Attack on Titan: Ending Explained

The Rumbling and the final battle

The Final Season builds to Eren Yeager unlocking the full power of the Founding Titan and unleashing the Rumbling, releasing the wall Titans to march across the world and crush everyone outside Paradis Island. To stop the slaughter, the former enemies of Paradis and Marley unite, and Mikasa Ackerman, Armin Arlert, Levi and the remaining fighters converge on Eren's colossal skeletal form. By the time they reach him, roughly eighty percent of humanity beyond the island has already been wiped out, making the cost of stopping him almost unbearable.

Mikasa kills Eren

With Levi's help, Mikasa makes it inside the mouth of Eren's Titan and reaches his human body at its nape. She decapitates him, and then, for the first and last time, kisses him goodbye. This is the decisive act of the series. Earlier, in the dreamlike Paths, Eren had told Armin that he wanted his friends to be remembered as the heroes who killed him and saved the world, and that much of the horror was engineered to finally release Ymir Fritz. He even erased Armin's memory of that talk, which only returns after his death.

Ymir is freed and the curse breaks

When Mikasa chooses to kill the person she loves most, Ymir Fritz at last understands how to let go of her own two-thousand-year devotion to King Fritz, and she smiles. The link binding Ymir, Eren and the source of all living matter is severed. Every Titan body crumbles, everyone who had been transformed reverts to human form, and all Eldians lose the ability to ever become Titans again. The curse that powered the entire war ends with Eren's death, which is the grim payoff of his plan to liberate his people.

The epilogue on the hill

Three years after the Rumbling, Mikasa buries Eren's severed head beneath the tree on the hill where he used to nap as a child. Wearing the scarf he once gave her, she mourns him as a bird tugs the scarf gently around her neck. The show then leaps far into the future, where Paradis has risen and fallen and a young boy with his dog stumbles upon the same enormous tree, now grown vast over Eren's grave. The closing note suggests the cycle of conflict, like the tree, simply keeps growing back.

The Final Image

Many years later, a boy and his dog wander up to the giant tree that has grown over Eren's grave on the hill, the same spot where the story began, quietly implying the cycle of war begins again.

Lingering Questions

Does Eren die at the end of Attack on Titan?

Yes. Mikasa enters his Titan's mouth, decapitates his human body and kisses him goodbye. His death ends the Rumbling and frees Ymir Fritz, which breaks the Titan curse entirely.

Are the Titans gone for good after the ending?

Yes. Once Eren dies and Ymir is released, every Titan crumbles, the transformed people return to human form, and all Eldians permanently lose the power to become Titans, ending the source of the war.

Sources

• Attack on Titan (TV series) - Wikipedia
• Attack On Titan's Ending, and Eren's Fate, Explained - CBR

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