Needed to share this take I found, easily one of the well thought out takes on Eren I’ve ever seen. I feel like if more people had this level of understanding then Eren would be even more praised as a character. I hope to help people appreciate the detail put into Eren as a character.

All it takes is a little effort to notice all the details, please read. 

“A major theme in AOT is people being trapped by their own inner desires rather than their external circumstances. “Everyone is a slave to something.” Eren’s tragic flaw is that he is a person with violent inclinations whose entire ideal of freedom is coextensive with the feeling of having someone or something to fight against.

When Eren was a child, he didn’t think much about the world beyond the walls until Armin showed him that book. Armin looked at the images presented on the book and was filled with wonder and curiosity, and a desire to see those things. But Eren had a fundamentally different experience. He saw the wonder in Armin’s eyes, and realized for the first time that something in life had been taken away from him. The Titans and the walls were keeping him restrained, silently telling him, “You are not permitted to do this.” And that filled Eren with a sense of indignation. “What gives them the right to stop me, or to tell me what I can’t do?”

Consequently, Eren feels at his most free when he is fighting against forces that he feels have taken his freedom from him, but what this ultimately translates to is an eternally shifting goalpost. Eren can never truly be “free,” because he’ll always be looking for the next fight. At his very core, there is just a complete lack, or inability, to enjoy the world for what it is, because that moment when he looked into Armin’s eyes and realized that he’d been denied freedom is etched into his soul. We see this when the Survey Corps first reach the ocean. Even with the knowledge of what the world outside is like, Armin is able to simply enjoy the sight of the sea that they have fought so hard to reach. But Eren appears oblivious to the waves at his feet, focusing solely on the next conflict that lies beyond the horizon.

When it comes to the matter of using the Rumbling, Eren’s feelings are complex. He knows deep down that it is an unjustifiable atrocity, and that it represents his absolute darkest desires of taking revenge against a world that had supplanted the wide-open, untouched world that he thought was waiting beyond the walls. But by this point, he has also seen visions of the future, which reveal to him that the Rumbling will occur by his hand, and that doing so will cause Titans to disappear from the world.

His acceptance of this outcome is gradual, and influenced by his fundamental objections to the alternative plans. He doesn’t want to pursue the 50-year plan because it would mean giving Historia a death sentence and forcing her children to continue the ritual of cannibalism in order to maintain control of the Founder. He doesn’t to pursue Zeke’s euthanasia plan because he refuses to take an option that feels like laying down and dying without a fight. These objections are rooted in Eren’s nature. Comparatively, he has always been willing to fight and kill anyone whom he feels has violated his freedom.

Even knowing that most of the people who will die by the Rumbling are innocent, and that he will put his own friends in mortal danger by pursuing it, Eren still finds it easier to accept that outcome than any of the others, simply because that’s who he is. And in a way, since he alone has the power to determine how the Founding Titan is used, choosing the option that only he wants, and is only possible because he wants it, is sort of the purest expression of freedom. He chose this future for the world. Nobody else had a say in it. The world has always seemed to dictate what he can and can’t do, but now, he has the power to set the terms.

Of course, he realizes the hypocrisy of this, and how it stems from his own inability to reconcile his deep disappointment with the world. So he feels immense guilt, even as he continues to enable the very outcome that he feels guilty for wanting. But by telling himself that his friends, whom he also wants to be able to live long lives, may be able to carve out a better position for themselves in a world without Titans as the heroes who stopped the Rumbling, he gives himself just enough of a justification — even if it’s a flimsy one — to enable himself to swallow the bitter pill that is his inability to resist the allure of acting upon his darkest desires and the feeling of “freedom” that will give him.

Because Eren is incapable of giving up on his twisted and childish ideal of freedom, he can never be free. Only the people who can give up on the dreams that they are slaves to can ever achieve freedom. In giving up his dream to obtain the Founding Titan to see if it would make him compassionate, Kenny Ackerman became compassionate, by giving the last remaining Titan serum to Levi for no other reason than it being the right thing to do. Erwin gave up on his dream of reaching the basement, and was finally able to put himself on the frontlines for the sake of humanity instead of sending other soldiers to their deaths and adding to his mountain of guilt. The existence of the Titans, the two-thousand-year prison that Ymir had created for herself, was only broken once Ymir gave up on her desire for King Fritz’s approval. The fact that Eren’s nature causes him to stand in contrast to these examples is why he is the final antagonist of the story.”

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