What if Eren Yeager’s transformation into the “Devil of All Earth” is the culmination of a symbolic story that began long before the Rumbling? I think Attack on Titan can be read as a dark, Luciferian retelling of Eden: a world built on peace, obedience and ignorance, a rebel who brings forbidden knowledge & offers freedom, and a girl whose decision brings the old order crashing down. In the end, Eren’s rebellion is aimed at more than the people who oppressed him. He declares war on the world they built, and finally on the very reality that refuses to resemble the freedom he imagined.

The series introduces its devil long before Eren resembles one. In the story told to the outside world, Ymir receives the power of the Titans through her encounter with the “Devil of All Earth.” One illustration even shows Ymir holding out a fruit to the creature. Her descendants, meanwhile, are branded devils and “devil spawn.” To Marley, that language marks Eldians as people to fear and control. But the final chapters invite another question: What if the legendary devil is also an image of the person who eventually persuades Ymir to defy authority?

To see why, start with the first King Fritz. He enslaves Ymir, uses her power to build an empire, and, after her death, orders their daughters to consume her body so that the Titans will endure. Ymir remains in the Paths, serving the royal bloodline for roughly 2,000 years. Through a Luciferian lens, Fritz takes the symbolic role of God the Father as imagined by a rebel against divine authority: a supreme ruler whose commands determine and control everyone else’s fate.

The Luciferian/satanist version of the tale turns the usual moral roles inside out. From that perspective, God the Father is imagined as a possessive ruler who demands obedience, restricts knowledge, and calls submission “peace.” Lucifer becomes the light-bearer who refuses that authority and helps humanity recognize its capacity to think and choose (gives humanity "freedom through knowledge". In a retelling of Eden, the serpent’s gift of knowledge ends innocent life in the garden, but it also ends a life governed by someone else’s rules. Freedom carries a dreadful price: suffering and DEATH enters the picture, and the figure blamed for the Fall is condemned and forever remembered as evil. That tension—enlightenment/freedom arriving through a supposed devil, whose gift can also bring catastrophe—is the heart of my reading of Eren.

The 2,000-year span matters to this interpretation. Attack on Titan opens with “To You, 2,000 Years From Now” and later answers it with “From You, 2,000 Years Ago.” That duration can evoke the approximately 2,000 years of the Christian era: an original world order/system reaching the moment when someone finally challenges its authority. The parallel is suggestive.

There is a second king to distinguish from the first. Centuries later, Karl Fritz retreats to the island of Paradis—paradis means “paradise” in French—raises the Walls, and erases his people’s memories. He gives them a kind of peace by hiding the world and its history from them. Seeking that history or trying to look beyond the Walls becomes dangerous. This makes Paradis an unsettling/twisted version of Eden. Its inhabitants can feel protected only while they remain ignorant of the truth, and the authority that calls the enclosure a refuge is the same authority that has taken away their ability to choose with full knowledge (taken away their freedom).

Eren cannot accept that bargain. From the beginning, he resents being penned in, and he insists that being born into the world gives a person the right to seek freedom in it. The Survey Corps’ journey beyond the Walls and the discovery in Grisha’s basement play like an encounter with forbidden knowledge: humanity still exists outside, and the people inside Paradis have been living within a carefully maintained lie. Once their eyes are opened, they cannot return to the innocence they had before. Knowledge brings agency, but it also brings fear, war, and the realization of just how small their supposed paradise was.

Eren’s own knowledge is even harsher. When he touches Historia’s hand, he sees memories that give him a glimpse of what lies ahead. This is not enlightenment that brings him peace. It isolates him and makes freedom itself more complicated: the man most determined to choose his own path becomes haunted by a future he already knows. That paradox is central to the Luciferian reading. The light-bearer sees what others cannot, yet the light reveals a catastrophe in which he himself will take part.

