[FREEDOM ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK IT IS] Every civilization has struggled for freedom in fiction and in the waking world. Whether it's Attack on Titan, or the United States telling Great Britain to get bent, liberty is universally sought. Yet, I'd wager only a small percentage of people have a readily available definition for "freedom." Like Lincoln said, What I'm interested in is how Hajime Isayama defines freedom employing Attack on Titan (Shingeki No Kyojin). I don't actually read the manga, so there won't be any manga spoilers, but there will be spoilers up to the end of season three of the anime, so season four slackers are in the clear. I digress, this is still very much a season four video. If you're caught up, you'll very easily connect the dots. And one more thing, I'm using the dub in this video because the rest of the video's in English. If you're a sub elitist, and gatekeeping gets you that bricked up, just-... (This isn't a translation of what I'm saying.) Let's dust off an oldie and dissect Attack on Titan's pilot episode with this idea of freedom at the hull. After our flash forward, an indicator that Isayama's gonna rip out our hearts and string them into little necklaces, our protagonist Eren wakes up in a field littered with Campanula flowers, also widely known as "bellflowers." These are significant, but I'll get to that in a minute. Isayama uses a common, but relevant insertion for the opening here - The slow onset of shadows. You see this done in "Breaking Bad," "No Country For Old Men," "A Clockwork Orange," and other great pieces of cinema. The use of this symbol is pretty on-the-nose. We're told off the bat that darkness is coming. A darkness in the world, and a darkness within our protagonist. Later in the episode, after Eren spergs out on Hannes, we're shown a bell. The bell has always, in political ideology and classic literature, been a fairly obvious symbol for freedom. In Philadelphia is the Liberty Bell, and across the world in Berlin, Germany, is the Freedom Bell. The majority of Attack on Titan's geography and culture is based on old Germany. I'm sure you're seeing some similarities here. The bell in Paradis is used to indicate the return of our scouts, but more esoterically, it's a symbol that says, And freedom is fundamentally good, right? Freedom should be sought and fought for? ... Right? "The day was lost! We have NOTHING!" This is life without walls. This is life not tethered to the neat order and submission of civilization. And as we know, this is what Eren called freedom. "It's more grown-up to settle for living in fear behind some stupid wall your whole pointless life?" It's pretty clear Isayama claims that freedom may not be what we think it is. Just like Brian Magee, the British philosopher, who once explained the Freudian perspective. And the responsibility of our mortality, that cold bronze bell, is a burden seldom approached when behind the convenience of a wall. Listen to the soundtrack when Eren's swallowed and has to face the true nature of his desires, that life without walls that he wanted so badly. Eren's idea of freedom sent him to the "belly of the whale," a climactic moment the hero of the story will have to shed their old skin and be birthed anew to escape fatal imprisonment. And this all started with the ring of a bell. Let's backtrack a second. Bellflowers. Isayama uses the symbol of the bell so frequently, it wouldn't be rash to say that the main idea of Attack on Titan, above all other theme and moral, is our relationship to freedom. These flowers are hidden away in the shadows, away from Eren, and that's where freedom lives. Freedom is not in the light, but in darkness. Or, like Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist says, To KNOW this translates to freedom. This leads us to our first definition: Let's slap on our first definition of freedom in accordance with Isayama's allegory. Freedom is, "disillusionment. It is the darkness of a harsh truth..." "balancing out the blinding light of our delusions." There's a spoiler-free piece of manga dialogue that reinforces this idea. "... There's nothing further removed from freedom than ignorance." There's an issue that comes with the truth, though. It's really, really scary. The kind of scary you write an entire animated, post-apocalyptic series about. But as Aristotle reminds us, Or, like Isayama claims through Hange, "Knowledge is always worth the risk. I believe that." What is this horrifying truth Isayama's talking about, then? I think this is an appropriate time to get a pretty big idea out of the way. I discussed this in my previous video, which is linked above, but for those that can't reach the button, I'll summarize. It's important for the sake of this discussion that any theme or idea introduced here doesn't get relegated to only the universe of Attack on Titan. Animated characters or the human beings you're surrounded by everyday, these themes are universal. They're embedded in our DNA. Like the lead adaptive writer of the Funimation series said, Attack on Titan can be approached as an allegory. "Between what is out there," "that is to say, beyond the walls that we