20251014

 Fell asleep around 1 and got up at 7:30 to have breakfast. Watched anime in the morning as usual, and played piano after lunch. Did a cycling exercise around 3. Slept around 6.5 hours and completed 5 pomodoroes today - two for learning and three for exercise.

Finished Shingeki no Kyojin in the morning. I haven't put much effort on it, and I won't. So it's just my feellings and speculations. From the plot, I didn't feel any idea was being developed, and finished in the end. At least not consistant ideas. The only thing remains unchanged is situation, complex, complicated, always changing situations, in which it's hard to believe something. Trust yourself, or trust your fellow, or follow a religion, or act according to a party, whatever you do, it won't bring you good results constantly. With this tone, it's hard to develop any ideas. But it's very approriate for its plot, for people in it have to face hard problems. And it's done convincingly, the situations are made by people with different intentions and acts, without apparent author's interfere. Actually, I guess, instead of claiming something and telling stories to support them, the author might prefer to, for any belief, construct a situation, in which you will find difficulties sticking to it. Not surprisingly, the manga will be associate with nihilism. But it's not so nihilism, the author did give some ideas, very general, broad ideas, for such situations. As I recalled, there are three scenes, in which people are unable to act or feel meaningless: before Mikasa stabs the thief when she was youny, before Erwin leads the new recruits in a suicide charge to Beast Titan, and before Grisha turned into Attack Titan. They acted in the end, and the message is very simple, might be cliche: the world, or the author, not only the author of this manga, but also those want to write something in history, will sometimes push you into corners, and you have to fight (not nessesarily killing or violence). Maybe just you have to fight. The final one is interesting, Grisha was told, "you should finish the story you started", so "you" becomes an author. There are other ideas could be infered from this. In such hard situations, you might have to make a choice between what's precious to you, so you have to sacrifice something. I don't like Armin's statement, it sounds like "I can always gain from suffering". And people who fight with you are trustworthy. Well, they might turn out to be traitors later, but they will still be moved by these shared experience of fighting. Family, or shared experience of living and dining together has similar effects, which helps Gabi turn, but the bond won't be so strong. The strongest bond exists between the three main characters. On the other hand, it won't always bring you good results, but the author seems not to encourage such utilitarian thinking. Stick to your belief (not immutable, but consistent), until death, he might say. I can't remember where it came from, some guy measures a novelist's greatness by how many factors from reality his work presents. By this standard, this work would certainly be top-tier. Only when enought factors from reality were considered, one can create a chaos convincingly, in which everybody is suffering reasonably. It's very shocking and entertaining.