The ending of the Shingeki no Kyojin anime changed one of its most important scenes because Hajime Isayama was not convinced about it in the manga.

After ten years Shingeki no Kyojin ended this weekend after releasing his last powerful chapter More than an hour. An ending that, as happened at the time with the manga, left no one indifferent, but its creator, Hajime Isayama, guaranteed a few days before its premiere that I had prepared a surprisewhich suggested that this could introduce a significant change in the final scenes or perhaps extend how it was going to end a little longer.

But in the end, it was neither. The change made was a little more subtle and related to one of the most important sequences. Naturally, this implies that If you continue reading from this point, you will encounter spoilers. linked to the end of Attack the Titans .

Isayama himself gave an interview to The New York Times in which he commented that from the beginning he wanted to participate in this episode because he wanted to change part of one of the most important conversations of all that Eren and Armin have. More precisely in which the first admits the reason why he wiped out 80% of the world’s population and in which he admits that he would have liked to live happily with Mikasa.

In the manga you can see Eren with a great feeling of guilt for everything that happened, explaining that his intention was to remain a villain so that his friends would kill him and thus be considered heroes for the rest of the world, which it would serve to prevent armies from around the world from attacking Paradise Island again. Despite everything, the tone of this conversation that the two characters maintain He didn’t convince Isayama .

This is why in the anime some sentences were changed so that Eren was not considered the only one responsible for everything that happened, since Armin also claims to be guilty and has no doubt that they will all end up both go there. hell when he dies. The scene was therefore modified so that the weight of the massacre falls on the shoulders of both :

I didn’t really think Armin was trying to push Eren away for the sake of justice or anything. Rather, I wanted, in a way, to assume a common responsibility. He wanted to become an accomplice. To do this, Armin had to make sure to use very strong words so that he could take these sins upon himself. And that was the intention behind it.

Still, Isayama believes he would have loved to have been able to change the ending, especially since he himself admitted long ago that he regretted the controversial way the manga ended. However, he felt like he was connected to the idea he originally thought from the first moment he published the first issue of the manga.

The truth is that the situation with Eren overlaps in some ways with my own history with this manga. When I started the series, I was afraid it would be canceled. It was a work that no one else knew about. But I had already started the story with the ending in mind. And the story ended up being read and seen by an incredible number of people, and that gave me enormous power that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with.

It would have been nice if I could have changed the ending. Writing manga is supposed to be liberating. But if it was completely free, I should have been able to change the ending. I could have changed it and said I wanted to go in a different direction. But the fact is that it was related to what he had initially imagined when he was young. And so, manga became a very restrictive art form for me, in the same way that Eren’s enormous powers ended up restricting him.

With the anime already finished and an ending that leaves the door open for a possible sequel, due to the scene of the boy finding a tree similar to the one Ymir entered and gave birth to the entire story, the only something that is guaranteed the future of Shingeki no Kyojin is that in April next year, an 18-page article will be published and will be entirely devoted to Levi.