In the new week, Rei shifted his work focus slightly toward the Spirited Away production.

Although animated film releases were no longer unfamiliar territory for the staff and all the procedures had become established, Rei did not step back from the process. He cooperated throughout, as he had with every previous release.

Among the films he had produced so far, the one he carried the most confidence in was Spirited Away.

Looking back at the Japanese animated film industry over the years in his previous life, the Demon Slayer film held the box office record. But that was the only category in which the Demon Slayer film surpassed Spirited Away.

It was a completely commercialised work that had achieved its results by occupying the right time, the right audience base, and the right market conditions. Rei liked the Demon Slayer film. But if genuinely pressed to compare them as works, Spirited Away was definitively the superior piece of filmmaking.

Having arrived at this point in his career, Rei did not have excessively high box office expectations for Spirited Away. Whether it broke the historical summer box office record, or the record set by Demon Slayer, was a secondary consideration. What he valued more was the market’s response to the film’s quality. The word-of-mouth. The specific way people talked about it after watching.

Accordingly, the nationwide promotional campaign for Spirited Away launched in mid-to-late February.

Thursday. Late February. The broadcast day for Attack on Titan Season Three, Episode Seven.

From the afternoon onward, Titan fans across the country became active simultaneously, speculating about tonight’s plot in the hours before broadcast.

Kenji Mori had been arguing with Attack on Titan anti-fans at high intensity since getting off work. This was a standard part of his post-work routine at this point in the season.

Shirogane-sensei’s anti-fans were a permanent feature of the landscape. They would never disappear entirely because the relationship between anti-fans and genuine fans was more fluid than it appeared.

Many of the most committed Attack on Titan anti-fans had originally been Hunter x Hunter fans who had turned hostile because people kept claiming Attack on Titan was superior to Hunter x Hunter.

If Shirogane-sensei ever returned to serialising Hunter x Hunter, those same people would immediately revert to being ten-year loyal fans without missing a step.

As eight o’clock approached, Kenji ended his phone call with his girlfriend ahead of schedule, citing a shower that he was not going to take. He arranged his prepared snacks and beer, settled into position, and waited.

Eight o’clock. The screen shifted. The familiar opening theme played. The plot continued from the previous week.

The first scene was a battle among minor soldiers: the squad rescuing Eren clashing with the Military Police Brigade units operating under Kenny Ackerman. Five minutes of combat before the sequence concluded.

It was not the section Kenji was most interested in, but he found himself noticing something anyway.

The art style of Titan keeps getting better.

Season Three had been given sufficient pre-production time and the additional preparation was visible in the detail quality. He filed the observation and let the plot pull him forward.

The scene shifted to the underground cavern where Historia, her father, and the restrained Eren were located.

Historia was still listening to her father recount the history: the tragedy of their family being destroyed by Eren’s father years ago. The chain of causality that led from that event to this moment, with Eren bound in front of her and a vial of serum in her father’s hand.

Whether to avenge her sister, her siblings, her other family members, or to reclaim the Titan power that had passed through the Reiss bloodline for a hundred years: nobody could argue against her eating Eren given the circumstances as they stood.

Her father spoke to her with genuine tenderness, holding out the vial, explaining that she only needed to inject it. Transform into a Titan. Consume Eren. Become something capable of commanding all humans within the walls and resolving the external threat that had been building since the wall breach five years ago.

Historia wavered.

Then, just before the needle reached her skin, she asked a question.

"Why hasn’t the Reiss Family liberated humanity for a hundred years?"

She looked directly at her father as she asked it.

Kenji’s attention sharpened.

This had been the central discussion point among Titan fans over the past week. If the Founding Titan’s power was as described, the ability to command all Titans and potentially eliminate the external threat entirely, why had a hundred years of Reiss kings done nothing with it?

One generation was comprehensible. Several generations of people all independently choosing the same inaction was not.

Historia’s father gave the answer.

In every generation of the family, someone had made exactly this request of the person holding the Founding Titan’s power. Without exception, every individual who inherited the Founding Titan subsequently changed.

Even those who had wanted to liberate humanity before accepting the power found that their thoughts shifted after receiving it.

They followed the will of the First King.

Kenji understood immediately.

The anime was being deliberately indirect about the mechanism. But the information provided across the preceding episodes made the deduction straightforward.

The Founding Titan’s power included control over all subjects of the walls. Was it possible that royal blood inheritors did not merely gain the power but were simultaneously subjected to it?

That the First King had built into the inheritance mechanism a guarantee that every successor would align with his beliefs? Not erasing their will entirely. Changing their thoughts. Making them genuinely identify with what the First King had chosen.

This is brainwashing built into the power itself. And you cannot resist it because accepting the power is what causes it.

Kenji’s scalp prickled.

