So you’ll forgive me if my recollection of the final chapters is spotty. I breezed through them online via my Crunchyroll subscription. And although I bought the first five “Colossal Edition” collected volumes by Kodansha, I doubt I will complete the set (with what sounds like three volumes left). So here are my takeaways from the finale, just based on my flashes of comprehension and boredom:

• Eren, our hero, succeeds in his plan to use the power of the Titans to murder the majority of humankind. They are crushed underfoot, dismembered, and devoured, just like his own mother was at the beginning of the series, when we were still supposed to like him. That’s meant to be a satisfying end to his character arc, because there goes the problem of the Titans, I guess. Nobody left to kill. Win-win for everybody.
• But wait – now we learn that there will always be Titans unless the surviving humans manage to slay some kind of glowing centipede that we’ve never heard anything about before. So, they kill it. Lucky break, there.
• Ymir was held prisoner by her husband, King Fritz, and was apparently in a relationship where she was constantly raped, but she really loved him anyway and that’s why all of this happened in the first place – or something?

That last item is truly cringeworthy. But why should I care at all, at this point? About anything? After so many misdirections and about-faces for all of these characters, I don’t know anything about any of them. They don’t even resemble real people.

Also, I don’t know anything about the place where they live. That, too, has dodged left and right as we’ve “learned” more of the “truth” about their world. There’s no logic to it.

Titans, no Titans … who cares? There’s some kind of magic that made the whole Titans situation happen, but now the spell is broken, like Snow White. Never mind that there was very little setup for that, or especially the glowing centipede, which feels like the ultimate contrivance to wrap up a weak plot. If there was foreshadowing for that, I missed it. But the centipede is dead, so … hooray? I guess?

Even though the centipede is dead, though, the final takeaway in the epilogue seems to be that, Titans or no Titans, humans will always form factions and find reasons to hate and kill each other; so in that sense, the whole thing was pointless. I guess Isayama found his downer ending, after all.

What a disappointment. But at the end of the day, I think this has less to do with Isayama than with the pressures of the manga industry itself. He had a hit on his hands and he wasn’t sure what to do about it. He had to produce, and produce he did – even when he wasn’t saying anything much. He lost his way, Attack on Titan’s star waned, and readers – and equally important, the publishers – moved on. (What’s the new hot thing, now? Demon Slayer?)

It will be interesting to see what Isayama does next in manga – if he does anything at all. He has some of the earmarks of a one-hit wonder. Personally, I’d like him to take a sabbatical to learn more of the craft of making manga. But if he does do a follow-up act, I’m curious to see whether the publishers can successfully market it as something by the creator of Attack on Titan. Because in hindsight, Attack on Titan seems less like a blockbuster and more of a flash in the pan from 10-12 years ago that outstayed its welcome.