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It takes a deft hand to turn the protagonist of your manga into a genocidal maniac by the end, but Attack on Titan creator Hajime Isayama pulled it off remarkably well. However, the mangaka admits that the version of Eren Yeager that we saw in the ending of Attack on Titan wasn’t quite what he originally envisioned for the character. In fact, he feels that giving Eran sympathetic qualities lacked “sincerity” with his original work.

The comments come from an art installation in Hajime Isayama’s hometown of Oyama in Japan. The artwork displayed was recently changed and, as shown by a local news network’s coverage, includes some of Isayama’s thoughts on Attack on Titan, from its characters to its plot and, importantly, its controversial ending. Isayama offered this insight into the character of Eren Yeager, who begins Attack on Titan as a hero trying to save humanity and ends the series actively trying to kill most of the human population in the world.

“Eren became a protagonist who committed mass slaughter on a scale rarely seen in other works of fiction,” Hajime Isayama explained. “As for why I conceived such a story from the beginning, part of it was my desire to create a narrative with a major twist – where the victim becomes the perpetrator. But a large factor was also my own immaturity and foolishness at the time, when I was in my early 20s. That aspect became the core of Eren’s character, leading to the point where he confesses not as someone forced into wrongdoing by circumstances, but as someone who harbored a desire to do harm."

"However, Attack on Titan had long since ceased to be mine alone, and Eren became a character loved by many readers," he continues. "In the end, without fully committing to portraying him as a detestable figure, I found myself depicting him with a certain closeness and sympathy. As a result, I feel there remains a sense of insincerity in the story’s conclusion – at least in my own assessment.”

Now, this isn’t Isayama trying to distance himself from the controversial ending of the manga, which spawned a fully-fledged media franchise including a hit anime, a series of live-action films, and video games. Instead, it seems that Isayama believes that his portrayal of Eren as a sympathetic figure isn’t how he originally planned the story. True, we all hated Eren by the end of the story, but, in the Attack on Titan creator’s eyes, we didn’t hate him nearly enough.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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