I watched Attack on Titan

[Finished November 4th, 2023. Rating: 3/10]

Don’t watch this show.

Attack on Titan is the biggest anime that I avoided for the longest time. For basically as long as I’d known it existed, I’d heard that it was an anime widely deemed problematic despite its popularity, with accusations commonly suggesting its messaging was antisemitic or even outright fascist. That negative reputation was off-putting enough for me to steer clear regardless of quality for essentially its entire production history. Additionally… I really trust my current circle of friends when it comes to fiction. Not just for having good recommendations, either; they’re consistently introspective and critical about the stories we discuss, and I believe in their judgment regarding both those we like and those we don’t. So, when multiple of them began vouching for AoT’s ability to write complex characters despite its infamy, I was really intrigued. My hesitation over the things I’d heard about it still lingered, but they all clearly seemed open to discussing and criticizing the flaws within it, so I figured it was safe to at least test the waters.

And, you know what? They were kind of right. Attack on Titan can write a pretty damn impressive handful of characters when it’s trying to. But, man, it sure does suck anyways! I can’t say I entirely agree with every reason people have given to hate this show over the years — the idea of the show being anything other than against fascist militarism and nationalism feels pretty absurd to me — but those uncomfortable antisemitic implications sure are there. The reason I don’t understand fans of this show isn’t just due to that, however. Even beyond the problematic aspects, AoT is simply too wishy-washy and mild in its messaging and storytelling to ever approach anything meaningful to me.

It goes without saying that for a story to engage me, it needs a continuous and evolving sense of core conflict alongside fleshed-out internal beliefs for its cast. I was actually willing to give this show a lot of leeway in this department at first, since it had been sold to me as a story that took a long time to show its hand in either of those areas; its true depth would supposedly become evident around late season 3/early season 4. That’s a long time to wait, but I have patience for stories like this (including some of my favorites of all time). Attack on Titan backloading its ideas so far into its runtime was a bold gambit, and I trusted it’d pay off with all the episodes it spent on intricately developing its world.

So did that fabled payoff eventually come? Unfortunately, the answer is more complex than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. But if you asked me for a short answer, I’d still pretty easily say ‘no’.

The beginning of Attack on Titan is a very straightforward action story. It’s primarily concerned with being flashy and intense, which feels like it leaves little room for its characters to express the full range of their humanity. And, indeed, this is the point. War dehumanizes and stifles its participants no matter how seemingly ‘justified’ its intentions. Eren and Armin lack the luxury of chasing their genuine dreams and aspirations because strife is more or less the only principle on which their society is founded — they run up against the same walls, over and over again. This is portrayed in an exceptionally grounded and believable way for sure, but it’s not a very layered conflict. Everyone deals with giant monsters and an overzealous military in fairly straightforward ways, without much psychological complexity to how or why they make the decisions they do; an important part of the narrative is their firm refusal to question or subvert these norms, believing it’s the only way to survive. This lack of individual nuance is worsened by the sheer size of AoT’s cast, too. Within the first season alone, the focus seems to start out small on just the main trio of childhood friends, but quickly expands to include: nearly all twenty-something members of their military training division, the leaders of the military division the main trio ends up joining, various important members of another military division that also happens to exist, and a miscellaneous handful of prominent members of society. Not all of them are treated with equal levels of importance, thankfully. But the sheer number of them involved in the story causes it to be bloated with scenes that often left me feeling like I was given no reason to care besides pure realism. (This problem only worsens in the later seasons, which sometimes get to the point of introducing nearly as many characters as season 1 did, somehow.)

Needless to say, it doesn’t feel like a very individual-driven show. Some might argue it’s theme-driven, but even within that framework, I don’t think its themes are very impressive if none of the players involved offer a perspective more nuanced than ‘war and oppression are bad’. In my opinion, the best description of the first three seasons is that it’s a guy playing with action figures. Roleplay of a society that’s technically multifaceted in how many moving parts it has, but nothing that conveys any genuine complexity in either the people running it or the people it victimizes. But as I mentioned before, this is all prior to the fabled ‘part where it gets good’. If these pieces were eventually brought together in a legitimately satisfying way, I felt I could come around on AoT.

Season 4’s opening was an incredibly promising indication that my hopes might be answered. Shifting focus to those on the other side of the story’s current conflict, their reaction to the ongoing war is suddenly so much more nuanced than what came before — they’re explicitly struggling to stay committed to their cause and are deeply unsettled by the depersonalization they go through. Each and every subsequent episode at the start of this season builds on the show’s ideas in exactly the ways I was hoping it would. Instead of a protagonist who exclusively sticks to the one trait of only wanting to conquer his enemies because society says so, S4’s initial protagonist Gabi expands this trait into a superiority complex built on overcompensation for the oppression she faces, with a ton of layers to how she reinforces this through increasingly unsubtle self-hatred. And she’s only one member of the unbelievably all-around solid cast introduced beside her. Practically every character in the opening arc has a level of depth and moral intricacy that’s impressive not just for Attack on Titan, but by general character writing standards. Even when the story returns to the perspective of the prior seasons’ main cast, despite remaining a little boring at first, it quickly turns around and expands greatly upon their established ideas in a way that makes them feel so much more justified. Seeing the military’s rapid descent into open-faced fascism which horrifies the main characters too much to justify anymore is both beautifully written and absurdly emotionally powerful. All in all, the first part of this final season had me convinced. Attack on Titan would finally live up to the potential I’d waited so long for it to realize.

