A Child Made God.

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:17]Heat. Heat.

[00:00:44]Aaron Joerger, the protagonist of Attack on Titan. Honestly, one of the most talked about characters in all of fiction. Before he became a monster or the man who committed mass genocide on approximately two billion people, he was a young boy yearning for freedom.

[00:01:10]He was a boy who wanted nothing but to see the ocean and the world outside the walls that they were kept in like cattle. The whole saga started with one key moment in Aaron's life, his mother's death. On that day, a far bigger Titan than anyone had ever seen appeared out of nowhere, breaking down the outer wall and letting hordes of Titans in. In this chaos, Aaron came to the terrifying realization that his house was around the area of attack. He stormed there with his two friends, Armen and Mikasa, only to find that his house was crushed by a big boulder and his mom stuck under the rubble.

[00:01:53]He couldn't do it. He wasn't strong enough to lift up the rubble and get his mob out, having to leave her there and watch his own mother get eaten and killed by a titan right in front of his eyes. This to me is arguably one of the greatest openings to a piece of fiction as it sets the tone for the story immediately. Cold, harsh, and unapologetic.

[00:02:19]The early parts of Attack on Titan are honestly quite fun and thrilling to watch with its high-paced Odium gear fights, the music, the visuals, and most importantly, a brilliant cast of characters. In fact, the earlier parts of Attack on Titan might be the greatest scam of all time purely due to the fact that you as the viewer are kept in complete darkness, not knowing about the horrors that will unfold in the coming arcs of the show. the people they lose, the ones that betray them, the ones they have no idea about. All of these intricately woven into a greater narrative that has you not knowing about what could possibly happen next. In the basement that Aaron's father told him about, we learn the truth of the world.

[00:03:09]We learned that the Eldians are kept on this island and constantly called devils because of what their ancestors did to the world a thousand years ago.

[00:03:20]The biggest turning point in the entire plot comes from season 4. It is revealed to us that the attack titan which Aaron inherited has the power to see the future. It receives memories only from past inheritors like the others, but also the future ones. That moment when Aaron pushed his own father from the future using the Attack Titan's power to kill the whole Ree family has to be one of the most spine- chilling moments in the show. Because in that moment, everything you knew about the show completely changes.

[00:03:57]You realize that Aaron from the very beginning has been orchestrating the greatest master plan, including his own mother's death.

[00:04:08]This plot twist changes everything. And in that future, he sees genocide. He sees himself unleashing an absurd amount of colossal titans onto the world, flattening everything in its way.

[00:04:24]And we call this act the rumbling. He sets out to slaughter nearly 2 billion people, wiping out 3/4 of the population almost as sort of revenge against what has been done to his people.

[00:04:39]He starts the rumblings so that his friends can kill him, stop him so that they will be seen as heroes who save the world and no more as devils.

[00:04:50]In the final act of the show, we see Aaron and Armen talking to each other in the parts. Aaron confesses that he did it all without knowing why. And the infamous line, >> the thing is that this line really didn't sit right with me. I've watched the show three times now and still to this day I just can't wrap my head around it. I just cannot accept it because he is telling us that he doesn't know why or what drove him to unleash massacre on more than half of the population of the world purely because he saw the future.

[00:05:34]Well, I'd like to take you on a journey into history to really break down the thought process that Aaron had and in a way show you why he is an absolute coward.

[00:05:55]fornowledge. The awareness or knowledge of an event, fact, or situation before it happens or exists.

[00:06:03]Erin is not the first person to be cursed with knowing the future.

[00:06:08]Throughout history, there have been plenty of stories, myths, and tales about people knowing the future.

[00:06:15]Cassandra. In the city of Troy, there was a princess named Cassandra. The god Apollo loved her and to win her, he gave her the gift of prophecy, a true vision of every future. When she rejected him, he could not take the gift back. So, he added a curse. She would always speak the truth and no one would believe her.

[00:06:39]Cassandra knew Troy would fall. She knew the wooden horse was a trap. She knew her own death was waiting for her in Agamemnon's palace.

[00:06:49]And she said all of it again and again, screaming in the streets, and the Trojans called her mad. In Asculus's play, on the day she dies, she walks through the palace door anyway, lucid, cleareyed, she tramples her prophets, Regalia in the dust, and she says she will not shrink. Like a bird that fears a bush, she does not flee. She does not deny. She does not pretend. She walks toward her death as a witness.

[00:07:18]Cassandra is the first fornoer in our literature and what she does with her fornowledge is to bear with it honestly until the end.

[00:07:32]Opedious a king and queen of thieves are told their son will kill the father and marry the mother. They abandon the baby on a hillside. The baby survives, grows up not knowing who he is, meets a stranger at a crossroads, kills him in an argument, and that stranger is his father. He travels to thieves, solves the riddle of the Sphinx, marries the queen as his reward, and the queen is his mother.

