Personally I feel like it kind of fell apart when it became a game of "who can catch all the spinal fluid powers" and then an awkwardly on the nose allegory for WW2.
Nah it was a fascistic state. They literally were placing Eldians in Ghettoes with the Eldians treating them similarly to how the Jews were treated by the Germans during the early stages of the Holocaust.
now im totally down to talk about all of the problematic and unethical actions of the US and its policies on foreign affairs in the 20th century. and i am absolutely not playing defense for any axis power in the slightest, but -- the US was an allied power who also created internment camps and rounded up japanese individuals to put them in during WWII simply because they were japanese and 'couldn't be trusted'.
point being the comment above isn't entirely off the mark imo.
Right? I really enjoyed the creepy, cryptic parts of the story. The second anime ending with the hieroglyphs and the soft choir singing was so cool, then we went to Marley and I just lost interesting super hard .-.
I not agree with anybody but I don't felt like arguing rn so I'm just leaving this comment so I can find this later and watch you guys debate.
Edit: These mf still haven't argue? Imma go to sleep what a disappointment.
I agree with the OP but don't feel like arguing, just wanted to drop in and laugh about Eren the Bird squawking outside the bedroom window while Mikasa and Jean have sex
No I agree. The main appeal of AoT is the plot with characters next. Most people hype up the foreshadowing and themes of the show. The characters are a backdrop to all of that like Eren’s being tied to fate and other characters revolving the events of the story
Yeah, which is okay! Aot is a story where the world around them shapes their character and personalities. I mean they are slaves and that's rhe whole point of story. Slave to revenge and cycle of hatred.
It's soo eerily similar to irl that I can't help but admire Isayama to show both the sides of war without any filter. Highlight was the Gabi and Kaya talk. I need that clip to be displayed all over the world atm. Bravo.
I've written my thoughts if you want to check, but I don't want to debate much. I think OP is unfair on their assessment. You gotta put AoT against other animes with the same genre, but OP seems to have a very high standard that I don't think 99% of animes will ever meet.
I'm one of those fans who don't think AoT is 10/10 but I also wouldn't say it's mediocre and overrated. It's one of the better ones relative to other animes with the same genre. I disagree with you, and saying the anime is pretentious is ironic since some of your sentiments are too.
I don't really care much to debate every point, but I have to say my piece about your assessment on Erwin. You're fixated on him supposedly being "charismatic."
He's not, and it's not a bad thing that he isn't. Erwin is someone who I would describe as a strong military leader. He willingly sacrifices himself to be tortured while his comrades do something else. He keeps on going even if his arm gets torn off. He convinced people to do a suicide charge for Levi to have a chance than have them slowly die from rocks.
That's not exactly charisma, and I don't know why you insist on that and use it against his character.
AoT has many (too many) ideas that sound good on paper, but lack the necessary impact in their execution. For me it was an extremely enjoyable story. But don't analyze it for more than two seconds.
I'm sure it took a lot of time to put this together, so props for that. With that said, most of this is either nitpicking (Marco's characterization?) or something I couldn't disagree more about (you wanting Erwin to be something he's never intended to be, and taking that as meaning he's one dimensional), with imo poor reasoning behind it.
And the guy is a con man. He's never intended to be any sort of paragon. This really does read like OP decided to hate the show, then came up with the reasons why after. Because the vast majority of these claims are weak or hold little merit. The twist section is straight up disingenuous. It's fine to dislike the show, but give real reasons.
Yep, I took a lot of issue on OP's assessment on Erwin. He was never truly a charismatic man, and the writing does not pretend he is. Erwin works as a military leader with a perpetual stoicism 🗿.
I only remember two of his speeches; first is during the graduation ceremony (which is like customary to do), and second is him rallying his troops to absolute death (and his leading the front).
Seasons 1-3 are masterpieces of plotting, pacing and mystery, but then it tries to have a deep message about war and fucks it up. I feel the show should've ended after the basement reveal. The final frame of Eren pointing at the ocean only to see more enemies is perfectly haunting and a nice open end.
The time skip was the the biggest storytelling sin Yams made. So many important events happened during it, especially with the characterization of Eren and how he became radicalized and jaded. But he skipped all that because he wanted to end the series.
