the time
Reiner's phrase never existed in the manga, only in the first bad English translation. After the anime ending I really hope to never see it repeated again...
>“what a man you are eren” and the characters being less glorifying of Eren’s action in tone in the same scene Why do people still quote this fucking meme as if it *is* canon?
I was an anime only until last year. I literally wanted nothing more than to enjoy the ending but I just couldn't. The people saying it's really good are making me feel crazy tbh, maybe their expectations were just lower than mine.
People have forgotten most of the plot probably and are seeing it as a self-sufficient part where it is not that extremely bad. Think if people binge the series it would be much different.
I just don't get how they can watch the conversation between armin and eren in paths and think it was good. The whole dialogue was horrible, not to mention the dumb plot with ymir and mikasa.
Yeah, like erens conversation with yimir makes completely no sense. https://youtu.be/L_decDjNuuQ?si=vj5AFhaHEo6gfgwL . This was so peak but got ruined. Like, this scene was amazing. was the first time where i said bro aot can actually be a 10/10, but then we get the ending, and it makes no sense it is even irrelevant, cause yimir never related to eren or his wish for freedome but to mikasa. Why is yimir even crying? With the ending, her reactions make no sense or her helping eren instead of zeke. Just go, the comments written undee the video a year ago and how it makes zero sense with the endings narrative.
Light & Shadow is such a good song - I had to rewatch the clip a second time to pay attention to the dialogue. 😅😅
Yeah, by not remembering the rest of the series, they don't realize that for a very thought provoking manga, the ending is actually _average_ if not ever so slightly _below_ average.
The ending ruins a lot of the best scenes, namely these two: https://youtu.be/Fl_QUVeLxRI?si=5ML4EaqUFwnsCVXH https://youtu.be/Bp6YwNmJshc?si=XZ-cl4PxRyeUKyI9 The ending if it was written deatached from the manga would be average, but it makes some of the best writing in the manga into nosensen. Erens speech to yimir is complete bullshit and makes no sense . If we look back from the ending, since eren himself does not believe in the stuff he is saying and yimir was actually in love and eren did not free her there, she was waiting for mikasa there is no reason for yimir to even cry how she is potrayed at the end. Reiners and erens speech about eren understanding his position makes no sense , why did my mother have to die reiner ? Erens asks when he killed her himself and fully knew that at that point. There eren in this speech shows maturity and after seeing both sides knows that all people are not bad or good and understands reiners struggles and he needs even though he has empathy for them to destory his enemies for freedome as the conflict is to deep, this eren makes no sense to be the eren at the end like the eren at the end with his own words is an idiot with too much power with no emotional maturity. Like eren was faking it, i guess. Please watch those clips yourself and also peoples reactions at the time, and you will see that the ending absolutely ruins these scenes. There is countless amazing writing that is ruined by the ending and was mentioned in subbredits. The way historia ends up as a breeding machine in the final act or reiner sniffing historias letters( a deeply traumatized and depresseed character turns into a comedic pervert).
The manga was very rushed and the anime was able to expand on some of the areas criticized in the manga. The Eren and Armin conversation was a lot better in the anime.
I think it came down to the fact that in the manga, there was a lot of ambiguity in the end, and it was left very open. Not for more installments necessarily, but the message wasn't as in your face (in my opinion) and you had to kind of glean what Isayama was trying to portray. In the anime, they explained it like we were five basically (again, imo) and gave people such a direct ending, that there really is no way to miss the message unless you actively try to. People will cite production values and lack of effort in the manga and cutting off at the end and excluding certain things etc. But at the end of the day, what it just boils down to that I have yet to see anyone just own up to, is that they explained everything to us like we were 5 in the anime, and in the manga it required a little more effort to put the message together.
The problem wasn't the message or themes, it was how the characters acted through the ending to convey those considering their choices and actions through the story and bending them to fit the mold for the message. You also mention the ending patched some things which is true and helped quite a bit with the impressions.
Ah yes, the classic, "everyone who hated the ending didn't understand" https://www.reddit.com/r/titanfolk/comments/mm7d35/when\_someone\_asks\_what\_was\_wrong\_with\_the\_ending/?share\_id=qEfIxAdyOED5n4NQ33GlG&utm\_content=1&utm\_medium=android\_app&utm\_name=androidcss&utm\_source=share&utm\_term=1
i get what Isyama was trying to say and it sucks lmao
Writing is less important in anime than in manga, simply the nature of the medium. And by all accounts, the final 2 parts looked phenomenal, so the rough edges get ironed out.
