Attack on Attack on Titan: an In-Depth Review of a Story I Hate · 9:38pm Jun 26th, 2021
Attack on Titan—Shingeki no Kyojin if we’re being Like That, and we’re not—is a manga written and illustrated by Hajime Isayama, which ran from September 2009 to April 2021, and it’s bad. It’s so fucking bad.
And it's fascinating.
Narratively speaking, Attack on Titan makes some incredibly stupid mistakes. But that’s the thing, right? It also does some things incredibly well. Only, those things it does incredibly well actually make the story worse as a whole. It’s incredible. It’s super entertaining. Don’t read it. It blows.
So that’s what we’re talking about today. This review will be split in sections for ease of reading, and it will contain full spoilers of everything Attack on Titan. You don’t need to know anything about the series to understand this review, and I don’t recommend you read it if you haven’t already.
Let's get to it without further ado. We're going to talk structure, thesis, allegories--and for the love of God, we're going to talk politics.
The Story
[Note: Please, keep in mind that the screenshots are read right-to-left]
Attack on Titan can be roughly split into four parts—as in, what the story is actually about changes three times as the comic goes on. The genre, the hook, the reason why you’re reading it—it keeps evolving, it keeps mutating; there’s no real status quo for this series.
This is why some readers dropped the series very early into its run, while others got incredibly hooked. Some people couldn’t stay engaged after all these paradigm shifts, while others revel in them.
So at the start, Attack on Titan is an ontological mystery: most of humanity has been wiped out by the titular titans: massive human-like monsters, ugly as all hell, who kill and eat any human on sight. Meeting a titan is an immediate death sentence; they’re strong, fast, never tire, and brush off most wounds.
We don’t know what they are, or where they came from, or why they’re there. They just showed up one day and started killing people, and it’s been more than three hundred years and they never stopped.
They look like this, which like, some of you will immediately go “hmmm” at this and, yeah, frankly, yeah. Yeah.
The few humans who survived live in a single country, surrounded by giant walls. It’s a militaristic, steampunk society. They have guns, but they don’t have electricity, that sorta deal. Nobody knows how their ancestors built those walls. All they know is, the titans want them dead.
So that’s the setting. The hook is, our main character’s mother is eaten alive by one of these titans, so he wants to take revenge. He wants to kill all titans, and while we’re at it, discover what titans are and where they came from.
Notice the wording! This will be important later! In a bad way!
This is what the story is about for the first few chapters; then, the first of those three big paradigm shifts happens: the main character himself—Eren Jaeger [1]—turns into a titan during a fight. Turns out, he can do that! Humans can do that.
[1] The official translation uses “Eren Yaeger”, even though his name is very obviously meant to be “Jaeger”, “Jäger”, German for “hunter”. He wants to kill all titans, the whole narrative is about the hunted becoming the hunters, etcetera etcetera. Jaeger.
Translations insist on using hepburn romanization, which means that you translate shit phonetically rather than properly. Like, one character is French, and clearly supposed to be named Rivaille, but they translated it as "Levi" because Kodansha is like, genuinely, bottom of my heart, fuck the readers.
This is the least radical shift the story will go through—I mean, the titans look like messed-up humans anyway, so it’s not that crazy a jump in logic to think “oh, maybe they’re actually humans.” It’s not unexpected.
However, it changes the vibe of the story a lot. Up until now, meeting a titan equals certain death; the comic establishes this relentlessly, it has entire chapters dedicated to the idea. Just seeing a titan is a traumatic experience that changes you forever; surviving that encounter makes you a war hero.
The last picture here is one of the main characters, as soon as they meet their first titan. It’s a very Games-of-Thrones-ish moment, establishing that:
A) Anyone can die.
B) Main characters are not exempt from this fate.
Only now, Eren can turn into a titan and just Jackie Chan his way out of a fight, so like, sure. Why not. There goes the hopeless vibe of the story.
Take THAT, existential dread!
The first time I tried to read it, this is where I dropped the series, because soon enough other people start having titan powers, and Attack on Titan becomes the Power Rangers but with big naked people instead of giant robots, and like, I’m good, thanks.
So, after this, as I said, it turns out other characters can also turn into titans. These ones are evil, though, so that’s what the story’s about for a bit—find out which of the main characters is a traitor titan-shifter, and learn why they’re doing this, and what is going on, and where do titans come from, etcetera.
There’s also a subplot at this point that’s like, oh, hey, are these people gay? These people are super gay-coded. Are these people hooking up? And the answer is, hahah, nah, we’re gonna bury the fuck out of our gays, so that’s a Whole Thing. More on this on the “Characters” and “Female Characters" sections later.
And then, the second shift happens.
This is the biggest twist in the story. Just like the first one, it’s telegraphed well enough that it’s kind of predictable—there’s life outside the walls, and that’s where the titans come from. That said, the twist keeps going: while the island where our characters live is a soft steampunk sorta world, the rest of the world is on an early-1900s level of technology, with electricity and planes and trains and so on. Every titan, indeed, was a human once, but the world is not full of titans either—it’s just this one island.
Also, the series has been set in Madagascar the whole time.
This will be relevant later
Also!
The series has been set in a concentration camp the whole time!
Not this one, though! This is more of a ghetto, where most of the story also takes place. Yeah, it turns into that kind of story.
Turns out, the rest of the world hates the people of this island, which, we discover, is named Paradis [2]. The people of Paradis are the only ones who can turn into titans, mostly against their will. The island of Paradis is a prison, the titans are thrown there to keep them in check, and Attack on Titan is now a story about racism, but most of all, it’s a story about genocide.
[2] I groaned, too, but if you want subtlety you really can’t be reading manga, it won’t be good for your health.
2. Attack on Titan is a story about genocide
And not in a good way. Not in a “let’s explore the consequences of a genocide, which is a human tragedy so great in scope it’s hard to even understand it emotionally”, but rather, in a “genocide is unavoidable and arguably not that bad” way.
Hell of a thesis.
Anyway. So after this second paradigm shift, there’s a timeskip, and the story gets sidetracked for a while. We see what happens in the outside world, and learn that the people who come from Paradis are discriminated against in a very horrible, inhuman way.
