WARNING: The following contains discussion of suicide and PTSD, as well as spoilers for Season 4, Episode 3 of Attack on Titan, "The Door of Hope," now streaming on Crunchyroll, Funinmation, Hulu and Amazon Prime.
Attack on Titan's Eren Jaeger is one of the most famous shonen protagonists of the past decade, but he's certainly not universally loved. Much like (and to a lesser extent) Black Clover's Asta, the Titan-hating teen soldier is divisive, but for the opposite reason the wannabe Wizard King is. For Eren, it's his overwrought, blubbery angst -- something usually more befitting of a shonen rival than a main hero.
But while anime fans are due to see a whole new side of Attack on Titan's star character in Season 4, the show's final installment has already proven that one of its biggest antagonists is also deserving of the same sympathy we've been affording Eren: Reiner Braun, the Armored Titan.
Episode 3 of Season 4 could be viewed as largely 'filler' (from the source material, but filler story nonetheless) but it does offer some depressing insights into Reiner's state of mind that will impact greatly on his role during the story's concluding arcs. Having gone from living behind enemy lines for five years to jumping straight into the field of combat against the Mid-East Allied Forces for a further four, Attack on Titan now finds the Warrior at his lowest point -- crying himself to sleep and, eventually, on the brink of attempting to take his own life.
The episode also details more of Reiner's torrid backstory, further contextualizing his current mindset. The son of an Eldian woman and a Marleyan man, Reiner was desperate to make it into the Warrior Unit as a child so that he could attain the title of 'honorary Marleyan' -- the highest that lower-class Eldians can achieve in the ghetto of Liberio. He worked hard to be selected to become the Armored Titan's new vessel but it was all for naught. Though celebrated as a national hero, he was still rejected by his racist father, ashamed to have fathered a child with "devil's" blood. Things only got more traumatic from there for him.
Still only an adolescent, Reiner was sent on the Marleyan military's riskiest mission yet: infiltrating the walled civilization on Paradis Island -- the Eldian stronghold -- along with Annie, the Female Titan, Bertolt, the Colossal Titan and Marcel, the Jaw Titan. Even the young soldier's journey to the walls was a fraught one. Marcel was eaten by Ymir, then a Pure Titan, losing them their appointed leader and causing Annie, also keen to protect and honor her family, to violently lash out at Reiner. Their infiltration mission is what we saw unfold in the anime's first episode, with Bertolt ripping through Wall Maria in his Titan form, leaving Reiner, Annie and scores of chaotic Pure Titans to pour through and wreak havoc on Eren, Mikasa and Armin's home.
The three of them then, as we know from the anime's other seasons, joined the Survey Corps in the hopes of finding the Founding Titan, which explains Annie's interest in Kenny -- the Season 3 antagonist who had a secret alliance with the Reiss family, the Founding Titan's keepers. In the end, only Reiner was able to escape the island.
The snapshots we get in the newest episode of Reiner encouraging Eren during training, with what seems like genuine care for his fellow Eldian, remind us of the fractured personality the Marleyan spy developed during his time on the island. As we've learned from Season 4's first few episodes, Eldians living in Marley have been indoctrinated into hating their own kind so much that some of them will willfully contribute towards their race's slaughter -- evidenced, most disturbingly, in Gabi, Reiner's young cousin. Unpicking that internalized hatred is naturally going to take its toll.
For this reason, every Subject of Ymir living under Marleyan rule is inherently tragic, no matter how grim the atrocities they commit are. This isn't to say, of course, that they should be automatically absolved of any and all sin. Reiner's actions on Paradis Island cost Eren his mother and killed and displaced hundreds of innocent civilians. Though he did think himself to be on the right side of history, he is also still fighting for the side of the story's Nazi stand-ins, making him instantly dislikeable in many ways. But, on the other hand, from Marley's propaganda, Reiner was likely expecting to burst his way into a hive of "island devils" armed to the teeth in preparation for his motherland's destruction. Instead, he grew to know an island of human beings scrambling for survival against an unknowable enemy.
All of this led to Reiner developing untreated PTSD from his time on the island and, clearly unable to find peace again, ready to try and end it all in Episode 3 of the final season. It's only the sudden reminder that he needs to protect Gabi from suffering the same fate as him that prevents his finger from pulling the trigger.
Being the series' hero for most of its run, and enduring a lifetime's worth of horror in the process, Eren is still deserving of our sympathy but it's important to remember when comparing him to Reiner that the former made major strides forward at the end of Season 3. Reiner's traumatizing and formative time on the island ended in utter failure; now, he's a broken man. Used and spat out by a country that made him an instrument of his own people's destruction.
Is the current holder of the Armored Titan still a character to root against? For the time being, certainly. But well-written villains often give us just as many reasons to understand and empathize with their plight as they do to hope for their downfall. And right now, no one wishes for that more than Reiner himself.
