Why Eren Yeager is the greatest wielder of the Attack Titan in Shingeki no Kyojin History: Attack on titan, Memories of the Future.

 

Aside from extremely stubborn people like Eren Yeager, most people have a secret yearning for the gift of prophecy, a gift which the attack titan bestows on its holder. What Eren yeager does is not coercion, it is persuasion.When he persuades you to do something, you will think it is the only choice you have. Here is how the dots connect, at least up until  episode 4, Memories of the Future. Kruger in his last moments tells Grisha, form a family, find someone to love, a dog etc. If you want to save Mikasa and Armin, you must fulfill your duty. Grisha asks, Mikasa, Armin, who are those? Kruger answers, I don’t know, I wonder whose memories these are. Crystal clear evidence that Eren Yeager persuaded Kruger, and who knows how many more. By looking into the future, it is possible that all previous holders of the attack titan where influenced  by Eren Yeager, that he influenced the choice of who the next holder of the attack titan would be, that he influenced the actions of the current holders of the attack titan including Kruger himself. It’s pure speculation but it is possible Eren has been carefully orchestrating things to save the Eldians since the moment the king took the founding titan into the walls. Sort of making himself out to be like a god. Eren is driven by both extreme love as shown by his devotion to Armin and Mikasa and extreme vindictiveness as shown when he says of the titans, “Trapped in a small cage in a huge world, my freedom stolen by those unthinkable fiends, when I realized that, I couldn’t forgive them.”" I am who I’ve always been, I’ve been this way since the moment I was born, rather than letting someone still my freedom, I’ll steal theirs."

 Enter frames, it’s a concept in Neuro Linguistic Programming that says that when two individuals interact in a room, if there is rapport/a connection, the person with the stronger frame will be the influencer. Having a stronger frame in interaction means you have more confidence, certainty and congruence about what you believe, strong enough to make someone else buy into it. I believe that when previous holders of the attack titan look into the future, they are looking for the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within. They are rejecting everything else that doesn’t meet that standard. I think that in experiencing Eren’s childhood memories, which are filled with extreme love and devotion to his friends, an extreme vindictiveness for his enemies and an overwhelming confidence and certainty in his ideals, the previous holders find someone their childhood selves can connect to. I think that because of the traumatic and abusive childhoods most of them experienced simply by being Eldian, they find immediate kinship with someone who experienced the love and protection they didn’t experience, but someone who at the same time radiates a vindictiveness towards the transgressors of Eldia, a vindictiveness even greater than theirs. Their childhood selves deeply respond to this because in the all the memories of the future they experience, Eren’s are the only ones in which they find someone who is using anger as the right weapon,  because he is also clean enough to use it.

Take someone who had an abusive childhood, they may have felt that they were essentially bad, that they deserved it on one level, and that they were flawed. But when you take the person that they are today, and have that person look back to the child that they once were, then reality begins to change. They begin to see that they were essentially good in a bad environment and made the best choices they had available to them at the time. People don’t take action and don’t change for what they know on an intellectual level, but for what they feel, and even more so for what they feel physically. Because feeling something physically makes it the most real.

 This is what I think previous holders of the attack titan are experiencing in Eren’s memories of the future, this is why Kruger is telling Eren’s father to love someone or else the cycle will repeat, it’s why Eren’s father, even though killing children goes against his deepest values, does it. He does it because of persuasion, because someone is whispering in his ear, “I know you, I really do, I know what you have been through, and I know you know am telling the truth, you have to kill them, they have to die.” The conflict in Eren’s father comes from the concept in the Inception movie that says, “the subject’s mind can always trace the source of the idea, and will reject it.”