Attack on Titan: Manga Volume 34 Reaction!
Added 2023-12-08 18:00:07 +0000 UTC**SLIGHTLY TAKEN ABACK HEADPHONE WARNINGS**
Well, we are finally at the last volume of the manga and...honestly? It was NOT what I was expecting! I can't believe I'm saying this...but I'm maybe...more partial to the anime? In any case, it's a great adaptation, but I'm happy to see the final volume now as it was originally shown to you all!
Now all that's left is the recap...*DARK LAUGHTER* Hm. About that...
Thank you for watching with me and for all the support!
Comments
HAHAHA – the idea that AOT is a giant PSA for hygiene and being careful with unregulated meat is hilarious and I’m using that from now on to explain the founder. I agree, Pieck gnawing off her fingers is so…unsettling. That is a good point about Ymir and the titan shifters and yes, the Colossal Titan facing Armin is very Shonen to me. Oohhh, I really like that idea and theory of someone in the future being ready to make the Thunder Spears…it’s a shame none of that worked out. I am going to talk about Isayama’s thoughts on the end of the manga in the recap (I found a nice interview about it). But I agree that Isayama probably saw that he needed to be more explicit after reactions to the manga came out. Humans being humans…I would have liked a little more happiness in my AOT ending, but that is asking for a lot. Eh? ;) Now just to do the recap! Thanks for the kind words and comment!
Romaniablack
2023-12-19 01:12:00 +0000 UTCThe manga made the "founder" seem more like a (particulary bad) tapeworm infection, that's what Eren gets for not washing his hands and eating his father raw. You have to be extra careful with unregulated meat. With all the ways people turn into titans, Pieck biting the top of her thumb just makes my spine shiver the most, i don't know why. If we are nitpicking things that perhaps doesn't quite make sense, Eren going colossal for me ranks below how Ymir manifested all the past titan shifters. When she first made the Beast Titan it had the regular yellow lightning accompanying it but all the rest just appeared, having hundreds of those lightning explosions go off everywhere would certainly have been harder to deal with, escpecially if Ymir just had made a couple of Colossal titans explode into being instead, i guess she didn't want the fight to be that unfair? 😉 Early on i had a small theory that some founding titan, or Ymir herself, had this all planned out from the start and this could (among other things) explain how Paradis managed to make ODM-gear (and Thunder Spears) all while being far behind the rest of the world in science and technology. Someone in the future (or the past) wanted them to have that knowledge so things panned out according to someone's wishes and machinations. Now with only the Attack Titan having future vision and Ymir seemingly just a poor child getting to much power it would be very hard to make that theory fit. I guess Paradis just had some very talanted engineers when it came to pressurized gas and grappling hooks. Yeah in my opinion the manga ending certainly lacked something without that extra dressing-down of Eren that we get in the anime. Maybe Isayama liked his own creation a bit to much and had to sleep on it before showing it in more proper light, or perhaps some reactions after the manga ended made him want to be more... unequivocally clear about certain things. I don't see it Paradis getting wiped out, isn't the ending theme called "To you 2000, or 20000 years from now" or something? So that war can be so far into the future that all this Eldian hullabaloo could be a far forgotten past. Perhaps they could have stayed very isolationist on the island and kept their culture totally seperate from everyone else. But with the way we saw "modern" cities rise i would think they opened up to the world, and with "Eldian" not longer being a real thing i think that the war we see is just some unrelated future conflict, humans being humans.
Christopher Pettersson
2023-12-09 15:34:00 +0000 UTCSource for the "Eren is back" quote, and also the bit about the epilogue not being in the magazine version, is the interview in the final Guidebook. A link containing both scans of the raw interview and a fan translation is available here: https://old.reddit.com/r/ShingekiNoKyojin/comments/nw7orw/manga_spoilers_guidebook_interview_with_hajime/ The second image of the raw shows that it's clearly the Eren in the sea panel that Isayama is talking about. The fan translation of that page is the second image in the first link to the AttackonFans translation. Note that it's a bit of an awkward translation; they say "I really like the bad Eren" but the raw clearly states "格好悪い" which doesn't exactly mean 'bad', it's 'ugly/uncool'.
