I can see that many of the negative reviews for AOT season 4 are awfully nitpicky. I'm not gonna engage in nitpicking and I am not going to latch on to the show's plot holes either. I feel like there are broader and more important elements for me to critique than the minute details. If stuff like the physics of the 3D Maneuver Gear bother you, I don't know how you made it this far with the show.
What happened to Attack on Titan reminds me a lot of what happened to Claymore (manga) many years ago. The entire setting you knew, the one you thought you should care about, turns out to be just a small island in a larger world. A fly in an evil empire's militaristic soup. The monsters that you remember once sending shivers down your spine are revealed to be just weapons of war - things that can be created and even controlled. The lens, through which you observe the story, is now zoomed so far out, that all the struggles, drama and horror you went through with the show's characters before, now seems terribly small and insignificant.
But. Claymore at least had the decency to brush aside it's awful attempt at a shocking plot twist after it didn't really land for anybody. It wrapped up the story in the confines of the setting it had already established. The damage had been done and the twist had made everything worse, but at least it remained a concise story. Attack on Titan on the other hand doubles down on it's twist hard. While I kinda want to commend it for sticking to it's guns, the fact is that this is not even the same story anymore. This is an entirely new setting with new stakes and rules. Even new cast, really. There are enough new characters that get introduced during season 4 to fill up the entire character roster of an average anime series. I got nothing against expanding the scope of a series. It can keep things fresh and interesting. But this isn't expanding. There is a difference between expanding and just throwing the original premise in the trash.
Ever since season 1 ended, almost every new detail we have learned about the world has made the once cool and compelling setting less and less interesting. Was the Colossal Titan something that caught your attention back in the day? Thought it was menacing? In the endless cycle of the series trying to one-up itself, not only have we already seen bigger titans, but now we hear that there are literal millions of Colossal Titans. Millions. Did you happen to enjoy the main characters' struggle in the cool walled-off world of fascism, cruelty and cover-ups? Too bad. You were just watching bunch of recluses on an island - a society, held together by memory altering magic powers. Thought the silent terror of the unintelligent, man-eating titans was really horrific? Did you get invested in the fight against them? They are just killed off-screen. All of them. The great threat to mankind done and dusted, without so much as a montage sequence to commemorate the oocasion. We still get the transforming super titans... But those turn out to be nothing more than glorified mecha suits by the end. In a way, it's actually worse than just having mecha suits, because at least a vehicle could be lost or irreparably broken, so there might be some tension related to losing one. But with the titans, you can just keep conjuring them up as long as the "pilot" stays alive. Here, there are no lasting physical consequences to either the pilot or the vehicle outside of death.
Let's talk about the utilization of Eren in this. I don't know if it was the call of the writer(s), the director or the voice actor, but being "jaded" is translated to being "boring and monotone". No matter what you thought about Eren as a character in the previous seasons, it was actually kinda fun seeing him get agitated - spitting out (often hollow) threats and making bold claims. Screaming in rage or in terror. Crying his eyes out. Whether you thought he was oblivious, stupid or annoying, the character had some energy to him. Almost every single line of Eren, as delivered during season 4, sounds like he is one second away from falling asleep. You might call it character development - I call it yet another thing ruined. Not all development is good development and a stagnant character is better than a boring, passionless edgelord. I think I can just barely swallow the shift in Eren's morality, but not in his behavior. As a direction to take Eren towards, this could have worked, but it's pushed way too far.
The most frustrating thing about Season 4 is that, in a vacuum, there are still some neat things going on. The presentation is still more than fine and some of the dramatic peaks were undeniably effective and decently set up. There are even some deeper themes being explored than what we are used to in the show's previous seasons. As a detached, individual anime story, this could have been all right. But because this exists in the Attack on Titan "universe", it is hard for me to pay attention to anything that is going on beyond a once-so-awesome series that has systematically driven itself into the ground.
