Attack on Attack on Titan: an In-Depth Review of a Story I Hate (Part Two: Characters, and Sexism) · 8:27pm Jun 27th, 2021
Link to Part One. Once again, This review contains full spoilers of everything Attack on Titan, including and especially the ending of the manga.
5. The Characters
Escalation is a common problem in manga; it’s almost a staple of the medium that, as a series keeps going, the stakes will get higher and higher, and never stop. Ultimately, threats are so large in scale, it’s ridiculous—every enemy is ten times stronger than the last, every explosion is ten times bigger, etcetera—and the first few chapters look quaint in comparison.
It’s an endemic problem, one that takes away from the legitimacy of manga as an artistic medium for many people, and a symptom of the despicable working conditions manga authors are expected to live through. When your schedule looks like this, it’s absolutely natural that your storytelling abilities will suffer; and long-term planning will go out the window because you need to meet your deadline every week, and you have no time to think or plan or rest, and you’re operating on three hours of sleep. Constantly.
Which means that yes, actually, manga and anime are often really fucking bad because of capitalism. That’s, incidentally, also the reason why we’ve got so much fucking disgusting fanservice, often of the underage kind, so—y’know. Gift that keeps on giving. Thanks, Adam Smith. Really cool.
Anyway; badly-handled escalation happens to Attack on Titan, too. But unlike with other popular shows that suffer from this problem [1] Attack on Titan doesn’t make it a structural problem. It affects the characters.
[1]Naruto and Bleach immediately come to mind as examples, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who’s even glanced in their general direction.
See—because the thesis of the story is that violence is necessary, any threat has to be blown out of proportion, any kind of attack has to be shocking and visceral and sad. Because, if you do that, the characters going into a killer frenzy, glorifying rage and hatred and violence as a response, feels not only justified, but cathartic.
And at first this is easy to do. I already mentioned the juxtaposition of slice-of-life segments with gruesome violence, using whiplash to enhance the emotional reaction to the gore. But, remember when I talked about Eren turning into a titan, early on? How that changed the entire vibe of the story?
Yeah. Here’s where that really starts biting Attack on Titan in the ass.
Because so far, titans have been such an impossible threat, where just a single one of them could kill an entire army of specially-trained soldiers with top-notch equipment. Only, if Eren himself is a titan, there’s no real threat against him, is there? He can Jackie Chan his way out of a fight. No human can do anything about it. The stakes go out of the window.
So the series goes, no, actually, there are some soldiers who can absolutely kill Eren. Turns out that titans aren’t that much of a threat. Enter the Levi Squad.
The Levi Squad, named after their leader Rivaille, are a group of elite super soldiers that specialize in killing titans. Rivaille is the strongest soldier humanity has to offer, and there’s an entire chapter dedicated to convincing the government that he can totally take Eren in a fight.
Out goes the hopeless vibe of the story. Normal titans just don’t cut it anymore—to make it so Eren can be threatened or dealt with, the series tries to claim it’s been exaggerating the danger of the titans. If you have the right equipment and treatment, they’re easy to deal with.
But this completely robs the story of that visceral feeling it wants to keep. So the titans have to become more powerful, too; they have to be such a threat that the only solution is total extermination.
Enter the special titans.
And exit the Levi squad.
There, hopeless vibe restored. The Levi Squad is presented as an incredibly strong group of soldiers, as a way for humanity to take back what’s theirs—and then one titan with a blonde wig pops up and they all die incredibly gruesome deaths. It’s an effective moment, because we’ve gotten to know Levi’s Squad by this point, we’ve been shown what they’re capable of, we’ve come to trust they’ll stay alive.
So, this is actually pretty good. All this stuff I’ve told you about? This is good writing! It’s effective! It’s such a memorable moment.
And it completely makes Attack on Titan a worse series in the long run.
Because, first of all, this is not the only time it happens. Every time the humans manage to win anything, an even more fucked-up titan appears and wrecks shit galore. It’s a whole thing.
FUUUUUUUCK-
-YOUUUUUUUU
But these aren’t mindless titans, they’re not monsters—they’re titan-shifters, humans like Eren who can turn into a titan at will but keep their intelligence, morals, and motivations. They’re full three-dimensional characters with complex backstories that we later get to explore; most of them are victims of discrimination in their home country, and have been raised as child soldiers for a cause that involves killing their own people.
We learn this later, though. Way later. First thing we see is them gleefully torturing innocents for fun, and then laughing about it.
Because the story has to restate, as often and as strongly as possible, that titans are the worst blight humanity has suffered. For violence to be necessary, any other solution is deemed impossible; negotiation won’t get you anywhere, dialogue is not an option, common understanding is impossible. The titans are either mindless and won’t listen to reason, or they’re intelligent, and they use that intelligence to inflict more pain when they kill you.
It’s all about the escalation. The threat has to continuously be bigger. As the heroes learn new ways to deal with titans, the titans need to get more ruthless, more villainous. When characters reference this:
You, the reader, can’t just agree. You need to enthusiastically agree. You need to feel it in your bones.
Imagine how awkward, then, when later in the series, these characters are supposed to be allies, misguided innocents all along. They join the heroes, and show that all this time, they had such a heightened sense of empathy. They want to put an end to the war, too.
And the rest of the characters forgive them immediately. There’s other people to kill, anyhow. We gotta move on. Don’t think too much about it.
It’s jarring. I can’t stress enough just how baffling it is to read. How silly it feels to have Annie, a character whose very last scene before the timeskip involved this:
Be reintroduced to the very same characters like this:
She has a little intro before this where she’s played as a bit of a threat? She has a knife! She means business! And then it’s like, oh, look at her! She was just hungry! Laugh track, continue the story, never reference all the stuff she did. Some characters do point out that she’s getting off easy, but the narrative clearly frames them as hot-headed and in the wrong. Move on, it says. That doesn’t matter.
