Since Attack on Titan Chapter 134 came out, it's become fairly apparent that the final showdown is underway and the series will probably end within the next four chapters (around 138). It might be possible to stretch it beyond that, but there's so little left to explore, and if anyone had said at the start of the series that we'd be where we are now, I wouldn't have believed them.
Spoilers up to Chapter 134 from here on out. This is much farther than the anime series has broadcast, as of this writing.
I'd written before how Attack on Titan has been willing to change tone and genre and by and large its fan base has stuck with it even as it moved from being a grimdark fantasy to a more modern setting with trains, airships, and bowler hats. We know the truth about the titans, we know the truth about the world. It's not anything that anyone would have predicted given the incredibly limited knowledge the characters (and thus the audience) had about their world, but we got to make the discovery along with them.
When our protagonist, Eren, looks out at the sea in Chapter 90 and wonders if the island of Paradis will finally be free if they can get rid of all the people across the ocean who want to kill them, most readers can see it as a shift from his original determination to kill all the titans to wanting to kill the people responsible for tormenting the island with titans in the first place. And until that point, the people of Marley are portrayed as uniformly racist so there's not much reason to sympathize with them. Eren and company trade one set of antagonists for another.
But then things get complicated.
Being human, it turns out that Marleyans (and the people of other countries) are not uniformly racist. Sure, a lot are, and to varying degrees, but not everybody.
The Survey Corps tries to discretely find allies in the greater world, but they don't have a lot of luck. The island is too useful to the rest of the world as a scapegoat. Sure, some people of their Eldian ethnic group are to be pitied for being burdened by the sins of their ancestors, but not those folks on the island.
A lot of this is made more complicated by the circumstances under which the island came to be isolated in the first place, which I won't go into.
All of this leads to Eren's dilemma. He wants to protect the island he grew up on, but doing so in a world with many countries and many people would be a complicated endeavor with no guarantee for a lasting success. And he's not willing to shoot for anything less than a guarantee, which is bad.
Most of this final story arc has been told through the perspective of characters other than Eren, which is unusual since he's been our protagonist for the majority of the series. This is done specifically so the reader does not understand what Eren is doing or why until it becomes apparent that he intends to commit genocide in order to ensure that the islanders are never attacked again. Only by being so thorough that no survivor is left who could even contemplate revenge, can he be certain Paradis will be safe.
He doesn't make any bones about it, and he's upfront with his friends that he will fight them if they try to stop him. It's possible that he has a hidden agenda beyond what it looks like on the surface, but these past few chapters Eren has killed a lot of people in his purge (to the tune of using hundreds of thousands of titans to flatten civilization) so even if he has something else in mind, genocide isn't a bluff.
The reader isn't expected to agree with Eren, in fact nearly every other major character is on board to stop him. Chapter 134 ends with his friends and former enemies launching an combined attack against him in order to save the world. He's lost the moral high ground that most protagonists would keep, so I can't help wondering what the point of all this is.
Going back to my original thought for this post, I wouldn't have imagined this at the start of the series, and though it could be considered a natural progression for a character who's always been obsessed about killing every last one of his enemies (it was more acceptable when they were mindless monsters), it's not a symapthetic one. So why is this happening? Why take the protagonist down such a distant and dangerous route?
It might not be possible to answer that until after the series concludes, but I think the best Eren can hope to come out of this is by doing this intentionally to unite the world against him, so a combined team made of both people on the island and those abroad can defeat him, making it clear that the world has more to gain by working together than tearing each other apart. It would not redeem him, considering how many lives he's taken already, including those of children who he knows have nothing to do with his current grievances, but at least it would give him a more noble purpose beyond murdering most of the world just in case they might eventually hurt his remaining friends and homeland.
Personally, I'm not looking for Eren to be redeemed, and I feel like I already have the answer as to why he's doing what he's doing. I don't think he has an alternate agenda. His motives are what it says on the tin. There are arguably a lot of steps he skipped before deciding genocide is the only answer, but I don't doubt that he believes he's doing the appropriate thing, and series creator Hajime Isayama spends a lot of time making sure the reader understands that what Eren is doing is reprehensible. So the only question for me then, is why does Isayama want to go this route?
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