ghostmartyr:

Grisha and Eren make me so damn sad, man.

I’m sympathetic to most of Grisha post-island, but that really just makes what he does worse. He realizes how badly he lets down his first son. He dooms Zeke with a burden that no one should have been expected to bear at that age, and it comes back on Grisha and his wife. He figures that out. He has to listen to his friend ask how the hell he was raising his son that his son would take Marley’s side over theirs.

Grisha fails Zeke. Whatever is going on with the guy, there would have to be more twists than a slinky for that to be anything but true, and it’s a failure Grisha duly acknowledges.

Eren, he loves. Properly. He also loves Mikasa. They are at the front of his mind when he begs Frieda to use her power to fix the world. He’s grown up, and become a man who knows how to be a father.

But I think Wall Maria falling, the royal family’s refusal to help, and the news of his second wife dying just… breaks him all the way back to the angry revolutionary he used to be.

I don’t even know how to look at the Reiss massacre with anything but wide eyes and an open mouth, because yo, look at all those dead children. Grisha annihilates the Reiss family. Frieda’s younger than Eren is now when she dies. It’s a bloody mess, and when it’s over, he has to work his way through the masses of panicked people stampeding the streets–a panic the Founding Titan could have stopped, maybe, and if he hadn’t been so caught up in his new, peaceful life he could have gone after it earlier and there would be none of this chaos–and he finds his son.

His son, who tells him his second wife is gone.

I don’t know if Grisha knew that he was going to give Eren his Titan before Wall Maria fell. But I think if there was any thought of sparing his son that fate, it dies when the assault on Paradis began. Heck, maybe he even sees it as a good thing. His reckless son won’t die to a titan with these powers.

Grisha loses to his past. This son can do it. He’s been raised and loved well, and he has a heart that belongs to the Survey Corps, heroes of Eldia, and he has already shown a willingness to kill if he thinks it’s right. This son has the ability. He can do it right this time, and they’ll win.

Or something like that. Eldia matters more than anything, including his son. I think Grisha is so driven by his mission in the last hours of his life that he forgets every lesson, and Eren pays for it. The greater good is paramount–only that belief fuses with Grisha’s own personal fervor to do it all right this time.

It’s confusing and horrifying, but really tragically human. He’s confronted with enemies he can’t handle, and an incomplete plan turns into the only one, regardless of whether or not it actually is, and then he just… goes all in.

That last day is one of Grisha’s worst. I’m not sure if anything is ever going to come out to leave the situation more logic, but so much pain is involved, you can sort of see the domino that sets off the trainwreck falling in slow motion.