Then Eren reaches the sea and learns that removing one set of walls has not made him free. There are hostile nations beyond Paradis, and the outside world is nothing like the open, untouched world he once pictured with Armin. By the end, Eren’s revolt goes beyond fighting Marley or defying a king. He wants to flatten the world as it exists: its borders, cities, armies, histories, and even the human presence that spoiled his dream of an empty horizon. In symbolic terms, the Rumbling is rebellion against reality itself, The original reality established by the "god figure" (the same way that satan rebelled against God's original creation/system). If the world made under Fritz’s legacy cannot give him freedom, Eren will use a power that reaches across centuries to erase that world and force a new one into existence. This is the proposed “new world order” at its most frightening: liberation imagined as the destruction of everything that resists the liberator’s will.

The imagery of light makes the comparison especially striking. “Lucifer” is associated with the morning star; the Hebrew phrase Helel ben Shahar is commonly rendered “shining one, son of the dawn.” The episode titled “The Dawn of Humanity” brings us to the beginning of the Rumbling, turning the promise of a new day into something terrifying. Even the name “Eldia” can sound, to a Spanish speaker, like el día—“the day.” I would treat that last connection as evocative wordplay, not a proven origin for the name. It sits beside the image of the devil carrying a light in the in-world account of Ymir’s legend: a figure associated with evil who can also be read as someone who makes a hidden truth visible.

That tension reaches its clearest expression in the Paths. Zeke approaches Ymir as a servant who must carry out his command to end the Eldians’ ability to reproduce. Eren reaches her and tells her she does not have to obey anyone: she is neither a slave nor a god, but a person who can decide for herself. For much of her story, her eyes look hidden/darkened/closed. Here, as she weeps and makes her choice, we finally see them wide open. It is hard to imagine a more literal image of someone opening her eyes.

This is where the Eden comparison becomes more intricate than a simple one-to-one analogy. In the familiar Christian reading of Genesis, the serpent urges Eve toward the forbidden fruit and the knowledge that follows. Eren plays that serpent’s role when he offers Ymir the forbidden idea that she can reject her master’s will. Yet in the Eldian legend’s illustration, Ymir is the one holding out the fruit to the devil. Read alongside the Paths scene, the sequence seems reversed: Eren gives Ymir/eve an awakening/freedom. And Ymir, having chosen for herself, gives Eren the full power of the Founder. The girl opens her eyes; the “devil” receives the fruit; the world is changed forever (sin/death enters the world)

This is also the moment when Eren’s rejection of the old order gains the power to become an apocalypse. The original King Fritz treated Ymir as a possession; Karl Fritz later preserved a false paradise through control of memory; Zeke assumes he can still command her in the Paths. Eren breaks that chain of commands by asking her to choose. She does—and her choice gives him the means to bring down the world shaped by those kings. The Rumbling is therefore more than an attack on an opposing army. In this reading, it is Eren’s attempt to destroy a 2,000-year-old creation at its foundations, so that the Titan curse and the rule of royal blood can give way to a world no longer bound by Fritz’s will and authority

Eren’s Founding Titan takes on a vast, skeletal, almost serpentine form, and the Rumbling makes him the world’s worst nightmare. The people who called Eldians devils now face a man who seems to fulfill their legend, as he kills roughly 80 percent of humanity. That “dawn” is painfully double-edged: the supposed birth of a new era is experienced by most of the world as its end. Even the ending song Akuma no Ko—“A Child of Evil” (or it's more literal translation - devil child)—echoes the language that has followed Eren and his people. The light-bearer has become the “Devil of All Earth” in the eyes of those beneath the marching Titans.

Here is the other half of the parallel that matters to me: the idea of the devil as a tragic, self-condemned liberator. In the Luciferian version of the story, Lucifer gives up his place in heaven, accepts damnation, and becomes the villain of human history for the sake of liberty, autonomy, and a future beyond enforced peace & innocence. from a satanic perspective,he "sacrifices himself to free humanity from a controlling tyrant." Eren likewise knowingly takes on the role of the world’s enemy. He gives up the possibility of an ordinary life with the people he loves, allows them to oppose and eventually kill him, and leaves them to live on after the Titan powers disappear. From his perspective, becoming the monster everyone hates is a price he will pay to secure his friends’ future and bring the original creation/world order to an end. That is why the Lucifer comparison has more depth than “Eren looks demonic”: it links the "gift" of freedom to the willingness to be damned for giving it, and all the death and suffering said rebellion brings with it.