This is not just bad planning, though. This is all in service of the thesis.
Listen, Attack on Titan wants to make it clear that violence is necessary. It presents a world where every conflict can only be solved by adopting an us versus them mentality. Anything outside this very strict worldview is either wrong, or a recipe for failure—this is hammered home one, two, twenty, a hundred times.
The problem here is, then, that as the series goes on, the framing of who’s us and who’s them changes. The “them” is, at first conceptualized as the general threat of the titans, plural. Titan shifters count as titans, so they’re pure evil incarnate, and you can only kill them or be killed. They torture innocents, have no mercy, and, just.
Just.
FUUUUUUUCK-
-YOUUUUUUUU
But once the second paradigm shift in the story is reached, and they discover there’s a world outside the walls who hates them, those are the real enemies. Not the titans, but actually, the people outside of their island—the people of any race but their own, those who can’t turn into titans. People who can turn into titans are good, actually. They’re one of us.
It doesn’t matter what they did. It doesn’t matter what they’re like. What matters is, it’s us versus them, and anything outside of this worldview is wrong.
So, yes. Annie is good, actually. Ignore that whole “laughing at the horrible way in which she murders people” thing. That monkey I keep posting, too—that guy [2] is later revealed to be a psycho, sure, but a completely different brand of psycho, and the way in which he takes glee killing people horribly goes against his entire later characterization.
[2] His name is Zeke. He’s Eren’s secret royal half-brother, and wants to commit a slightly different kind of genocide, which the series calls “The Euthanasia Plan”, and it involves forced sterilization, and no euthanasia whatsoever. But at this point, you know, like. Whatever.
For violence to be necessary, it has to feel both justified and inevitable. This involves the enemy being ruthless, evil, monstrous—but it also requires a sense of purity to come from the good guys. They need to be noble, they need to be innocent or deserving of protection, so that their deaths are seen as particularly horrendous. The only way to defend them is violence, and so, that’s what you use.
But this is such an absolute, strict rule, it’s so fundamental for the thesis, that the series sacrifices characters in its service. It doesn’t matter what Annie or Zeke or Reiner were at the start of the series. They need to be good guys by the end. They’re us. Fighting against them. That’s all that matters.
What’s that quote from Ursula K. LeGuin I referenced earlier, again?
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.
Yeah.
So now that we’ve talked characters in general, let’s talk about female characters in particular. Because Attack on Titan is incredibly, horrendously, misogynistic.
And we’re talking about manga here, so like, even by those standards. Yeah. Get ready.
6. The Female Characters
The big issue with all the women in Attack on Titan, if we’re going by the broadest of strokes, is easy to explain. It goes like this:
- They’re irrelevant to the plot.
- They’re defined by the men around them.
The first point is easy to see, especially once the series is over. While you’re reading it you can’t really tell where a lot of the character arcs are going—and there’s enough women in the cast that you assume at least one will end up doing anything remotely important.
That doesn’t happen, though. In Attack on Titan, men make choices, and women stand by and watch. Sometimes they execute the plans that men have drafted up, but they make sure to follow strict orders; they’re cripplingly devoid of any personality. Delete every female character from Attack on Titan in the last 20 chapters or so, and there’ll be no real changes to the storyline—and in a character-based supernatural drama, that’s a huge red flag.
But it’s the second point that really drives it home for me—mostly because the fact women in Attack on Titan are defined and limited by the men they devote themselves to is the reason they’re so irrelevant. A male character’s goal by the end of the series is to save the world and ensure a future for humanity; a woman’s motivation is to marry, have children, and maybe ask their daddy for a hug.
In a series that deals with the necessity of violence and the horrors of death, having characters crave mundanity could have been a statement. To want something incompatible with violence.
It’s just that it’s literally only the women who do this, and it always involves a man. The “ask daddy for a hug” bit is not me being facetious; that’s literally Annie’s entire motivation by the end of the story.
Okay, no, that’s slightly wrong—she’s also someone else’s romantic interest. They have a subplot about that, and it looks like this:
Eleven pages ago:
Every main female character is someone else’s romantic interest, with the sole exception of two late-comers: Yelena, who literally disappears halfway through the ending because the author forgot about her, and Pieck, who just sort of exists[3]. There’s even a woman who’s been with the cast from the beginning—Sasha Braun; if you have never watched Attack on Titan but are aware of the memes, she’s the potato girl—who’s retroactively given a boyfriend after her unceremonious death, so he can have a character arc.
[3] Pieck as a character is fascinating because she does nothing, then has a cool moment in which she’s utterly dominated by Eren, then she does nothing, and then the series ends. She’s a fan favorite, though, because the fandom is unspeakably horny for her.
There’s a porn subreddit for Attack on Titan—named r/AttackonTitties—and I had to look up tutorials on how to get my phone to show me NSFW stuff on reddit to find it. It felt oddly humiliating, but at least I managed to prove my point: r/AttackonTitties is mostly about Pieck’s ass.
As a side note, by the way—there’s a bit of a Smurfette thing going on with Annie, the Female Titan? To start with, her name is literally “THE Female Titan,” implying there’s only the one. Other special titans all have a superpower that defines them (they can create armor, they’re very big, etc) but as far as we know, the Female Titan’s only superpower is that she’s got boobs.
So male-looking titans are the standard, and female-looking titans are such a rarity that one character mentions he’s been wanting to be vored by “a pretty titan lady” for decades. This is not a joke, this is a thing that happens. The name’s Commander Pixis, you can look it up.
