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It's time to accept that the genre shifting after the Basement reveal was not worth it.
The absolute peak of SnK was Return to Shiganshina.
Manga sales confirm this.
The high scores for the episodes of Season 3 Part 2 in metricfags sites confirm this.
Even from gut feeling alone, a dispassionate watcher who doesn't even like the franchise could tell you that there's a very compelling story being told about Eren and co. struggling against mysterious, powerful enemies that clearly also hold strong convictions and motivations.
Then the whole story changes.
It's a war drama now.
The kind of "grey morality" scenario that anyone who has watched 2 or more Gundam seasons already saw before. Heck, even someome who watched mecha shows in general could tell you where this was going.
But western fans were mesmerized.
Japanese fans correctly called bullshit when they understood what was happening (which explains the steep drop in manga sales), but westerners wanted their new Game of Thrones with giant naked people punching each other.
A protagonist who's willing to genocide people? Woah, he's gonna kill children and pregnant women??? A spicy moral dilemma? That sounds SO DEEP, not like other Japanese cartoons.
This daring premise was too attractive and tempting for western audiences to ignore, even though the seeds of the trainwreck were already being sown as soon as the timeskip happened. The subject matter itself was too grandiose, too thorny and complicated to be handled in any satisfying way, but people were blinded by the fact that Isayama dared to try his hand at telling such a polarizing tale in the first place.
Pre-Basement SnK stuck to its strong themes of freedom, duty, hard choices, commitment to pursuing the truth and challenging a cruel world. It reached a very satisfying conclusion with the Basement reveal and the beach scene.
It did everything that needed to be done.
It will age well, if you're able to pretend whatever came later was just a fever dream.
