Parallel world Manga Artist

Chapter 339 339: Reactions

The final scene of the episode showed Erwin leading the Survey Corps in the charge, interspersed with the battle plan he had formulated beforehand.

The strategy itself was not complex. From Rei's perspective, if he had to summarise the approaches used by Erwin and Armin in the Battle to Retake Wall Maria in simple terms: Armin's strategy was the Golden Cicada Sheds Its Skin.

Erwin's was Making a Feint to the East while Attacking in the West. Both were fundamental military concepts. Nothing that would impress a student of classical warfare.

And yet this arc had received some of the highest praise of any anime sequence in his previous life.

The strategies were basic. What the episode depicted in executing them was anything but.

Erwin had already admitted, before the charge began, that what he was doing was performing. He would act like a con artist, using whatever words he had to get soldiers who had already lost their will to fight to follow him anyway. The pre-battle mobilisation was the mechanism. The speech was the instrument.

The plan itself, stripped of everything else: after ordering the all-out charge and having the formation fire signal flares to obstruct the Beast Titan's sightlines, Levi would move along the flank.

The Titans standing in the wasteland surrounding the Beast Titan would serve as ODM Gear anchor points, a series of stepping stones allowing Levi to cover the distance and reach the Beast Titan while its attention was directed at Erwin's charge. The suicide squad firing flares was the feint. The feint existed to die in a way that created one opening for one person.

So when Floch and the others asked Erwin directly whether they were riding to their deaths, and whether deaths like that would be meaningless, the answer Erwin gave them was:

"That's right. It's all meaningless. No matter what dreams or hopes you hold, no matter what kind of life you lead, the end is the same once you're hit by a rock."

He had agreed with them completely. Given them nothing to push against.

The voice actor had burned himself completely out in this sequence. What viewers at home experienced as a single continuous performance had taken over a month of recording sessions, the animation director and Rei requesting take after take until the specific quality they were looking for was present.

The voice actor had reportedly been reciting these lines in his dreams before the session concluded. The bonus Rei had paid him afterward had been equivalent to more than a year of his normal income.

The simplest words. Delivered at the ceiling of what a human voice could carry.

And then the animation.

The crushed stones launched by the Beast Titan from high above descended like dense rain into the charging formation.

Heads blown apart. Arms severed mid-gallop with a single impact. Fist-sized holes punched through the bodies of running horses by fragments moving at projectile velocity.

Horses falling in groups like grain cut by a scythe, the animals behind unable to stop, the field becoming a rolling destruction that moved through the formation like something inevitable.

Animating horses at full gallop was among the most technically demanding tasks in the medium. The cost of horse scenes was the reason JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 7: Steel Ball Run had gone unanimated for so long in Rei's previous life.

The difficulty was not just financial. The technical skill required to produce horse movement at quality was genuinely rare, and animation studios without the production capability to meet that standard risked damaging their reputation by attempting it.

For this episode, Illumination Production Company had recruited animation supervisors from studios across Tokyo with salaries that reflected the ask.

Industry veterans who had long since passed the stage in their careers where they worked as ordinary key animators were brought in specifically to produce horse scene manuscripts that met Rei's quality requirements.

Regular key animators could not produce the level of work the episode demanded.

Kenji sat parched and shaking.

The peers in Japan's anime industry watching this episode on their televisions were dumbfounded for different reasons.

The fellow key animators watching the episode at home had scalps tingling and eyes brimming with tears. Not from the emotional impact alone.

From recognising what they were watching in technical terms. The horse sequences. The debris impacts. The specific quality of animation that they understood from the inside meant months of work from people operating at the absolute ceiling of their professional capability.

Then the episode reached its climax.

Commander Erwin, leading the charge at the front, finally encountered a piece of crushed stone.

It hit his lower left abdomen.

Blood scattered. His expression froze. His body lurched in the saddle.

The gentle ending theme began to play.

Kenji's eyes were wide open and not blinking.

For viewers with a weaker sense of immersion, this might have registered as interesting or tragic in a general way. Kenji had always had an extremely strong sense of immersion when watching anime. What he felt was not tragic in a general way. It was specific and deeply uncomfortable and also deeply shocking simultaneously.

For the vast majority of anime, the deaths of a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand people in a story were numbers. The audience had no genuine feeling for those people because the series had not built that feeling. The deaths landed as plot events rather than losses.

