“If we don’t win, we’ll die.
If we win, we’ll live!”

Really, what the post title says. This is just me being completely shattered over Shingeki no Kyojin‘s first 7 episodes, which I marathon-ed in between bouts of Candy Crush and Harry Potter fanfics. Spoilers abound, so for the uninitiated, please please please, watch the anime first. I recommend it with all my tears and screaming hysteria.

And now on to the fangirling.

In this post, I’m not going to go into plot. I’m still in the very beginning of the anime and the manga, so I don’t have any working theories yet on what it all means and have yet to develop any strong/violent feelings at the unfolding of events. What I do have, however, is a working theory on the main characters’ dynamics and how they pull each other together.

The Golden Trio or the Holy Trinity of this anime, if you will, is symbolic of a person’s Mind, Body, and Spirit.

Eren: Spirit

Eren. Eren is Spirit. He is the driving force of not just his little band of friends, but of all the people he meets. He displays such a powerful, burning desire to exact vengeance on Titans and to see the world outside of his walls, that it cannot help but change the way people live their lives. Meeting him is a turning point; you are defined by the choices he makes you face simply because when you are with him, there is no middle ground or gray area.

Mikasa: Body

Mikasa, on the other hand, is Body, or the epitome of the human physique at it’s prime. Beautiful, single-minded, efficient, and deadly. A weapon, per se. Mikasa destroys without effort and out of her three friends, spends the least time on moral, ethical, or worldly quandaries because she lives so much in the present. She is not vengeful like Eren, or curious like Armin, or motivated towards any kind of goal any of the other characters display because all she wants is to survive.

Armin: Mind

And finally Armin. The Mind. Out of all the three he seems to be the one most grounded in reality. Only Armin is, I think, fully aware of the consequences humans fighting Titans entails. He is the only one who understands that whenever they go into battle, they go into it with the barest chance of survival, which is why he is the one most usually paralyzed into inaction. Where his friends can just act, Armin thinks and acknowledges and is weighed down.

*sobs*

But this early on, the anime has already established that the three pull each other into a perfect kind of tension.

Eren without Mikasa would die, and actually has died because his body cannot keep up with the strength of his desire. He rushed headlong into battle because he needed to save people, but his body was unable to keep up and therefore, no matter how valiant an effort he put into his fight, he got eaten. Eren without Armin would never have even been able to dream of living in a world outside of the walls, and would have lacked any driving ambition outside of vengeance.

Mikasa without Eren would just exist, without a goal, without desire, and would probably have just wasted away when she was just a child. Mikasa, without Armin, would have died in her little suicide stunt because she simply did not take into account how much gas she was using when trying to kill the Titans.

And Armin, without either Mikasa or Eren to save him, would have been the first casualty of the attacks because a Mind is just not suited for battle in close quarters.

The trio cannot exist without each other, whether the presence of one is just in their minds or a physical thing. Even the elimination of one would be fatal, because none of them can compensate for what a single person in that unit brings to the table.

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