Either way—this gets somewhat addressed later on, but very sloppily. We’re shown other women who are titan-shifters, and titans who were women once, but once they turn into monsters they all look male, because again, Attack on Titan acts as if being a man is the standard. As per the Female Titan, while she maintains her stupid title, the show retcons her some superpowers—turns out she can copy other titans’ special abilities. This adds nothing to the plot and raises at least two more plot holes that I’m aware of. So, y’know, good series, very progressive.
Annie’s taciturn, doesn’t talk much, she waits for other people to tell her what to do—mostly so she can snark about it, then obey anyway. It’s implied she’s got more going on, and that we’ll understand her better once we learn her backstory. Only we don’t learn her backstory. She’s got none.
We learn Reiner’s backstory, though, Reiner being a character who has the exact same narrative role as Annie [4] but he’s a man, so he’s more important. We follow him for half of the story, and Annie is, sometimes, in the background.
[4] It’s truly bizarre, actually, because both Annie and Reiner are in the show from the start, and the fact that they’re traitors—they come from outside of Paradis, and are actively working against the protagonists, and kill some of their friends—is this huge twist that turns the story inside out.
Only, it’s Annie who’s built up. She teaches Eren how to fight, so they’ve got a student-master thing going on, and we learn some world-building by having her cast doubts on the Paradis government. Annie is then revealed to be a traitor, and immediately turns into a crystal—long, boring story; you don’t care—which means she vanishes from the story completely.
Then fucking Reiner, who I swear to god has been silently standing by the corner for thirty chapters by this point, is suddenly given this entire backstory we never heard of—and we’re told, not shown, that Eren looks up to him, that they’ve got this huge student-master thing going on, that he’s incredibly important for our main cast. He’s also revealed to be a traitor—exact same structure to the reveal as Annie’s, even; beat by beat—but then he gets to carry the rest of the plot.
So we get the exact same reveal and the same beats twice in a row. Annie’s doing stuff, and then the story goes “wait, no, something’s wrong,” pauses, does it again with a guy in her stead, and goes “phew, that’s so much better.”
Reiner is given entire chapters about his psyche and how he feels about killing the people he’s called ‘friends’ for years. It gets to the point where the wiki calls him “the main protagonist of Attack on Titan from the (non-Paradis) perspective. The first time I read Attack on Titan, I had no idea who he was when we’re told he’s a traitor. I had to Google it.
Annie is only important when Reiner talks to her. He’s like, what the fuck’s up with you. She goes, idk, I’ve got a dad, I guess. I’m very taciturn. I kill stuff.
Zero depth to this. In a striking bout of irony, Reiner also has daddy issues, and those are actually shown and explained, but he doesn’t really seem to give a shit. He’s busy having actual motivations.
The funniest thing about this is that Annie isn’t even the worst example, because the deuteragonist of Attack on Titan, named Mikasa, is basically Annie but with black hair: taciturn, serious, waits for orders, sometimes snarks.
We see a little bit more of Mikasa’s backstory—only, it’s completely focused on Eren, the guy who will later commit genocide. Eren saved Mikasa from child trafficking when they were eight years old. We see that scene from her point of view, but the focus is absolutely, one hundred percent, on Eren. It’s all about how he makes the choice to fight, and how he inspires her to fight under his command.
Mikasa is then adopted by Eren’s family. Which means that they’re siblings, yes, but they’re not related by blood, and this is going exactly where you think it’s going.
Mikasa is hopelessly in love with Eren. Basically everything she does, she does it to protect, please, or save Eren. That’s her entire deal.
There you go. You literally do not have to read any other piece of Mikasa dialogue anymore. You’re welcome.
There are implications there’s more to her. She’s incredibly strong, and there are hints it’s because of her ancestry. Then it’s implied she’s superhuman, or from a different race. Then it’s implied her constant headaches are because she’s got some supernatural bond with Eren.
Literally none of the things I said impact the story, there’s nothing else to Mikasa, and the headaches were just headaches. Eren carries the plot; Mikasa reacts. No initiative. She does oppose Eren’s genocide, and you would think that’d be a conflict—but every single one of Eren’s friends opposes the genocide. No special emphasis is given on Mikasa; we instead focus on the men. She doesn’t talk much about it.
She’s the one who kills Eren, though, because she is—again—very, very strong. Here’s what she does right after:
And here’s how the series ends:
I told you. I fucking told you. I wasn’t kidding.
She does nothing. You can erase her from the story and nothing changes.
Then there’s this other female character—very cute, very kind, very clearly represents humanity’s best half. Her name is literally fucking Christa, no, I’m not kidding you, they do that.
Then it’s revealed Christa has a dark backstory. She’s related to the royal family of Paradis—she’s the true heir to the throne!—and she’s got access to the island’s secret history, and her real name is literally fucking Historia, and again, no, I’m not kidding you, they really do that.
Anyway! Historia has a personality. She’s fighty and jaded, she can joke around but is burdened by her horrible childhood—she got bullied to hell and back, and her mom was a bastard—and she wants to live and tell everyone to fuck off, let her rage out. She’s kind as a self-defense mechanism, because life has been horrible, and being liked is a surefire way to avoid getting hurt.
There’s an entire arc where she’s the main focus, and then she’s crowned Queen behind the Walls. Plot-wise, she shapes up to be one of the most important characters in the story.
She disappears for like twenty chapters.
She reappears after the timeskip, pregnant and miserable.
Her husband is, we’re told, one of the kids who threw stones at her. No, he doesn’t get a name. No, we never see these two interacting. We don’t even see this guy’s face.
He’s the one on the left! I’m still not kidding you!
