Attack on Titan: An Informal Review

Alright, my babies. We need to talk about Attack on Titan. I’m not an anime head but, in 2013, the same friends who showed me Sword Art Online also showed me Attack on Titan which was that year’s big anime. I watched it, and so did a lot of others—cultural phenomenon—and I feel like a lot of us forgot about it (or, like me, just don’t follow anime bullshit) when the second and third seasons came out years later from 2017 to 2019. Ruben Ferdinand, months before the premiere of the third season in 2018, published a blog post about the story’s fascist aesthetics, as if the author was drip-feeding Hitler particles to his audience. A lot of us took it at face value, in my case because I wasn’t watching the rest of the show and the first season was already fascist enough in hindsight, with or without the analysis submitted by Ferdinand. Polygon picked up the baton in 2019 and extended Ferdinand’s analysis to the twist ending of the third season: that Eren’s father Grisha is a neo-fascist hailing from the modern world outside the walls where his race is seen as infernal for the ability to become titans, and he infiltrates the walled society to set in motion his plan to revive the old titan-powered empire. It’s kind of a dumbass article like, huhhh, the military coup wears Hugo Boss drip and supports Eren in his plan to genocide the outside world?! Hearsay of the ending seemed to confirm our collective suspicion when Eren kills 80% of the world population and the story ends with the island under a fascist junta.

But by that point we should be asking ourselves: doesn’t this sound a little silly? Like, are we supposed to believe that author Hajime Isayama—who for the record has admitted to having certain sympathies for early-mid twentieth century Japan, but (I would argue) not to an abnormal degree relative to the overall Japanese population—wrote a setting where his fascist leanings are good and justified to the maximum possible extent, and a narrative about you need to commit genocide to achieve world peace? Would you be surprised to learn that the story’s conclusion was hated by everyone? Not just liberals, for apparently exposing unlimited genocide against the first world, but also fascists, because Eren at the very end is revealed to be a sniveling, pathetic incel who fails at his ubermensch mission. One night I saw FD Signifier made a video about how he was right about Attack on Titan two years earlier, because the author confirmed FD’s analysis that his story was (in part!) about his own self-loathing and imposter syndrome, and also that Attack on Titan was always meant to end with Eren becoming a genocidal maniac but that Isayama mistakenly made him too sympathetic to where that development seemed out of left field (for those in the audience who, I will argue, were not paying fucking attention).

So I decided to finish watching Attack on Titan after, Jesus, thirteen years. The promise of the story, combined with me also wanting to write a story about a pathetic individual who becomes like a god, genuinely interested me. And what I saw pissed me off because it was like no one talking about this show actually paid any attention to it. There are two clouds which seem to veil people’s comprehension of anime. The first is what my beloved refers to as “anime bullshit”: the medium’s generic short-hands which, big or small, encapsulate ideas or feelings in an almost standardized way. Attack on Titan certainly employs “anime bullshit”, or shonen (adolescent male genre) bullshit in particular; but if you only watch for those tropes, you will miss how the show interrogates and lampshades them. This cloud is worsened by most anime freaks watching the original Japanese voice tracks with subtitles but then not really reading the subtitles anyway. My partner noticed this while watching The Apothecary Diaries and seeing how many viewers were “theorizing” about things that were outright confirmed or contradicted by the dialogue, and we realized the viewers just watched the pretty pictures and relied on anime bullshit to get through the show. Just like Lucretius then, let’s hope the rays of reason shine through these clouds. First, because no one has actually seen this fucking show for what it is apparently, let me recount its events from start to finish in an internet-friendly numbered list. Note that we’re starting at #9.

9. Eren lives with his friends and family inside a walled society.
10. Outside the walls live giant man-eating monsters called titans.
11. The titans break inside the walls, and one eats Eren’s mom alive.
12. Eren joins the military to one day take back his hometown.
13. Eren realizes he has the power to transform into a special sentient titan, and uses this power to help the military.
14. The military is actually full of people with the ability to become special titans, but they all seem opposed to the walled society and their goal of defeating the dumb titans. (This goes on for like 30 episodes).
15. The military stages a coup against the royal family and clergy because they realize that they are actually standing in the way of defeating the titans. (The walls are made of big titans, the same as the kind that originally destroyed the wall around Eren’s hometown.)
16. The military retakes Eren’s hometown, so he finally goes into his dad’s basement to learn what secrets his fathers promised he would tell him about the titans and the outside world.