erect in our daily life," "and what is in here," "what we keep hidden, what we keep protected behind those walls," "there has to be some... some level, however slight, of communication between the two," "otherwise, what is out there eventually turns into this kind of" "unfathomable wilderness that cannot be navigated or negotiated with." "but that's often the case in our lives, at least on a psychological level." Our fears and the parts of us which we've casted outside out own proverbial walls are highlighted by Isayama's work. That's the chief function of Attack on Titan. We may relate to Eren in that we struggle to explain it, or communicate it, or even identify it, but we don't do well behind walls. No matter what anybody tells you. It's, of all people, actually, uh-... Pope Benedict that said, Or, it's like Freud said, We're not psychologically wired for the life which our culture demands of us. It's like what Erich Fromm claimed, Showcased in Eren, there is a tinge of spite that we all subconsciously hold against the world as a result. Isayama implores us, in 23 minute increments, to not pretend otherwise. Culture, however, our walls, tell us to ignore it, and nowhere in that request are we geared for facing what lies beyond the walls, or the facets of us that the walls do not accept. Like Michael Tatum explains, there are consequences to that. Eren is the resentful part of us which has been buried by civilization simply disguised as a cartoon character. I know that's a HUGE claim to make, so before I'm called out for being a "blue curtains mean depression" a__hole, Isayama, creator of the series Isayama, touched on this idea when asked which character he sees in himself. Isayama further confirms this in the final Attack on Titan guidebook saying, So, back to the question. Through the symbol of Eren, we're shown a horrifying truth embedded in our nature cleverly disguised as conflict in a cartoon. What is it that Isayama digs up from the basement? The ultimate revelation within Attack on Titan is the epiphany that humans and titans are the same beings. Not just relegated to the story, that titans are transformed Eldians, but that Eren and the Smiling Titan are, in many ways, the same character. That Erwin, in all his nobility, is the same character as this thing. Titans are a symbol for everything within us that is repressed and cast away by both ourselves and our culture. We put up walls to keep out the parts of us that we don't want to properly tend to. Doesn't seem to be working out too well for Paradis, does it? As much as Eren is a symbol, titans are symbols as well. It's a fact shown in history time and time again that human beings, the ones that you love and interact with are... We see this in 1940s Germany referenced throughout the series that perfectly "normal" people, the people joking and socializing in bars were the same people who we read about in history books described as demons. And this was not a freak, one-off accident. If it happened then, it can happen now. No matter who you are, you carry evil. And this inherent evil is embodied in the symbol of the titan. It's what Jung called the shadow, what Christians called Satan, and it's what Isayama called a titan. It's like Jung asks, Or in the words of Floch, "If we wanna stand any chance against the titans..." Because I respect empirical evidence over mindless theory, one point of reference here. Paul Maclean, an American neuroscientist, deduced that a part of the human brain is reptilian, aptly named the "reptile brain." It's the part of our neurology that drives These faculties are sewn to us, no matter how much our civilization and society try dethreading them. And titans are an apt symbol for this. Titans are reptilian in nature. "As a matter of fact, they'll probably just grow back lizard-style," "creepy little b___ard." The reptile brain, on a neurological level, houses our darkness. And it's located at the base of our brain stem, running down into the spinal cord. Interesting, then, that's right where a titan needs to be struck to be conquered. Titans are kind of a reverse reflection of humans. They're all animal, all primal, all reptile except for the human at the nape. The dark mirror in mythology has never shown us what isn't already there. This arrangement is an obvious yin and yang, which ultimately proves my point. Eren and the Smiling Titan are the same character. Levi and the Beast Titan are the same character. As above, so below. Again, Jung explains this in one of his early works called "The Psychology of the Unconscious." Acknowledging this very present animal capacity is no easy task, it's no easy task to slay a titan. Like the writer of "Wicked," Gregory Maguire says, "I'm the bad guy." "We are the walking dead." "We all go a little mad sometimes." "Everybody's a suspect." "EVERYONE." "I am not in danger, Skyler," "I am the danger." "A guy opens his door and gets shot, you think that of me?" "No." "I am the one who knocks." This truth must manifest upwards from the depths in one way or another. Which is why Isayama wrote that Grisha Yeager hid the books, the horror of knowledge, in the basement down below. The greatest knowledge, hence, the