Historia then does absolutely nothing. She only talks one more time in the entire story; it’s in a flashback, and she talks to Eren—and the focus of the scene is squarely on Eren.
This one is so painful, it’s built up in such a prominent way only to then do absolutely nothing, that I’ve still to see a single fan defending it. The way the story completely drags this character through the mud by the end would be more infuriating if it weren’t so incredibly baffling. Entire subplots about her that aren’t even mentioned in the ending. It’s not even like the writer forgot—it’s like he literally stopped writing.
Small note: remember the lesbians? The ones I mentioned last time?
Yeah, one of them was Historia! The girl next to her, called Ymir, starts as a taciturn character who snarks but ultimately follows ord—okay you know the deal. Ymir has a very strong bond with Historia, and it’s extremely implied that they’re in love. There are a lot of talks about how they love each other, how Ymir wants to marry Historia, how they’ll escape and live together, etcetera.
Also, there’s this:
The dude she’s talking to? That’s Reiner! Male Annie! His love interest is Berthold, a character that—okay, to be honest, these two have no chemistry together. Still, y’know. Cool to have this!
Ymir is revealed to be a titan, and Reiner carries her away from Paradis. She’s never seen after that. Much later, we’re told Ymir died off-screen, and she’s literally never brought up again. Historia thinks about her once, when she gets a letter, and then gets pregnant.
(Berthold has a more plot-relevant death, but he still, absolutely, dies).
Here’s where it gets fucked, though. This one will be quick, because, to be entirely honest, it’s repugnant—and I don’t want to make fun of it. I just want to point out how bad it is.
Ymir, the lesbian, shares her name with Ymir, the first titan. Ymir (old) was a child slave who got in contact with an alien, and that’s why she became a titan.
The king of the island took notice of this, and since Ymir was his slave, he started giving her orders, telling her what to do, which enemies to kill. Ymir obeyed.
The king then decided he wanted his family to have titan powers, so he sexually abused Ymir, multiple times. The lack of consent on her end—she has no say in this matter—is made explicit. The king cut off her tongue, so it’s not like she could speak anyway.
She’s forced to bear three of the king’s children, and then dies defending him.
The king does not give a shit, as you can see, and he forces his children to eat Ymir’s body to inherit their powers (in a scene I won’t show, because it’s too gruesome for my tastes).
Through all this, there’s the ongoing question—why did Ymir do any of this. She could turn into a titan and kill the king whenever, we’re told multiple times she wanted to be free, she’s clearly miserable through it all. So why did she obey? Is it something related to the titans, some kind of supernatural bond? Some kind of supernatural curse?
Nah.
Ymir, the Founder, was in love with the man who’d been raping her every night since she was thirteen years old.
Attack on Titan is misogynistic even by anime standards. I told you.
So now let’s talk about the racism.
Concluded in Part Three
For real no fuck this series.
Thank you ara… for publishing this blog on fim fiction dot com…..
Honestly, I will give Attack on Titan credit for its queer representation. It's important to show that sometimes gay men can get into relationships with people they have no chemistry with!
It'd be even more impressive if it was an intentional statement, rather than just the writer not knowing how to authentically portray it. Sometimes you really do just date people because they're there, an underrepresented truth.
5542298
brb writing gay versions of Boomer "I hate my wife" jokes in the name of diversity.
The shit people can ignore in the name of what is considered a "good" series, never ceases to amaze me.
This might have been a translation error, like how "Android" 18 is actually a cyborg. Some of the other numbered androids as well, but I pick her for the double-whammy that a) being a girl would actually have made her a gynoid, and b) Krillin eventually manages to impregnate her. Like with whatshername and Eren up there, it's still a well-known fact that she could effortlessly kick his ass. (By this point in the story, it has been several seasons since Krillin has been relevant in a fight, and that was when the villain killed him to piss Goku off).
5542291
Thank you for writing an essay that I can send to peipke when I dont want to explain why I hate AoT
I couldnt put it into words and I didnt want to waste time putting it into words so I thank you for putting my feelings into worda
As one of the ones who bounced off this after the first time skip, and had heard it was bad so had no interest in going back, thanks for showing me this dumpster fire.
I think this whole Euthanasia plan and sterilization is a reference to Aktion T4 or at least part of it
which doesn't make it better at all.
Ymir: I hate it here. I want to get out, chose my own destiny
Also Ymir: I love him (the one chaining me here) though
What the fuck.
This is the weirdest advertisement for an infuriating trainwreck I've ever come across. Now I want to finish this series. Not because I think I'll enjoy it or doubt the evidence you're showing, or even your interpretation's validity (whether I end up 100% agreeing or not, and I'm betting 95+), but because what the hell IS this?
I had the feeling about Mikasa... because yeah her character is clear from the get go. And while devotion to a sibling/best friend/love interest isn't inherently bad... it being all you are is, and the person being all those at once is not great also. Sooo I was afraid of that. As I mentioned prior Eren being kind of shitty about it doesn't help him in my eyes, especially early on when she's helping keep him fed so he can maintain enough strength to keep that sense of entitlement going. It's funny to me that she's the one who kills him and you still say she doesn't matter. I'm not arguing the point, the funny comes from his death being so inevitable to the story's theme that it actually didn't matter who killed the protagonist. Annie's a disappointment though, as is Sasha. I feel like they had personalities and motivations to build on.
Bleh... I think a lot of us are in the pony fandom because we like strong female characters, and it's a shame anime (which those of us reading and writing stuff like this blog are also into) has so much trouble with them. But this... wth AoT?
I don't think I've ever seen you this viscerally angry.
Jeeeesus that Ymir story. I no longer regret jumping ship after season 2.