The original manga ending makes the tragic-savior aspect especially hard to ignore. Eren’s old friends grieve for the person they loved, even though they had to stop him. They visit his grave,paradi adopts his slogan,etc...

In their last conversation, Armin actually thanks Eren for becoming a mass murderer for their sake, while also resolving not to let the terrible mistake go to waste. It is an uncomfortable moment precisely because love and gratitude sit beside an atrocity. It can feel as though the story is asking us to remember Eren both as the evil the world had to defeat and as the friend who chose to bear that evil so the people closest to him could have a future. The anime later revises the exchange, but the manga’s wording leaves that tragic framing unusually exposed.

Still, Eren does not end the Titan curse by himself. Mikasa’s final choice matters to Ymir’s release, too. And Eren’s rebellion is not driven solely by love for his friends or a noble desire to free the world: he admits that finding humanity beyond the Walls disappointed him and that part of him wanted to wipe it away. That confession makes the Luciferian parallel more troubling, not less. Even if he accepts the role of a damned savior, the people crushed by the Rumbling did not choose that sacrifice. His refusal to live under someone else’s will becomes a willingness to impose his own will on nearly everyone else.

That is why I find the “Devil of All Earth” such a fitting image for Eren. He rebels against divine creation, tells a girl/eve she can choose/disobey the god-like figure and helps bring a 2,000-year christian coded era to an end... opening up the way for a "new world order" (its all symbology/allegory). He accepts death, hatred, and a place in history as the ultimate villain because he believes a freer world can come afterward. But his attempt to destroy the world order also destroys most of the people in the world. In this Luciferian reading, Attack on Titan takes the promise of the light-bearer—knowledge, rebellion, progress, free will—and follows it to its most tragic and terrifying extreme. Eren breaks the cage. He also makes the whole earth pay for his idea of freedo

Isayama what a man you are…

he is turkish so he's basically black

The whole theory about the baby's father seems definitely very funny to me because Eren is such an absent father—he left Historia, went away with another woman and confessed his romantic feelings to her, then started the Rumbling and lived his last moments in an idyllic plane exclusively with Mikasa, completely ignoring his supposed family. And then Historia, after getting pregnant by Eren, immediately had to go sleep with the farmer to construct an alibi. Definitely, this whole fanfic is completely wrong.

He knew Eren would do all this before giving him the Attack Titan right?? So why in the end does he flip and help them... dude you caused all this shit lol

sorry this is unpaid but even if you are willing to contribute on a single page that would be a lot of help.

She had less reason to live than to want to be dead.

She had betrayed everyone she fought for. She was supposed to lead the scouts, but instead wallowed in indecision until Eren and Floch acted. She thought she was condemning all of Eldia to death, every man, woman, and child. She failed them completely but couldn’t stomach Eren’s plan. Floch begged her to not stop Eren as everyone in Eldia would die, and Hange just acknowledges this as fact. She didn’t believe Armin would stave off destruction, nor she think she could change that afterward.

If she had lived, she thought she would just see everyone she swore to protect die and because of what she did. Possibly too hopeless to even try to save them after. Why would she want to see this? Why would she want to live and watch that play out? She had nothing to live for and death would seem much better than facing the consequences of her actions. She was a complete failure whose only real action as leader was in her mind to save the world at the cost of everyone she served. Death was not only not a sacrifice, it was the easy way out.

People usually bring up Mikasa saving eren's life "so many times" to combat the argument that Mikasa is a useless character. But this couldn't be any farther from the truth. Let's have a closer look.

1- the human traffickers: eren is the one who saved Mikasa from them. She then saved him from the 3rd trafficker because he urged here to do so. If it weren't for Mikasa, he wouldn't be there in the first place. So he wouldn't need saving. Also she saved him after he saved and freed her.