This is where the story has its big twist. Let’s enjoy an interstitial of Eren’s dad Grisha and his account of the outside world.

1. Eren, his father Grisha, and the walled society are all of People A.
2. People A used to have a world-spanning empire who had come to power because they had the ability to turn into titans (dumb and smart).
3. One day, People A had a liberal king who felt pity for the rest of the world, so he orchestrated a civil war where People B would take control and he would take as many of People A as possible to a remote island and made them forget about their recent past with his titan powers (lol).
4. One hundred years later, People B now has their own empire and oppresses what remains of People A outside the island, using their titan powers against other people groups, and telling them that this is punishment for their ancestors’ sins.
5. Grisha’s sister is allegedly [!] eaten by dogs—put a pin in it—which radicalizes him into becoming a neo-fascist who recruits others by convincing them of a revisionist history of People A according to ancient texts he can’t actually read [!!].
6. Grisha marries the alleged heiress of People A’s empire, and has a son whom he tries to make into a Messiah, but instead reports him to the police.
7. Grisha is transported to the island where his comrades are forcibly transformed into titans and set loose to torment the People A who live inside the walls. However, the mole who has been helping Grisha turns out to be one of his captors, who reveals himself to be a special titan and then kills the other military personnel. He turns Grisha into a dumb titan so Grisha can eat him and gain his special titan power, explaining that he needs to infiltrate the walled island and eat the royal titan with whose powers he can restore the empire by re-animating the big ass titans whose bodies are currently frozen inside the walls.
8. Grisha marries a woman inside the walls who gives birth to Eren. Eren has special titan powers because, the night after the walls fell, Grisha turned Eren into a dumb titan and had Eren eat him to take both his own special titan power and that of the royal titan whom he had already eaten earlier on [!] but could not wield its power because he lacked royal blood.

Did you get all of that? Alright. Here’s where the anime takes an interesting turn, because the characters up to this point have been naive fascists. Ferdinand’s analysis is accurate if only with respect to the internal logic of the society depicted in the story, but that caveat is important because the society’s naive fascism disintegrates. Suddenly the society in the way of Prometheus is given the gift of true nationalism, with a name and a founding myth according to which they can interface with the larger (modern!) world. The ruling party for the most part wants to liberalize because they realized how backward their society is and, despite becoming a nation, would rather prove themselves to the world than subjugate it. But Eren becomes a fascist just like his father. This is where the anime bullshit comes in: Eren is increasingly perceived by the other characters as an violent idiot teenager, having anime boy protagonist outbursts and muttering crypto-genocidal spiels which seem equally trivial to the viewers who are assumed to be immune to anime bullshit and just take for granted that Eren would act that way. But hopefully now you can clearly see what’s going on: Eren is getting radicalized, not because he’s cool or justified, but because he’s fucking freaky and pathetic. The fourth season skips some years into the future when Eren infiltrates the empire of People B as a wounded soldier in an internment camp, only to do a titan 9/11 to the surprise of his peers who had lost track of him but now have no choice but to save him and face the concentrated wrath of the larger world.

And unfortunately, after having suffered through hours upon hours of monster fights and anime bullshit, that fourth season is a fucking banger, hampered only by the need to keep having monster fights and also by its strange commitment to being didactic to the viewer about nationalism-fueled cycles of violence—which, considering the show’s reputation as I have described above, is also a plus? I’m just fully serious. The season has a couple new characters of note: including some children of People A who lived in the internment camp of Empire B, and were radicalized to commit genocide against the islanders because they (the girl character in particular) wanted to be good examples of their own race; as well as a black character from another nation oppressed by People B, who then defects from the military of People B in solidarity with People A. All these characters’ arcs reinforce the now overly explicit theme of the season, when Genocide Girl realizes that the islanders are normal people who were traumatized by war just like her, and when the black guy realizes that People A through their nationalism (another military coup, inspired by Eren and wearing even drippier Hugo Boss, takes place and they are called the Jaegerists after Eren’s family name) had become as xenophobic and violent as People B. The author also demonstrates some genre-savviness by putting the black guy in perilous situations in which he should have died but, contrary to the show’s norms, survives. The significant characters from the previous seasons, for their part, become dedicated antifascists and constantly monologue about how nationalism begets nothing but generational trauma and incessant blood feud. “I will not be an accessory to genocide,” my bitch Hange says. She also looks straight at the camera and says she is the exact kind of communist as me, which was actually kinda dope.