...By the way, is the king mentioned with Ymir meant to be a bad guy? Or are we supposed to side with him?
Well, I've been wrestling with curiosity about this series since it came out as an anime. The militaristic undertones already drove me away, but seeing how it's a por-genocide, misogynistic mess, I'm actually glad I didn't give it any time.
Thanks for such a goo analysis.
5542473
IIRC, That's for Naruto.
I watched the anime once and bounced off after 3 episodes because the pacing was jarring and it was horribly bleak.
I watched the anime again and got all the way through the first arc where Eren discovers he can turn into a Titan. I actually enjoyed it that time. I was kind of into Mikasa and wanted to see where the series was going with her. I actually thought all the side characters were relatively neat and enjoyable. That said, I never found the time/energy to watch more and by the time I did my interest had tapered off so I never watched past the end of that arc.
...
What the fuck? What the actual fuck? What is wrong with this series?
5542473
The fact that we can't tell is kind of amazing.
5542521
Not really, this blog is about how the series is ethically abhorrent, so the usual considerations of good morals = good character don't apply, because the whole reason this blog exists is because the manga writer got it wrong. My question is more 'how wrong?' Are we talking about the normalising of what we generally (and erroneously) call stockholm syndrome, or that plus a lot of rape brushed under the rug with a character we're being asked to side with?
I'm reminded of A Song of Ice and Fire's Khal Drogo, who repeatedly rapes Daenerys Targaryen, a child who then comes to love him (if I remember rightly, it's been a decade since I read it but I don't think she values him just for power and she's very upset when he dies). And he's, well, not really a good guy, but usually portrayed as being a savage who's morally better than whoever he's up against, like her brother.
I'm getting Mr. Plinkett vibes from this review. It even has numbered headings that I've started hearing in his voice.
So, I'm gonna forgo the first half of this to focus on the second half about sexism. As I mentioned, I was looking forward to this since I feel this aspect of the story is more deserving of the criticism. May or not may not come back, since there's still a lot to say.
Christ almighty I'm tiring myself out.
Kind of. Its power is versatility, being a jack-of-all trades that's pretty good at most things. That said, it's kind of unclear until later, but at the same time, we still know very little about Titans when it and its powers are introduced. All things considered though, I don't think it's that bad, it just should have been called something else.
Titans are explicitly noted to have more masculine features, but there are some with more noticeable feminine traits, but only the "Female Titan" has such a curvy appearance and sizable breasts. It does bother me some, since the Titans are transformed former humans.
It's kinda weird since the Founding Titan does too, but only seems to appear that way when it's being used by a female shifter. Like much of the fandom, I kind of just assume that if a man inherited the Female Titan, it would still look more male, but with a much more feminine leaning.
Yeah, but Pixis is an eccentric weirdo, pretty explicitly.
I... never realized this, but I think you're right. Reiner kind of just usurped Annie's entire role in the story while she literally turned into an inanimate plot element for 4 years in the story, 7.5 YEARS in real life!
It's nothing against Reiner, he's a great character, but he can do his own thing just fine without Annie becoming pointless...
Annie is the most wasted character in the story, even moreso than Historia. Thanks to her upbringing, she was forced into becoming a sociopathic child soldier to get by. Much like Reiner, she was psychologically devastated by what she did, albeit in a rather different manner. She had a caring, compassionate side that she suppressed in favor of leaning into her nastier tendencies in order to deal with her situation. Empathy could only end in pain after all, in the role she was in.
And what does the author do with this? Very very little! She spends a large majority of the story in suspended animation as a lump of crystal and when she finally comes back her conflict and trauma is barely even used or explored, she totally just wants to see daddy again until the last ~7 chapters or so when she finally does something more.
Eeyup, another wasted female character, and a titan shifter too! How is it that the female titan shifters get less development than female regular humans?
And she was only "dominated by Eren" because she literally let it happen that way, it was no mistake, it was so she could lure him into position. Pieck had the most badass scene in Season 4 right at the end, and some intriguing moments in the rest of the season that seemed to promise more development and fcous. But no, for the rest of the series after that moment, she's kind of... there. Sure she's pretty useful in battle and easily one of the most intelligent at her using her titan abilities, but she doesn't really contribute much beyond fighting later on. Her motivations and story are left completely by the wayside after Chapter 116/ Episode 75.
But she's hot, so who cares right? Ironically, Isayama was originally going to have the Cart Titan's shifter be an old/middle-aged man, but changed it. Which is reflected in it's changing manga appearance:
i.redd.it/c0jh5kxnu9r11.jpg
In the anime, it keeps the later design from the moment it's introduced.
Well, they were only family for a mere year before the series starts and their life falls apart, so it's not as weird and creepy as it seems. Their relationship was more than brother and sister.
Kind of? Yeah things would have gone differently without her but she's far more of a plot device much of the time than actually making her own contributions, being mostly there for the author to pull out for some badass action when Levi is injured or busy elsewhere, or if the main squad needs a lot of firepower.
She only becomes even halfway interesting after the time skip, and then it's still a disappointment since her dreadfully underdeveloped "character arc" was all about moving past Eren, which had a ton of potential! Sure would have been nice if she actually, you know, spoke more and interacted with others instead of just stewing in her own turmoil alone!