greatest freedom, comes from unlocking that dark cellar door storing all of the things about us and about the world that we cannot face. After the climactic approach to our shadows, Isayama shows us that there is a freedom that follows, similar to Jung's claim that, Again, I value evidence in the literature much more than I do grasping at straws and brooding over this stuff, so here's more proof. Isayama very carefully, very delicately, tells us that this is freedom. "THIS..." "IS FREEDOM." Knowledge is liberation. However, there's an obvious difference between this freedom and freedom in practice, so let's add onto our definition. Freedom is also action despite consequence. Liberation, as Isayama defines, does not consider outcome. There's this repeating instance within Attack on Titan that often goes overlooked, but is so important to effectively digesting the story. Tell me if you see a pattern here. "And I'll be damned if I'm going to miss it." "Being there... is that important?" "More than humanity's victory?" "Yes." "I don't care about killing all the titans! And I don't care about freeing mankind either!" "I say let them get wiped out by titans!" "And if that makes me an enemy of humanity? So be it." "I don't care if I'm the worst girl who's ever lived!" "You agree to take Christa with us today right now, "or so help me, I will throw your whole plan out of whack." "Are you completely insane? That doesn't help her! I thought that you genuinely cared!" "If it robs her of a future, then life's a b__ch." "I've made my peace with what that says about me." This introduces the paradox of freedom, the dark mirror image of liberty. No different than our own shadows, illustrated by titans, freedom carries a shadow side. One person's freedom is another's slavery. American author Mark Twain wrote a short story about it called, "The War Prayer," which includes the missive... Mikasa takes notice to this, examining a praying mantis eating a moth. Freedom oftentimes comes with a pricetag marked "selfishness." There's the oxymoron, a kind of... As Historia frees herself of her familial bond, her father is faced with mildly inconvenient consequences. (fat dude dying sounds) Had Eren been selfish enough to betray the scouts' orders, Petra wouldn't have been faced with mildly inconvenient consequences. What if Erwin wasn't selfish enough to go out on that mission despite being unfit, and develop a plan to get Eren back safely? And of course, one has to wonder what the consequences of King Fritz not renouncing war for several fleeting years of peace would've been. Another example, Ymir selfishly manipulates Historia to some degree, but it results in the first instance of unconditional love that Ymir ever experiences, so liberating in fact, that she's okay with the idea of her own demise. Counter-intuitive, isn't it? It's a simple matter of substance verses form. Substance being the words of others, the ideas and reason of others' experiences verses one's own ether, one's one experiences and personally struggled for insights. It's like reading the Bible verses undergoing an actual crucifixion, an actual rebirthing phenomenon. In the old fables and the classic tales, we always see selfishness as a hubris or a downfall. Isayamamamamamamama says, "No." He shows us instead that selfishness is not productive or destructive until there is outcome. Like he explains through Levi, "Do as your conscience dictates." "At the end of the day, there's no reason to go against how you see it." "The choice is yours." "Either way, there's no guarantee." "In the end, you choose what you choose." "If afterwards your regrets are at a minimum, good for you." Substance verses form. Participating in this decision is by all means... Freedom. In all of its liberating glory and destructive selfishness. And to my season four guys... HOLY S___ "Sucks, don't it?" "The moment you realize you don't know s___." Knowledge is liberation. Selfishness, even, liberation. Throughout the first two seasons of Attack on Titan, we come to find this over and over again. Until we don't. In season three, we're treated to a pivotal scene involving Levi and Kenny where Isayama has some troubling news for us. As Kenny dies, finally faced with mortality, he has an earth-shattering epiphany. "We humans are all the same. Every last one of us..." "For some it's drinkin'..." "For some it's women..." "For some, even religion..." "Family..." "The king..." "Dreams..." "Children..." "Power..." "All of us had to spend our lives drunk on somethin'..." "Else we'd have no cause to keep pushin' on." "Everyone..." "was a slave to somethin'." If freedom is the dream, if freedom is knowledge or selfishness, how could those truly be if we've shackled ourselves to those very things? That's the painful paradox that Isayama guides us towards. Even if it's our intellectualizations of ownership, the stuff you've been listening to me rattle on about for the past twenty minutes, we're all owned by something. As Kenny reminds us, freedom of one paradigm just submits us to another. As Historia freed herself of her familial ties, she became a slave to a new government. "Am I acting for myself? Or am I still just