The second part of the final season of Attack on Titan is already shaping up to be an emotional rollercoaster for a lot of fans, so we can only imagine what it must feel like for the people who’ve portrayed these characters for so many years to come to the final stop.
We’ve only got 11 episodes to burn through and Attack on Titan will forever come to a close. To think about it in these terms is quite surreal, a sentiment that the highly popular anime owes in large part to the manga source material, which prides itself on a masterfully crafted narrative by Hajime Isayama that has often proven to be as suspenseful as it is philosophically provocative.
However, Attack on Titan is not a story to lose itself in its own grandeur. That’s why it’s reasonable to assume this last batch of episodes will mainly revolve around the characters and their part in this tale rather than the large-scale implications of the narrative. Don’t get me wrong; we still have a ton of stuff to learn about Ymir and the origins of the Titans, but ultimately, the moments that are going to hit home will be those that are intimate to the characters we’ve come to know and love.
It goes without saying that as the tragic protagonist of the series, Eren will be at the epicenter of these sensations. Yuki Kaji, the voice actor behind Eren, can agree with us on this point, as he recently discussed the emotional toll of portraying Eren Yeager in an interview with NHK Japan.
“If you think about it carefully, you’ll understand how painful he had to feel,” He said. “When I was reading the script and dubbing some scenes from home on my own, I couldn’t stop thinking about this. Even though I had already read the manga and knew what was going to happen, when it came to acting, I really felt what Eren felt and couldn’t stop shedding tears.”
Give it a few weeks and we’ll probably be there with you on that particular sentiment, Kaji. In fact, it’s entirely possible that we might even start losing a few of our favorite characters as early as this week’s outing, “Deception,” which will premiere tomorrow on Crunchyroll and Funimation.