I know you read the manga, which I consider to be to mostly the lesser version of the story (which I'm pretty sure the author thinks too, but don't cite me on that quite yet). But this is one of the few things the anime actually does worse, thanks to Studio Wit (Made Seasons 1-3, all the pre-time skip material) having an obvious Eren/Mikasa preference and turning her from being dynamic as a slime mold, to as dynamic as a tectonic plate. Look at this:
Scene 1
Manga: preview.redd.it/uvfutlfd8kr61.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=bc3c74f1e6b621908d89e9974d42a0b486979225
Anime: preview.redd.it/n30ydmfd8kr61.jpg?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=3204fdce57c0cf8869a12336e69032a2a3c58a3f
Scene 2
Manga: preview.redd.it/qlceo3gd8kr61.jpg?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=8c6483d193faa5d68dd7ffcc3cb5faa5742687d6
Anime:preview.redd.it/kc0k5nfd8kr61.jpg?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=0e8b56c2a170173b4d01bb3b4513a4468fa67a53
And here I can fully agree at last! There's a damn good reason you see pretty much no one defending it.
For me, this was the easily the biggest disappointment in the entire story. She was practically my favorite character too, she was a total nobody in Season 1, but practically became a main character by the end of the Uprising arc in Season 3! In the RTS arc, it made sense why she was gone because she was a political leader, not a soldier.... but apparently not, since she does literally nothing even during the War for Paradis!
The author teases us that there's more going with her behind the scenes, and then... fuck all happens. Are you goddamn kidding me?! At least Ymir (the one in modern times, stupid confusing names...) had a conclusion to her arc that made sense, even if I'm still bitter about it since she was great and had the only gay relationship in the series, and a damn good and promising one at that!
I have strong feelings about this, but I struggle to say much more that hasn't already been said, fucking hell... She was a great character until the timeskip when she literally came barefoot sometimes, and pregnant all the time.
I am the odd one out, since I figured there was some extreme Stockholm Syndrome stuff going on in since the very moment she was introduced, where she could not psychologically defy King Fritz even though she held godlike power. It's the only way her situation made sense, but I suspect I know why more people don't see this.
Ymir "loved" King Fritz in the same way that one "loves" an abusive parent without having experience with genuine love and care. She was controlled and manipulated her whole life, never knowing real freedom or care until the very end. Her "love" was a tainted corrupted one the entire time, the result of her trying to hold onto anything until she no longer could bear it and let herself succumb to her wounds.
All in all, it's one of the things that bothered me least about the clusterfuck of a finale. Honestly, I think this is just another case of the author not giving nearly enough proper explanation.
Overall, no I wouldn't say it's misogynistic even by anime standards. AoT has been mentioned as having decent female roles for a while, and it's not for no reason, there's still things to like that stand out over most anime. There's still a decent number of female characters in varying roles. There are still lots of great moments for female characters, and some that aren't just squandered potential. Sasha and Gabi come to mind, but they're not mentioned much here since this is mostly about the problems you had with the story.
This ain't Naruto (or One Piece, Death Note, SAO, 7DS, My Hero, etc... though for more varying reasons) where literally every woman's purpose is devoted to a man, or are relegated into background roles. Even Mikasa seems feminist over Sakura...
That's not to say there isn't a lot of justified criticism to be had, criticism which only becomes more pertinent by the end of the series. And Hange, well, Hange's presence and character makes the problems with sexism even more baffling, honestly...
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None of this appears in the text, though. The literal only explanation we get is that Ymir "loved Karl Fritz", and then that she identifies with Mikasa, who also unironically loves Eren, in a way that is not portrayed as abusive or Stockholm Syndrome. The series makes a point of specifying it's not even a weird supernatural Ackermann bond thing; it's just pure love.
If a show fucks over its female characters this consistently, I'm not going to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it was actually making a striking point about abuse. I'm going to judge the text strictly by what the text says, which starts and ends with "Ymir loves her rapist".
(Bonus points for the fact that, y'know, Annie also loves her abuser, and Historia married the kid who threw rocks at her, so there's definitely a fucking pattern.)
I completely, 100% disagree.
Sakura in Naruto is a bundle of squandered potential, definitely -- only in Attack on Titan 95% of female characters are the exact same as Sakura. I don't think having one (1) single cool moment wherein the character loses to make it so Eren looks cooler counts as a counterpoint, quite frankly. This applies to Pieck and Annie both, and the least I say about Mikasa, the better.
At least in Naruto some women aren't motivated just by the existence of a man. The only ones who escape that in the Attack on Titan are Sasha (whom the author wanted to kill for over half the series, but the editor continuously forced him to keep alive), who is, again, retroactively given a fucking boyfriend so he can have a character arc, and Gabi (whom everyone hates).
Gabi is far an away the best-written woman in all of Attack on Titan; I'll fully give you that. Ditto the girl who calls Sasha her big sister. Everyone else, though, I absolutely stand for what I saw in this review. (And honestly, the more you look into it, the worse it gets -- did you know one of the very few changes between the volume and the magazine release of chapter 139 is that Isayama made Mikasa's chest bigger? Now you know! He could've expanded on Ymir's backstory, but priorities are priorities!)
Hange is canonically and explicitly nonbinary; the show uses they/them to refer to them, and Iyasama has confirmed it in interviews a couple times. Their death was completely senseless, but at least their arc to get there was interesting to read. Which isn't strange, given the fact that Hange's not a woman, and thus, is allowed to have a fair amount of agency.
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As I commented here, the story explicitly calls it "love" and draws a comparison to Eren and Mikasa, whose love is portrayed as nothing but a positive force in Mikasa's life. There's no mention whatsoever of anything resembling Stockholm Syndrome; all we get is that one fucking panel I linked in the blog. "Ymir loved Karl Fritz," fuck you, that's your explanation.
So from what I took, the show expects you to dislike Karl Fritz, but then to understand that Ymir loves him because that's just how women are. Again, both Mikasa and Annie and Historia fall in love with their abuser in a non-ironic, cool romantic way; why would Ymir be different, I guess.