That last one is a little girl being eaten alive by dogs, which is a cool and fun thing to have in your story, I guess.
We see that the traitors who could become titans were sent by this outside world to prevent the people of Paradis from learning the truth. We see that our main characters have infiltrated this outside world and are investigating it, incognito.
We see our main character, Eren, kill a lot of innocents. Emphasis on how he kills civilians, women, and children.
We don’t know why. The other characters also don’t know why. Eren has changed after the timeskip and is now way more edgy, and also more quiet and somber. Hence the killing of civilians and children. He’s brought back to Paradis, and he, uh.
He kind of, how do I explain this.
He creates something called the Jaegerists, a party of extremist, militaristic warmongers, who want to kill anyone who’s not a member of their race. The way they put it, the people outside of Paradis hate us, say we’re inferior, but actually they’re inferior, and they’re making us pay for the sins of our past, and we will not let that happen, and HEIL-
Yeah, you know what, more on this later. Third paradigm shift happens now, and it’s summarized in three points:
A) Eren Jaeger, our main character, can see the future. He’s been able to see the future for years, now.
B) Eren Jaeger is now a villain protagonist.
C) Eren Jaeger commits genocide.
Remember the walls that I mentioned all the way back? The ones that protect people against titans? They’re made out of very big titans, actually. Millions of them. Eren, for a series of convoluted reasons, can control them. So he does that, and he uses his new army of colossal friends to commit genocide.
The story is now about the rest of our main cast trying to stop Eren from committing genocide. They chase him around the world, and find him, and eventually stop him, and the story ends with the death of our main character.
And also most of humanity.
The text of the story, the things the characters say, indicates that this is a bad thing. The subtext of the story?
Yeah, nah. “Genocide is unavoidable, and arguably, not that bad.”
So, that’s the basic framework of the story out of the way. Now let’s get into why it’s bad—and to do that, we first have to say why Attack on Titan sometimes is actually really good, and fun to read, and I’m not being sarcastic here. A lot of people really enjoyed this series when it started, and all the way up till the ending showed what the story was really about, and I don’t blame them.
I myself had fun with this story often! Which is what makes it so much worse.
3. The Things Attack on Titan Does Well
When Attack on Titan came out, it got big, and it got big fast. To this day it’s one of the best-selling manga in the world, with over 100 million copies sold, and while the ending angered many, one can’t argue that this series, whether through the manga itself or through the incredibly popular anime adaptation, made a lot of noise. There are movies about Attack on Titan, books about Attack on Titan, videogames, a Marvel crossover. It’s not a series, it’s a media empire.
And we can be cynical about it if we want—but you don’t get this big without a modicum of quality.
So, yes, as I said earlier, Attack on Titan does a few things very, very well—especially at the start. I want to be fair in this review, and acting like the entirety of the series is badly executed, or that people who like the show have no media literacy, would be unfair. Attack on Titan gives you reasons to believe it’s a genuinely great show, up until it isn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of my readers had at least watched the first season of the animated show, and had positive thoughts on it.
In that vein, then, here’s a list of all the things that, in my opinion, Attack on Titan does well.
- The very nature of the story, the ontological mystery at the center of it all, is well-executed. The hook is interesting, you want to know both what happened in the past, and what comes next. The story keeps throwing twists at you, past chapters keep getting recontextualized as we understand more about the world, and overall, the story is very dynamic.
- The characters grow! They learn from their mistakes, and change, and make new interesting mistakes, and sometimes they die. Character interaction is the soul of Attack on Titan—early on, it turns itself into an ensemble cast story, and that was a good choice. You get invested in them, you learn to like them.
- The action in Attack on Titan is horrific and trauma inducing, and some of its imagery is purposely grotesque. This makes it an effective tension-builder—as I said, people just die all the time—but this is juxtaposed with the more slice-of-lifey scenes that happen whenever we see the characters coexisting. These moments between big action setpieces act as a palate cleanser, and they also sell you that these people are human. They joke around, they can be genuinely funny, and they try to find levity in all the horror of their lives. Attack on Titan at its best is a story about people trying to live while they survive. Which in turn, of course, only makes the action more horrific.
- The characters are distinct enough that you can tell them all apart both in looks and general character and motivation at a glance. Which sounds like not that big of a deal, but this is a series with a big cast, and it’s manga. So it is a big deal, actually. The art is stylistic, but it has strength and dynamism to it; seeing still images does it a disservice, because it really looks good when you read it all in a row.
- There’s this character called Hange, and they’re nonbinary and also one of the main, most important characters, and a fan favorite. That’s kind of neat. The official translation uses they/them. They have a lot of shit going on, they’re not just defined by their lack of a binary gender, and that’s also pretty neat. Manga is an incredibly cisheteronormative medium, so it’s refreshing to see such a mainstream series have one of its best characters be trans.
- Attack on Titan has a lot of jokes, and frankly, they can be real good. There’s an old piece of advice I stole from Ryukishi07 that I like to tell newbie writers—if you want your readers to cry for your characters, make them laugh first. Make the character fun, and funny, and entertaining to read about, and then your readers will develop an emotional link to said character. Kill them then, and see the tears flow. Attack on Titan does this, and it does it well.
- The worldbuilding is pretty cool up till a certain point. The way people kill titans—high-speed steam-powered parkour with swords—is just stupid enough that you roll with it. You’re like, yeah, yeah. I dig that. I dig it. It’s just visually effective enough that it works.
So that’s a pretty good list! Especially because so much of it is so general, and encompasses so much about the story. Shame, then, that all this good micro writing and well-paced, well-executed action scenes are in service of a thesis that is, legitimately, one of the worst things I’ve seen in a while.
4. Attack on Titan Has One of the Worst Theses I’ve Seen in a While
A thesis is, in few words, what a story is about. It’s the message communicated to the audience through the story and characters and setting. It’s the philosophical core of the story. I mentioned genocide earlier, and that is the thesis of Attack on Titan as of the last act. However, it also has a much more general thesis:
Attack on Titan is a story about violence, and the necessity of violence.
