Attack on Titan is set to release a new chapter for the manga, and that could work to fix the series’ controversial ending. On April 30, 2024, the new artbook Attack on Titan FLY will feature a short story by Hajime Isayama dubbed Attack on Titan volume #35. This will be the first official content from Isayama in three years, so suffice to say, it warrants a lot of attention.

It’s unknown what will be covered in felt the need to apologize for the series' ending and upsetting people. There’s plenty of justification for changing the ending, and volume #35 could be the perfect chance to make that happen.

How Attack On Titan Volume #35 Could Fix The Original Ending

Attack on Titan’s ending is so controversial because it implied that Eren never had true agency and was just following a predestined path to free Ymir Fritz, something many people felt ruined Eren’s arc of trying to seek out freedom. Making things worse was the infamous page of Eren crying about how he doesn’t want Mikasa to love anyone other than him; even if Eren did truly love Mikasa the entire time, that scene felt out of character and too much of a tonal shift for what was supposed to be a serious scene.

Further adding to the controversy was the extended version of the ending in volume #34. Volume #34 added pages to the final chapter that revealed that at some point after the Rumbling, the other nations of the world rebuilt their militaries and bombed Paradis, thus rendering Eren and everyone else’s efforts to protect their loved ones entirely moot and making an already bittersweet ending feel needlessly depressing. Add in some rather divisive character work, most notably with how Mikasa was handled at the end and some retcons to Ymir Fritz’s character, and Attack on Titan’s ending is one that still invokes controversy over two years later.

Volume #35 could fix all these issues, but it's still not an easy task. Naturally, it would be easy for it to treat the original ending as non-canon, but something that would probably work better would be if volume #35 simply showed that Mikasa, Armin, and everyone else weren’t caught up in the bombings of Paradis. That wouldn’t remove the depressing nature of Paradis being destroyed after everything Eren went through, but if at least his loved ones survived, then it would make their actions feel far less pointless and make the controversial nature of the ending easier to accept.

It would certainly be easy enough for volume #35 to fix Attack on Titan’s original ending, but whether it does so is another story. Comments from Hajime Isayama suggest that despite the controversial nature of the ending, it was how he wanted to conclude his series, so Isayama might not feel the need to change anything about it and volume #35 could be something entirely unrelated. More information will probably be revealed closer to the book’s release date, but regardless, considering how controversial Attack on Titan’s ending was, anything being done to fix it would be interesting to see.