Attack on Attack on Titan: an In-Depth Review of a Story I Hate (Part Three: Racism, Politics, and Conclusion) · 6:33pm Jun 29th, 2021
Link to Part One and Link to Part Two. Once again, This review contains full spoilers of everything Attack on Titan, including and especially the ending of the manga.
7. The Racism
When I say that Attack on Titan is a racist allegory, I’m actually talking about two completely different, independent issues. They are as such:
- Attack on Titan is a show that uses race as a shorthand to justify conflict—and its main thesis is that the best way to solve a conflict is destructive violence.
- The main characters of Attack on Titan are a Nazi allegory.
It’s important to study both issues separately, since otherwise it’s actively difficult to explore just how deeply problematic Attack on Titan can be. In other words: this series is, literally, so fucking racist, it boggles the mind.
I’ll start with the first point because most of my argumentation has already been made—I already said that the main thesis of Attack on Titan is that “violence is necessary”. When conflict arises between people, the only true way to fix it is by killing your enemy; this is said multiple times out loud, and the narrative consistently proves that the characters saying this are in the right.
This, eventually, reaches its logical conclusion in our main character, Eren Jaeger, committing mass genocide, and killing eighty percent of the population.
He did say he was sorry though I guess.
Which ironically proves not to be good enough. Since only eighty percent of the population was killed, the rest of the world eventually recovers, and carpet-bombs Eren’s hometown. He didn’t go far enough, and so, what he always feared would happen, happened:
Which means that, when he said that it was us versus them, he was unequivocally right. Violence was the solution; everything else fails.
Only, of course, Attack on Titan chooses to represent the abstract idea of human conflict through racial relations—as in, every conflict in the series is caused by race. There are no ideological, political, moral, philosophical, or even religious differences at play; war is fought exclusively because one race hates the other too much to withstand their mere existence.
Our main cast comes from the island of Paradis [1]. The second paradigm shift of Attack on Titan, if you remember, was the twist that titans weren't the true enemy; it was humans. And to give you a sense of scale, here: we’re introduced to the concept of human racism when an Eldian child commits a minor offense—and as punishment, humans beat him up, and his little sister is eaten alive by dogs.
[1] The people from Paradis are known as “Eldians” in the story, for the record. The term refers to both native Paradisians and also the descendants of Paradisians. This is important, because the hatred is not based on where they live, but rather, it’s explicitly racial.
I’ve been using “people from Paradis” as a shorthand for simplicity’s sake—it’s easier to keep terms consistent, and contextually up till now this distinction has not mattered. Since I’m discussing the matters of race now, though, it’s better to be more accurate. Attack on Titan has a specific term to designate those people who aren’t Eldians—they’re called Marleyans—but I’ll use “humans” instead, since it’s more intuitive, and that’s basically what the term stands for anyway.
In other words, from now on—“Eldians” refers to our main cast, including Eren. “Human” refers to everything else. Eren, an Eldian, commits genocide on the human race, kills eighty percent of humanity. Cool? Cool. On with the discussion.
The explanation for such disproportionate hatred is that, in the past, Eldians tortured and killed humans for no reason. And in the present, humans do the same to Eldians. On a fundamental level, then, humans and Eldians cannot coexist. The urge to kill, humiliate, and dominate the other is innate to both races; it’s the first thing they do as soon as they’ve got the chance. Only among their own kin can they live in peace.
Which means that Attack on Titan advocates for the existence of ethnostates.
This is an inevitable conclusion, really. The story’s entire point is that violence is necessary and that conflict can only be solved when you completely decimate your enemy. At the same time, though, “conflict” is shown exclusively as a matter of race—and racism is unconditional, and cannot be fixed at a societal level[2]. Attack on Titan advocates for violence against those who are not part of your race; there’s no other reading to the text, that’s the moral of the story.
[2] Some characters are shown as getting over their deep-seated racism for Eldians; tellingly, these characters aren’t humans. They’re Eldians who’ve been raised among humans, treated like subhuman garbage and taught to hate their own race—and then learn that they’re not inherently inferior.
An argument I’ve been seeing in the previous blogs (which I won’t link here, since it feels like I’m painting a target on the user’s back, and it was a good comment) says that Attack on Titan does justify the racism and the genocide within the series, because objectively speaking, an Eldian can turn into a titan at any point. They are more dangerous to the world than a simple human. All it takes is one deranged Eldian to commit genocide—and this is, indeed, what happens.
The argument then concludes that, since this is not the case in the real world, Attack on Titan is only advocating for genocide in the world of Attack on Titan, and not defending the use of genocide in abstract. As such, nobody should arrive to the conclusion that genocide is good, and if they do, they’re delusional; the circumstances of Attack on Titan simply don’t apply to our society.
As I said, I disagree with this argument. I summarize my reply in three points:
- In-universe justifications for harmful messages in a series are ultimately meaningless. In the fiction of the show, yes, racism is justified—but the fiction is created by the author. The racism is not a natural consequence of a creative work, but rather, it’s the entire reason the creative work exists in the first place. Folding Ideas dubbed this phenomenon “The Thermian Argument”, and he explains this point better than I could. Check the video, it’s not even five minutes long.
- Every racist person out there believes their racism is based on objective facts. If Attack on Titan is constructed in such a way that the reader comes out thinking that, well, the racists have a point in this case—then you’re opening the door to the belief that sometimes racism is justified. Attack on Titan doesn’t differentiate between the real world and the fictional world; it simply points at a situation, and says “racism is correct”.
- The argument that the racism in Attack on Titan doesn’t parallel the racism of the real world doesn’t hold water. The racism against Eldians is based on the idea that they’re an inherently dangerous race, and thus racism is a form of self-defense—this is an incredibly common speaking point in the rhetoric of racist arguments. It, indeed, isn’t true in real life, but that doesn’t mean people don’t believe it, especially if they’re already inclined to do so. Presenting this racial danger as an objective fact within the fiction is a way to legitimize the argument.