[00:08:05]Sophoculus wrote this play 2500 years ago and it has been told in every generation since because it captures something we cannot stop being afraid of that the more we struggle against what is coming the tighter the trap becomes.

[00:08:22]McBth three witches on a heath in Scotland they tell a soldier named McBth that he will be king. Makbet pauses, considers, and says almost sensibly that if chance will have him king, then chance may crown him without his stir. He could let it happen. He could go home. He could simply wait. Instead, he kills his king in his sleep. And the prophecy that he could have walked into peacefully becomes a bloodbath that costs him his wife, his crown, and his soul. The witches never told him to murder anyone.

[00:08:59]He supplies the murder himself.

[00:09:02]It's clear that the idea of fornowledge and to be honest the tragedies it causes has been told throughout history and time again. But yet all these stories have a concept that is consistent with them except errands.

[00:09:26]In the beginning, I talked about Aaron Joerger and how as a child, he wanted to see the ocean. He shared this dream with Armen. Armen is honestly somewhat of a forgettable character in my opinion when you stack him up against the rest of the cast. In the final fight, he really did get his time to shine, but he's often seen as a weak and not really the strong character that Aaron is. And I believe this contrast is very intentional. Both of these young boys had the same dream.

[00:09:58]Yet when they finally reached the ocean, Armen just cried and laughed realizing that they did it. They finally fulfilled their dream. Yet on the complete opposite side, we have Aaron as he dramatically points towards the ocean saying that once we kill our enemies on the other side, it will be over.

[00:10:20]He didn't care for the ocean anymore.

[00:10:23]Not as much as Armen. Anyways, this contrast of showing how in the beginning we had these two young boys with the same dream. They both fantasized about the same ocean. They both read the same book. And yet they both now are worlds apart.

[00:10:40]But by the end, the question is the thing that survives. In their final conversation, in that infinite sandy place inside the parts, Aaron weeps in front of Armen for the first time in years. He confesses that he doesn't know fully why he did it. He confesses that he could have stopped. He confesses in his own broken way that he loved all of them all the way through. And Armen, who has every reason to hate him, thanks him. Thanks him for being a monster so that Armen and the others could be heroes. thanks him for taking the burden so they could be free of it.

[00:11:17]The thing is that Armen's gratitude only makes sense if Aaron had a choice. You don't thank someone for shouldering a burden if they were never carrying it.

[00:11:27]You pity them. The fact that Armen offers gratitude implies that what Aaron did was maybe a decision, an action, something he alone was the owner of. And Aaron accepts that gratitude without protest. Which means on some level even he knows deep down why he did it.

[00:11:56]I want to come back to those stories now. The ones I told you about in the second act. Cassandra Opedius and McBth.

[00:12:06]Cassandra screamed in the streets. She tried to warn them. She really did.

[00:12:10]Oedius, the moment he heard the prophecy, fled the only home he had ever known, abandon his son, abandon the people he loved, and walked into the wilderness alone to make sure he could never harm them.

[00:12:22]Regardless, in the end, even though he was killed and the prophecy fulfilled, he still tried. McBth deliberated. He stood on the stage and argued with himself whether he should act at all.

[00:12:35]Even at his most damned, even in the wrong direction, the man wrestled with the choice. He tried. Every single one of them tried. Most failed. Actually, the whole reason these are tragic stories is that them trying to alter or accelerate their fate didn't always work or just led to more chaos. But that isn't the point. The point is the trying. The single fact that all these stories have except errands which is intention.

[00:13:06]Aristotle 23 centuries ago said that what makes an action yours what makes it worthy of praise or blame is whether it sprang from an inner principle in you.

[00:13:18]Whether you intended it whether some part of you reached for it. In Victorian London, Charles Dickens wrote about an old miser named Ebenezer Scrooge, a man so cold and bitter that on Christmas Eve, three ghosts visit him to show his past, his present, and his future. The last ghost is silent, it doesn't speak.

[00:13:39]It just points. It just points at a grave. Scroo's grave. An empty house. No one mourning. No one even surprised.

[00:13:50]And Scrooge, terrified, broken, turns to the ghost and asks the most important question anyone has ever asked about the future.

[00:13:59]Are these the shadows of the things that will be? Or are they the shadows of things that may be?

[00:14:08]The ghost doesn't answer, but Scrooge answers it himself. He decides that what he's been shown is not a sentence, it's a warning. that courses can be departed from, that the future maybe can change.

[00:14:23]He wakes up the next morning a different man. Scrooge saw his own future and his response was not to surrender to it. His response was to revolt against it. That intention is what makes you you. It's the difference between a person and a falling rock. It's the price of admission to being a moral creature at all.

