“My Last War”: Finding a Peaceful World in Attack on Titan and Vinland Saga

General Spoiler Warning for the plots of Attack on Titan and Vinland Saga, below.

It's rather incredible how perfectly Eren Jeager and Thorfinn Thorsson serve as foils for each other, both as characters and as symbols for the larger thematic goals of their respective anime. It was not even a little surprising to learn that Attack on Titan author Hajime Isayama is a big fan of Makoto Yukimura's work on Vinland Saga because it feels like both stories are in direct dialogue with one another, especially in regards to what the stories have to say about war, and the toll it takes on the men—on the children—who are forced to fight on the frontlines. What has been surprising, though, is how both stories take their protagonists on almost diametrically opposed journeys toward self-destruction and redemption, despite being so fundamentally similar on the surface.

From the onset, both Eren and Thorfinn seem to be heroes that have essentially been molded from the same template: Both are young boys who lived idyllic lives in the isolated island communities that they'd called home for many years, only for their families and their futures to be ripped away from them when foreign invaders bring bloodshed and calamity to their shores. Through years of trial by combat, both boys discover that their natural talent for waging warfare is eclipsed only by their undying thirst for revenge against the monsters (both literal and metaphorical) that took their peaceful lives away.

Still, despite the gargantuan differences between the worlds that they live in and the scope of their battles, Eren and Thorfinn also share a common dream for a life beyond the endless cycle of killing that they've become trapped in: There is a vast ocean that separates their homelands from the rest of the world, and they cannot help but dream of a better, more peaceful land that lies somewhere beyond the sea.

Obviously, there are some pretty significant differences when it comes to Eren and Thorfinn's stories, but I want to avoid getting lost in the weeds when it comes to Attack on Titan's fantasy-horror elements versus Vinland Saga's (relatively) accurate depiction of the real-world conflicts between the so-called “Vikings” and the mainland kingdoms that plagued Europe throughout the 10th and 11th centuries. While it would certainly be interesting to debate whether or not an army of Vikings would stand a chance against even one Titan, at the end of the day, both series are simply using their respective genres and plot elements as hooks to get their audiences invested in stories that are ultimately about us. More specifically, the harrowing chronicles of Eren and Thorfinn's lives comment on humankind's relationship to its destructive tendencies. It's the differences we can find in those elements of the anime's stories that are far more interesting to ponder. While both Attack on Titan and Vinland Saga show the terrible effects of living a life dedicated to violence and revenge on their protagonists, they diverge wildly in whether or not their heroes can ultimately succeed in their attempts to escape the vicious machine of warfare.

In the case of Eren Jaeger, Hajime Isayama's outlook is heartbreakingly pessimistic, but for all of the controversy that has surrounded Eren's descent into genocidal madness, I think his arc makes total sense considering what Attack on Titan has been trying to say for over a decade. Across nearly a hundred episodes, we were repeatedly reminded that Eren's growth as a person was fundamentally stunted and broken by the trauma inflicted upon him when the Titans first tore down the walls of his city. He may have always had some capacity for violence and hatred in his heart, even before the war started, but the same could be said for so many people throughout history. The hope has always been, at least, that a nurturing society that encourages empathy and understanding can help wean children from that particular strain of wildness before it corrupts them as adults.

Eren never had a chance. Yes, this is partly because of the wonky and difficult-to-conceptualize consequences of magical time travel, but even all of that fantastical window-dressing is just another layer of metaphor used to illustrate how doomed this wayward hero was from the moment he took up arms against his enemies. In a world twisted by generations of bigotry, genocide, and weaponized propaganda, there was no hope that Eren would ever find a means to ceasefire in the name of peace or understanding.

Even when Eren got the chance to fulfill his childhood dream and cross the sea to the lands beyond the island of Paradis, it was still tainted by the stain of war and subterfuge. His inability to grow beyond his childish understanding of the world has left him unable to conceptualize a world that can be peaceful and populated with any other human life. He has come to believe that every other person on the planet is a de facto enemy, whether they support the war against his people or not. The only world that could ever possibly offer his friends and family a chance at peace is an empty one. And, if the lands beyond the sea are not empty, then Eren will simply have to raze them himself, and he just so happens to have the power to do just that…

This is where Thorfinn's journey truly begins to diverge from Eren's, though it takes a very long time for the split in their paths to become apparent. It all begins with the words that his father, Thors, tells him before he is killed: “You have no enemies. Not a single one.”