And you don’t have to take my word for it, either! Here’s the fucking editor of Attack on Titan recognizing that the series glorifies and justifies genocide in the post-finale interview!
So Attack on Titan has some pretty heavy xenophobic undertones already, only these aren’t undertones, this is more like the show’s main leitmotif. It’s repugnant. It’s morally reprehensible.
And then there’s the Nazi thing.
Mind, though, that when I say “Nazi” I don’t mean it in a hyperbolic way. It’s not a shorthand for “fascist” either [3]—I mean, quite literally, the Nazi party that terrorized and ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945. And, surprisingly, I’m not basing my argument on the fact that the series ends with a racially motivated genocide.
[3] Sidenote: I don’t have enough time to dwell on it too much, but Attack on Titan absolutely has fascist overtones. The glorification of the military is strong from the very start—every member of the main cast is a soldier, they join the military when they’re twelve—but it only gets worse as time goes on.
The series constantly advocates for military rule; the characters organize an actual military coup d’etat where their generals take over the government and change the head of state—and this is seen as a good thing. Civilians are like cattle, doing whatever they’re told, never really taken into account. Every major decision in the story is made by military leaders, and sacrificing their own men for the sake of whatever the leaders want to do is seen as the correct, glorious thing to do.
What I mean here is that Eldians, our main cast, read like an allegory for the Nazi regime. The further the story goes, the more obvious this becomes, the more little details start adding up to support that analysis—and quite honestly, the story doesn’t shy away from these comparisons. The imagery Attack on Titan uses is very… Y’know.
See if you spot any parallels: the Eldians started a World War in the past, and tried to take over the world. More specifically, they annexed most territories around them, to create what they called the Great Eldian Empire; in the present, Eldian loyalist want to bring forth the New Great Eldian Empire, and take back what’s theirs.
This great empire was founded on racial superiority—Eldians have the power to use and turn into titans; humans cannot. Humans were deemed inferior. They were slaughtered, oppressed, defiled, and entire cultures were eradicated.
So, that’s the Third Reich. That entire bit to me read like the Third Reich, the Nazi regime. But don’t worry, just in case you think I’m reading too much into it—here’s the Great Eldian Empire’s general policy on Internal Affairs:
Last panel added to clarify that “other means to silence the minorities” specifically means “to purge or exterminate them”. This is obvious if you’ve read the story up to this point—we see that exact thing happen—but, just in case.
The Eldians ultimately lost. Their leader, Karl Fritz, grew tired of the fight and betrayed them, forcing his own people to retreat to the island of Paradis[4].
[4] If you remember correctly, Paradis is the Attack on Titan equivalent of Madagascar. When I brought this up to two German friends of mine, they rightfully flipped the fuck out, and linked me to this page. I told you that the picture of Eren as King Julian would be relevant. I told you.
Not every Eldian was brought to Paradis, though. Some others were kept outside—and their descendants are the victims of the heinous racism I described above. Humans call it justice, because they’re doing to the Eldians what the Eldians did to them. And of course, this includes marking them with yellow stars, and red armbands:
They’re forced to live in ghettos, and can’t leave without a special permit:
And they’re executed en masse, in a way that looks like this:
Some Eldians rebel against this. They become restorationists—carve crosses in their own bodies as a sign of their loyalty to the cause. They’re not swastikas! They’re just crosses. Phew.
The restorationists also believe that the Great Eldian Empire horror stories are propaganda, and that their ancestors actually mostly did good things for the people they oppressed. Like, sure, they raped and killed and pillaged everything in sight—but they also built trains!
Note the exact wording of that last panel because by god it will be relevant later.
Back in Paradis, the people loyal to Eren Jaeger create a group called the Jaegerists—or Yaegerists, depending on which translation of Eren’s last name you choose—a group of nationalist, warmongering alt-righters, who want to kill everybody else, and protect the future of the new Eldian Empire.
By the end of the series, they’ve taken over Paradis, and are building an army to, I guess, continue the war against the rest of the world.
And of course, there’s, yknow. The fact that it all ends with Eldians committing a mass genocide on humans.
I’ve seen people argue that Eldians aren’t a Nazi allegory, but rather, that they’re an allegory for Jewish people. It’s humans who represent the Nazis. This is because in the current time of the series, it’s Eldians who are forced to live in ghettos, it’s Eldians who are oppressed.
I don’t agree with this reading, though, because that implies ignoring everything else regarding Eldian history[5]. To me, the Jewish parallel isn’t there; Eldians are, indeed, currently oppressed—but this feels less like a callback to the horrible persecution Jewish people have suffered through history, and more a representation of modern blowback against, uh. Nazis, I guess.
[5] I also feel the need to add that Eldians being an allegory for Jewish people would, if anything, be worse. Eldians turn into horrible, often big-nosed monsters who feast on human flesh, and openly recognize they used to rule the world. In a way, it makes the series feel more explicitly anti-Semitic.
It’s a testament to the ambiguity of allegories that the main division among literary analysts of this story is who, exactly, are the real Nazis. In my defense, I’ll also add that the article linked above was written before Eren committed genocide; that little fact does tip the scales somewhat.
So, yes. My reading of Attack on Titan is that, whether on purpose or accidentally, the story functions as a commentary on the hardships of being a Nazi in the current climate, a la “we’re the oppressed ones, actually”. Political correctness gone mad sorta deal.
Hell of a fucking thing to complain about. I suppose saying “authoritarian right-wing nationalist” instead of “Nazi” would cast a wider net and make that statement less controversial, but the story uses such explicit Nazi imagery that I don’t want to use vague language. It feels dishonest on my end.
Does this mean I think the author is actually sympathetic to the Third Reich? Am I accusing Attack on Titan of being Nazi propaganda? Yes and no. I don’t know to which degree all the parallels I see are intentional, and which are simply me seeking patterns where there are none. It’s entirely possible—and very likely—that some of the things that make me arch an eyebrow are entirely unintentional, and simple coincidences.