someone's tool?" As Mikasa frees herself of inaction, she in some ways becomes a slave to her genetic instincts. As Grisha frees the founding titan of its inaction, a family is faced with death. And as Levi frees the civilians of Paradis from titans, he himself falls a slave to... "Heroics?" This is where the tragedy of Eren Yeager lies. Like a character in season four says, Throughout the third season, Isayama concludes that something must own us, something has to fill that vacancy, and it's because, like what the American anthropologist Ernest Becker deduced in his book, "The Denial of Death," We as humans are paradoxes, our very existence is a paradox. We're stuck half-animal, half-symbolic, half a primal interface, half more than it. This contradictory nature of existence, living just to one day die, sends mankind into a subconscious, desperate grope for illusions. For some, it's drinking. For some, it's women. Some, even religion. Kenny's list isn't extensive, he is, however, suggesting that your passions, your meaning, are all your own clever self-deception, blinding you from the fact that someday you will be rigid, and cold. There is a reason that this epiphany comes at Kenny's final minutes. Death, then, becomes in a way an answer to life. The key to one's shackles usually erect new prisons. New bars, but bars all the same. Harrowing to suggest that everything we do, everything we love is Just a neurotic means to escape the chilling reality of our eventual, grotesque demise. "All of us had to spend our lives drunk on something..." Like the German psychologist Erich Fromm asked, We are romantically drunk on the culture, or on the counter-culture, on the music, or on the silence. Take you pick. Just like Eren did. To look down upon someone else's slavery is to forgo the terrifying realization that you, yourself, are shackled. Notice Eren is so passionately driven, so intensely infuriated by the shackles he sees on other people? It's almost like he sees a part of himself in these people, a part of himself almost no man has the courage to face, his own shadow cast upon the sheep he criticizes. Herman Hesse, the German-Swiss poet tells us as much. Eren's irrational vibrance when looking upon others in shackles indicates that Eren Yeager bares the heaviest shackles of any character in Attack on Titan. It wouldn't be irrational to deduce at this point that in a show about defining and then attaining freedom, freedom cannot be defined, nor can it be obtained. Nothing can free us from the imminent reality that the hearts beating in our chests are going to cease. I'm sure by this point, you're thinking... However, I'd strongly disagree. Like Attack on Titan shows us time and time again, one must undergo loss. A loss of self, and a loss of confidence, a loss of dreams, one's illusions, and a life's worth of betrayal. Because like Chuck Palahniuk says in "Fight Club," I'm now going to introduce a film that plays an integral role in this discussion. Frank Darabont's "The Shawshank Redemption." If you haven't seen this classic, it's a grounded musing on what freedom is. Spoiler warning if you haven't seen it, but... The film follows Andy Dufresne, a man stuck behind walls for a crime he never committed. He spends his days in and out, dreaming of one day making it beyond the walls to Zihuatanejo - A small shore on the Pacific ocean. Remind you of anybody? However, Andy's really the opposite of Eren. He's cool, calm, and collected. Andy's got something figured out despite his physical shackles. Like the character Red says, "He strolled. Like a man in a park without a care or a worry in the world." "Like he had an invisible coat that would shield him from this place." Like I said, the opposite of Eren. REEEEEEEEEEEEEE There is this beautiful scene where Andy comes back from two weeks of solitary confinement completely unscatched. His friends are shocked and ask him how he maintained his sanity. He explains the walls can't affect you if you don't permit them because of something deep within that nothing in the physical world can breach. Andy is a man behind walls, but the film depicts him as free. And this free man strolling without a care is the only character in the whole movie to successfully break out of Shawshank prison. Could it be that internal freedom must befall the individual before external freedom can be granted? Attack on Titan is slowly moving towards this sentiment. Again, I'm not a manga reader, so I could be off, but with the progression of the show and the hints planted along the way, it just seems natural that we'd arrive at this conclusion. That when disillusioned and faced with the coldest reality of all, that you will one day die, the only unrivaled truth that still matters is that you were born at all. Even Eren has seen fragments of this truth, his missives on being "born into this world" and being free as a result are proof, but he so easily and so quickly forgets it in the turmoil of his ideas, and aspirations for what that freedom should be. Isayama has introduced a whole slough of characters who have not moved towards this realization yet... Except for one. There's one character in this series that lives like