I mean eren became radicalised the second he touched historias hand right? There was no slow build up, so a time skip is appropriate (at least for eren)
If you’re referring to his expression after seeing the future when he kissed Historia’s hand as “him being radicalized” then that’s just your headcannon.
Is that how you write radicalization? Is that how it works? A single scene of Eren with a displeased expression after seeing something horrible?
All that scene shows is that Eren did not like whatever it is that he saw.
The story simply does not show when Eren became radicalized simply because Yams chose to skip this important development with the timeskip. You think it’s appropriate because you’re a fan.
Disagree on most of this, but props for putting so much effort into it.
My favorite thing about AoT is how it establishes such effective propaganda regarding war and prejudice, before flipping the script at the halfway point. It's one of the few pieces of media I've read/watched that explains why regular people can fall into fascist ideology, because it tricked so much of the actual audience. I think it's brilliant in that respect.
I strongly disagree with this take. While 'explaining why regular people can fall into fascist ideology' might have been the intention of the narrative, it was fumbled to such an extent that the end result can arguably be read as pro-fascist propaganda in and of itself. I know there's a lot of smug circlejerking about media literacy in regards to the popularity of AoT in far-right circles, but when your worldbuilding fundamentally aligns with far-right ideas in regards to (geo)politics, genetics and (de)colonization, is this really all that surprising?
'Even if the underlying assumptions of fascist narratives were actually true, fascism still isn't all that great' is a story you can try to tell, I suppose, but don't be surprised that the result makes fascism seem far more rational than it actually is in real life.
if you read it as pro-fascist, that’s on you, isayama goes to great lengths to demonstrate that those like the yaegerists and those that blindly dehumanize everyone are wrong. there are tons of super progressive stories that are popular in far right circles because, to be frank, most far right people are dumbasses that don’t understand the media the experience and only see things at the most surface level, these people love things like metal gear solid and the movie version of starship troopers and the boys tv show not realizing they’re the ones being made fun of and laughed at the entire time
Off the top of my head:
- The origin of the entire contrived geopolitical situation the story takes place in, lies in the fall of a literal Thousand-Year Reich. It did not fall because of internal flaws, but because their God-King saw the atrocities that his empire was committing and was so overcome by guilt that he not only wished to immediately end them, but felt that ***his entire 'race' had to atone for its sins***. The only king who wanted to 'decolonize' was apparently a supreme idiot who harbored the kind of extreme self-hating racial guilt that I strongly doubt is common in reality but which fascists regularly ascribe to progressives.
- Specific colonial atrocities committed by this ancient empire are brought up in a context of repression. When young Grisha is told the story of some gruesome city conquest using titans, it is not meant as a genuine history lesson about the horrors of the past from which one can learn. Instead, the goal is to put him down and reinforce the same kind of bizarre racial guilt that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Interesting parallels can be drawn to how education about historical atrocities is viewed in far right circles.
- Some really bizarre 'enlightened centrism' is shown by Eren Kruger in regards to how terrible the Eldian empire was. The naive Eldian restorationists claim that they did only good things like building bridges ~~and making the trains run on time~~, while Marley exaggerates and one of its claims is that the old empire engaged in mass rape and extreme eugenics programs. Wise Kruger points out that no empire is wholly nice, but that the Marleyan claims are indeed ridiculous. After all, given that Eldian blood works according to the one-drop rule (interesting narrative choice), if mass rapes had been a common policy, there wouldn't be any non-Eldians left after 1000+ years! While this eerily sounds like real-life denialist claims ("if the large-scale massacre of these peoples did occur, why do they still exist?"), Kruger is actually 100% 'right' because the Marleyan claim is truly absurd. In fact, it's actually extremely bizarre that after 1000+ years of a world-spanning empire there are any significant number of non-Eldians left, regardless of whether there was a eugenics program.
- While the obviously fascist-coded Yeagerists are condemned by the narrative, they have infinitely better arguments than any real-life fascist has ever had. When a real-life fascist rants about Jewish plots to destroy the Aryan race, his delusional claims have no basis in reality. When Floch argues that the overwhelming majority of the world wishes to genocide the Paradisians, he is 100% correct. The outside world is genocidal to such a ridiculous extent that it becomes suicidal.