Fortunately, Eren did not have royal blood and could not fully activate the Founding Titan. Otherwise he would have become exactly the kind of person the First King had designed all his successors to become: someone who found the walls sufficient and had no desire to see beyond them.

Historia in the animation was working through the same logic in real time. Her father had been deliberately vague, but the conclusion was not difficult to reach.

The entire basis of the freedom she wanted, the freedom to think and choose and act according to her own values, would be consumed by the very power her father was offering her. She would want to liberate humanity before accepting it. She would not want that afterward.

The episode had arrived again at the core theme running through Attack on Titan from its first episode. The exploration of freedom. What it meant. What it cost. What it was worth.

And the memory of Ymir surfaced: standing on the tower’s edge surrounded by Titans in the second season, smiling at Historia before she jumped.

"Christa, I have no right to criticize the way you live."

"So this is just my selfish wish."

"Live your life with your head held high and with pride."

Kenji’s eyes went red.

Ten seconds of footage. Just Ymir’s voice and face from the second season, the promise she had made on the tower before jumping. And it unearthed something in him that he could not have explained beforehand.

What Ymir had said to Historia in the second season had become the most important internal support Historia carried into this moment.

She was not going to blindly please others anymore. If pleasing others meant having her own thoughts stamped out by the inherited will of the First King, then what had Ymir’s sacrifice actually been for?

The BGM kicked in.

Historia slapped the syringe out of her father’s hand. It shattered on the floor.

Facing her enraged father, she delivered a forceful shoulder throw.

"What ’God’! Selfishly looking for a way out, selfishly inciting others. I will no longer tolerate you continuing to erase me."

Adrenaline hit Kenji’s brain directly.

He watched Historia grab the key and rush toward Eren’s chains. Eren was crying, consumed by despair over what he had done to his father, not wanting to continue. Historia looked at him and delivered a direct punch to his face.

"Crybaby, shut up. Who wants to do something as troublesome as exterminating humanity? I hate humans the most; it’s fine if they’re destroyed by Titans."

She unlocked his chains with deliberate force.

"Eren, I’m going to let you escape from here, and then destroy everything."

The plot twist was completely outside what Kenji had anticipated, and he found himself entirely in love with Historia as a character in this episode.

Christa is gone. This is the real Historia.

Why live according to other people’s ideas. Why sacrifice your own will just to satisfy what others needed her to be.

Saving the world by sacrificing one person for the greater good was framed as self-evidently correct. But that framing had been imposed on Historia by others, not generated from inside her.

She had not decided to be a saint. What she had decided was that she would not fail Ymir, who had risked and lost everything for her. The way of life Ymir had hoped for her was to follow her own heart. That was the promise. That was what mattered.

In most anime, a character who rejected the utilitarian sacrifice and acted on personal loyalty over collective benefit would be framed as the villain. In Attack on Titan, Kenji loved her completely.

Shirogane-sensei was a genius.

Following the Demon Slayer first season’s Mother-Eating Divine Song and the Attack on Titan second season’s Betrayal Divine Song, the third season now had its own entry in the canon of exceptional Attack on Titan insert music.

The internet immediately named it the Father-Throwing Divine Song.

The name was perfect and the internet agreed unanimously.

"That was satisfying. Historia, good job."

"Her father was clearly just afraid to try the serum himself and was using Historia as a substitute. This was not the greater good. This was moral kidnapping wrapped in the language of sacrifice."

"Her father did drink the medicine off the floor at the end of the episode though. He finally found some courage."

"He did not find courage. The military coup had already succeeded. If he did not reclaim the Founding Titan’s power and alter memories, the Reiss Family would be purged by the military. He had no other viable option."

"So it was not courage. It was the only remaining move."

"Eren in this arc is genuinely pitiable, but watching him I still cannot help being frustrated."

"He is fifteen years old. Show some sympathy."

"I do feel sympathy for him. I also bash him. Both things coexist."

"He ate his father because his father forced the transformation on him. Making such an enormous crisis out of something he had no meaningful choice about is understandable emotionally and still frustrating to watch."

"The First King Reiss built a prison inside walls for a million subjects and then used the Founding Titan’s inheritance to ensure every successor would maintain the prison without wanting to leave it.

Looking at the history of rulers throughout Japan and abroad, monarchs who abdicated their responsibilities for personal preference were not rare. An emperor who liked carpentry, an emperor who liked poetry, an emperor who felt the role was burdensome and gave it to a son to become a monk.

What makes the First King distinctive is that he embedded his preference for lying flat into the power structure itself so that no one who inherited it could choose differently."

"The current situation is a complete deadlock. Activating the Founding Titan to liberate humanity requires royal blood. Royal blood inheriting the Founding Titan results in being overwritten by the First King’s will and wanting to maintain the walls. The solution that resolves the external threat eliminates the person who would implement it. This is a perfectly designed impossibility."