Then the rest of season 4 proceeded to suck.

I don’t see myself as someone who hates the ending for the reasons most people do. (Okay, I do obviously hate the antisemitism, but people more eloquent than I have already written about that.) The way I’ve seen most people who followed the whole story up to the ending talk about it usually involves them believing that AoT was always a great story, but that it ‘fell off’ towards the ending for not resolving enough plot threads, making the main protagonist too pathetic and unlikable, having him become too willing to commit atrocities in service of his goals, or disturbingly framing him as correct for those atrocities. None of these complaints align with my perspective. Firstly, it was always my opinion that the show was too fixated on totally meaningless plot devices, so I didn’t really care how much ended up going without a concrete explanation. Secondly, Eren’s consistently unhealthy ideals were always dull to me because of how they refused to come into conflict with anything or anyone in his society, so I was actually excited for him to take a more overtly villainous and hard-to-reconcile role that might push his flaws to the forefront. Lastly, I believed that the story was so obviously already about how his mentality was toxic that it would be ridiculous for the ending to turn around and present him as a good guy. And I think I was totally right about that last part! The show condemns him in pretty much every way it should. But none of it is interesting.

Eren’s conclusion is so bizarre to me, because it feels like they just take the premise of what his flaws are from season 1 and unambiguously explain them without actually expanding upon him at all. The show comes off like it wants you to think him dehumanizing his enemies in favor of violent conquest is some crazy twist nobody saw coming, but it is literally the fundamental idea behind him from episode one. That is what the entire story of AoT is constructed to repeatedly beat into its viewers’ heads. The ending is him applying that flawed perspective to increasingly large-scale situations, but it’s still the same basic trait, and that never changes regardless of how elaborate the narrative metaphor is for him feeling like he’s predestined to walk this path. I guess the ways he internalizes his powers and processes the philosophy of his friends not being ‘free’ are vaguely new traits? But they never feel like they’re delved into, because the ending only lightly touches upon them as supplementary to the very simplistic core of his writing. It ends up feeling like a conflict that should have been resolved in season 1, not the final episode of the show.

None of that ends up being my main problem with the ending, though. Eren’s writing is disappointing, but ultimately I never considered it necessary for me to like him in order to think the show was good. That might sound counterintuitive considering he’s literally the main protagonist of the story, but I think it just speaks to how directionless the show feels for so long that he ends up feeling like any other face in a crowd of equally uninteresting characters prior to season 4, only trivially elevated by his technical plot importance. By the time the first arc of season 4 ended, I felt as though he encapsulated so little of what was meaningful about the show that I sighed when I got to the episode that featured his inevitable return to the spotlight. I also knew that the show’s writing choices would disagree with me; Eren wouldn’t be the main protagonist if Isayama didn’t want to place him at the core of the story’s focus. That didn’t prepare me, though, for him to be essentially the only character who Isayama cared to give a resolution whatsoever.

Past season 4 part 1, Attack on Titan does not feel like it remotely cares about following through on any of the genuinely meaningful narratives it spent its entire story setting up. That new cast I mentioned at the start of S4? After having an incredible arc dedicated to all of their interweaving conflicts and injustices at the hands of the world around them, the show just handwaves them into the group who teams up to stop the final antagonist, because… plot. There’s no catharsis to any of their struggles, and I guess the story wants you to think they either aren’t relevant anymore or will just keep on suffering forever, but fuck that?? These characters were the only part of the story that felt like they could realize the potential it held to be actually deep and interesting, and they’re just thrown to the sidelines unceremoniously! Even the military society that had been a crucial part of the worldbuilding from the beginning — you know, the one that I said was the subject of a beautifully written arc surrounding its fascist rise to power — is only relevant to the finale through its soldiers being the antagonist’s irrelevant cannon fodder lackeys. It’s like this show truly does not regard the idea of its own depth with any actual respect. Which, ultimately, makes my conclusion on it hurt far more after it showed so much promise.

Attack on Titan is not about the things I liked it for. Not in any meaningful or well-executed sense. It’s a story about how war and dehumanization are bad for very simple reasons, and it resolves their narrative presence in a way that’s as simplistic as how it sets them up. Towards the end, it features a lot of fantastic ideas that could be perfect extensions of its premise if the writing knew how to connect the dots, but when all’s said and done, it feels as though the good parts of the story are deemed totally irrelevant to what it’s going for. The characters and ideas I loved were there, I suppose, to momentarily shock and awe viewers with the concept of empathizing with other perspectives in a purely superficial sense before returning to the status quo. I don’t want to believe that’s all it is, but I honestly cannot see it in any other way when the main focus is so bland for so long and all of its good qualities are treated as disposably as any other side character. Isn’t that ironic, for a story meant to be about seeing the beauty in others’ lives and accepting that nobody is truly disposable?

Oh, god. Is that supposed to be intentionally bad too? Am I still in the setup part of the show?? They just announced that new epilogue volume for the manga, didn’t they. Is that what’s ACTUALLY going to justify everything??? Am I going insane???? Did I miss something in the 500 hours of worldbuilding, some detail that will completely recontextualize the way I understand this series and make it all make sense?? I need to know. When will I finally understand why Mikasa is actually the most cracked character ever? What were they even doing with that entire part of the ending? Am I just another person who doesn’t get the ending???? Do I still not comprehend the rules of fate enough?????? Is this, too, the Titans’ curse…??!!!

Well, at least Zeke is pretty cool. Thanks for reading.