One of the very first things the series does is establish that titans are ruthless, and can’t be reasoned with. This is hammered home multiple times—no matter how much you plead, or what you do, or how you treat them, the titans will kill you as soon as they lay eyes on you.
The death scenes are purposely ugly, visceral, and upsetting. Nobody keeps their cool whenever titans enter the picture, and the series takes grim glee in juxtaposing the peppy hero-like attitude of newbies before they fight their first titan, with the horrible things that happen to them once they actually fight. Titans represent a violent death, and nobody stays calm when faced with it.
These events happen in the span of of five pages. I counted!
So the only way to deal with a titan is to kill it first. Anything else is suicide. Violence is necessary, because violence is inevitable, and you can only choose between being the victim or the victimizer?
Do you want to be the hunter, or do you want to be the hunted?
So, there’s your answer. This is the story of Eren Hunter, who wants to kill all titans, because that’s the only way for humanity to survive: to destroy that which threatens you.
Now. War is a very common allegory in the fantasy genre. By making the abstract philosophical conflict of your story a literal one, the struggle is made explicit, and easier to understand. Famously, the big villain in Game of Thrones—the ice zombies—are an allegory for climate change; the author has the hero stabbing climate change to death to explain that we should try to avoid total ecological and environmental disaster.
Which means that, no, Attack on Titan is not a lesser series by having the characters fight the Other with swords and cool steampunk devices. That’s just a tool. It’s what the war represents that makes it icky—Game of Thrones has climate change as a threat, right? So what does Attack on Titan have? What do the titans represent?
This isn’t clear from the get-go, which is why Attack on Titan can make such a good impression at the start. Eren Jaeger wants to be free, and his best friend wants to explore the world beyond the walls—so maybe the titans are the abstract threat of authoritarianism? Maybe they represent death?
What and who the titans are is one of the main mysteries, after all. You want to find out, you want to keep reading. And then, we’re told the answer, and the mystery behind the titans is revealed, and Attack on Titan shows us what the story is really about.
According to Attack on Titan, the biggest threat against humanity is humanity itself.
Mind, this is not me reading too much into the text. The titans are actual humans, they’re people who want us dead, and so we have to kill them first. Also, like, y’know.
We’re just literally fucking told that humans are the real threat.
Like, out loud.
Like, it’s in the dialogue.
The thing about war, as an allegory, is that it’s reductive. It presents a conflict that is only solved through the destruction of the others. It works very well for certain conflicts—to go back to the earlier example, you can’t negotiate with the abstract conflict of climate change—but others, it has some Unfortunate Implications. Ursula K. Le Guin avoided the use of war as an allegory; she found it simplistic, and easy to misuse. To quote her directly:
Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.
If the actual threat that the war is representing is literally other people, humanity itself, then what we’re left with is a text that kind of… advocates for the necessity of genocide?
We repeatedly, constantly, get Eren saying that he wants to exterminate all titans. “I’m going to kill all of these animals” is something he says multiple times; the term extermination is used literally—and the story treats this as a good, correct goal to pursue. Then we learn that the titans are people, and controlled by other people, and Eren’s goal is to still exterminate them all.
The series keeps asking the same question—is violence necessary? And every time, the answer is yes.
Homo homini lupus. Fuck yeah.
Now, the characters often talk about how they don’t want war. They repeatedly express that they want peace, that they don’t want to kill innocent people, that they want to talk with the enemies and find a civil solution to their conflict.
Every time, though, this is seen as a foolish dream at best, an actual show of cowardice at worst. There’s a couple moments where our main character himself recognizes that, actually, his enemies aren’t as different from him. Both times, this is immediately followed by him going “mind, I’m still killing all of you.”
One chapter later:
Eleven pages later:
Sure, the text of the story tells you war is bad, and the characters are convinced war is bad, but they also feel violence is the only real solution to any real problem. There’s simply too many evil people out there, too many cowards, too many traitors who will take any opportunity to kill you.
This culminates in the big final conflict of the series, exemplified by Eren Jaeger and his secret half-brother who can turn into a giant killer monkey: there are two solutions to the “titan problem”:
A) Genocide: we kill everyone outside of the island of Paradis.
B) Genocide: we forcefully sterilize everyone in the island of Paradis.
Eren wins.
And he feels bad about it!
But the narrative is like, nah, mate, you’re cool. You’re cool. If you hadn’t killed them all they wouldn’t have learned their lesson.
This is the moral backbone of the story going, “yeah, thanks for the genocide, it really was the only way I guess”
So, to reiterate: Attack on Titan is a story about violence, and the necessity of violence. Genocide, it says by the very end, is unavoidable, and arguably not that bad. It’s the only real way to find peace.
…Which, I mean, yeah. It’s not a good thesis. It’s one of the worst theses I’ve seen, from a simple moral standpoint, because it basically says that—I mean, this is advocating for genocide. This is just straight up advocating for genocide as the only way to solve a large-scale problem.
But that’s not the only reason why the thesis is bad. I do oppose this thesis morally, but also on a purely literary level—because the thesis informs the rest of Attack on Titan, right? It’s what the story is about, it affects everything else in the story.
It completely fucks up the characters. To give you an example.
Continued in Part Two.
I believe it's supposed to be an allegory to WWII. It's pro-Japanese imperialism, which is kind of awful.
(Er, to be specific, the fact that people don't know about the outside world and are confined to the city, as the Japanese viewed Japan. There's also a bold reference to a general from the war, as I recall.)
The rest of the review is written already -- part two (which I'll post in roughly two days) will talk about the sexism in the series, and part three will talk about the racism in the series, and oh, boy, I'm going to get some spicy comments on those two.
Anyway, I hope you liked this one; I hope I didn't overdo it with the screenshots. See ya!
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Yeah, the ending was like, Mikasa and co join the Nazi allegories, and stop Eren, who wants to kill all the Nazi allegories, and anyone alligned with them. So ergo, Eren is now the bad guy. Someone suggested they should have pulled a Zero Requiem and had Eren plan his death as a message, with Levi as his Suzaku
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Yeah, the ending and the unironic Nazi/Japanese imperialist shit will be fully addressed in part 3. It's the longest part, and I made sure to fill it to the brim with sources n shit to make my point accross--so look forward to that!
