It really pains me to give the show a measly 4/10, considering the other seasons are 8+, but this season was terrible, and if it wasn't for the strong start it'd be way lower.
1. Bad/no character development and phoney motivations
Mikasa, Conny, Armin, Levi and Jean made the decision to make it their goal to stop Eren (but not kill him?) and in doing so betray all of Eldia, so much so they were willing to kill 100+ members of the military. Something so grand would require some real justification and soul searching, but no, none of that is present. Let’s start of with how Conny wants to abduct Falco to save his mom, when this happened, I was thinking to myself “yes! Finally, one of these characters break their do-gooders shounen archetypal behaviour”. But no, it really didn’t amount to anything and it didn’t sit well with me how committed he was to saving Falco’s life, because he truly has zero reason to care about some kid, and the way he was teaming up with Gabby made it more nonsensical. The infamous pie scene occurs, and I realized this show has fully gone to dirt. They literally reunite with someone who has killed 10s of their comrades and there is zero dialogue, just a lame, unfunny joke paired with horrible animation.
Then there’s Jean, he also posses a decent motivation which is if he joins the Jeagerist he will be able to live a comfortable luxurious life till he dies (married to Mikasa, which I thought was really lame lol). Hange and Jean have a heated exchange, in which Jean rightfully points out that if Eren died Elida could very well be destroyed by the world, as they’d have no way of protecting themselves, and that killing Eren is possibly suicide for the entire island (a very major point), but Hange gave no real response to this. In the end Jean has some flashback of Marco and decides he will team up with the guy who killed him (Reiner) and betray his entire nation. No matter how you spin it this literally made NO SENSE, why of all things was it Marco's face which triggers Jean to 'forever be a scout'.
Levi seems to hate Zeke for killing his comrades, yet he seems to have zero qualms with siding with Annie and Reinar who killed way more people. Especially Annie, she wiped out his OG squad and his girl Petra. And Hange's an idiot for thinking Eren sacrifices too many of his own people in Liberia, because don't you all remember Erwin's crazy plan of having Annie and Eren brawl in the middle of Stohess?
It's all just forced to bring about a new protragonist group who will 'save the world' (the world excluding their homeland of course). And to those of you who say, “genocide is wrong”, yes, I very much understand that, and so would anyone looking at it from a bird’s eye view (like us the viewer). But they’re Eldian’s so it’s only natural they’d prioritize their own people’s survival. It’s like, would you let your own family of four die to protect a family of 10? Now ask yourself work you work to actively kill your own family to protect that family of 10, while still professing your love for your family. Their behaviour is just very unnatural and it’s so apparent that my engagement fell. Let's not forget the world wants to genocide Paradis, especially after seeing what Eren has done, it'd be their number one priority, no matter how many times you attack their military alone like what Armin wanted. They would just collect all their energy to rebuilding and relaunching a new attack, and that's the cycle Eren wanted to break, and the cycle Eren's friends (the 'alliance') fail to consider. Genocide is occruing on both sides, so their is no 'no one get's hurt' solution.
2. Jeagerist are a shitty foe
The fight at the port was bad. The fact that Mikasa was fighting 50+ people and didn’t get shot is just massive plot armour. At least in other instances they had well thought out plans to take down people when they were outnumbered (like in Liberia, or when fighting the MPs), but for this they just brute force everything. This show is also trying to demonstrate moral relativism, but they make the Jeagerist all look like psychos when they’re really just trying to defend the island. Floch is also depicted like an idiot who gets beat up by old ladies (also how silly is it that he was one shot by Gabby far away but none of the other scouts took a bullet?). And yes, I know, in this show which demonstrates moral relativism there is no ‘real villain’ but you get what I mean.
It really blows my mind how the fandom hates Floch so much, he's one of the few characters whose actions make sense and are well motivated (aka wanting to protect your own nation to the death and killing off incompetent leaders which Erwin did too)
Other thoughts
The shows animation was top-notch in a few cases like the beginning fight scenes, but the non fight scenes were terrible, way too many still frames. I would have liked to see some new tracks for the OST, as they were starting to get a little repetitive. Ymir’s backstory was also good. Still don’t like the shading style of MAPPA’s compared to WIT, everything is way too flat and the line styles are weak. The last episode was also very well done, AOT handles drama well, but the trajectory of the show seems to remain the same.
But overall, I really didn’t like how a lot of the characters ended up, and it’s not because my personal motivations didn’t align with the characters, but that the characters motivations were just not properly justified which made the 2nd half of the season just awful, I was totally disengaged as opposed to the beginning of the season where I was on the edge of my seat every episode.
In short: “HAHAHAHA ANNIE’S EATING A PIE”
