Quote Originally Posted by Kato View Post
I'm not sure what the point is... And the bad thing is, I'm not curious because I feel like I will be disappointed either way. My best guess is, Eren just is neither a good protagonist nor a good person, or at least a damn stupid one. Or a dirty liar. Or he has some "plan" and we're supposed to symphathize with him when it's revealed. But... I'm not holding my breath for that happening.
But at least they give an explanation why their elite soldiers do stupid manual labor. And they give some kind of excuse why everyone understands each other.
One thing with storytelling is sometimes you want a person to relate to a protagonists even if they do not want to have them relate completely. Aka the protagonist is a mirror to explore your own self in a compare and contrast fashion via empathy (which is different than sympathy.) This is one of the reasons why anti heroes tv shows are popular. You can empathize with the anti hero while at the same time realize you would not do the same things, you have other priorities but you can empathize and understand why someone feels a certain way. It is a way to identify emotions inside of yourself that are not the primary (and thus the strongest emotion) and thus get a more nuanced viewpoint of how you work.

What I am saying is when you empathize with a protagonist / character you identify at least one part of the character which is "like me" even if many aspects of the character is "NOT like me". With empathy you are identify with the person's emotions, not their behavior, not how they interact with the world.

Sympathy is different and there are dozens of definitions of sympathy. But one definition sympathy is you feel the same thing as the other person, aka when the person is sad you pity them and you feel sorrowful, when a person gains a boon you take pleasure in their joys. Often we find the people we are sympathetic to as being likable and we see ourselves as allies with them. In fact the sym- prefix actually literally means this we are "with / together / in company with" we are one another's accomplice.

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I think right now the writter is trying to make us Empathetic with Eren but very much not Sympathetic with Eren. Eren has his reasons and we need to acknowledge his reasons, but we are not supposed to see ourselves as allies directly with him, for Eren has specifically cut himself off from his allies, he does not try to explain his behavior, his feelings, his thoughts and he is leaving his allies in the dark.

We as audience members seeing this feel rejected and ignored even though we are not participants in the story. We as audience members of the story feel frustrated by this experience, yet part of us inside of us feels this is a mystery we have to unwrap in order to understand Eren.

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Like I said before many anti-hero protagonist stories in TV work similarly to this. For many anti-heroes stories in TV are men "apart" from society. Hell it is not just a male thing, it is also a female thing. The reason why Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City is an interesting character is we empathize with her, even though we do not sympathize with her. Carrie Bradshaw is a female anti-hero story (her 3 friends though are typical heroes though, flawed beings yes but they are trying to be more heroic.)



Carrie Bradshaw allows us to see the road not taken, and after we learn from her we try to integrate these different stories into a single essence that is better than the status quo. Take the best and remove the worst.

But hey conflict is part of Attack on Titan, for conflict drives advancement, much like the Greek Philospher Heracltius metaphor of a Bow and Arrow, or what Attack on Titan 1st opening calls Guren no Yumiya (Crimson Bow and Arrow.)