I never got into AoT and honestly? Kinda glad at this point. But these are still likely to be very interesting reads.
I think you were fine for the amount of screenshots, for whatever that's worth.
So, this is my first time reading this with pictures. When I helped edit this, where the pictures would go, instead Aragon had written descriptions of what the picture he's going to put there will be.
This whole review series is fantastic, and it's an experience to finally see the context behind: [NO REALLY, A LITTLE GIRL IS EATEN ALIVE BY DOGS HERE] or ["THANK YOU FOR DOING GENOCIDE FOR OUR SAKE" IS THE ACTUAL LINE, IT'S JUST A THING THAT HE SAYS, REALLY]
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I mean, I knew this story was going somewhere weird when an 8-year-old boy was talking about the "have and have-nots," but I would not have guessed "Genocide is cool, bro."
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I could've sworn you guys nuked that sort of thing out of them. Nope, apparently the only thing that caused was a bunch of video games where the final boss was given no foreshadowing or buildup whatsoever.
Marley deserves to get nuked to kingdom come.
And why the heck is it called Marley anyway? I couldn't take it seriously because the name keeps reminding me of Bob Marley. (I was a huge fan! ^3^)
This is allegorically World War from the point of view of the Nazis except they win
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Oh, it actually makes more sense, never mind
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If bombs and violence were enough to fix ideology, then Attack on Titan would be right.
I'm one of what feels like a handful of people who were on the internet when AoT was first huge and didn't ever end up reading or watching any of it. In a way, it's good to know that I both missed out on something that was genuinely entertaining for a while and also dodged an enormous bullet.
I never actually got past the portion of the series where they were trying to root out the titan shifters, as I got turned off when the author cast too wide a net and bounced the narrative focus between too many characters. But yeah, this is, uh, pretty bad. And you read the manga, which means there was probably even less to enjoy. The main reasons I even watched the anime were the expertly animated action sequences and intense musical score, not the story.
Now that I think about it, it's like, what if Spider-Man used swords? And that's conceptually neat to think about if objectively against character.
Back to reading! Your essay, I mean.
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Yeah, in hindsight it should have been obvious that they'd take completely the wrong lesson from all of that. The fact that Germany was and is rather more visible about cleaning up their act despite facing a less complete annihilation is also a point worth making in that regard.
Loving this so far.
You've also brought back how much Thomas' death fucked me up.
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Ah, nuts. You're making me regret missing the review due to my unnatural fear of spoilers even more, but I should have expected that level of Aragon coming into this.
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Arguments over whether their use in WWII helped aside, nukes aren't particularly humorous, in particular when they wipe out and maim civilians.
It should be clear that defeat eliminated none of the pride of the ruling class of Japan. They're the only country who continues to refer to their figurehead as "Emperor" (something the Allies allowed as a concession) because their rulers cling to the 'glory' of imperialism. They also have a grim war monument where thousands of noses of Koreans are buried, and they refuse to give them back.
They call it the "ear mound", because that's less grotesque sounding than "nose mound". Shame is pretty selective apparently.
Also before anypony says nothing good came of Attack on Titan, at least there's this:
As someone who has been really enjoying the anime adaptation and isn't reading the manga, I'm sorry to have to skip this blog post. I'm very curious what you find so broken about the story, though. Guess I'll come back in a year after the second half of the final season airs, lol. Just figured I'd provide some feedback on the decision to go full spoilers.
(I could understand if maybe there's key stuff to talk about in the final arcs of the manga, it seems like the ending was controversially received. Though it doesn't seem like "it ended poorly" is the kind of thing you're factoring too heavily into this critique, based on what I read.)
I remember reading someone writing about Final Fantasy, I think, and they said something along the lines of, "the basic default conflict in Japanese stories isn't good vs evil, its existence vs nonexistence," and I've found that true for most of the anime and manga I have read. Suicide, individual and social, is a common theme; the default villains want to erase the world, or its people, in some sense and the heroes fight them by affirming their existence, together through their friendship, though something worth living for, or by stating that living is itself good.
I've never read or watched Attack on Titan, and from what you have described it certainly seems to be a very... interesting take on that. There's something very Schmittian about it.
Ooooh, thanks for writing all this. Not like you had anything else to keep you busy, right?
I watched the 1st season of the AoT anime awhile back, but haven't bothered with the rest of the franchise since. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that it went to ... places.
Honestly, though, what threw me off from the start of the series was the bit where they had to evacuate the outer ring, but OH NO THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE IN TOO SMALL A SPACE, and so they did a little genocide in sending a bunch of people to die in a suicidal battle against the titans. As you do.
Except ... I vaguely remember doing some math, and determining 'wait, they still have an area as big as a small European country to work with. Why not ... have the people build farms or something?'
But honestly, Attack on Titan ultimately comes off as a 'gotcha!' kind of setting, in which the creator makes a bunch of arbitrary rules to ensure the worst possible outcome, human ingenuity or basic logic be damned. (See also: "The Cold Equations," but that's another thing entirely).
Though really, the whole 'sometimes you have to do a genocide but it's okay if you feel bad later' thing reminds me of Ender's Game and its sequels, which ... well, again. ANother blog post entirely. But it's fun to gab about, at least!
I'm reminded by all this that you had a RWBY avatar for the longest time, and hoo boy, if you think SnK is atrocious for all the various reasons listed above, I can only strongly recommend you pick back up that particular dumpster fire and see what truly awful morality lies behind it.