However.
I do not think, in the slightest, that everything I just mentioned is a coincidence. Neither do I think my reading is me adding meaning to the story when there’s none. Attack on Titan is an intended commentary on the author’s distaste for people’s unwillingness to look past atrocities or crimes against humanity when examining historical events or figures. “Can’t we just focus on how much the Nazis did for medicine, instead of the Holocaust—in the end it was almost a net positive” sorta thing.
Three pieces of evidence for this reasoning:
1. The characters tells us we should look at the silver lining of past atrocities
If you remember, we’re told of the Eldian/human conflict when a kid’s little sister is eaten alive by dogs. This conversation happens right after we’re explicitly shown the Eldian Empire was the Third Reich:
In-universe, yeah, no, the kid is absolutely right. His little sister got viciously murdered, and he got beaten up, for no reason. “Your ancestors were devils” is just racism with a couple extra words. He suffered a heinous hate crime, and it’s impossible not to side with him in this scene.
In a meta sense, though, what with the whole Nazi parallel, this scene gets a little bit trickier. Eldians are a race—is the story saying Germans in particular are oppressed? Or are Eldians a parallel to people who hold beliefs similar to Nazism, and this is complaining about the “unfairness” of considering fascism inherently heinous for what Nazis did in the past?
Later, the same kid who argued that he hadn’t done anything grew up to be the guy defending the old Eldian Empire, and the leader of the restorationists. He’s the one who says this:
So, yeah, we didn’t commit any genocide—and either way, was it really that bad? Look, we did a lot of good, too. There’s shades of grey to it all, etc etc. Furthering this narrative are the next two points.
2. Commander Pixis is based on a war criminal
Remember the guy who wanted to be vored by a hot titan lady? His name is Commander Pixis, he’s a prominent, important, noble figure in Attack on Titan, and the author directly recognized basing the guy on Akiyama Yoshifuru, the father of modern Japanese cavalry, and massive war criminal. Source. English article talking about it.
This admission caused a flame war—Akiyama Yoshifuru was a prominent figure in the First Sinto-Japanese war, and comments were made on his participation on the Port Arthur Massacre, either by actively joining in, or by passively letting it happen.
The Port Arthur Massacre of 1894 (not to be confused with the Australian tragedy of 1996) is in itself controversial—first reported by a Canadian journalist as an unimaginable act of cruelty against civilians on account of the Japanese army, independent investigators sent by the US State Department concluded that most of that reporting had been exaggerated.
The massacre itself is not debated—we know it happened, that’s a fact—but the exact scope of the tragedy is unknown. Accounts vary from as much as 60,000 dead to as “little” as 120 civilians, and an unspecified amount of soldiers. The Japanese Foreign Minister Mutsu Munemitsu argued that only soldiers dressed as civilians had been killed; his inquiry resulted in no punishments towards the troops. To quote directly from the Wikipedia article:
The Japanese press generally avoided reporting on the massacre,[7] or dismissed it, as when the Jiyū Shinbun [ja] called allegations "an invidious desire to detract from the glory of the Japanese Army". [19] The Shin Chōya [ja] accused Westerners of exaggerating the extent of the atrocities, and of hypocrisy in light of the atrocities they had committed throughout the East, stating that "the history of savage nations that have come in contact with Christian Occidentals is all but written in blood".[20] Some questioned Creelman [the original Canadian reporter]’s reliability, and a rumour spread that he left for Shanghai after the fall of Port Arthur to work for the Chinese government. [21] The Japan Weekly Mail, on the other hand, castigated the Japanese army in several articles.[22] Attempts to launch an inquiry met resistance from those who wanted it covered up.[7] The inquiry resulted in no punishments given out.[17]
The Port Arthur Massacre is just one example—but it’s representative of the kind of figure that is Akiyama Yoshifuru. Within the context of a story that already deals with characters denying the relevance or verisimilitude of past atrocities (and I need to emphasize that the people saying that are, explicitly, Eldian restorationists, they want to bring back the Great Eldian Empire), and which already justifies the usage of violence against members of any other race, it’s…
It’s not a good look. Quite frankly, while from a Eurocentric perspective we immediately draw parallels to the Nazi regime—intended parallels at that; I’ve already shown enough evidence—from a more Asian point of view, this gives the vibe that the author of Attack on Titan might be, y’know. A Japanese imperialist?
Which drives us to my third point.
3. There’s a lot of evidence that the author of Attack on Titan may be a Japanese imperialist.
Who could’ve seen that coming.
Japan has infamously glossed over past atrocities committed against China and Korea in their history textbooks and in their general educational system. These accounts go from the denial of the existence of “Comfort Women”—the name given to refer to the victims and survivors of Japan's brutal sex slave trade, which ran from 1932 to 1945 in multiple occupied Asian countries, but especially Korea and China—to the still very present, still very real denial that the Nanjing Massacre (also known as the Rape of Nanjing) ever happened.
This adds much-needed context to the points I was raising earlier: if a Japanese manga keeps hinting at the idea that the history of past atrocities has been exaggerated or overstated, that in truth they brought good to the world by colonizing other countries, and those who say otherwise are simply lying—that’s a massive red flag. It’s, in essence, a dog whistle.
And then people found the author’s private Twitter account. To quote directly:
The @migiteorerno account is private, but some tweets are visible on the site Favstar that organizes tweets by number of times favorited and retweeted.
One that has been spread across South Korean news articles to various blog posts apparently reads “I believe that categorizing the Japanese soldiers who were in Korea before Korea was a country(??) as ‘Nazis’ is quite crude. Also, I do not believe that the people whose populations were increased twofold by Japan’s unification(??) of the country can be compared to people who experienced the Holocaust. This type of miscategorization is the source of misunderstanding and discrimination.”
@migiteorerno dismisses how Japan’s imperialist war atrocities are often considered the East Asia equivalent to the Holocaust, instead giving credit for Korean’s modernization to Japan’s colonization.
