Good start, terrible everything else

It went from a story of a group of humans trying to survive with limited technology and ressources, to a full blown Marvel's Avengers Titan war spin off.

The element that kept me hooked was exactly that, an unknown/mysterious force that threatens human existence. I hoped that the story would develop in such a way that those titans you see at the beginning don't end up being target dummies. Lo and behold, that's exactly what ended up happening. That fear of the titans soon weared off and I was left only looking forward to the "why" behind the Titan mystery. The way it unfolded was too far from the universe we were asked to create in the first part of the story.

As if that wasn't enough, the way the story unfold created a bunch of plot holes along the way and using cheap cop out plot devices like time traveling. We had to be bombarded with edgy time traveling nonsense and inexplicable magical origins (i.e. Spine), and even when a part of it was explained (Ymir), it felt like the most half-assed school-essay backstory they could come up with.

The characters were absolutely lackluster, especially the main crew we're following. The only characters with redeemable qualities were Erwin and Zeke, the rest were an absolute pain to follow and trying to like. Not only were their personalities awful, but despite years of being submerged into the fight against Titans, they still acted and felt like clueless farmers that were drafted into the Corps. Reiner was an absolute mess; so many plot armors, such a mundane character that's just thrown at you as being "unstable" and that's somehow supposed to make him relatable and conflicting for us the viewers.

Eren is perhaps one of the worst protagonists I've seen and that ending completely burried the barely standing character. Also Eldia, I don't know if Eldia was supposed to be the nation we're rooting for, but if that was the plan, it was an absolute shamble. Every single thing that made up Eldia's story made me side with Marleyans even more. If flipping sides so far into the story was the idea, well done, but I doubt that was the idea.

The ending was comically bad, I had to double-check to see if I wasn't reading some forum fandom alternative story. The absolute nonchalance of the characters while a world genocide was happening is something out of a sitcom. The way the story concluded was beyond the boundaries of what should be humanely possible in terms of sheer cringe. All that world, in an instant, was reduced to a cheap premise that all started with some demented symbolic will of Ymir.

Of course, still no explanation for what/when/why some random sea creature has godly Titan-giving powers and somehow barged into a random little girl's spine to change the world's fate.

In hopes that the anime gets its own ending. At least there will be something redeemable about it.