I think SnK and manga and anime like it inform a particularly insidious and distasteful subculture of the genre that's been spreading the last few years. I've found it to be particularly true of RWBY but I think it's true of many IPs these days that the joy has been sucked out of it. The point of series like this is to as straightforwardly and uncritically as possible reflect on the misery of its characters, often (almost as a rule) at the expense of the quality of those characters. But there's a layer of fragility beneath it, I think. Fans of these kinds of works will defend them to the death on account of how """mature""" and """deep""" they are(n't), and you don't actually think it's bad you're just sad that [character] died, and such. It feels really insecure, and all these White (or Japanese) imperialist sentiments and biases seem to rise to the surface in these works. Toxic masculinity, warmongering, racism (and really poor allegory for it), poverty, rape and sex assault, suicide, etc are all used as topics to fluff up pieces that don't need that kind of heavy material weighing them down, but their very inclusion turns, in certain people's eyes, the work into Art, and Art is unassailable, which is why it feels so fragile.
Wonder Egg Priority, for example, also falls into this category. Lovely concept, beautiful art, and, oh, it's actually about schoolgirls who committed suicide, most of whom were sexually abused, and we're not going to approach any of those topics with the delicacy that they require, they'll just be ornaments to lavish onto our show whenever we feel it's getting too mundane. There's no purpose behind it. It's allegory for the sake of allegory, if there's any at all, and all of it is shallow and needless, The characters aren't served by their trauma, nobody grows from it, there's no need at all except that 'tackling' these kinds of topics amounts more to tokenizing them these days than actually exploring them.
People are forgetting that Edgy isn't a good thing, and I fear that has a very direct lineage back to the rise of a certain set of political beliefs* online the last few years. I think the people who make edgy works aren't of that ilk, but I think the people who defend it are. Generally speaking this kind of writing stems from immaturity, overconfidence, and poor editing standards, and should be relegated to fanfiction websites, stricken with downvotes, and forgotten to time, but the demand for it... is unhealthy.
*Not big F Fascism but you know the type. "We should just kill everyone in the Middle East and be done with it," "Maybe it was right to want to get rid of the Jews from Europe, I mean, Britain ended up doing it with Israel anyways," "Norway works because it has such a homogenous society," and such. Most of the way there, maybe, but not fully.
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to be fair, the genocide in Ender's Game was a complete accident on part of Ender, and he was shocked that they let him get away with it (until a few years later in which opinions shifted). Unlike AoT where it just out and goes, "sometimes you just got to kill everyone, man"
And everything was caused by a centipede with mutagenic and psychic superpowers that could even connect and "revive?" it's victims? for a short time?
This was the same shit like in Naruto were the true enemy was revealed near the end (Kaguya and black Zetsu basically trolled everyone) and everything just went bonkers.
My problems with AoT mainly start with the final season, because, being a filthy casual, I did not read the manga. Or, rather, I did, but the art style was too jarring a change from the anime, which I was used to. The Marleyans, who are the ones who confined Eren and co to Paradis, are very much an allegory for Nazis.
And the final season expects the audience to care about them. Especially/including one who kills one of the most liked main characters, and never shows anything approaching remorse. I realize this is small compared to the issues you pointed out, but it still bothers me a lot.
and I can't say they wrong... (looking at how deadlocked political process today, with capital interests of few today making future harder for most - now and into future... This climate change thing for example is not just geological - it all political and economical, as well as psychological.... )
Of course 'killing all humans' is not very interesting answer - but at this point I basically see no way for any of (art/sceince/intellectualism/organization) to actually *change* way our biases exploited (
We like to read all those artowrks deeply - but... aren't majority of readers/watchers of popular art skip real hard thinking and acting in *their* lives part because.. it IS hard, now as it was in the past?
Ah yes, the story where the author flubbed the final chapter so badly that he came across as promoting fascism and genocide. Bravo, Isayama, you sent precisely the opposite message you meant to.
Even with the knowledge that this will be a 3-part review, with the section on racism being the longest I feel I should speak up now, because I don't believe it was ever intended to come across this way or promote this kind of message, and I think I can make the case that indeed, it is actually meant to be a condemnation of fascism and nationalism, when looking at the entire series up to the very final chapter and also knowing the serious mistakes that were made in the delivery of that confusing finale. Because that final chapter, it just doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the series, it's confusing as all hell and inadvertently sends messages the author wished he had portrayed far, far better and clearer.
And when I look back at everything that led up to that point, I think I have a pretty good idea what it's trying to really say. Quite frankly, the accusation that AoT is fascist or something just did not hold much water right up until Isayama gave us such disconcerting and misleading dialogue like "Thank you for becoming a mass murderer for our sake" (seriously, what the hell?!). I say this for a good reason, this dialogue makes no goddamn sense and is almost certainly the result of serious issues communicating what was supposed to be happening.
Attack on Titan is a story about nationalism, history, and cycles of violence, but the message up to that point is not that violence is cool. The reason everyone is continually forced into fighting and war over and over is because the world itself and the ideologies that infest it make genuine peace very difficult. Because the world is just that cruel, not due to the fault of anyone in particular, not the antagonists or protagonists. And in worlds like this, even otherwise good people can be pushed into taking sides and perpetuating violence. Few want it, but everyone is pushed into conflict by forces much larger than them.
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It is because of the sick and twisted history that we as humans use as excuses to justify our violence, and the views that perpetuate that history and hate. Not because violence is truly necessary, but because we as humans struggle often fall into grotesque, cruelly short-sighted ways of thinking that "protect" those groups we belong to, and harm those we do not.
In the world of Attack on Titan, everyone is a victim. The story is about how we deal with the reality of this cruel world, and the actions we take that keep that cruelty going and going. It's about how difficult it is to truly break free from such cycles of hate and fear, even for those of us who have good motivations.
And it's because of this that the final chapter was so fucking godawful at times. In recent leaked interviews, he explicitly says that Armin does not approve of what Eren did with his mass genocide, nor that it was a good or necessary thing. What he meant to convey was that Armin was a beneficiary in a twisted way from the genocide that was committed, and that Armin would attempt to salvage something from this great transgression. He also speaks that way to Eren in part because this is their final time they will ever meet. Unfortunately, the delivery of this dialogue was severely distorted and abysmally communicated; and it makes it sounds like Armin thinks mass murder is great even though he literally spent the entire last arc doing anything he could to stop it.
And in the end, Eren's genocide doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't bring peace, it doesn't guarantee the end of hatred and violence, it might even make these problems even worse. The story ends on a rather ambiguous note, which is the only real way it could end in my opinion.