The viewership for this episode reached 8.49 percent, a new series record.

The discussion volume was the largest since the broadcast began.

The two episodes that followed shifted focus to Historia’s father, who had consumed the serum and transformed into a Royal Blood Titan of enormous scale, larger than the Colossal Titan. This was the specific capability that royal blood conferred upon transformation: a different category of Titan entirely from what Eren could produce in his minor skirmishes.

The audience response to these two episodes was correspondingly lower. It was ultimately a sequence of everyone in the Survey Corps working together to stop a Royal Blood Titan from breaking through the walls, succeeding with full effort, and concluding the immediate crisis. Competent, but not the kind of episode that produced goosebumps or viral discussion.

Time moved into mid-March.

In the final portion of Season Three’s first half, the focus returned to Eren’s character development.

Eren, who had possessed Titan power only because his father had forced a transfer upon him, fell into a period of depression after the Royal Blood Titan crisis was resolved. His uniqueness was not his own. He had a special father and had received something he had not earned. Fundamentally, he felt, he was useless.

When the Survey Corps located the commander of the Training Corps, an old acquaintance of Eren’s father, they learned what his mother had said to him when he was a child.

"This child is already very cute. He is already great. Because he was born into this world."

Carla’s words, delivered in a memory, to describe a small boy who had not yet done anything remarkable and did not need to.

The sense of destiny the episode created reached the highest point the arc had produced.

Kenji sat in his living room and was not bothered about whether anyone saw the tears.

Carla, Eren’s mother, who had gone offline in the first episode of the first season, surged to number one on the character popularity rankings within three days of the episode airing.

She held that position for three days before Levi’s fan vote base pushed her back down. The specificity of this outcome was noted and appreciated by everyone watching.

With this, the Royal Government arc of Attack on Titan Season Three’s first half concluded.

The viewership had reached an all-time high for the series since broadcast began. The controversy had also reached its peak. Both things were true simultaneously and that was the expected condition of following this anime.

Rei gathered the staff from Illumination Production Company and Shirogane Animation for a joint celebration banquet.

He had always said that Attack on Titan’s commercial value was lower than Demon Slayer’s. This remained true. But lower than Demon Slayer’s still left it significantly above works like Hunter x Hunter and One-Punch Man on a global scale.

During the year the anime had been airing, the cooperative infrastructure that Demon Slayer had established for Illumination Production Company and Shirogane Animation made the globalisation of the Attack on Titan IP rapid and relatively smooth. It had become the number one anime in Japan and had generated significant response in most overseas markets where it released.

Spring ended. Summer arrived.

The promotional campaign for Spirited Away began intensifying nationwide. Not just official website material images. Short promotional videos, trailers, and other content began running through Illumination Production Company, Shirogane Animation, and Ion TV’s broadcast slots. Rei stepped out of his usual low-profile promotional posture and began fully cooperating with the campaign.

Simultaneously, the second half of Attack on Titan Season Three began airing.

The main plot was delivered immediately.

With the Royal Government arc concluded, Historia was the last surviving member of the Reiss Family. The military installed her as nominal Queen while retaining actual military and political control through the coup’s outcome.

With the nobles’ interference eliminated and full military support in place, the Survey Corps began preparing for the operation to use Eren’s crystallisation ability to seal the breach in Wall Maria and reclaim the territory humanity had lost five years ago.

And, of course: the secret in the basement of Eren’s home. The locked room that had been mentioned in episode one of Season One and had not been revisited since.

From the first episode of the second half, the enemies waiting for the Survey Corps on this mission were also introduced. Reiner and Bertholdt, absent for several months. And the Beast Titan.

"Carla going to number one on the popularity rankings from a memory sequence. One line spoken about a small boy. ’He was born into this world.’ Three seasons of Eren’s journey leading back to what his mother said when he was a child. The architecture of this series is extraordinary."

"Historia throwing her father over her shoulder and telling Eren she was going to let him escape and then destroy everything. The character I spent two seasons watching perform gentle selflessness was carrying this version of herself the entire time."

"The Father-Throwing Divine Song. The naming is correct. The internet has made the correct decision."

"The Royal Government arc’s viewership record and controversy record arriving simultaneously. The arc asked for a month of patience and episode seven justified all of it. This is the Shirogane-sensei pattern applied across an entire arc."

"Wall Maria recapture arc beginning. The breach that has been open since episode one of Season One. Five years in the story. Nearly two years of broadcast. Reiner, Bertholdt, and the Beast Titan waiting on the other side."

"The basement. Episode one. The key around Grisha’s neck. ’When I return I will show you.’ Three seasons later we are finally going."

"Spirited Away promotional campaign running alongside the Wall Maria arc. Shirogane-sensei has the summer season planned with two major properties building simultaneously."