EREN killed 80% of HUMANITY. So why do we defend this MONSTER | WHY.VILLAIN

[00:00:01]Before you decide he was the villain, ask yourself one honest question.

[00:00:05]If the world showed you nothing but cages your entire life, wouldn't you eventually burn it down just to feel what open air tastes like?

[00:00:19]You've already made up your mind about him. Most people do.

[00:00:23]It's easier that way.

[00:00:24]We label things monsters so we don't have to sit with the discomfort of what they actually are.

[00:00:30]But tonight, we're going to sit with it.

[00:00:34]We're going to look at the boy before the world broke him.

[00:00:36]The child before the crime.

[00:00:39]The human being the world was already destroying before he decided to destroy [music] it back.

[00:00:45]This is not a defense of what Eren Yeager did.

[00:00:48]This is a mirror.

[00:00:50]And you might not like what you see in it.

[00:00:54]Born into the cage, he was not born angry. No one is.

[00:01:00]Eren Yeager was born into a world that had already decided the terms of his existence before he took his first breath.

[00:01:06]A boy with a mother and a home.

[00:01:09]But surrounding all of it, three walls.

[00:01:13]Not walls of stone really.

[00:01:15]Walls of permission.

[00:01:16]Walls that said, "This far.

[00:01:19]No further.

[00:01:21]This is the shape of your life.

[00:01:23]This is the size of your freedom.

[00:01:26]Be grateful you're alive inside it.

[00:01:28]Even the birds that flew over those walls, he watched them.

[00:01:32]He envied them.

[00:01:34]A child envying a bird.

[00:01:36]Let that land. We never ask why the animal broke from its cage.

[00:01:41]We only ever mourn the damage it caused on the way out.

[00:01:46]The day everything ended.

[00:01:49]They talk about the day the Colossal Titan breached Wall Maria like it was an event.

[00:01:54]A historical incident.

[00:01:56]It wasn't.

[00:01:57]For Eren Yeager, was the moment the last soft thing inside him was eaten. Not killed. Not destroyed.

[00:02:05]Eaten.

[00:02:06]He watched his mother consumed while he was carried away, screaming her name into wind that didn't care.

[00:02:13]And somewhere in that screaming, in that absolute helplessness, something in him made a decision his conscious mind wouldn't understand for years.

[00:02:22]It decided never again. Not never again for me.

[00:02:26]Never again for anyone.

[00:02:28]No matter what it costs. No matter who pays it.

[00:02:31]Is that monstrous?

[00:02:33]Or is that the only logical conclusion a traumatized 9-year-old brain could reach when the world offers it nothing else?

[00:02:39]Because here is what we don't talk about. This happens in our world right now.

[00:02:46]Children who survive atrocity don't become okay.

[00:02:49]They become something else.

[00:02:51]Something quieter.

[00:02:53]Something that waits.

[00:02:54]And we call it trauma when it's silent.

[00:02:57]We call it terrorism when it speaks.

[00:03:03]The world outside the walls He crossed the walls. He found the world he had been dreaming of his entire life.

[00:03:10]And the world wanted him dead.

[00:03:13]Not because of anything he'd done.

[00:03:15]Not because of his choices, his crimes, his nature.

[00:03:20]Because of his blood. Because of what he was born as.

[00:03:24]Sound familiar?

[00:03:25]The world beyond the walls didn't greet Paradis with diplomacy.

[00:03:29]It sent children as weapons.

[00:03:32]It taught little boys to hate themselves so thoroughly that they would volunteer to die for the people who humiliated them.

[00:03:39]And when Eren understood the war was never going to end, the last door inside him closed quietly.

[00:03:46]No one heard it shut.

[00:03:49]History does not create monsters from nothing.

[00:03:51]It assembles them slowly, carefully, from suffering it refuses to acknowledge until it's too late.

[00:03:59]>> [music] >> The rumbling.

[00:04:02]Let's be precise about what Eren Yeager chose.

[00:04:06]He chose to kill 80% of the world.

[00:04:09]Say that again.

[00:04:10]Sit with that number.

[00:04:12]There is no version of that sentence that ends with the word hero.

[00:04:16]But here's the question history keeps asking.

[00:04:19]The question we keep refusing to answer.

[00:04:22]What were the other options?

[00:04:25]Negotiation?

[00:04:26]With a world that had been planning their extermination for decades?

[00:04:30]Diplomacy?

[00:04:31]With nations [music] that trained children as suicide soldiers?

[00:04:35]Surrender?

[00:04:37]To people who saw Paradisans as subhuman?

[00:04:40]He tried, you know.

[00:04:42]He tried the other ways first.

[00:04:44]And every door he knocked on was barred from the inside by people who needed his people dead to feel safe themselves.

[00:04:51]There is a word for what happens to a human being when every nonviolent path is eliminated. [music] We don't use it.

[00:04:57]We prefer the word monster.

[00:04:59]It asks less of us. We have always done this.

[00:05:02]We have always called the violence that protects power necessary and called the violence that challenges it evil. The difference between a war criminal and a war hero is almost always who wrote the history.

[00:05:15]Almost always who survived.

[00:05:20]The tragic truth.

[00:05:22]Here is what no one tells you about Eren Yeager.

[00:05:25]He knew he was the villain.

[00:05:27]He knew. He had seen it.

[00:05:29]He had seen everything, all of it, through the power of the founding Titan.

[00:05:34]Every future, every consequence, every grave.

[00:05:39]He chose it anyway.

[00:05:41]Not because he was evil, because he was tired.

[00:05:44]Tired of a world that demanded his people apologize for existing.

[00:05:49]Tired of a cycle that had no end unless someone was willing to absorb the weight of ending it.

[00:05:54]Tired in that way that lives inside the bones after too many years of surviving things you were never supposed to survive.

[00:06:01]He didn't want to be the monster. He just wanted to feel freedom.

[00:06:04]He wanted the trees. He wanted the ocean.

[00:06:08]The real ocean.

[00:06:10]Not the one in the books.

[00:06:12]The one you could stand in.

[00:06:13]The one that had no walls on either side of it.

[00:06:17]But that boy died the day he was carried away screaming a name into the wind.

[00:06:22]What walked out of those woods wasn't a villain. It was a wound that learned to walk.

[00:06:29]We will call the next one a monster, too.

[00:06:32]We will be horrified.

[00:06:34]We will mourn.

[00:06:35]We will build memorials and then we will do nothing about the walls we built.

[00:06:40]The cages we maintain.

[00:06:43]The people we were already destroying slowly, quietly, legally long before they decided to destroy [music] us back.