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Right, got it. Fritz is villainous, but Ymir loved him anyway.
"Rape is bad, but women are too dumb/emotional to realise it."
My only experience with AoT has been memes and one episode of an abridged series. Given your brutal evisceration of the series (thematically appropriate!) I'm glad I didn't go any further down that particular rabbit hole. And to think, we're not even done yet...
That said, this does make me appreciate even the really forced reformations in FiM. I'll take those over "Local Angry Man Uses National Landmark to Flatten Eurasia."
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Sort of? Fritz's actions were portrayed as incredibly damaging toward her and her psychological wellbeing. She was unable to even truly envision freedom for centuries! It was very very clear she was suffering immensely and unable to truly think for herself because of her treatment, let alone achieve genuine love for someone else. She suffered so much that she just let herself die one day when she could have easily survived. Most of this is also in the text, by the way. I can't see how this was anything even close to real love.
Yes, it is absolutely correct that this should have been made more explicit. But I am not certainly not going to be overly literal with the text, you can come to all kinds of conclusions by doing stuff like that. It's necessary to consider how the story portrays certain characters, the actions they take, and the context around them.
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/308788748316049409/859046509487456276/face_of_love.PNG
And I really don't think this is a face of "love" right here.
Before the timeskip, maybe. But after what he did in Chapter 112, hardly. What he said to her was so bad that his former friend attacked him right then and there.
Ymir identifies with Mikasa, and Mikasa rose up and killed the one she was unhealthily attached to. The Power of the Titans disappeared immediately after she killed him.
No way in hell, I'd rather read the final chapter again than endure stuff like Death Note and Naruto. Let's look at all the notable female characters. Historia, Ymir, Mikasa, Sasha, Pieck, Annie, Kaya (arguable), Ymir Fritz (arguable), and Gabi.
The ones in bold have enormous characterization issues or just get ignored by the author. That's more than half, and I agree with most of your issues, and I've gone into my own as well, which are pretty huge. Even the ones with issues can have really awesome moments, like Historia's entire role before the timeskip before Isayama forgot she existed.
There are many, many, many manga what don't even come close, including Naruto. A huge issues is that so many barely even have notable female characters at all, or ones that do hardly anything noteworthy, like the ones I listed and many more. A story with just Gabi, Sasha, Ymir, and pre-timeskip Historia would be better for its female characters than most, so there's a world of improvement to be had. And after typing this out, I'm even more angry that characters like Historia and Mikasa were so severely mishandled.
That's not what I was saying... All I said was that Pieck had a moment that was indeed genuinely awesome and her potential was completely squandered after it. I even mostly agreed with you.
Sasha's death and everything that happened because of it were not just to make a man interesting; far, far from it! The way Sasha's legacy was utilized was amazing and used to great effect in illustrating the human toll, hatred, and complicated allegiances that exist because of the Marley/Eldia conflict
I did not know that, the added pages were bad enough on their own.... Completely and utterly incomprehensible why the fuck he wouldn't expand upon Armin and Eren's final conversation.
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I don't think it's a case of the author not giving enough of a proper explanation, more than the author caring enough about the plot points. There is clearly supposed to be some parallels between Ymir/Frits and Mikasa/Eren, but as Hajime Isayama brought it up in the climax of the stories and Ymir couldn't defy Frits like Mikasa wasn't supposed too be able to defy Eren, but this plot thread is never given a through line. Considering all the sexism in the story that isn't surprising though.
That tells more about you attention span than the lack of characterization. Reiner was a bit of a background character at the start but he was extremely well characterized by the time the big reveal came
It was made pretty clear earlier when Eren freed her in the paths that she was suffering from an extreme Stockholm syndrome. Everything in the final chapters is questionable because it goes against what has been stated before, so much so that a sizable portion of the fanbase suspects editor interference.
The way the show buried its gays was one of the things that really bugged me about it. They even had a perfect opportunity to un-bury one of them with the whole "Armin is merging consciousnesses with Berthold" thing... but then used that to prop up an Annie relationship that seemed to be made up on the spot instead! Not that Reihner and Berthold had any chemistry to begin with, but, I'm just saying. You wanna show us Armin's not quite in control of his own mind? Suddenly being attracted to dudes would communicate that!
Speaking of Annie, I never really noticed that she and Reihner are doubling up the narrative role, but by cracky you're right. Anyway, I agree with most of your sexism stuff vis-a-vis "the female characters mostly got defined by men, even the ones who it looked like, early on, wouldn't (need to) be." I was a little confused by your comment here, though:
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Mikasa watches her parents get brutally murdered in front of her, is manipulated into stabbing a man to death by Eren, and then is immediately impressed into this murder-enabler's family. Now sure, Daddy Jager is by all appearances "adopting" her out of kindness, so her unhealthy empathy with the family isn't technically Stockholm Syndrome, and obviously she's better off with them than with the people who were straight-up kidnapping her, but... I mean, she clearly has an unhealthy relationship with that family, and she gets called out on that unhealthy relationship constantly throughout the series, I don't see how you can read that as "unironically lov[ing] Eren."
But, you know, that's one female character (well, plus Hange, who is def. presented as a female even if she isn't presented as a woman.*). And even then, she still ends up being almost entirely defined by Eren, so it's not like it's much better in that regard.
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Best summary of the ending I've read.
*I never picked up on the pronouns (which are a cool thing to have in the series, and it makes me appreciate it a little more knowing they're there), because when someone in an anime/manga gets referred to as "they," I assume it's because it's a bad translation, not that it's deliberate. And usually, it is! Subtlety doesn't survive language barriers well, even less so when one's conditioned to expect the barrier to result in some trainwrecks. #justanimeproblems
I believe the term is "big oof."