Our lovely main character and his faction are not heroes, they are downright evil by the end of it, no matter how much Eren whines about it, he became a murderous, selfish sack of shit who convinced himself he "needed" to kill most of humanity to "save" his own group of people. He became a selfish short-sighted monster who was willing to kill legions of people because he couldn't deal with the true ambiguity and hardship of the peace process. it was easier to just kill all the bad people. And his faction, the Jaegarists? Those obvious fascist/Nazi parallels are there on purpose. I mean, if you've seen enough of their kind of rhetoric, it's obvious they are meant to be fascists. They become the antagonists and their official leader (Floch, Eren's second in command) is perhaps the most blatantly evil character in the entire main story.
The Jaegarists are a portrait of what happens when seemingly innocent patriotism turns into nationalism, which then turns into fascism. They have legitimate reason to be afraid of the outside world, but they turn that reasonable fear into violence and hatred. They are not the heroes, nor are they reasonable.
And... wow, I've let this go on for long enough already...
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I honestly disagree. I can see how this is how it looks like up till the very ending -- I myself felt vaguely that way before the series ended -- because the themes are purposedly vague and a lot of character arcs are defined by the way they conclude. This is perfectly normal, mind; a lot of media are recontextualized by their ending. It's just, AoT is an extreme example.
I had read bits of the story before it ended, and then kept up through sheer pop cultural osmosis (checking comment threads very now and then, friends and family being into it). Once I learned of the ending I made a point of reading the entire story as-is, and with that recontextualization in mind, once you know where every path leads and understand the foreshadowing and early clues, AoT is very much not a condemnation of fascism. It's more a condemnation of the overstatement of fascist atrocities, which is just me saying in a pedant way that AoT is going "listen, yes, we might've killed and tortured and raped and pillaged hundreds of thousands, but is it really that bad? We also built trains. I think it's a net positive."
More on the 'racism' bit in part three indeed, but--yeah, I respectfully disagree with this read. I think it's an interesting and possible reading of the series if you ignore the ending, but the ending is part of the story, and it was planned from the very start. It's not that the ending fucks up what came before, it's that what came before was there exclusively so we could get that shitty ending.
And the thing is that, yes, the Jaegerists are portrayed as bad, and so's Floch, but the epilogue makes it clear that they were 100% right. The humans were going to kill all Eldians, so the Jaegerists want to kill all humans. Eren kills 80% of them, and some years later, humans carpet-bomb Paradis.
Like, yes, the characters tell us that the Jaegerists are horrible, but the story consistently shows us they're in the right. Attack on Titan presents a world where racism is inherent to society and the only way to achieve peace is an ethnostate (either all Eldians or all Humans, no middle point). The climax of the ending is just a question of who will commit genocide the fastest--and the entire series was written with this in mind. The genocide is not a natural consequence of the story, the story was written in a particular way to justify the final genocide.
But anyway, yes, I'm just abridging part 3 of the blog, I'll learn to wait myself. I kind of wanted to post everything at the same time, but that would've made the blog too long? Guess that'll show me to be shorter.
Either way, yeah, this is a fine reading but I just don't agree with the conclusion, or the amount of good faith we assume on the author's part. Would love to discuss this more in depth once part 3 comes out, see if we see eye to eye by then, actually. That'll be a cool discussion.
I've tried getting into this series twice now, because of the hype around it and my brother recommending it. Never had much luck. The idea that after so long humans wouldn't develop better methods for dealing with Titans than inaccurate cannons, magical climbing gear, and sheet metal swords is ridiculous enough (say what you will about war, it drives innovation... terrible, terrible innovation). Seriously, given how many people die using that stupid crap why the hell DO they keep using it? But instead of developing, they're just sending out the same worthless exploration parties to get slaughtered and learn nothing. I dunno maybe that gets explained later.
Add to that I also kinda hated Eren from the start. He does come off as an entitled little brat from the get go. He treats Mikasa pretty poorly, acts like everyone around him is stupid to be afraid of Titans, and just believes he can kill them all for whatever reason. When titans come and start killing people, does he learn how wrong he was? Nah. Rather than any real wake up call from any of the horror the world throws at him he just gets super powers. Heck even before that he almost washed out of the military, and that was nearly interesting. He had the moment of 'oh shit my comment about weak people going home might apply to me... but I'm the anime protagonist wtf?!' ...And then nope, turned out it was a pointless misdirection because his gear was defective. And again that didn't matter anyway because he didn't need the gear. Impossible to like the kid and, as it turns out, that's just as well.
I have yet to get past the first season (first time watching years back that was all there was, tried again recently and it just didn't hold my attention very well), but I'd already gotten story spoilers from various sources so this was a fun read. Looking forward to the next parts.
My buddy and I watched the first season and really liked it, up to a point. So all those positives you point out, you're 100% correct and they're why it was so good.
But I know I was really invested in finding out Eren's past, why he was the way he was, where the titans came from and how the walls got built, and then halfway through the first season, the story shifts quickly to "here's a smart titan with boobs to make the fanboys happy" and I just. Did not. Care.
And then it ended without answering any of my questions and with no second season on the horizon, and we were just so terribly disappointed I threw out any notion of ever continuing with the series. So I'm all for full spoilers, I guess!
Also, the walls are made of titans? This is some next-level stupidity.
But I'm not for spoilers for Game of Thrones! D: You monster.
Anyway, I've recently heard rumblings that AoT is inherently anti-Semitic, and let me tell you, the definition of what counts as inherently anti-Semitic continues to surprise me year after year, but now I'm quickly starting to see why that might be the case here! :')
"Titan solution" and "Elbian question" feel like perfect puns for this blog series, and I am disappointed that I haven't seen them yet.
Also, I feel strangely compelled to read the series now. I hope this goes away when you go into more detail later on.
A compelling and informative review! I look forward to the next couple of parts.