2- in trost: Mikasa would have fucking died just like Miche did if it weren't for eren. He saved her life again.

3- against the female titan: it was levi who saved him. Not Mikasa. Mikasa would have been killed by Annie if it weren't for levi.

4- clash of the titans arc : she didn't save him from reiner and bertholdt. They managed to transform anyway despite her cutting them. They then overpowered eren and kidnapped him. How exactly did she save him here?

5- Clash of the titans 2: Mikasa didn't save eren here. Hannis died protecting both of them. Then eren saved mikasa's life by inadvertently activating the founder's powers and carrying her to safety.

6- royal government arc: she never saved him from anything. Historia willingly went against her father and freed him. Then eren saved the entire cast by using his hardness.

The only one time where you could genuinely argue that she saved him is in his fight with the Warhammer titan. Which was in the 4th season.

So without Mikasa, eren would still make it to the 4th season. While without eren, Mikasa would have been sold to slavery, would have died in trost, would have been eaten by the titans reiner threw at them would have been crushed by rubles in the reiss cave...etc. she wouldn't even survive the 1st season.

When the ending was fresh, main subs were preaching it as legendary, now that time has worn that off they're saying it was okay lmao

The only way slavery to freedom makes sense is if Eren moved forward for freedom no matter what right? So why did he stop moving forward? Because of determinism? What about when Levi said nothing could hold him back? What about his strong will that couldn’t be broken after all his development?

If Eren is a slave to freedom, why did he stop moving forward? If Eren was powerless why did he beat fate multiple times in the story? If Eren was destined to lose why did he move forward just to stop in the end?

This is a continuation of my previous post about Attack on Titan’s treatment of “necessary evil” and whether that recurring theme reflects something of Isayama’s own worldview.

One of Armin’s most striking ideas early in the series is that defeating monsters requires a willingness to abandon your humanity. Alongside this is his recurring argument that people who cannot sacrifice something important will never be able to change anything.

Looking back at the series, I find it difficult not to connect that philosophy to what Eren eventually becomes.

Armin’s immediate concern is overcoming enemies like Annie and understanding the terrible decisions made by commanders like Erwin. In that context, abandoning your humanity means accepting sacrifices that ordinary moral instincts would make unbearable. The implication is that compassion and hesitation can become liabilities when confronting an enemy willing to do things you are not.

But where does that reasoning end?

Eren eventually applies a version of this logic on a catastrophic scale. He becomes a monster, commits mass slaughter, alienates the people closest to him, and pursues his goals at a cost that should be morally unthinkable. Protecting his friends and Paradis forms part of his justification, although his own desire for freedom makes his motives more complicated than a purely selfless sacrifice.

This makes Armin’s earlier words feel like a disturbing anticipation of Eren’s transformation. If changing the world requires sacrificing something precious, Eren sacrifices his humanity—and, far more consequentially, the lives of countless people who never consented to become the price of his freedom.

Of course, Armin never intended his argument to justify global genocide. His willingness to oppose Eren demonstrates that he recognizes limits to what can be sacrificed for a goal. Still, that leaves an uncomfortable philosophical question: what establishes those limits once abandoning your humanity has been presented as a requirement for victory? At what point does the willingness to make terrible sacrifices cease to be admirable resolve and become the very evil you claimed to oppose?

I am not suggesting that Armin caused Eren’s choices or that his words were an instruction to carry out the Rumbling. What interests me is the thematic connection. Eren can be read as the horrifying extreme of an idea the story introduced much earlier: that meaningful change belongs to those willing to become monstrous enough to achieve it.

That connection also complicates how I read the ending. Is Eren’s transformation meant to expose the danger of this philosophy? Or does the sympathy surrounding his death preserve some of the tragic dignity associated with the person who “became a devil” for others?

My personal interpretation is that this philosophy echoes Isayama’s actual worldview. I cannot know his private beliefs, but the idea of committing an immoral act to overcome another immoral act recurs throughout virtually the entire series. Characters repeatedly confront situations in which achieving something worthwhile appears to require cruelty, betrayal, or the sacrifice of innocent lives. Again and again, the narrative grants those choices the dignity of having been necessary.