Source. Screencaps of the tweets.
Interesting to note that the Holocaust comparisons aren’t purely due to a Eurocentric reading of the series either—as I mentioned, the visual parallels are definitely intentional—and from what I understand, it’s not like comparing a denial of the Holocaust with a denial of Japanese war crimes is a new thing either way [6].
[6] As a side note, this does suggest the alternate reading that Eldians stand, not for the Third Reich, but rather for the Empire of Japan. In exchange, the humans do stand for the Nazi regime, and the point of Attack on Titan is now “look how much worse they are” by having the Nazi humans opress the Eldians.
Ultimately, this changes very little of my criticism towards the series, since it’s still justifying genocide and criticising the perceived overstatement of past atrocities. You just change the exact flavor of genocide you’re defending.
While the @migiteorerno account has never been officially linked to the author of Attack on Titan—whose name is Hajime Isayama, in case you forgot—there’s enough evidence for most people to assume it is actually him. Here's a skeptic being convinced by stuff like @migiteorerno tweeting about the movie Elysium immediately before Isayama talks about it in his official blog. Here's someone pointing out how @migiteorerno apparently keeps contact with a lot of Isayama’s associates, editor and assistants included.
My source above—the one where I took the translations of the tweet from—expresses, if not outright disbelief, at least a little bit of despair at the possibility of @migiteorerno being Isayama’s account. The reasoning is, according to the writer, Attack on Titan runs a message that’s opposite to that of Japanese imperialism: the military isn’t glorified, war is horrible, and oppression is inhuman.
And once again, I get it—while Attack on Titan was running, it was difficult to know where the story was leading. The ending is fundamental to understand the thesis of a story, and Attack on Titan in particular doesn’t really do “thematic arcs”. Everything is in service to the main thesis.
The ending, however, revealed that the thesis is, as I already argued, that violence is necessary, and the only way to solve conflict. The focus on race as a way to represent the abstract idea of conflict makes the story feel racist by itself already—but the more you look into it, the more you analyze the storyline, the worse it gets.
I’ll be quite frank: even if we’re being charitable, even if we assume all these parallels were unintentional, a complete coincidence, it doesn’t excuse it. When a certain reading of a work is common enough to be perceived so universally, it does not matter whether the author intended it, because the reader doesn’t see the intent behind a work of art. The reader sees the work itself. [7]
[7] And some of these are, I must insist, absolutely intentional. Mikasa, Eren’s half-sister who does nothing, is reportedly named after the battleship Mikasa, which, wouldn’t you know, fought in the Battle of Port Arthur in 1904. Like, I mean, come the fuck on.
“Unfortunate implications” is a couple of words that I see thrown around a lot when talking about these topics, but in the year 2021, this is not “unfortunate”, this is negligent.
Here's an article on how the alt-right fucking loves Attack on Titan. Here’s the kind of memes I kept seeing whenever I browsed around Attack on Titan subreddits. Here’s some of the reactions to the joke. Here’s some more.
Genuinely, from the bottom of my heart:
Fuck this series.
And fuck what it stands for.
8. The Conclusion
At the start of this blog series, I called Attack on Titan a bad series. From a purely technical point of view, I was accurate—I think Attack on Titan completely destroys its own sense of escalation, it sacrifices its characters in the name of its thesis, and the ending is both too abrupt and too slow to make any sense. Characters are dropped mid-series, subplots are forgotten, foreshadowing leads nowhere.
But from a philosophical point of view, Attack on Titan is not just bad—it’s despicable. By itself, the thesis about violence would be bad. By itself, the Holocaust/Japanese imperialism allegory would be repugnant. By itself, the glorification of genocide and advocacy for an ethnostate would be abhorrent.
And we get all three of them, at the same time.
That’s why I decided I wanted to review Attack on Titan. I started this series back when it first came out in 2009 and quickly dropped; pop cultural osmosis was enough for me to somewhat keep up with the storyline. Then the in-universe genocide happened, and the ending happened, and that’s when I actually went back to the start of the series and re-read it all in one go.
I don’t recommend Attack on Titan. Lurking around fan spaces has taught me that people get really into joking about the genocide—and many end up complaining that the series didn’t go far enough, that they should have killed more people.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence, and I don’t think that’s simply people being edgy. Within the story’s universe, it makes a grim sort of sense to advocate for a greater genocide—that’s the true evil of Attack on Titan. In-universe, it justifies itself.
But it’s the author who writes those justifications. The genocide doesn’t happen as a “natural” consequence of the circumstances that lead to it. Those circumstances were put there so that a genocide could happen.
Attack on Titan presents a warped view on humanity so that the political and philosophical stance of “violence is necessary, and atrocities shouldn’t be dwelled on” can hold any water whatsoever. And I just can’t ever recommend that, or call it anything but, at best, horrible. At worst, evil.
The micro writing of Attack on Titan is engaging; that makes it worse. That makes it not only propaganda, but effective propaganda. Every story is, in the end, a way to convey a certain message, a certain moral. And it’s important, when consuming media, to understand what the story is telling us, and what the author is trying to sell.
Because otherwise, we run the risk of buying it.
For real. Fuck this series.
I got a lot of comments on my first blog that said they weren't completely convinced on my argument that the thesis of Attack on Titan is "violence is necessary". I believe this blog addresses those points? But just in case, I thought I'd clarify my thought process in this first comment. Just in case.
Attack on Titan doesn't go full mask-off until the very end. A lot of people argue that the endng completely destroys the rest of the series, and contradicts its messages; in my opinon, the ending and the last arc in general simply answer the question asked by the rest of the series -- "why is there violence?" -- with a clear "because there has to be."
Characters are anti-war, and anti-violence. The series isn't. The narrative goes to huge lengths to make you hate Marley (the humans) and want to see them die; you can check the comments in this blog series and see people indeed defend that position. This is because the series is written in a way where it just feels right, as a reader, to agree.