Attack on Titan was different.

For viewers who had followed it since the first episode of the first season, even the minor Survey Corps members had accumulated weight. Small moments across three seasons of following these characters had deposited something in the audience that could not be withdrawn without cost.

And this episode had just spent every bit of that accumulated investment simultaneously. Everyone in that charge. Everyone who fired their smoke bombs and rode toward the Beast Titan's field of fire.

Including Erwin.

Who had not even reached the halfway point of the distance before the stone hit him.

Who had not seen the truth in the basement. Had not realised his father's dream. Had not known the answer he had spent his entire life approaching.

Shirogane-sensei. What are you doing. Was this necessary.

Kenji opened his phone before the ending theme had finished. Found Shirogane-sensei's account. His fingers were moving before he had fully decided to type.

The comment section was already filling.

"I cannot accept this. What is this. Erwin cannot die."

"Shirogane-sensei, if you want to kill someone, kill Eren. Let Erwin be the protagonist."

"The three most compelling characters in this anime are Erwin, Levi, and Mikasa. Shirogane-sensei you really dared. You are letting Erwin go offline? Are you not afraid of a massive popularity drop?"

"There is no need for this. There is a significant enemy force behind Reiner. If Erwin dies, who commands the Survey Corps against them? Can we rely on Eren for that?"

"Cannot accept this. Erwin absolutely must not die here. If he dies like this it is a failure of this arc."

"It took the entire series to build a character this compelling and letting him die like this is wrong."

"He might not necessarily be dead."

"He was only hit in the left abdomen. Surely it is not that severe."

"His abdomen was pierced by a rock the size of his torso. Even if it missed the organs, abdominal infection in that era is a death sentence."

"It is an anime. As long as Shirogane-sensei wants it, anything can happen."

"Shirogane-sensei, Erwin must be fully resurrected next week. Otherwise I will be sending local specialties to your home address."

"Shirogane, you built this man across three seasons just to have a rock end him before he even reaches the halfway point of the charge. I am genuinely furious."

"Erwin did not see the basement. He did not know the truth. He spent his entire life chasing one answer and died one wall away from it. Shirogane-sensei I need you to understand what you have done."

"The speech. MY SOLDIERS RAGE. And then a rock hits him in the abdomen ten seconds into the charge. The cruelty of the timing is deliberate and I hate that it works so well."

"I got full body goosebumps during the speech and then immediately started crying when the stone hit him. My body went through three emotional states in ninety seconds. This is not healthy."

"Shirogane-sensei when he wrote this arc: let me give them the greatest pre-battle speech in anime history and then immediately follow it with the speaker getting hit by debris. Thank you. Thank you so much for this."

"The voice actor for Erwin delivered that speech at a level that made my spine feel like something was running up it. And then the ending theme started. I have not recovered."

"I have watched anime for twelve years. I have never had a physical goosebump response from a piece of dialogue before tonight. Erwin's speech produced an involuntary biological reaction in me and I am still processing what that means."

"MY SOLDIERS PUSH FORWARD. MY SOLDIERS SCREAM OUT. MY SOLDIERS RAGE. I heard this and stood up from my sofa. I did not decide to stand up. My body stood up on its own."

"The recruits answering the speech by straightening in their saddles with the fear still on their faces. That image alone before the charge even began was enough to destroy me. Everything after it was simply additional damage."

"Shirogane-sensei you promised Levi would have a brilliant performance. Levi had better make every single death in that charge mean something next episode or I am done. I am not done. But I need him to."

"Kill Eren. Let Erwin live. Make Erwin the protagonist. These are my demands and I acknowledge they will not be met."

"Three seasons of watching Erwin build toward something. Three seasons of watching him spend soldiers like currency because he believed the truth was worth it. And then he chose to spend himself the same way. I cannot argue with the logic and I cannot accept the outcome."

"The charging formation covered less than half the distance before Erwin went down. Less than half. He never got close. The charge worked as a feint and Erwin died as the feint. He knew this would happen. He planned for this to happen. That is what is making me unable to breathe right now."

"Shirogane-sensei answer your comment section. Thousands of people are currently typing variations of the same message. Erwin must not be dead. We know he is probably dead. He must not be dead."

"I wrote a comment on Shirogane-sensei's account telling him to bring Erwin back. I have never done this for any character in any series in my life. Erwin broke a record I did not know I was keeping."