[00:14:46]The thing is that it never really felt like Aaron intended to try another possible route. Aaron had the powers of three titans. He had the founding titan which can rewrite memory across an entire species. He had the attack titan which gave him visions of the future. He had the Warhammer Titan which let him manifest weapons out of his own body. He had a half brother with royal blood. An army of magarists ready to die for him.

[00:15:14]allies in Marley, an entire infrastructure in Paradi Island, and four years of advanced warning, and he seriously never considered any other path.

[00:15:28]Did he attempt to use a partial rumbling, the strategy that Julina and Zeke proposed, as a deterrent rather than an extinction event? He considered it briefly but then completely dismissed it as insufficient and unleashed a full rumbling killing roughly four times more people than any deterrent would have required. Did he attempt to share the truth of his fornowledge with Armen, with Mikasa, with Hanji, with anyone whose mind might have found a way that his own could not? No, he hid it. He performed the role of the broken martyr who had no choice. He went to Marley alone and made unilateral decisions about the lives of every human being on earth.

[00:16:12]Did he at any point in 4 years really sit down and ask the question if there was another way? Sure, in the end he said he looked at other possible outcomes, but doesn't really make sense at the end of it. Scrooge asked the ghost whether the shadows he saw were things that would be or things that may be it never it didn't feel like Aaron ever asked.

[00:16:40]No, he saw the future and he assumed it was destiny. He never tested it. He never argued with it because Aaron is truly a coward.

[00:16:59]Aaron Joerger was 19 when he started the rumbling. Just 19. Imagine giving the ability and choice to end all of humanity into a 19year-old's hands. He was simply too afraid by the fact that his decisions would alter the fate of humanity itself.

[00:17:21]So he just chocked it up to fate. said that nothing else can be done and this is the only way forward.

[00:17:29]This whole idea to me personally is what makes Eron such an incredibly well-written character because him being such a coward truly makes him the most human and the most real character of all. He was just a dumb kid who was given the power to change the world and did not know what to do with it. Despite having all these supernatural powers, when it came down to it, he just sat there and let fate steer his life.

[00:18:00]He had spent his entire conscious life inside a war he hadn't started. He had watched his mother be eaten. He watched friends die in front of him for years.

[00:18:10]He had been told at 15 that he was a monster.

[00:18:15]He had been told at 17 that the world was bigger than he thought and that the world hated him for being born.

[00:18:22]He had been handed powers that should never have existed in the same body. He had been handed visions of a future he did not ask to see.

[00:18:33]And the question he asked at 19 was, "What is the right course of action for the next 2,000 years of human civilization?

[00:18:44]That isn't a fair question. Not to anyone. Not to definitely not to a 19year-old.

[00:18:51]And so what we are watching as the show goes on is not really the moral failure of a great man. It's the collapse of a frightened child who happened to be holding the control of the world.

[00:19:04]Aaron who chose the rumbling is not the calm strategist he's playing at being.

[00:19:11]He is a boy in shock. He's a boy doing the thing he had decided he must do because the act of choosing has become unbearable.

[00:19:21]He is a coward. I think that's the best way to put it. He was a coward in the way that he is a 19year-old with too much responsibility.

[00:19:33]Trying is hard. Trying means you might fail. Trining means that genocide isn't fated and you might be the one who chose it badly. Trying means looking your friends in the eye and saying, "I don't know what to do. Help me."

[00:19:48]Aaron never said that. Never. Not once.

[00:19:51]In four years of foreign knowledge, he never asked Armen, his oldest friend, definitely the smartest person we know in the show, who had outsmarted, even Bertold, outsmarted the female titan, outsmarted half the threats in the show.

[00:20:07]He never asked him, not once.

[00:20:12]He chose loneliness. He chose the easier thing because every alternative would have required him to admit that he didn't know. And the show makes you feel it in a way. In that final conversation with Armen when he breaks down crying, what he is crying for is not the people he killed. He's crying because he loved them. Because he didn't want to do it.

[00:20:38]Because some part of him spent four years screaming at himself to stop. The boy who promised to kill every titan ended his life by becoming the last and the worst of them.

[00:20:50]The boys whose only word was freedom, the word he screamed in episode 1, the word that defined his entire identity, died as the one most enslaved by it.

[00:21:04]Enslaved by his own future.

[00:21:08]This is the tragedy that occurs in Attack on Titan. Not the rumbling.

[00:21:15]The tragedy is the soul of the boy who was given godlike power and forced to bear with it alone.

[00:21:25]If you have made it this far into the video, I much appreciate it. This is the first video that I'm like making properly on YouTube and I would highly appreciate it if you guys can just like the video, subscribe and just comment down below any sort of discussions or like maybe other things that I should cover. I have a lot more ideas on what all videos I want to make soon. So yeah, thank you for watching guys.