Eren does have a mental breakdown when he realizes he's going to kill innocents, he does break down and cry about it. He kills innocents anyway. His inner monologue is striking, because he says, outright, that he either kills all Eldians, or he kills all humans. He will kill humans because he can't bear the thought of Eldians dying. That's it.
There's no third option, there's no way to save everyone, it's kill or be killed, us versus them. When violence is inevitable [1] then it also becomes necessary, because it's the only way to survive. It's basic self-defense.
[1] Quite literally; the series ends by explaining there's a time loop at hand, and Eren caused the events that drove him to commit genocide in the first place. The genocide was, in every sense of the word, destined to happen no matter what.
This is why I say that the series goes mask-off at the end, because it shows that all that "we need to get the children out of the forest" speech was very pretty, very noble, morally right platitudes that can't withstand the weight of reality. Violence is going to happen. You just gotta pick which side is yours.
To drive the point home: the last chapters of Attack on Titan involve humans and Eldians trusting each other for the first time in the series, because 80% of humanity has been killed already, and they're at their wits' ends. Only when they've been utterly devastated do humans open up to dialogue--because they see other Eldians fighting Eren.
That's why Armin thanks Eren for the genocide. It was the only way to convince humans.
(And then Paradis gets carpet-bombed anyway, because Eren didn't kill them all.)
wow, it's so much worse than i thought.
I mean i knew it was bad, but holy f***, the bar was low and we've somehow limboed below the mariana fucking trench here.
I sincerely cannot get over how stupid The Rumbling is. This is the dumbest allegory for nuclear deterrents I've ever seen.
Could I get some context for this?
This, to me, is the single most important point to emphasize from this review, as well as the single most damning element of Attack on Titan as an artistic creation. In essence, it's what "death of the author" actually means: as the person who creates a piece of media, you are responsible for every aspect of it, including the ways in which it's misinterpreted.
Even if you portray awful behavior as something that eventually comes around to haunt and destroy the protagonist, like Fight Club and Breaking Bad sort of do, you still bear some degree of fault for people who skim your story at the surface level, miss the subtext and even some of the explicit morals, and think being a murderous meth dealer or selfish asshole is super cool. You're the one who set up the scenario and wrote a story around it, and the core purpose of telling a story is to communicate ideas. If people don't read your intentions correctly, that's on you for not communicating your ideas clearly enough.
Some artists like to argue that they're not liable for the stupid thoughts of stupid people, and they're right in the sense that they're not "liable" in a legal sense. In an artistic and arguably a moral sense, though, you absolutely are culpable for the impact your words have, regardless of what you meant for them to do. It's why I've gotten so up in arms on this site about the effect that "jokes" and leading questions can have--after all, to paraphrase a commenter on one of my blogs, we're all writers here, so how could we possibly argue in good faith that words mean nothing?
Well. That is utterly horrifying. Very glad I never got into this series. (Heck, I was getting imperialist vibes from the earlier parts of your dissection.)
5543359
You summarized my thoughts better than I could have done. That conclusion is the exact reason why I came here and stayed.
Nevermind the micro writing. Indeed, the fact that it's so good is a bad thing. The macro is the heart of the story, the thing the author actively works to develop after getting a rough first draft down, and this story's heart is a putrid black tar.
As the conclusion says itself:
Be mindful and on your feet, lest you get rooted by the tar around you. Fuck me, that was a conclusion.
So my initial sentiment when I saw the advertisements for the anime and the initial reviews was correct.
A shit series.
For me the giant robots where missing. And now I found the technological regression strange like where are the bloody MLRS seen in one of the pictures coming from and ... are those B-2 Stealth Bombers?
Like WTF wasn't this a fantasy series.
Aside from the ending which I heard was a letdown, the rest of it seems pretty hype.
In retrospect I feel like Eren would've done a lot more to at least force a surrender on the rest of the world rather than kill everything. You know like how most wars conclude :v
Also as a writer person, how would you conclude this racial conflict in a less thematically fucked way
* SIGH *
I`ll admit I may be wrong. No, I´m PROBABLY wrong. But between the fact that I still have to watch Attack on Titan, and, the fact that we live in a time where EVERYTHING is racist, if you look hard enough, you´ll need to excuse me if I simply don´t have enough spare mental energy to read this wall of text (wich, by no way, means it is a BAD wall of text...it is just...too much...right now, for me) in order to come to terms that another aspect of our society, one aspect that should bring us joy and enterteinament (yeah...I know...I wrote it wrong...again, not enough mental energy to care) is racist.
Actually...is there something left that is not racist ? Something I can watch, read, enjoy, overall, without discovering, later, that it should be burnt to the ashes for being racist. Or homophobic. Or nazi-facist ?
Sci-Fi related, if possible. Or is Sci-Fi is racist too...I don´t know anymore...hard to keep up with things nowadays....
5543510
It depends. A fair bit of military sci fi tends to lean heavily towards hard right in their politics and their dislike of civilian governance
Incorrect. They are called Marleyans because Marley is their country. Eldians were originally a warmongering tribe before the power of the titans made them distinctively different from normal humans during the time they established the Eldian Empire. Hizuru is another country which is full of people who are neither Eldians or Marleyans.
5543510
Stanisław Lem is a good science fiction author. He's also got some weird takes, a bit of sexism for sure, but…
Here's the thing: Only because that's true that doesn't make it bad to enjoy his works. Me knowing that Lem had sexist ideas and that some of that found its way into his work doesn't detract from my enjoyment of that work, and that again doesn't make me a bad person.
So, your comment reads to me like
"I sometimes don't wanna thing critically about the stuff I consume, so it's very inconsiderate of you to think critically about stuff."
And yeah, nothing is perfect. So everything can be criticized for something. That's how culture grows and develops.
5543552
I'm aware. The original draft ot the blog even had a section on the etymology of "Hizuru", but it was quickly made apparent in comments (and in my PMs and the like) that a lot of people reading these blogs hadn't read Attack on Titan.