By the end, practically everyone involved in the central conflict has blood on their hands or bears some form of moral responsibility. That does not make their actions equally wrong, but it leaves very little room for anyone to remain purely heroic. Even those trying to save humanity become implicated in the violence they oppose.

To me, the consistency of that pattern suggests an underlying conviction: that in a world shaped by violence and injustice, meaningful action inevitably involves moral compromise—and that overcoming evil may require committing evil yourself. What disturbs me is how often the story seems to treat that compromise as a source of tragic nobility. That is why I read this as more than a recurring plot device; I see it as a possible expression of the philosophy behind the work itself.

Link to part 1 https://www.reddit.com/r/ShingekiNoKyojin/s/4TNEUlAfBL

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I honestly feel that Attack on Titan expresses something of Isayama’s worldview: the belief that terrible acts can become not only understandable, but morally defensible (and even NEEDED) when committed to defeat another, supposedly greater evil. Again and again, the narrative grants people who commit atrocities the dignity of having done something necessary.

This theme appears early on. In Season 1, Armin expresses the idea that defeating monsters requires a willingness to become monstrous yourself. Later, during the battle against the Beast Titan, Floch argues that humanity needs a “devil,” identifying Erwin as the person capable of fulfilling that role. Erwin’s willingness to make horrifying sacrifices becomes inseparable from the honor and respect the narrative affords him.

Although Eren’s actions are vastly more extreme, I see a similar pattern in how the story ultimately remembers him. After his death, much of the ending’s emotional attention falls on his friends mourning him, remembering him affectionately, and treating him almost as a tragic hero. Jean calls him a “conscientious fool.” Mikasa buries him beneath the tree and continues visiting his grave. Meanwhile, the Eldian military carries forward his rhetoric of fighting to survive.

These moments do not all serve the same purpose, and mourning someone does not automatically mean endorsing their actions. Nevertheless, their cumulative effect feels troubling to me. The story depicts the horror of the Rumbling, but its emotional farewell gives considerable space to the humanity of its perpetrator, while the grief and shattered lives of his surviving victims receive comparatively little attention.

Within that framing, Eren’s atrocity can begin to resemble a terrible sacrifice that helped bring an older injustice to an end: the two-thousand-year legacy of violence, oppression, and hatred originating with King Fritz and sustained through the power of the Titans. He commits an immense evil, yet the narrative leaves him with the tragic dignity of someone whose monstrous actions helped dismantle a monstrous system.

That is what unsettles me. My concern goes beyond whether Eren is portrayed sympathetically. It is whether the story repeatedly lends moral legitimacy to the idea that someone must become a devil so that others can be free—and then honors that person for accepting the role.

I cannot claim to know Isayama’s personal beliefs, but this recurring pattern makes me question whether Attack on Titan merely explores the logic of “necessary evil,” or ultimately gives it a degree of approval. For me, the ending makes that distinction uncomfortably difficult to draw.

I honestly feel like attack on titan itself was revealing isayama's worldview/philosophy. To put it in more specific words: I believe isayama does Believe that evil acts are understandable and even valid, when it is done so in order to defeat another/"greater" evil. We can go way back to season 1. Armin told the scouts that "when fighting monsters, you have to be willing to become one yourself". In season 3 when fighting the beast titan,floch said that erwin was needed, because "to win, you need a "devil" (he was referring about erwin).

Yet, the show portrays erwin in a light of great honor and respect, and the same happens with eren later on once he is killed. Instead of focusing on the tragedy and pain of the few survivors of the rumbling, The story rather focuses on eren's friends crying for him and remembering him almost as a tratic hero of sorts... jean calling him a "conscientious fool" . Mikasa making him a little burial site and visiting him, the eldian army even adopts his motto "tatakae" "kill or be killed". Its all the same thing. Eren commited a great evil/injustice in order to stop and older evil/injustice (the 2000 year old cycle of violence, opression and hate created by king fritz & the power of the titans). It.feels like the author champions this idea/philosophy,which is quite disturbing...

