There was no time for Hana to stay in shock.
The plot kept moving, and Eren in the animation was just as dazed as she was.
Facing the person he had spent years alongside, someone he regarded as an older brother, who had personally told him that he was the Armored Titan and that their other close friend was the Colossal Titan.
The two culprits responsible for the wall breach five years ago. The reason his mother was dead.
Anyone's head would be spinning.
Eren could not determine whether he was dreaming or whether his two closest friends had been traumatised by the recent Titan siege and were speaking nonsense.
Even after the Survey Corps's strategy meeting the night before, where Reiner had been confirmed as a suspect, the full reality of it had not settled in Eren yet.
Eren's dazed reaction made Hana frown. Then it made her feel something closer to relief.
If she came home and discovered her closest friend had been deceiving her across years of genuine-seeming closeness, she would probably be unable to process it immediately either.
What Eren was facing was several orders of magnitude beyond even the most extreme hypothetical she could construct. His reaction was the only reasonable reaction.
"There's no way I would just listen to a few words and go with you."
Reiner's expression when he received this response was genuinely startled. Hana felt the specific absurdity of the moment. Yes. Obviously Eren was not going to quietly agree to leave with the two people who had just confessed to destroying his hometown and killing his mother.
But even with the animation explicitly confirming it, Hana still could not fully believe it in her chest.
How could it be.
Were the years of friendship with Eren false. The line they had spoken to him under the moonlight: I want to return to the hometown I can never go back to. Was that performance. When the Female Titan had been chasing Eren through the forest and Reiner had fought her to hold her back, was that acting.
Last episode, when Reiner's arm was bitten and fractured by the three-metre Titan and he still physically lifted the creature and threw it out of the tower window to protect his companions: was that acting too.
Had the characters gone mad, or had Shirogane-sensei gone mad.
The specific discomfort of having the answer directly in front of her while being unable to make herself accept it was something Hana had not experienced while watching anime before.
She could usually predict where a plot was going by the halfway point of any given episode. In this one, the author had already revealed the answer and she was sitting there refusing to believe it.
Unless, she thought, you make them transform.
The moment the thought appeared, the BGM changed.
Reiner's expression became sorrowful. Bertholdt beside him was flustered in his characteristic way.
"What on earth was I thinking."
Reiner said it quietly, almost to himself.
"Have I really gone mad?"
"It must be because I stayed here too long. It must be because I lived among people like this for three years. I was just a child back then. I didn't know anything. If I hadn't known that people like this existed in the world, I wouldn't have become such a..."
His expression twisted.
"Indecisive coward."
The BGM lifted.
The internal collapse of the character came through the screen and settled in Hana's chest. Reiner was not a person performing a villain's speech.
He was a person who had spent three years building genuine relationships he was not supposed to build, with people he was not supposed to care about, and had arrived at a point where the mission he had been sent to complete and the person he had become in the process of attempting it were no longer compatible.
Is his mental pressure already at a breaking point.
"I can no longer distinguish right from wrong. But what I must do, as a warrior, is take responsibility for my choices to the very end."
Reiner unwrapped the bandage on his hand.
White steam rose from the skin underneath. The specific steam of a wound healing at a rate no ordinary human body could produce.
It is real.
Even though the plot had been telling Hana this for the past several minutes, only now, watching the steam rise from Reiner's hand, did she actually begin to believe it in the way Eren was beginning to believe it in the animation simultaneously.
"Reiner, are we doing it? Now, right here?" Bertholdt asked, flustered.
"Right here, we settle this."
Mikasa, who had noticed something was wrong before anyone else had moved, launched herself at both of them and cut them into serious injuries before the decision could complete itself.
It was not enough. People with the power of the Titans could transform the moment blood was drawn. Every injury healed in the transformation.
A low, deep female vocal chant began somewhere in the score.
Golden lightning started crackling.
The electricity shot from the crown of her head straight down through her spine. Goosebumps broke across Hana's entire body.
Her immersion was complete enough that she could hear her own heartbeat in the space between the sound from the television.