The narrative and the worldbuilding of the series is just complicated enough that explaining it in too much detail, in abstract, becomes a slog. Simplifying for the sake of readability was a necessity for this blog series -- and quite frankly, just going 'Humans' makes it easier to understand. It's the same reason I used 'Eldians' instead of 'Subjects of Ymir', too.
5543510
Uh, who's forcing you?
Also, i hear Star Trek is alright? Stein's Gate, Infinity Train, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Ghostbusters, Megamind, Gurren Lagann, Evangelion,
5543519
I cant avoid´the feeling that you are refering to a lot of the 80´s sci-fi (Starship Troopers, Robocop).
But, usually, they have a satire-like vision, of clear criticize, such more hard-right tropes. The first Robocop, for example, is dark humour all over.
It's worth mentioning that Germany is almost excessively ashamed of what it did back then, while Japan... well, you covered it better than I did.
5543599
I'm not. I'm more referring to books written by the likes of David Webber, John Ringo and Tom Kratman
5543325
Well, as one of the people who was wondering about the justifications back after the first post dropped, I have to say... I guess I see where you're coming from, kinda? Like, if we take your premises as givens, then yes, it all adds up. But your premises? Not the arguments, but the "here's the facts" that precede them? I'm still not sure how you got to some of them.
I'm not going to go line-by-line through everything you wrote since, again, I agree with your conclusions about lots of specific things, and with lots of your reactions (in particular, how very horrifying that the author is a mask-barely-hanging-on-by-a-thread imperial nationalist! Ew!). But, there are some things about your larger reading of the comic that I just don't get. Like, just to pick one little bit to death by way of example, near the start you say:
Well, no he wasn't right! Not just morally, but like, he actually made a bad choice in-universe, and the narrative takes pains to show us that! Eren could've gone with a "test-rumbling:" wake up a hundred or so of the wall-titans, march them over to the coast, and have them stop there where any country could send their boats over to see "yup, they can rumble all right." Boom! The damage done by the Marlyans learning that the rumbling might be an empty threat is allayed, and with that accomplished he can take away everyone else's titan powers, and Paradis can modernize while the other nations are paralyzed by faux-nuclear deterrent and hopefully, after a few generations of Eldians not being able to be turned into city-destroying murder-machines without any notice, everyone can integrate peacefully.
But, and this is the classic tragedy part of the story, Eren can't do that, because what if it doesn't work? Not that he cares about Eldians, or humanity, or ethics, but what if something happens to Mikasa or Armin? Because he's a child soldier, and even if he's "grown up" over a couple of timeskips, you never stop being a child soldier without the kind of post-trauma support and unconditional love that he very clearly never gets. He lacks empathy, is singularly obsessed with protecting his self-identified family or in-group, and is unable to see beyond immediate threats down at the base of Maslow's pyramid. If he does a test-rumbling, there's always a chance the other nations will still try something; no deterrent is perfect. And if that happens, and if Mikasa or Armin got killed as a result, it would mean (to him) that he failed to protect his in-group.
So he decides to kill 80% of humanity, because then he knows that Mikasa and Armin will be safe, for their lifetimes.
And that's it. That's the tragedy. Because if you go that route, of course war will follow as soon as the remaining 20% recovers (not to mention the whole "also, you just murdered 80% of humanity, which is bad on its own merits" thing...), but Eren can't think that far ahead. All he can see is "protect in-group from immediate threat regardless of consequences."
So, no, I can't see how "violence [was] the solution" when it's explicitly shown that it failed, and only lead to more violence. I can't see how you got "he was unequivocally right" when the series explicitly shows us how poorly things went for everyone because of his choice. Given how good the ethnostate of Paradis was at finding non-racial reasons to sub-group themselves and kill each other (and yes, there was plenty of "kill the foreign bloodlines" in there too, but Paradisian Eldians found plenty of reasons to kill other full-blooded Paradisian Eldians over the course of the series), I don't see how a conclusion that "He didn’t go far enough" is supported by the story.
I dunno, I feel like I'm being really negative about your analysis here, or sounding like I'm stanning for AoT? But I don't mean to do either; AoT was just okay, and had plenty of really stupid bits and at least a few really offensive ones, and I enjoyed reading your review and agreed with large parts of it. But I'm still just not following where you're seeing certain events in the story.
Even with that said, you pointed out a lot of problems I had with the series, opened my eyes to a few things I hadn't noticed, and put together a damn interesting analysis. So thanks for this, Aragon; I've really enjoyed reading it over the last few days!
5543510
Just watch the series. Most of this post is over-inflated and grasping for straws in order to paint the series as some horrific abomination.
5543510
Why is it that on a blog that is specifically for breaking down AoT and explaining the problems in its thesis and execution, you feel the need to comment "haven't read this blog, but I'm tired of having to think about racism, it's sooooo exhausting can't I just have a break :(." Like damn yeah it is exhausting having to think about racism. Imagine not having the choice to avoid it! That sounds like it would be horrible! Maybe we should do something about it, like point out where it exists so it can't be perpetuated and so people don't unknowingly parrot its ideas? Something like what this blog that you commented on without reading for some reason does?
Look, if it's exhausting to try and avoid racist media, imagine how exhausting it is for people harmed by racism just trying to find something to watch that doesn't justify or glorify the problems they face. Also, just getting caught up in "can somebody tell me what's racist so I can avoid it so the woke crowd doesn't get me" completely misses the point of understanding why these pieces of media are racist, why that is harmful, and what we should avoid replicating. If you just think "meh everything is racist ""these days"" whatever" then you're not actually thinking about the material. And yes, turn your brain off media is fun and deserves to exist. But if it contains imperialist propaganda that people are going to thoughtlessly consume, would you rather people never point it out just because it's "tiring" to do so?
So, Aragon, after writing three blog posts about this story, I can't help but feel you have some mildly strong feelings about this.