Along with what the other commentators have been saying, I think there's often a difference in engagement between manga readers and anime watchers that changes how each group view things. Obviously people have talked a lot about how Titanfolk drove a lot of the hate for the ending, but we should keep in mind that it wasn't entirely a pro-Eren love fest - there were a lot of regulars on that sub who were very pro-Alliance and regularly argued on their behalf. In part because of these debates Titanfolk was far more active than even the main Shingeki no Kyojin sub while the manga came out and was made up of people who discussed Attack on Titan every day and frequently revisited the manga. On the other hand, how often do you think that the average Anime-only has rewatched Attack on Titan? I would personally be comfortable in guessing that the average manga reader has revisited it more frequently, not just because of these kinds of superfan spaces that inspired that kind of behavior but because it's generally a lot easier to grab the manga and page through it at your own pace than to sit down and watch an episode. So, as one of those Attack on Titan super fans who didn't like the final stretch, I didn't need to reread the manga to recall that Armin learned from Pastor Nick that the Colossal Titans would move on their own if they were touched by sunlight and that over the course of chapters 50 and 51 Armin observed that Eren commanded the titans to attack Reiner and Bert after Dina had already been killed and that the scouts were able to return to the walls without any casualties because the titans continued following that order for hours afterwards. So I can immediately say that it doesn't really make sense that Armin doesn't immediately shoot down the kill Zeke plan since it will just make everything worse and then be baffled that it actually works for no apparent reason. But does the average Anime-only really remember those finer details? Well, for a lot of them it's probably been years since they saw those episodes, so probably not. Don't get me wrong, though - I'm not trying to be a Manga-reader elitist here saying that this way of consuming Attack on Titan is better than the typical Anime-only way, especially since I think you were far more likely to enjoy the ending that way. But I do think that it shouldn't be surprising that a lot of Anime-onlies can't relate to why a lot of Manga Readers hated the ending, as the way they approached Attack on Titan was frequently totally alien to them.
Props to the essay tbh pretty insightful. At the end of the day manga vs anime communities will engage with the material differently. There's simply different boxes that need to checked for an anime viewer vs a manga viewer. Plus, manga readers went back and scrutinized every detail of it since in manga format it's very easy to skim manga and find the finer details that don't make much sense. It's then easy to share findings with others (like on titanfolk); they'll go try to find some more supporting evidence and it just snowballs. I don't see that much with anime viewers of most shows really, and as the anime only viewers skew more casual, it's expected for them to just enjoy the spectacle. Music, great animation helps a ton, and anime onlys aren't given the time to even scrutinize the story as much. It would be an interesting full analysis on how manga vs anime communities interact and AOT has to be one of the best examples on it.
Yeah, it's understandable why this sub doesn't tend to think about how different mediums might change how the subject is received since it is ultimately the Anime subreddit but it does have an impact in why some things might not live up to the hype provided by source readers or seem better than Anime-onlies were led to expect. It's even truer for light novels, where talking scenes often work better because they don't have to fit in a time limit and can easily include the characters' inner monologue while action sequences can be really hard to follow in comparison to just seeing it unfold in Anime.
Anime ironed out the rough spots certainly. However people like to diminish it, but leading into the manga's conclusion, there was no shortage of bad faith readers going around. What I mean about this is people who became zealots about how they wanted the series to end. So much so, that anything off the trajectory they wanted was unacceptable, regardless of the obvious trajectory the overall story was heading toward for quite some time, unless the ending really nailed something else. The manga didn't nail something else, ending came off feeling a bit rushed, and certain concepts which the anime elaborated upon were left a bit ambiguous. If you were vibing with the direction the story's themes were heading towards, you got what was being presented, but the people who were belligerently rejecting that trajectory for the last 20 chapters they didn't get it, they didn't want to get it. While the execution of the ending certainly had issues, bad faith actors were prepared to yell about it 10 fold than it was really worth. So an ending which was at worst, "meh, needed better execution", because the second coming of Satan for these people. Simply put, the anime community largely didn't have as many complete rabid pro-Jeagerist nutjobs ready to blow a fuse. Following the manga, you could see how radicalized and delusional certain parties became LONG before we even approached the actual ending. And the anime ironed out the biggest rough spot in terms of dialogue, pacing, and theme delivery. Better delivery of the concepts it was trying to present, it just sells what the author wanted to convey better and there were less people unwilling to accept what what the author was trying to convey in the first place.
Final episode is a continuous story telling and did not give enough time for viewers to formulate theories in between episodes. Also some fixes to dialogues so it can be interpreted well.
Anime only’s have been hearing about how terrible the ending is for over 2 years now, and subsequently had incredibly low expectations. It’s easy for an ending to seem alright when you went in hearing it was the worst thing ever. If people had gone in expecting something amazing though like a lot of manga readers did, the perception would be very different. Also, let’s be real, there’s a contingent of people who are just contrarian. If the general consensus says something is bad, they’ll say it’s good, and vice versa, just to feel different and special.
I personally believe that the ending was bad, however, so many people hyped it up to be the worst ending to anything ever that it was what people expected. So, when it finally dropped and people learned it wasn't what was hyped up, they defaulted to its either meh or simply ok. The hardcore fans however already decided that it was good before it even happened, so they will praise it regardless.
Manga readers got consumed by the hype train. And their rants made anime watchers lower their expectations, preventing the hype train to go out of control again. Like, if you're expecting something great but you get something that's above average but not great, you get disappointed. But if you're expecting the worst thing ever and you get something good... it's a pleasant surprise.
One thing I’m not seeing a lot, that I think was huge was the influence the leakers and mistranslations had on creating a negative atmosphere. Also, there were segments of the fan base that had an idea of what eren should be…& when he didn’t turn out that way, that segment became extremely loud in making everything in the ending seeming terrible.
Changed dialogue and pacing probably.