All that by itself, I think, demonstrates the show’s actual themes—but it also gets really weird with it, because another primary motif of the fourth season is conspiracy and historical revisionism. The start of the season revolves partly around a nobleman from People A who lives in Empire B and wields not an insignificant amount of political clout, which some viewers interpreted as an antisemitic trope (though he’s of the same race as the aspirant fascists so… the metaphor’s getting a little mixed here if so). His hope was to demonize the islanders so that the remnants of People A from elsewhere in the world can contribute to defeating the island and make a better name for themselves. He gets killed in Eren’s 9/11 attack. Then we learn that Eren’s special titan form has the ability to peek into the past or future, Scrooge-style, and speak to people there. It turns out not only did he feed the memory of his father’s sister getting eaten by dogs (which may or may not have happened; most commentators suggest it did happen but that Eren just intervened with the memory at a point where his father hesitated, but the ambiguity plays into the larger theme of revisionism), but that he also directed the titan who ate his mom to do so in order that he would grow up and become a fascist (by the way, that titan was actually his dad’s first wife). Crazy shit! You can’t tell me that isn’t interesting.

The ending is even more fucking gag-worthy. Eren uses his volk power to tell everyone of People A that he is going to mass genocide everyone who doesn’t live on the wall island—including those of People A who live in the internment camps. He re-animates the big ass titans who make up the walls and sends them to kill literally everyone. The finale takes place on a mesa between a desert and an ocean where a bunch of People A and People B take refuge and try to take a final stand for humanity. A military commander of People B literally apologizes to the children in what he thinks is his last radio message, because he says their parents (him included) created a world of non-stop racial hatred and violence—but, once you think they’ve solved racism, Eren turns all the People A there into titans so he can kill the rest of People B (etc., C–Z) there. Eventually a team of humanist scouts and military personnel team up to finally defeat Eren, and the killing blow is dealt by Mikasa, who in doing so also frees the ancestral spirit of the titans from her toxic love story with the ancient king who enslaved her, thus ending the curse of the titans for good. BUT IT’S NOT OVER YET. It turns out Eren visited all his ex-friends in the previous day to tell them he’s being a genocidal freak on purpose so that they can kill him and redeem the islanders in the eyes of the world—but he had wiped their memories of this with his volk power, so they didn’t remember until after they had killed him. And he had the fucking gall to be like “Ohhh I hope Mikasa doesn’t forget about me after I die”, at which his ex-friend beats the shit out of him for being a fucking pathetic freak. The ending is that the outside world is “saved” (albeit 80% dead) but the island descends deeper into fascism because they fear reprisal from others for what Eren had done. Guess it’s… never… really… over.

I can’t help but be impressed by what the story turned out to be. I think even FD Signifier understated the actual themes of the show by saying Eren was suddenly revealed to be a pathetic and despicable figure at the end, when the entire show (if you speed through the 30-something episodes of monster bullshit) is specifically about his path to radicalization and the violent social forces at play in nation-building. Attack on Titan is a disturbing deep dive into the heart of fascism, one which toys with the presumed viewer by allowing them to descend into the same dark fantasy as its genocidal protagonist. But except for how it’s difficult in general to depict war without glorifying it—especially in the context of a genre which constantly justifies this sort of violence—it’s hard to say the story Isayama wrote is anything but critical of its own subject matter (even if that very subject is identifiable with the author, whether as a cartoonist with imposter syndrome, or as an insecure male with socially ingrained fascist tendencies). I’m also pretty sure this all is the same fucking plot as Dune, right? I haven’t read Dune but I feel like Attack on Titan was a prank to get me to read/watch Dune without reading/watching it. Oh well. They think in centuries.

One last stray thought: titans, or at least titan power are a really funny plot contrivance because Isayama needs them to do double or triple or even quadruple duty. They need to be giant cannibal monsters, and also they need to have memory powers, and also they need to have Scrooge ghost powers, and also they need to have volk radio powers. I'd suggest that titans represent the social mechanisms of nationalism, which creates enemies of other human beings and in doing so creates a shared identity for a particular in-group. That feels right, but also it feels a little silly trying to tie it all up with a bow like that except for how on the nose it is. So, uh, nationalism. Not even once, babies.