In seriousness, I meant what I said when the first flag that this show was going to be weird was a literally eight-year-old child talking about political theory. I'm also not surprised that AoT has good technical points and terrible technical points while still being super popular (I have opinions on RWBY, is all I'll say on that front). You do make wonderful points, I am fascinated that the franchise has such a deep dive into crazy town, and I'm perturbed that it does.
Thank you for your service and suffering on our behalf.
Well, I certainly got much more enjoyment out of reading this review than I ever got out of the few episodes I watched!
While it wasn't an anime I ever planned on watching, thanks for the breakdown on it.
Honestly, given what you've written here, I was thinking the Eldians sound a lot like the Jews as portrayed by Nazi propaganda. So, er, yeah, part of me wonders if maybe this series isn't a little antisemitic maybe?
Besides, who says they must be only one allegory!?
I mean, I haven't actually read or watched the thing. Season 1 was super neat, and then I read about the Titans in the walls and I was like "nah, fuck that noise."
Looks like I made the right choice!
5543358
King Julien, the lemur king from the Madagascar movies.
There was a picture earlier that had Eren dressed up like him.
Attack on Titan gets there deliberately, more or less... but a lot of works of fiction that feature superpowers (or aliens) of one degree or another put their foot in this bear trap without meaning to.
Giving people superpowers is an old, old, old literary device. Gilgamesh, you know, from-the-oldest-story-in-the-world-Gilgamesh has what would be recognizable to a modern reader as superpowers, superpowers that crucially are based on his bloodline.
Making said powers based on bloodline or heritability is also an old literary device.
And that's well and good when your stories are limited in scope and you're not at all engaged in what a modern literary analyst or critic would call magical realism, where you try and extend the implications, consequences, and fallout from such things in a way that is recognizable to our own society.
Which is when you step on the land mine, because if your literary seed was "superpowers which are more or less bloodline based" what you've just done is literally created either 1) the Overman, or 2) a legitimately dangerous minority that does in fact by its very existence pose a unique threat to those around them. You might not know you did this. But depending on how what you're writing evolves, eventually someone is going to go "waiiiiiittt a minute."
One of the reasons the X-Men don't function particularly well as an allegory for racism these days is that after the fifth or sixth time a single mutant proves they can single-handedly plunge the entire planet into peril and rack up a seven or eight figure body count, and that mutant is perfectly capable of passing those dangerous powers onto their offspring, you start thinking "maybe the guys behind the Mutant Registration Act were on to something." (Conversely, the fifth or sixth time some human comes very near to murdering all the mutants everywhere, you likewise can't help thinking "maybe Magneto was right." Different topic tho.)
Even if it had been written by a different author with a different sense of intentionality behind them, I don't think Attack on Titan could have not stepped on this rake given the sort of stories about politics, war, history, and racism it was trying to engage with. You can do stories with people who have superpowers, even ones that establish them as a seperate and arguably dangerous or superior race... but if you do that it REALLY limits a lot of your options for acting as an allegory of or trying to shine a light on the real world. You gotta step a long way back from the magical realism, because trying to apply magical realism is going to take you to some places that might be stories worth telling... but maybe are gonna take you to places you don't want to go.
Yes. What a travesty, what a fucking shit show. Fuck it.
So how often have you gotten the;
‘Maybe it’s more meant to be a story that shows what happens if we don’t move past rasium?’ So far. Still kind of in that camp, but really finding it harder to justify the longer I think about it :/
I agree that the series is morally bankrupt, I disagree that it's creating alt righters anymore than video games cause violence. Then again if a series is being so lovingly adopted by said alt righters then it's time to do a double take. Let it be condemned for what it is.
5543703
Sorry...wall of text and another "everything is racist".
Again.
I mean no disrespect...but that is tiresome.
5544435
Lovely reaction. Fuck off.
5543510
I mean, there's a non-zero chance you're being facetious here, buuuut there's honestly a LOT of legitimately thoughtful (and entertaining!) sci-fi and fantasy that is by no means racist or sexist or whatever. N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became is a love letter to NYC that's also the best urban fantasy book I've read in a long time. Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth is a wild space-opera-fantasy mashup that's unlike anything on the shelves right now. Or, while I haven't read past the first one, my friends keep raving about Martha Wells' Murderbot novellas.
Or hell, if you don't feel like reading, Legends of Tomorrow is simultaneously one of the dumbest, smartest, and gayest things on TV right now. Seriously, go watch it. Just skip the first season if you're watching on Netflix or whatever.
And that's just a couple of things off the top of my head. The moral here is, it's not hard to find entertainment that's not full of shitty ideas being put forth by shitty people.
5543670
Yeah, fuck Tom Kratman.
Weber's ... okay, I guess? Though John Ringo ... uh, just google "Oh John Ringo No" sometime. It's an entertaining read.
This said, Mil-SF doesn't necessarily have to be right wing, I've found! It's just that Baen publishes ... well, Baen stuff.
On the flipside, there's stuff like Tanya Huff's Valor novels (the first one is Roarke's Drift! In SPAAACE!) or John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, both of which are definitely left-aligned. Or heck, going back further, Louis MacMaster-Bujold's Vorkosigan books are almost deconstructions of the 'standard' Mil-SF narrative/hero? Or then you've got Eric Flint puttering around as Baen's token lefty. Rats, Bats, and Vats is a goofy novel, but it's definitely more on the side of the downtrodden footsloggers than any space-Emperors or what have you.
But yeah, I can goob about sci-fi books all day long if you let me.
5544435
Maybe you shouldn't be disrespectful then.
5544513
Yee. There's plenty of good examples out there if he isn't being facetious. Where there's no instances of the "heroes" commiting war crimes or calling a kid an idiot because he wants to have peace between two civilizations
Heh. I had stopped reading the manga when it was revealed the wall was made of titans. Around that time I could tell the story was going into a philosophical and god-fearing archetype. And I recall reading up on Air Gear before then and seeing the same thing with the tower to God or whatever and everybody sniffing their farts of superiority.