This kind of lesson would come across as little more than a sick joke to a boy like Eren since he and his people have been beset on all sides by the most horrific enemies imaginable since day one. For young Thorfinn, too, the idea is just as outlandish. He saw his father cut down like a dog, and he was forced to serve under his father's killer as a soldier for years on top of that. Watching only the first season of Vinland Saga, it is all too easy to see Thorfinn's journey coming to the same conclusion as Eren's (sans the supernatural ability to travel through time and transform into a world-destroying ultra-kaiju, of course). What makes Vinland Saga such a perfect counterpoint to Attack on Titan is that Thorfinn avoids that terrible fate by doing the one thing that Eren never could: He grows up.

It is a challenging and needlessly cruel process because Thorfinn lives in a challenging and needlessly cruel time, where the fate that usually befalls a failed (but still breathing) soldier is slavery. Still, if there can be any “benefit” to this ultimate form of humiliation and degradation, it is that it forces Thorfinn to not only reach out and connect to other civilians like his new friend Einar, but it also gives him the necessary time to be able to grow enough to reflect not only on the harm done to him as a child but on the harm he caused as a soldier as well.

One of the key developments in the history of technology and strategy in war isn't just the increase in raw killing power but the increase in space between soldiers on the battlefield. The endless streams of propaganda and misinformation that come part and parcel with war have always been effective at dehumanizing the enemy, and it only gets easier to strike a killing blow when you don't even have to get close enough to your enemy to see their faces. Thorfinn, perhaps to his benefit, never had the opportunity to pull the trigger on a gun, and his foes were undoubtedly not the deformed uncanny monsters that Eren fought for so long. In his dreams, he is haunted by the memories of his steel piercing the flesh of warriors and innocents alike, by the visions of their eyes turning up and their bodies going stiff as he robs them of everything they ever were and ever could be, again and again.

As a soldier, Thorfinn never had the time or the inclination to stop and think of the gravity of his actions. As a slave, all he can do is tally the weight of the bodies he has left in his wake and count up each second of time that he stole from them all. He decides it is his moral duty to carry those memories, those bodies, with him for the rest of his life as a reminder of the price paid whenever even one man swings his blade in anger or pride.

The first verse of the opening theme that introduced us to Attack on Titan: The Final Season ends with the words: “This is my last war.” Here, the core thesis unifies Attack on Titan and Vinland Saga as two stories asking, “What does it take to live a life of peace in a world that demands war?” Each show seems equally committed to the belief that war is a fundamentally destructive and futile effort, but they offer incredibly different perspectives on what that answer might be.

In Eren Jeager, we have a boy trapped in the body of a man with more power than he can handle; he is a hero who has transformed himself into an unstoppable monster. He has been so desensitized and embittered by the endless conflicts waged by the adults in his world that he is, in effect, throwing history's greatest temper tantrum. He dreamed once of finding peace in a land across the sea, and now that he's made his way there, he will make sure that this is the last war that he or any of his friends ever have to fight in, even if it means burning the rest of the world to ash. I do not believe that Hajime Isayama is writing Eren as the type of role model that we should aspire to, but I think he is resigned to the fact that Eren does, at least in part, represent a lot of who we are, as a species, whether we like it or not.

Thorfinn is a different kind of hero, one who doesn't so much represent who we are but who we could become, should we find the strength within ourselves. Thorfinn knows too well the horror that war brings, but he recognizes that, even if he cannot stop or change the vast mechanisms of government and culture that perpetuate war, he can take responsibility for his individual part in it. His last war will be one that takes a lifetime to wage, and he will fight with every fiber of his being to win it without taking even more human life. It is a war against the baser impulses and childish power fantasies that dwell within the human heart. When Thorfinn crosses over to the land beyond the sea, his dream will not be to kill all the enemies that may dwell there. He merely wants to work together with whomever he finds there and make a better, kinder world.