Though honestly, a lot of shonen/seinen anime & manga has the same problem of sidelining female characters and otherwise making them irrelevant. But I suppose it's a bit different in AoT as it has male characters stepping in to narratively replace said female characters for, uh, reasons.
Looking forward to the 'finale' of this series, 'cause from what I've read about AoT and stuff, well-- it's even "bigger oof." To put it mildly.
Though I kinda wonder if you'll be able to find something else to rip into once you're through with AoT-- but it takes a 'special' combination of popular and problematic that ... well, I guess it's a lucky thing we don't see it quite as often as we do. Or maybe I'm just completely oblivious because the only TV show I keep up with is Legends of Tomorrow, 'cause it's the best damn thing on TV. Last night's episode had a singing cowboy in it.
So basically, the Paradisians embrace Annie, Reiner and Zeke like Oceania embraces Eastasia.
Also, when I was reading the manga in Shonen Jump, I also forgot who Reiner was upon his outing as a traitor.
Something I am seeing a lot in the comments about Ymir is repeated references to Stockholm Syndrome, and I feel like this is a really good place to mention that Stockholm Syndrome as a thing is highly, highly contested. If anything like it exists, it would fall under the branches of PTSD or another trauma response, but specifically the Stockholm Syndrome idea of falling in deep sexual love with your captor and refusing to help authority against them is pretty much misogynistic bullshit.
Nils Bejerot, the scientist who coined the term while being the police psychiatrist who responded to the bank robbery whose hostages kicked off the term, never even talked to any of the victims who supposedly suffered from this syndrome. What he originally diagnosed them with was something he completely made up on the spot, Norrmalm-storg Syndrome, that later got renamed and spread around by the media. More than that, he made it up specifically to discredit a female hostage, Kristin Enmark, who was enraged at how the police response was so clumsy and over-aggressive that she feared her death at their hands more than at the hands of her captors, especially after the authorities refused to talk to her at all even when given the chance, when they continuously acted like they were going to bust in and get everybody involved killed, and when even the prime minister of Sweden assured her that she would just have to find pride in having died at her post. On the contrary, her captors didn't actually want to kill her, and at that point that was enough to make her feel safer in the bank with them than with the police presence outside. She didn't develop any feelings towards them, she just thought they were less likely to get her killed than the police at that point.
So of course the second she was free she slammed the police response and the actions of Bejerot specifically as the police psychiatrist, because they fucked the whole situation up. Bejerot then pulled that syndrome name out of thin air, claimed that she was just so madly sexually in love with her captors because trauma, and that this was proved by the fact that, on the day she got rescued, she refused to leave in a police stretcher and "did not appear traumatized." If this sounds a lot like some bullshit female hysteria to you, congratulations, you are correct.
So if this story is actually leaning on Stockholm Syndrome for the reason Ymir never left, that's somehow actually even more misogynistic, because the diagnosis of Stockholm Syndrome only exists as a myth perpetuated by a bad psychiatrist trying to protect his job by discrediting a woman who questioned his authority! If we wanted to talk about this as a more complex trauma response that created similar symptoms, cool, those exist, but I genuinely do not trust AoT to have done anything resembling research into genuine trauma responses when it could just nick the one that makes women seem least competent.
I wonder how much of this sexism is the result of culture or marketing strategy (if it is true that the manga market prefers women to be nothing more than eye candy - I have no idea).
I'm very curious about how the author would react if he was forced to respond to your criticism of his work, regarding the sexism. Like, where would his response fall on a Venn diagram of the following options:
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That is wonderful information, thank you!
Tell me you watched Gurren Laggan without telling me you watched Gurren Laggan.
You know, it’s weird because I remember the female characters in the annimie more than the males :/
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I'm pretty sure he was actually talking about DBZ here; Gurren Lagann is concentrated shonen, but that means everything relevant is present in the genre at large.
5542977 Where did you find this information?
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It's pretty widely available; the Wikipedia article on Stockholm Syndrome goes into the controversy, if only briefly; and references the Jess Hill (2019) article on domestic violence which tore it apart pretty thoroughly, including analyzing the Swedish hostage situation that DuskPhoenix referred to.
It's telling that Stockholm Syndrome has never been officially recognized as a valid psychological disorder. It doesn't appear in any version of the DSM (including the latest), and the overwhelming majority of "diagnoses" of the syndrome are made by the media, not by medical professionals. The FBI considers it to be "extremely rare", and performed a study with the University of Vermont that found there was not a single recorded instance of a hostage interfering or refusing to cooperate with police as a result of emotional bonding with a kidnapper/hostage taker (as separate from cases where victims refused to cooperate due to real or perceived threats, or a distrust of/animosity towards police).
The case that is most often brought up as "evidence" of Stockholm Syndrome in the US is the Patty Hearst kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Looking at the case, it has none of the ostensible hallmarks of the syndrome; but instead fits far more readily in the tactics of classic cult indoctrination or "brainwashing".
Most of what is termed "Stockholm Syndrome" is nothing more than victims "playing along" with their abusers out of a sense of self-preservation. PTSD and other trauma responses often incorporate behaviours such as ingratiating one's self to one's abuser, attempting to please or appease them in an attempt to reduce the threat they pose to the victim. Once the threat to the victim is removed, and the victim feels comfortable that they will no longer be victimized, the behaviours tend to cease, and more expected trauma responses tend to manifest.
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why does this make me so upset
thkng is, I do not think this is too fictional story.. I currently stay in some relatively far-end place, and one old (nearly 80 years old) lady told me she was also living with definitely not stellar (drink too much) husband for 20 years.. yet, she for some reason (daughters?) stayed around....