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Note that the cannons aren't missing constantly, its that the Titans are literally unkillable, regenerating zombies that can only die from a precision strike to the back of the neck, which means you need a way to quickly get behind them to get a shot at their necks. Admittedly, it was never explored if a strong enough cannon shot through the neck could also do the trick, but considering the speed of the titans, it may have been a tricky shot.
The swords are explained as the only way they could get the cutting edge sharp enough to cut deep enough, which also incidentally makes the blade kinda fragile. However, the snapping easily part is sorta a double edged sword. Yes you need to carry like 20 extra blades with you, but you also don't want a bad swing to leave you stuck on their back, just break the blade and fly away until you can get a second try.
Damn. And I thought they dropled the ball on the FIRST major shift. What started as an intense, fascinating if a bit simple Man vs Nature conflict became a much more... weird? And kinda boring? Man vs Other Man. Which has it's place, but I don't enjoy a bait and switch.
Also. Meat Gundams.
The Titans are Meat Gundams.
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You don't even need better technology! A lance wall would be more effective! Replace the canons with Ballista! They'd be more accurate and you can use tow lines to drag a titan down. Pit traps and deadfalls even!
Actually hell, at that level of tech they could have gatling guns.
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Nah, I knew that... it was simply odd (especially in hindsight, given the reason that spot is fatal for titans) that a decapitation from the shoulder up (which we saw in a couple shots in the anime) didn't kill them. The same spot highlighted during the soldier training as their weakness had definitely been half or better blown away and they were not dead. It was a flimsy excuse for the mangaka's chosen method of combat, which was... admittedly cool looking as long as you didn't think about it... or how generally ineffective it was for most soldiers using it.
As to cannons 'missing constantly'... they were missing enough that I'd call them inaccurate, but sure ymmv. Even temporary crippling would lead to easy kills for the mobile corps, but I didn't see that much synergy at play there. And most titans weren't fast. The 'aberrant' or 'abnormal' were, most weren't. And we still saw a scene very early on with cannoneers just whiffing those normal titans. It was laughable. I've looked into it a bit now and seems some other methods, traps and such, are developed later on and that's neat. They should have been there all along since most titans were slow, lumbering, and dumb (easily lured and distracted, I believe was said at one point in the anime). Those traps weren't there at first so the story could establish how terrible these monsters are, but if they wanted to do that starting us off like a century after the first attack didn't do it for me. I didn't think the titans were terrifying; I thought the humans were idiots.
...Huh.
It's funny; I only got into the series a few months ago, when I caught a news item about "super-popular manga/anime about to finish" and decided to give it a try. I watched the show, almost bailed after the first couple of episodes because it seemed so silly, but after a friend reassured me that it wasn't really about people being stupid about fighting for no obvious reason, I pushed through, found enough stuff I liked to keep going, and then when I got to the end of the anime, went ahead and read the since-completed last 20-odd chapters of the manga to get to "the end." And it was okay! Not great, but it had a few turns that I really enjoyed, and on the whole the dumb parts weren't enough to make me wish I hadn't wasted my time on it.
But what's weird is, I think I came to exactly the opposite conclusions about it from you regarding, well, everything. Which probably means you're right and I'm wrong; I'm not plugged into the AoT fandom in any way, so for all I know when you talk about there being pro-genocide themes, you're literally quoting the author in an interview where he says "Yes, different cultures can't coexist, that's what my story's about." I wouldn't know! And while Death of the Author has its place, "what I meant to convey in this story" ain't it.
But, yeah. I read this whole essay(/part 1), and I'm still not understanding where you see "the narrative endorses genocide." Like, I'm looking at the page you summarize as “Genocide is unavoidable, and arguably, not that bad,” and I simply can't fathom how you got there. I read that page, and I see, "genocide is bad, and there is no amount of rationalization that can make it okay." Which, again, literally the opposite of what you're seeing. Not just in general, but on that specific page, I'm reading the exact opposite from what you are. I'm looking for places where the story asks us to believe that Erin and co. are anything other than villain victims--people who we should pity even as we revile their means and motives alike--and I'm just not finding it.
If you'd asked me what the story is about, I'd have said, "child soldiery is bad." Which, okay, duh, but I'm not gonna dock too many points for having a super-obvious theme. Once you get past the first few episodes/chapters and into the bits where it's clear the author appears to have had at least some inkling of where he was going, that's the one loud and clear message I see in every character, in every confrontation: that children are not equipped, mentally or emotionally, to be soldiers, and if you force them to be soldiers anyway, they break. And when people break, everyone suffers. That's the story: children are forced to be soldiers, are extremely fucked up as a result.
The fact that this ends in monster mayhem and genocide rather than depression and suicide, is a symptom of being a manga. Like you say, "if you want subtlety you really can’t be reading manga, it won’t be good for your health." But yeah, I can't find anything to suggest that I'm supposed to look at Erin's final choice and think anything other than, "this guy is so fucked up, even Armin knows his plan is fucked up, and he's nearly as fucked up as Erin!"
(I could spend a long time talking about how the "We've gotta keep the younguns out of the forest" speech is the thematic center of AoT, not because it's so deep and subtle--again, manga--but because both the general theme, and the specific imagery in it, are present from at least as early as Mikasa's backstory, all the way up to the very last chapters of the manga)
So, I'm really looking forward to part 3! Because again, I'm not in tune with the fandom, or the author, so I'm assuming there's some major context I'm missing from just watching the show and reading (the remainder of) the manga that would explain why the message I'm getting is 180 degrees from the "real" one.* I always like reading your stuff, especially when you're doing actual analysis behind your (already worth reading on its own merits) schtick.
*Other disagreements, I'm less convinced we're ever going to see eye-to-eye on. The actual fighting is just the dumbest, and my eyes glazed over every time they tried to justify their ziplines and stuff. Everything pre-Erin-turns-into-a-titan is awful, at least some of it doesn't even amount to useful setup, and the first episode is one of the worst hooks I've ever seen. So, I'm also opposite you on what parts of the show are "good," but that's a "Chris likes twists and classical tragedies, hates steampunk and monster fights" thing, not a "what is the message" thing.
Thank you for justifying my complete and utter distaste for this series from the beginning, Aragon.
