Defending The Ending To “Attack on Titan” | Column from the Editor

With “Attack on Titan” officially wrapped up, some fans have been irked by a credits scene that depicts its island of Paradis many years after the events of the series. Here’s why I think it’s fine.

Spoilers ahead.

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After the events of The Rumbling, Mikasa Ackerman buries Eren Yeager’s body (or at least his head) at the base of a tree he used to nap at when they were kids. We then get a time lapse seeing Paradis build first into a modern city, then into a futuristic city beyond what we have the means to do in the current day.

We then see it come under attack, damaging some of the buildings, before we see a round of either nuclear missiles or atomic bombs wipe it out. Some fans think this means that Eren’s efforts to save Paradis were in vain — the source of the discontent around this scene — but I don’t necessarily agree.

There’s a few factors we must accept with this scene, the first being that everyone in the show is long dead when it occurs and the fact that the Eldian population on Earth survives after this, unless this is indeed a world-ending nuclear event. Assuming the latter is not true, how is the former?

Even in the events of most of the show, all Eldians don’t live in Paradis — a large portion live in Marley and it is reasonable to assume they live elsewhere as well.

Secondly, 80 percent of the world outside the walls was leveled in The Rumbling and Paradis knows the remaining survivors will not hold their peace forever. This would make Eldian expansion a necessity.

But beyond that, so much time has passed in that clip without any context for us to reasonably assume anything about it other than the fact that war is cyclical and returns to Earth long after the power of the titans fades.

Whether or not that power returns in the series’ final scene I think is open to interpretation (the boy and the dog entering the tree where Ymir got her titan powers). But I think the show’s bittersweet ending perfectly suits it — it’s a show all about how there’s no heroes in war and how it can twist even the best of intentions. A clean, happy ending seems inappropriate for a series of this nature.