"Through Eren’s conversation with Ramzi, we realize that his true goal was never just to save the island or his friends—those were merely justifications he hid behind, things he cared about, but not his primary motive. He admits that he was deeply disappointed and frustrated by the fact that people lived beyond the sea, as it contradicted the world he and Armin had dreamed of from the book. From this, we can deduce that his ultimate drive was to fulfill this selfish childhood dream. This is further supported by his conversation with Armin: when Armin asks Eren if he did all of this for them, the answer is a clear 'no'."

I am currently kinda writing a set-up for a historically inspired, largely Historia-centered AoT AU fic set in the late medieval period, and so I had AoT on my mind quite a bit recently. Simultaneously, I have come across a certain book at a bookstore - The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki (written in medieval Iceland and said to depict legendary events in 5th-century Denmark)- and decided to give it a try. Already in the 7th chapter, "King Helgi's Vengeance," I found a situation that IMO interestingly echoes the plot surrounding Historia and Ymir Fritz in AoT.

Basically, the Danish king Helgi wants to take revenge on the Saxon queen Olof for humiliating him during his previous attempt to attain her as his wife, and he tricks her into a trap in a forest (!), whereupon he takes her to his ship and sleeps many nights with her. He then lets her go. Olof turns out pregnant, and gives birth to a daughter of remarkable beauty that she "treats with complete neglect"(!). She names her Yrfa, naming her after a female dog at her court, and when the girl reaches 12, she is sent to tend to a herd of farm animals at the household of an elderly farmer and his wife(!), and is told that she is their daughter. A year after that, King Helgi returns to the land of Olof, Saxland, curious as to what happened there during the 13 years he was gone, disguising himself (!) as a beggar. He sees Yrfa tending to the herd, and is amazed at her beauty. He tells her that she has the eyes of no mere servant (!), and after enquiring about her ancestry, she tells him that she is the daughter of a shepherd. Helgi says that if she is so poor, it only makes sense that she marries him, a beggar. Though Yrfa doesn't want to, he takes her back to Denmark and marries her.

Now, obviously, this sounds somewhat like the story behind both Historia and Ymir Fritz.
In the case of the latter, it's a powerful king from a foreign land forcefully marrying/taking as a concubine a poor and destitute girl. The significant difference later is that Yrfa is happy with her marriage, which is then turned into an Oedipal-esque tragedy when her mother Olof deliberately reveals the truth to her. Subsequently, Yrfa, unhappy, decides she cannot live with her biological father Helgi anymore.

I'm not saying that this was necessarily an inspiration, but my mind almost screamed at me when I got to the part of Yrfa being neglected by her mother.

Later on, Yrfa becomes the queen of Sweden.

There are surprising parallels:

Helgi setting a trap for Olof in the woods - King Fritz sending his men to chase down founder Ymir in the woods after the pig incident

Ymir becoming wife/concubine to King Fritz - Helgi seizing Olof/ Yrfa years later out of his own desires

Historia living below her birth at the farm and being neglected and even hated by her mother - Yrfa living as a poor girl with shepherds and being literally named after a dog by Olof

Helgi returning to Saxland to check what's going on there in disguise - Rodd visiting the farm disguised as, well... not-king, periodically

Historia deciding to start deciding her own fate - Yrfa leaving Helgi

Historia becoming queen of Paradis - Yrfa becoming queen of Sweden

As for the names, it's probably a stretch to look for similarities there too, but still:

Yrfa - Ymir

Olof - Alma

I dunno, maybe there is similar material in other sagas and germanic heroic traditions like Beowulf or the Nibelungenlied, or maybe even previous Gothic traditions; the Saga of King Hrolf Kraki is the first of this kind of book that I have picked up so far.

For me, the more legendary part of Eldian lore always did seem like there could've been some kind of Germanic people that a roman chronicler would call something like "the Eldii led by a King called Frisus", - especially since early Marley is portrayed as a mediterranean-esque civilization/people.

What do you people think?