Opinion: Attack on Titan's Final Season Will Be Polarizing for Fans Because of Reiner's Side, Part 1

If you’re like me, you were surprised to learn that Eren Jaeger, Mikasa Ackerman, and Armin Arlelt do not appear in the first episode of the final season of Attack on Titan. They don’t even appear in the second episode!

Warning: this 2-part article discusses events up to the second episode of Attack on Titan’s final season. If you haven’t watched the anime up to then, this article may contain spoilers for you!

If you’re up to date with reading the manga, maybe our heroic trio not appearing in the first couple of eps of the season didn’t surprise you. I don’t read the manga, so I’m not sure how closely the anime is following. But based solely on watching the anime all these years, and considering how the end of the third season played out, you’d think we’d see Eren, Mikasa, and Armin. That’s because in large part, they’re the three protagonists whose journey we’ve followed.

Series creator and author Hajime Isayama has done an amazing job keeping us guessing what will happen next ever since the anime first premiered eons ago, in the spring of 2013. AoT is without a doubt one of the biggest anime of the decade, some may even say of all time. That’s due to surprising story revelations and cliffhangers seeded throughout the show. It’s the kind of show that works perfectly as a Netflix binge session.

The newest surprise dropped on us at the beginning of this final season is the introduction of a whole cast of characters we’ve never met before! We’re of course familiar with Reiner Braun. The last time we saw him, he was the Armored Titan. He got his ass handed to him by Eren and the Scout Regiment and was nearly eaten, but Zeke Jaeger managed to save him and the two retreated. Now we know what happened next. Sort of, anyway. The two left Paradis and returned to the Eldian force that was loyal to Marley.

But the other big surprise for this final season comes in the shape of a time skip. FOUR YEARS have passed since the events at the end of Season 3. Reiner and Zeke have been fighting a war with some other country of the world all that time. We finally see what war is like for the world outside of Paradis. It is crazy, and it is brutal. Weapons are far more advanced than what we’ve seen on Paradis. Similarly to our real world, trains and flying vehicles exist. And as you might guess, both are used on the battlefield. We see this in the first episode of Season 4, when the Marley army uses a blimp to drop dozens of Eldians onto the enemy’s stronghold, Fort Slava, and the Beast Titan (in the human form of Zeke) activates them into falling titans with his scream! The massive beings fall like a bombing attack on the enemy!

To Be Continued in Part 2 of this article

(image source: Amazon)