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I am having so much fucking fun with these comments that I'm posting part 2 a day early. Fuck it. I wanna reply to y'all -- you make good points! -- but I would just be repeating the points I already wrote in the review, only worse, and with less examples. So. Screw it! Posting part 2 in a couple minutes! I don't care! Let's do this!
Attack on Titan was probably my favorite work of fiction for quite a long while. It’s what got me into attempting to write fanfiction, made me realize that very violent anime is, like, my favorite kind of thing, and I did and still do think there’re some really strong characters in it. I’ll happily admit it’s very, very flawed, and not just in small ways, but I got quite a lot of good out of it.
And I went into the ending with low expectations—I think the series had some big, big missteps way earlier than that, so I was kinda thinking the author had written himself into a corner he should not have been able to get out of but was going to figure out some nonsense way to make it happen.
And it still pissed me the hell off.
So I’m glad to see the series getting a lot of criticism, and this has been an interesting read.
I’m mainly interested in seeing how that point about genocide is developed further.
In particular: the world of Attack on Titan is, I think, constructed in such a way that racism is considerably more legitimate than it is in our own reality. We see from what the Founding Titan is capable of that, yeah, there’s a good reason for the rest of the world to not be totally on board with Eldians, because one Eldian being malevolent can potentially wipe out all of humanity, and even benevolent Eldians can be transformed against their will into murderous, destructive monsters. It’s an objective statement in this world that an Eldian neighbor puts you in more danger than a non-Eldian neighbor.
I’d like to think, though, that anyone sensible enough to listen to is going to agree that that’s not the case so much in the real world. There’s considerably more reason in reality to think that different races and cultures can coexist peacefully, because in many ways they’re more similar than different. So if someone comes away from AoT thinking hmm genocide solved the problem here, let’s apply this to the real world, far as I’m concerned they’re insane and delusional, because the contexts are very clearly distinct to me.
I guess the point I’m hung up on is that Attack on Titan kinda says with its ending that in this fictional, constructed context, genocide of some sort is the only option for peace. Which I don’t completely disagree with, for the reasons I outlined. In this world, it is difficult for me to imagine distrust of Eldians ever going away completely.
That’s not to say I like the ending. In not much time at all, I think it’s genuinely stunning how badly it eviscerates what I would’ve said not long before that were some of the series’ better characters.
But I don’t see how you go from that to saying that Attack on Titan defends genocide as a concept, which seems to be the point you’re asserting is AoT’s thesis.
So I’m curious to see where you’re going with this, and hoping to find some interesting arguments I hadn’t considered (I was partway through writing all this out at the time part 2 dropped, so I’ll go and read that now).
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You know I'm actually much more interested in part 2 than part 3, since the treatment of certain female characters did legitimately upset me in the end. Let's go.
Was this in the original ending of the release? The first time I read it the chapter ended with Mikasa on the hill, just checked it out again and saw the bombing scene and the possible return of the Titan power?
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The original magazine release ended at the hill; the volume releases always have six extra pages, and that's where the epilogue (carpet bombing and a new child finding the tree) come from.
Volumes are the canon version, so that's the official epilogue of the story.
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That is even worse than the chapter ending. So the story is kind of about racism but not really because everything is cyclical in this world because the Titans seem to come back.
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Err, there's a good reason for that, which is explained. Technological development is purposefully sabotaged by the Royal Government, which is why things advance so much once they are deposed. In fact, later on, we even see anti-Titan ballistics in the wider world which is orders of magnitude more effective. At the most advanced end of things is a huge handheld rifle nearly as tall as a human.
And about cannons and weak points, the weak points are infuriatingly inconsistent at a couple moments, like in one scene in Season 2 where one Titans is continually has its neck slashed at without being hindered at all. But usually, the rules are followed. The problem is that you need either a lot of accuracy, or a lot of firepower to ensure the destruction of that weak point, both of which are problems for cannons as primitives as these. On the other hand, soldiers can slice through flesh with ease and accuracy.
There's actually a ton of effort and justification put into the worldbuilding in this regard.
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I have to mostly agree on the themes and message. Eren's plan accomplished little, ensured mass loss of human life, and was so heinous that bitter enemies were forced into an uncomfortable alliance out of desperation. There was hardly anyone left on his side by the end, and his faction were blatant fascists for anyone really looked at their rhetoric and goals. I got precisely the opposite message that Aragon got about the themes of the story; of which there are more than one. Which I could honestly go on about for a while, since I think it's a lot more than "child soldiers are bad", and lean into a much more political direction.
But the action... yeah, the ODM action is obviously a little silly with steampunk Spidermen swinging around with ultra-sharp swords, but the worldbuilding has a ton of effort put into justifying things and the fighting pretty decent overall, outside ofthe more absurd Levi scenes. It's flashy and beautifully animated, but more than a little absurd even for a superhuman. Which is why his second real fight with Zeke makes a lot more sense than the first one even if it's not as good-looking.
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You're kinda right. As long as certain people can transform into WMD's, it makes peace pretty difficult, which is why the Power of the Titans had to end. But without the Titans, Eldians can't yet meaningfully defend themselves, and therein lies the dilemma.
What can't agree with is genocide being any sort of real solution, and in the end, it isn't.
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It comes out nowhere and left everyone even more confused than before. I figured that Power of Titans probably existed in some form, but it deserves more than literally one or two pages.
It's still about racism and nationalism, full stop, though I disagree significantly with how it's portrayed in this review. The Titans aren't inextricably linked with those things, that's just how humanity made it.
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True, though many do wish Eren HAD succeeded and killed all the Nazi allegory bastards.
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You know, up until an hour or two ago I would still have defended Wonder Egg, but I saw the actual finale now and I just can't. It's depressing, too, because it has such moments of like...good stuff (Biased towards Momoe no regrets), but at this point it's like 'Okay you wrapped a bunch of pretentious stuff together then went nowhere with it'
The comparison to Madoka becomes inevitable (Any overtly dark Magical-Girl esque series inherently invites that these days) and it just illustrates so well the difference between having a very deliberate story to tell and...well, not.