I absolutely love Attack on Titan and it’s one of the best anime’s I have ever seen. Even the clown show ending from the manga has been fixed to an great extent in the anime. The anime has so many excellent moments which are some of the best written scenes in anime.
The fanbase is insufferable though. It’s either full of “Eren is literally me” mfs or glazers with no sense of reality and I’m pissed at liking the same thing as them.
I’m a big fan of worldbuilding and historical lore in shows, so I was pretty impressed with Attack on Titan, plus the characters all seem to have rational motivations, and it was fun to piece together everything on a re-watch.
I’m a bit confused about the claims that the author is fascist. I admit I haven’t looked into in great depth, the biggest evidence I’ve seen is that the character Pixis is based off of Akiyama Yoshifuru, an imperialist general, and that the author has stated he admires him greatly. Granted, that’s not a good look, but I’m not entirely sure about the context on this, for all I know, he might admire him the same way one might admire Genghis Khan, not based on any sort of moral compass, but rather on a “Wow, that’s a lot of conquering.”
But I digress, regardless of the author’s views, just from watching the anime twice with at least a modest amount of literary analysis ability, I can’t see how the show can be interpreted as anything other than anti-fascist. Eren Jaeger is not sympathetic at all once he goes genocidal. Marley is basically a stand in for Nazi Germany and is portrayed as barbaric and monstrous. Most of the atrocities committed by the Titan Holders is based in trauma and is the direct consequence of military indoctrination and nationalistic fervor. I must admit, Armin justifying the slaughter of thousands of civilians left a bad taste in my mouth, I do wish the show went further into exploring his traumatic change in character. As it stands, he’s usually portrayed as the level-headed one, so people might think of him as morally justified. But all in all, it seems like the thesis of the show is that trauma begets trauma, and nationalistic attitude is the root cause of most of it.
I mean, please correct me, I definitely do not want to be militarist apologist, but I’ve heard this sentiment quite a lot on the internet, and I don’t think it’s been satisfactorily explained to me yet.
Armin justifying the slaughter of thousands of civilians left a bad taste in my mouth
When did Armin do this? From what I remember, he was always against violence. Even when he nuked the Navy, he was clearly distraught from that.
Eren Jaeger is not sympathetic at all once he goes genocidal
Assuming you’re talking about Eren after the rumbling started. Because during the duration of season 4, he was genocidal(wanted to start the rumbling) yet had great character development and moments when I sympathized with him. I didn’t agree with him but seeing him evolve into a villain because of his never ending trauma was genuinely great to watch.
Idk about AoT, I bailed after a person got eaten, but can’t all anime be described as having an insufferable fan base? I literally don’t talk about it IRL. If someone starts the conversation, maybe I’ll join in, but only when it comes to mecha. Average people don’t give you as much side eye if you’re talking giant robots. I won’t talk about all the other shows I watch bc they associate that with weirdos. It’s true, I am a weirdo, but at least I know when to keep my mouth shut about it.
I hear a lot of people say AoT is fascist, but I’ve never seen it and only know the most basic details (medieval setting, giants attack fortress city, heroes fight them off). Can someone fill me in.
true dat, WIT fight scenes were goated and MAPPA wasn’t bad either
but
did they fix the utter plot armor given to the heroes during the final battle? Like they fought multiple powerful titan shifter clone thingies at once and yet none of them died.