I did not expect AoT would nose dive into some type of racial propanda to the level of Nazis. Then again, the story is very bloody and cruel. And what better template of cruelty than the Nazis.
5543510
Geez, you might think it was all written by humans or something.
Humans are not perfect, and a whole lot of humans have a whole lot of bad viewpoints about things. Some of them express these bad viewpoints in their writing deliberately to promote and glorify them; others because that's just their culture and how they understand the world; and a few in order to examine and critique these bad viewpoints, and propose alternative viewpoints.
And yes, you're not entirely wrong. There is a lot of racism, imperialism, sexism, queerphobia, and so on, in western literature; because there is a lot of racism, imperialism, sexism, queerphobia, and so on, in western culture. That's clearly demonstrable and unavoidable. Denying it doesn't make it go away.
Human literature is often problematic, because humans are often problematic.
it's up to every reader to decide what they will consider tolerable in the work that the consume, and how they react to it, based on what sort of person they want to be, and how they want to think about the world. There's a lot of stuff that I still enjoy despite the obvious problems with it, and understanding how those problems inform the work. There's also a lot of stuff that I used to enjoy, but no longer can because of the problems, and the fact that I've grown past the stage where I can simply ignore the problems. And I definitely do not want to be the sort of person who simply ignores problems and accepts things uncritically.
5544513
Wow, I'd entirely forgotten that existed. I remember it being quite entertaining.
I feel like a large part of Attack on Titan's popularity can be traced directly to it getting a stupidly good anime adaptation. So much of this series works better in the hands of the Studio Wit team and if nothing else, some very passionate animators got to do a lot of great work for it. If you're a big fan of the anime and you haven't watched it already, do yourself a favor and go watch Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress. You know all that beautiful, high-quality, kinetic animation you remember from AoT? It's got that. Same director, same animation team, very fun, the ending's a bit of a disappointment by most people's accounts but it's still worth it. Or did you want another sci-fi/alt-universe downer show? Go watch 86. Or Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans. There's no shortage of good mili sci-fi and fantasy in anime right now and I guarantee you will find something that speaks to you in the same way AoT does, or at least fill the hole in your heart. If you feel at all conflicted about following the show now, I promise you, there's another anime out there that's just as good and equally deserving of your time.
AoT being shit is a real downer for me too - seriously, I mean it. I followed the series for a while after Eren turned into a Titan on the basis of the show being "the longest backdoor pilot to a mecha series of all time", and I was excited to see where it was going to go with that, and I fell off as the show began to throw out signals that it just refused to be as good as it seemed like it was going to be back in that first arc, and it was clear it couldn't recapture the lightning in a bottle. Trust me though, you will not miss this show nearly as much as you think you will once you take a look at what else is out there.
5544085
I think that's a pretty interesting point, and that the rake metaphor can be expanded upon to say something about AoT. Let's say you do always have to step on the rake for the sake of simplicity, but a lot can go into the setup of the rake and how the consequences from that are handled.
You can stumble upon it on accident, like X-men, sure, but also, you can do the equivalent of yelling "DO IT FOR THE VINE! (THE TIK-TOK! [I'm old])" before leaping on to the rake and slamming it into your forehead.
The outcome of stepping on that rake is something that you can choose to handle differently, too. You could then say, "ok, ow," and move the rake out of the way, or you could say "well, time to kill all the rakes."
If you've lost track of what my extended metaphor is trying to say, good, because I have too, to be honest. I think a lot of credit can be given to the notion of, wow, it would be nice if AoT setup the rake next to a place where Eldians and humans could recover from the rake and come back together in an effortful peace, instead of putting the rake right in front of a giant pit of spikes with a single ladder for climbing out that has a big fat label that just says GENOCIDE on it.
I'm using your comment as a springboard and not as something I'm disagreeing with, just to be clear -
I'm reminded by all of this of when the Mane 6 visited Our Town and got into an argument with eachother in front of the whole town, worrying the town before they laughed it off. The townsponyolk asked, how'd you do that? How are you okay? And the M6 just cheerily shrugged and said, well, we just are!, clarifying that after years of friendship (and the implied effort of smoothing things out occasionally across years together) they can get over differences.
It makes me want to see an AoT where, instead of declaring racial genocidal war as the only solution, Eren and whoever the protagonists are have to stop the alt-right-esque extremists from causing genocide, imply that genocide is bad, and that even despite tragedy humanity can overcome and make a better place, whether it takes 10 years or 50 or 100.
I want to frame that paragraph and hang it in the wall.
This is a fantastic essay. Are you posting it anywhere else, like Tumblr or Reddit? I'd like to show this to a friend, because he wants to watch the series, and I'd rather not now. But I'm worried it would get off track if I also had to explain to him what this My Little Pony fanfiction website is, and why it happened to be posted on here.
5547379
That's the plan! I might add it to Offprint and some other blog, so people can check it without it being linked to a horse website. I'll notify you when I post it, if you want.
5548107
Sure. Though I still think it would do well on Tumblr as well.
Well, shit.
I thought that there was some iffy stuff here and there as I watched the anime, but this really highlights the difference in being able to notice patterns and put things together when you go through all of it in a short time span.
I think most of the anime's soundtrack is great; it's just a shame that it's all in service to a twisted message.
This was a deeply fascinating read. Thank you so much for putting it together.
My first and only meaningful experience with AoT, was watching videos of a certain youtuber playing the game, and the impression I came away from that with was "Wow, I'm probably gonna enjoy watching/reading this series. I'm probably also gonna look back on it once I finish it, and ask myself 'why the fuck did I watch/read this?'." I haven't touched AoT since.
Thanks for having now justified my instinctive reaction from 5 years ago with this review series. It was an, uh, fun? read.
Everytime someone in a server I'm in starts a convo about not liking AoT, your review always helps spread awareness about how despicable this show is.