Andy Dufresne, taking what life sends his way while dreaming of a warm place by the ocean. I think the perfect symbol of unbridled freedom is Armin. "I found a book my grandpa keeps hidden away!" "Believe it or not, it's about life on the outside!" I believe Armin will be the symbolic answer to Attack on Titan's conflict. Because if Eren is our repression, Armin is our wisdom. Eren the Faustian self, Armin the entire self. There's a reason his name in German descends from the word, "whole." Armin finds profound value in trivialities, in small, fleeting moments that other characters easily glance over whether or not there are walls around him. In many ways, Armin is like a child. Not infantile, but youthful. He sees the world in all its brutality from the eyes of a child who that brutality has not poisoned yet. This isn't regression or ignorance, it's instead wisdom. The Christian doctrine tells us this much, quote, From episode one, Armin's freedom wasn't the extermination of the titans it wasn't protection, it wasn't power. Eren even agrees as much. "And Armin's lost as much as I have. But he just isn't like me." "He cares about more than fighting." And this even strikes someone as cold as Levi. While contemplating Kenny's missive on enslavement, Armin's perspective is suddenly the answer which comes to him. Armin is the conclusion to Kenny's hypothesis - That in the face of death and in the weight of existing, the one thing that turns out to matter... is simply what is. Take for another example, Mikasa and Eren debate over what was and what could be, Armin reminds them of what is. "Can we go back?" "To how things used to be?" "Some things will be the same, but..." "Some things have changed forever." "We'll make them pay for that..." "There's more out there, though." "The sea." "Remember?" "There's so much beyond the walls! Not just titans." "Water that glows like fire, fields of ice, giant rocks that take days to climb..." Where others looked to the horizon, Armin looked down at the ground. There's a pretty clear visual justification of this, Armin is the one who picks up the seashell while Eren gazes outward. We analyzed the first episode of the first season, now let's analyze the last episode of the third season right next to Shawshank. Eren's eyes lay on the horizon. Of course, physical conflict is not to be rejected, but Eren remains hopelessly negligent to the fact that the thing he's been searching for is just below his feet. In his obsessive pursuit for freedom, in his anguishings over his shackles, he's lost something. He even admitted to it on a rooftop in Shiganshina. "- Thing is..." "That's been our dream since we were kids..." "Only I forgot it a long time ago..." Eren's so closely tethered to his idea of freedom that his microscopic obessions prevent him from seeing the full picture, a crime that we are all perpetrators of. Here's the closing scene of Shawshank. Andy Dufresne has found that warm place, that symbolic baptism, that token of freedom. Andy's still a wanted man, the people above that body of water are presumably searching for him. But he made it to the sea, and that's damn good enough. Andy Dufresne and Eren Yeager both stand on the same ground, in the same timeless place, but one is free, and the other is not. Of course I recognize I'm committing the same sin that a lot of other "YouTube essayists" do. I've started to riff a lot of ideas without evidence, but fortunately, Isayama shared with us some insight in the latest and final Attack on Titan guidebook that may help solidify my claims. There are two missives that help conclude this segment, the first is a little lengthy but it's important to cover for the sake of this video. Here's an excerpt from a book written by the Buddhist Steve Hagen. And a conclusive missive from Lao Tzu in his work, "Tao Te Ching." The great paradox of freedom is that one's idea of it must be sacrificed to be obtained, which is ultimately where the Christ, or the rebirth allegory stems from, the same sacrificial rebirthing we saw Eren undergo in the first season. I think we've heard this idea before. "Give up on your dream and charge to your death." Isayama's claim is that, through sacrament, sacrificing every preconceived notion about what freedom should be, and all of its physical baggage, and then facing your mortality, there lies an even greater reward on the other side. Of course, it's Armin that reminds us, "If you can't let it go, it's not worth holding onto." Freedom never existed beyond the walls. It wasn't ever anywhere our characters weren't. Freedom was the field Eren woke up in, it was in the bandage Historia made out of her skirt, it was on the stairs outside of the pub, and it was on the streets of Shiganshina the day we met Eren. We're all bound in spirit by our similar archetypal struggles, cartoon characters or not, and it's the given moment that stands to hold value in the face of that realization. Because as Isayama tells us, you are alive. Like Eren says, you were born into this world. And although Eren tends to forget it, Isayama conludes... That's special enough. Freedom exists in sacrifice, in suffering, and above all, it exists here... and now.