cw
2023-12-08 20:45:58 +0000 UTCAnd that's it. The end of AoT. Except for the 18 page side story,and of course the recap that I'm very much looking forward to. Thanks, Romania; it was a lot of fun to go through this story with you. Already feeling a bit nostalgic. Yes, read the NYT interview. It's short and really interesting. i like the manga version of the ending a lot, but it's much more compact and opaque. To really get everything, you need to cross-reference other scenes and really work through it. There's lots shades of meaning in there, and some that may be hard to translate (even with my limited Japanese knowledge, I've worked through pretty much the whole final chapter at this point...) They're not actually that different in my opinion (although there are some differences), but the anime ending puts everything much more out in the open. Which is not a bad thing at all; the years of controversy regarding this ending have showed that being super explicit can really help. But I do enjoy the subtleties of the original as well. Some of it is certainly due to the page limit; Isayama really wanted the series to end at 139 chapters, for practical (too long for one volume, not long enough for two volumes) and maybe more importantly numerological reasons; 13 (years) + 9 (titan shifters) and 140 apparently represents 'freedom' in numerology and we can't have that in this series. The new script for the Eren and Armin scene was written by Isayama though, two years or so later and with no constraints on page length. He didn't turn it into a finished manga, but did draw a name (manga storyboard/draft), which will be released with the artbook next year. They did post the first couple of pages as promotion on Twitter, so if you want a glimpse of what the anime version might have looked like on the page, have a look here: https://twitter.com/shingeki_FLY/status/1718945856727200113 Also, the post-bird epilogue was cut from the original magazine release; apparently Isayama had considered it then, but wasn't sure and decided to trim it to fit the available space. The volume version could afford a few extra pages, so he completed them and put them back in. They were somewhat controversial, with some people appreciating how they tie everything together, and others finding them a bit too bleak. (Personally, while it's certainly rather pessimistic, I like how it's not defeatist - Everyone will die some tay, all that we build will crumble, but that doesn't make it meaningless). Funny enough, history repeats itself for the series as well: With the extended dialogue and everything, the "final" chapter of the anime was apparently too long to fit a regular TV slot, so some cuts had to be made for the episodic release of the specials. And they end where the magazine version did, with Mikasa thanking Eren for wrapping the scarf around her. You kept saying how much like a shounen manga this feels in both the adaptation and the manga... AoT is a shounen manga. It even says "Shonen Magazine Comics" directly on the cover of each (Japanese) volume. It's just usually not following the typical 'Jump' style of shounen manga and its most common tropes. It's from a competitor to Jump after all. I love that panel with Mikasa and birdman Falco behind her. It's also such a nice shounen message: The true Wings of Freedom are the friends we made along the way. Full frontal Zeke was indeed an anime addition, but Isayama is no stranger to full frontality. I don't know if anyone has ever linked you to a particular drawing he made that has become quite infamous/legendary. You can find the full details here: https://didanwhisperer.tumblr.com/post/119524862326/did-isayama-really-draw-that-reiner-pic But be careful, despite being printed in, and 'strategically' cropped directly on the cover of, a magazine for teens, this is a *very* NSFW picture. Fun fact: In the draft for chapter 138, Isayama scribbled "Switzerland" as the background for the cabin scene, to indicate what it should look like. And some fans came to call cabin Eren "Aaron Yoghurt", which for some reason always cracks me up. He's the real chad Eren lol. From another interview, a fun little bit (I'll put the interview source and links as a comment). The scene with Eren in the water was a late addition to his script. Isayama loves drawing uncool Eren, and when he finished that image he thought to himself "Eren is back!" (The chad Eren ultra-stans, who already hated the ending and that scene in particular, got really mad at this, but I completely get him. Looking at that page just gives me that "Eren is back!" kind of feeling...) Regarding "That one guy" you said you saw in the panel that had yawning Hitch and possibly-Rico, if you mean Surma (the named one from the group that Shadis saved), I thought so too. But someone who can read Japanese said to me that the final guidebook confirms it's not him. I have no way of verifying this at the moment, I don't have the raw of that guidebook and even if I did, it would probably take me longer to figure out where it says that than it's worth. But now that I look at it, the guy does look a little too old to be Surma just three years later. "Is Eren going to be there instead of Ymir?" I don't think that's the implication. What's more likely to be there is another worm-like thing, and the new Ymir would be the boy, or maybe the dog? Historia's absence is probably the one major gripe I have with the final third of the story. This is just my personal speculation, but I think Isayam had a plan for her that he ended up discarding, or rather included in only a rudimentary state, and that is to turn her into a villain, or at leas someone who actively aids and abets a villain. Looking at the progression of the story as a whole, that seems to be the most logical progression, especially with how Isayama likes to reframe events that happened. I'm glad he didn't lean more heavily into this though. And with what we ended up getting, I find it kind of fitting in a strange way that Historia ended up "living for herself" to the extent that not even the viewer really gets a good look in to her private life... which doesn't exactly make it satisfying, though.
cw
2023-12-08 20:35:44 +0000 UTC
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