The music. The animation performance. The storyboards. The choices being made by characters who had been constructed across two seasons of careful work, arriving at the most consequential moment in their lives.
Atop the wall, a heatwave rose from nothing, scattering the nearby soldiers.
Massive ribs erupted from the air like nails being driven into stone, one after another, supporting the upper body of a red, blazing Colossal Titan as it rose to its full height.
The Colossal Titan's massive hand closed around Ymir's unconscious body. The Armored Titan, transforming from Reiner simultaneously, seized Eren in its grip and launched itself off the wall.
And in the noise and the heat and the chaos of it, a line from years earlier echoed through the scene.
"I want to return to that hometown I can never go back to. That is my wish."
The words Reiner had spoken to Eren under the moon. Real words. Words that meant something. Words that were not performance, even if the mission was.
Hana's nose stung.
Even as a viewer, sitting in her living room, the sense of betrayal was physical. Not because she had been tricked by a fictional character, but because the series had built Reiner and Bertholdt as people she had trusted, and watching the full shape of their situation arrive was the specific experience of caring about someone and discovering that the care had been accurate and the concealment had been just as real.
The rage that gathered in her chest had nowhere to go.
In the animation, Eren's voice gave it somewhere to go.
The golden flash. The transformation. Eren's Titan form driving its fist into the body of Reiner's Armored Titan with everything it had.
"Reiner, Bertholdt. You damn traitors."
The ending theme began.
Hana's expression froze.
That is where it ends.
Shirogane-sensei. Are you even human.
The night that followed was the largest single-episode fan reaction since Attack on Titan had begun broadcasting.
"Reiner and Bertholdt are the Armored Titan and the Colossal Titan. Based on what. How could they have hidden it this deeply across two full seasons."
"Is this not a setting pulled from thin air? Is this actually foreshadowed or is Shirogane-sensei improvising?"
"Go back to the first season. When Eren's first transformation was discovered, Reiner and Bertholdt were both present. Everyone else's reaction was pure shock. Their expressions were more complex. I went back and checked the manga after this episode. It is visible in retrospect."
"The conversation in the tower with Ymir. The strange language on the canned food that Ymir recognised. After he watched Ymir transform, Reiner's behaviour was visibly abnormal. The foreshadowing was there. We did not know what we were looking at."
"My scalp is tingling. I cannot figure out where this anime is going and I have been watching it for thirty weeks."
"What was the BGM in the final sequence of this episode. The choral piece when the transformations began. Who composed that. Who did the storyboards for the transformation sequence."
"I am watching this with tears in my eyes and not because of the plot specifically. I am moved by the quality of the production itself. Who complained about the first five weeks of the second season being slow? Without those five weeks, could this episode land the way it landed? The pacing was construction, not padding."
"Foreshadowing hidden across two seasons. Completely unguessable until the moment of reveal. And then immediately obvious in retrospect. This is the correct way to construct a mystery."
"Was there not a post before this that named Reiner and Bertholdt as suspects?"
"At that point every character with lines was on someone's suspect list. Nobody took that post more seriously than any other speculation thread. It does not count as a prediction."
"This episode is the best single episode in the history of Japanese animation."
"The death of the Chimera Ant King and Komugi in Hunter x Hunter."
"Demon Slayer episode nineteen, Hinokami."
"The episode where Sai disappears in Hikaru no Go."
"The first episode of One-Punch Man. Saitama against the Subterranean King in the dream sequence. Nothing has matched that for pure excitement."
"If we are seriously discussing the best single episode in anime history, should we not mention the seventh episode of a certain popular anime from nineteen years ago."
"Crimson Abyss?"
"The person upstairs wins. I cannot continue."
"Before this episode I considered Attack on Titan one tier below Hunter x Hunter and Demon Slayer. After tonight I have changed my position. Attack on Titan is qualified to sit at the same table."
"Shirogane-sensei, if you ever meet an impatient fan who tracks you down over your cliffhangers, you will have brought it on yourself."