Do you remember Season 1? Of course you do, everyone and their mother saw the first season of Attack on Titan. For all the criticism it got, it knew how to do one thing: it knew how to make something feel like a big deal. The specific example I want to bring up is retaking Trost, between the dialog by the characters, the music, everything, we knew it was a big deal. It was the first real victory humanity had ever had against the Titans, the first glimmer of hope, hundreds of people died for that tiny victory, and it felt like it was worth those deaths.
If I told you right after that retaking the wall and winning the entire war with the Titans would be treated as a footnote, how would you have felt? You’d probably laugh me off, but that’s exactly what happens here. The series is so preoccupied setting up what’s next, that paying off all the hours and emotions that have been invested up to this point gets...forgotten.
Let’s take a look at what’s changed since Season 1: the main characters are still surrounded by an overwhelmingly powerful adversary, Eren is still completely defined by his obsession to defeat his enemy and has little character beyond that, and...wait, is that basically the whole show? Okay, fine, there was a lot of side content like the political fights, but let’s be real, those weren’t the appeal of the show. The appeal of the show was Titans, how overwhelming they were, how mysterious they were, how they affected the characters, and now that they’re gone we’re stuck with...Nazis? I might be overblowing the racist internment camp parallel, but the new antagonists just don’t have the instant impact Titans had at all.
Then there’s the characters. The only character that had any significant growth this season is Armin, he gets a little bit of the spotlight and actually thrives in it. Eren is baffling to me, he started the series strong, showing real human emotions like anxiety for about 5 minutes before he puts his angry face on again. So much happens to him this season and he just doesn’t react. He retook his home town, does he react? Nah. He finds out his dad wasn’t a murderer, and actually loved him, does he react? Nah. He finds out his enemy is his brother, does he react? Nah. He’s been basically reset back to his Season 1 self, except instead of shouting about killing Titans, he just internally broods about the new bad guys with nothing to his character besides that.
Erwin though is the big complaint I have as far as characters go, because he has easily the best moment in the season if you look at it in isolation. When he leads the scouts in the suicide charge, preaching about laying down your life, trusting your successors to make your sacrifice worth it, it’s incredible...until you remember he already had this moment in Season 2 when he lost his arm. That moment in Season 2 was great, it was high action, and it spoke volumes of Erwin’s character as he prioritized Eren, mankind’s only chance at survival, over his own life, making him a selfless, dedicated, and pragmatic leader. Then they retconned that in Season 3 by making him a selfish gambler who only goes down because he gets backed into a corner and his best friend thinks he’s better off dead. What? No seriously, what? Great moment sure, but Erwin’s whole character is just a mess at this point, one good moment doesn’t salvage him.
This season left me unsatisfied. We've invested a lot of time and emotion to get to this point, and to see all of that ignored just to set up a dramatically less compelling next arc is so disappointing.
