The following contains full spoilers for Attack on Titan: The Final Season Part 2, which is now available to stream on Crunchyroll and Funimation.
After almost a decade, Attack on Titan has finally come to an end, with The Final Season reaching its proper, undeniable conclusion… well, Part 2 of The Final Season, anyway. This chapter brings apocalyptic horror accompanied by Studio MAPPA’s best animation and goosebumps-inducing voice acting, all while the themes of the show are finally brought to the forefront. Though it is unfortunate that we have to wait another year to truly see the end of this story, this season is Attack on Titan at its very best.
The first part of The Final Season was about the attack on Marley and the rise of the Yeagerist faction, with Eren starting to distance himself from his friends. Part 2, then, was all about Eren’s full descent into the ultimate villain and the rise of the resistance, with the start of the Rumbling threatening to flatten the Earth and forcing old comrades to betray one another as they weigh the wellbeing of those they know against saving the lives of those they don’t.
At the center of this, of course, is Eren Yeager himself. It has been Attack on Titan’s biggest accomplishment to see Eren get one of the best heel turns not just in anime, but in all of fiction since Walter White. After last season presented a cold, closed-off Eren, this season finally revealed his plan to annihilate every last human outside of Paradis Island. What makes his arc so satisfying is how clear the show is about it not being a sudden 180; Eren is no Daenerys. Instead, the murderous rage inside him has always been there. Eren has always been headstrong and brash, idealistic to the extreme even before we met him in Season 1 – we just went along with it because he is the protagonist and because his anger was directed at nameless Titans rather than men, women, and children.
Much of the season was devoted to reconciling Eren’s actions with the kid we knew, and trying to understand what led him to activate the Rumbling, with revelations that recontextualized everything we thought we knew about the show. Rather than follow him through this whole ordeal, we spend half of the season without even seeing Eren, but he still casts such a large shadow that we consistently feel his presence even when he is literally hundreds of feet in the air as a terrifying whale Titan. Attack on Titan makes the brilliant choice of distancing us from him and focusing instead on how the other characters react to Eren’s actions.
Indeed, this season we spend more time not just with Mikasa and Armin, but with Jean and Connie too as the characters struggle to come to terms with the people they thought they’d be, and the people they became throughout the course of the show. For Jean, this means realizing that he is no longer the kid who desperately wanted to get a cozy office job in the interior, safe from danger, but is instead someone who continuously chooses to do what’s right, and the true successor to Erwin Smith as the leader of the group. Meanwhile, Connie has a crisis of faith after suffering one heartbreak and betrayal after another, as he sees himself becoming a murderous traitor to the Yeagerists that he initially saw Reiner and Bertolt as back in Season 2.
As if deepening the original characters wasn’t enough, this final (not really, but let’s just roll with it) season also gives us one of the most despicable, hateful, punchable douchebag villains in all of anime — Floch, and a character destined to be misunderstood and debated for years to come, Gabi. After being introduced as a clear parallel to Eren, then an irredeemable monster who killed a beloved character, it quickly became clear that Gabi was one of the most important players in Attack on Titan.
Gabi is the vessel through which the show conveys its ultimate message about the cost of war and how children are the ones who suffer the most in continuing cycles of violence. This season doubles down on these themes and, even if at times they feel too in-your-face, it may be necessary to make sure the audience fully gets it. This show is ultimately about the way adults hang onto and obsess over old conflicts and continue to spread hatred, passing it on to children.
This is what makes the tragedy of Eren Yeager. Whether you agree with his decision to kill 99% of the world population or not is irrelevant, because the season makes it clear that his plan will simply not work. As Kiyomi Azumabito explains to Floch at one point, it doesn’t matter how much destruction the Titans bring, there will be some people who survive, and they will definitely not forget Eren killing the world, continuing the cycle of hatred and violence. That’s what makes Eren’s story unique and special; that, at the core of it, he is just a hotheaded kid thrown into an unwinnable situation and given absolute power yet no hope for a peaceful solution.
Attack on Titan has always been a dark show with horror imagery, but this season is the bleakest it’s ever been. From sailors literally getting the skin peeled off their bodies from the steam of the Colossal Titans, to Mikasa slaughtering Yeagerists and bathing in their blood, to children eating the corpse of their mother, this season brought the horror of the Rumbling to nightmare-inducing life that you won’t be able to forget about any time soon.
After the first part of the season stumbled a bit in the animation department, Studio MAPPA delivers kinetic and thrilling action each episode in Part 2. Blending computer-generated and 2D animation, as well as innovative camerawork and framing, the show knows when action should be exciting, and when it should be utterly terrifying, especially when accompanied by the operatic score by Kohta Yamamoto and Hiroyuki Sawano.
Attack on Titan The Final Season Part 2 suffers from a couple of oddly paced episodes, and the fact that it isn’t the actual ending takes away from the impact of its finale. Still, by the time the final scene of the season finale arrives and we see the Titans obliterating Marley while we hear Eren’s speech from all the way back in Season 1 about wanting to destroy them all, it brings the story of Eren full circle. There can be no winners, no hope of a happy ending, but this season reaffirms Attack on Titan as a defining anime for the modern era, one with striking action, nuanced characters, an edge-of-your-seat story full of pathos, and one of the best character arcs in fiction.