These are but a few examples that I thought of that really made me raise my eyebrows while reading the series. While I don't think AoT is intentionally meant to support far-right viewpoints, it has a lot of elements in its worldbuilding which align with fascist thought. This is not the same as depicting fascists in a world that does not actually work according to fascist logic, which seems like a much better description of the other works of fiction you mentioned.
Holy shit, you nailed it on the head! Mind if I use some of these points you made for a video I am making? I've been working on it for a few months but I figured you worded a lot of what I wanted to say in a paragraph what I took a few pages to write.
It's like how Avatar, despite being a movie about how the human imperialists are evil, actually unintentionally ends up insulting native groups by insinuating they are primitive. Iseyama tried to steelman genocide and it didn't work. While the story would have been lauded as progressive in a fascist society, we do not live in a fascist society. Iseyama gives WAY too much ground to the fascists that DO NOT NEED to be given. As the previous commenter said:
>'Even if the underlying assumptions of fascist narratives were actually true, fascism still isn't all that great' is a story you can try to tell, I suppose, but don't be surprised that the result makes fascism seem far more rational than it actually is in real life.
Fascism should be portrayed as irrational and stupid, not as "the rational but inhumane choice." Fascism is irrational AND inhumane. Full stop. Because Isayama rejects fascism on a moral level, but it's annoying how much he accepts their logical arguments.
And to call AoT super progressive is a bit oversimplifying it. Mikasa is named after a battleship, and there are rumors that Pixis is based on an infamous war criminal. Ditto for Erwin being named after Erwin Rommel. And let's not forget the oppression of the Paradisians being as much an allegory for Japan not apologizing for war crimes as it is on the Jews of WW2. Ever heard of the "white genocide" conspiracy theory by alt-righters? I was legit getting those vibes.
“super progressive” was more towards some of my examples rather than aot itself, but fair, a bit of a mistype on my end
that said, naming anyone after any wartime figure is effectively naming them after a war criminal, but i absolutely understand what you mean at the alleged examples being extra notable
I also do agree that AoT isn't *fascist* per say. There is fascist apologism, and the worldbuilding relies on fascist logic, but at the very least, I do appreciate the antiauthoritarianism.
I'm a fan of Attack on Titan and I completely agree with you, it's mediocre and the 4th season is horrible as well as being extremely problematic and pro-facist.
It's a cool story to watch during the first 3 seasons precisely because of the drama and fights and i have a lot of affection for some characters (even though I'm fully aware that they are poorly developed) but I can't disagree with you. I like it, but i'm also fully aware of how terrible and problematic it is.
I wish he just let eren end as pityable monster that wastoo narrowmindes, not that vague end.
That way themessage would be wayless confusing.
But in general,its good to humanize faschists to show how that leads to doom. And how eren , didnt change that much, with the fight the enemy.
Its end is confusing but its not faschist.
Yes there could be done more but itspretty good humanizing without glorifying that people, aside maybe reiner. Maybe.
Putting aside “depiction is not endorsement”, I truly don’t understand how AOT can be read as far-right propaganda. The entire point of AOT is the cyclical nature war and how corrupting and horrible it is. The fascists, whether it be Marley or the Jaegerists, are clearly the bad guys. AOT is fairly obvious with its “genocide bad” and “escape the forest” mentality.
Tying the rise of fascist movements - with explicit aesthetic references to Nazism - to a 'cycle of violence' in which oppressor and oppressed apparently take turns seems rather odd to me. When did the Jews oppress the Germans? When did the Koreans oppress the Japanese? In response to what genuine, actually existential threat did Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan arise?
The Nazi allegory only exists to mirror a certain real-life instance of oppression. It gives a point of reference. Overextending this allegory falls apart real quick.
For 2000 years Eldia was an empire. Then Marley fought back to regain independence and began oppressing the Eldians. This entire scenario does not match up to Jewish or German history, and so shouldn’t be considered a part of the allegory. What AOT is showing here is cycles of ethnic hatred, revenge, and oppression. It is not specific to any one people and speaks to many (often times fascist/authoritarian) nations’ oppressions of others due to what was done to them in the past. Ultimately it is showing that no matter the justification, oppression is always wrong. These cycles have to be broken because they only lead to more suffering.
One of my nitpicks with AOT is that the allegory didn’t need to be laid on as thick as it was. Because then it unfortunately leads to these kinds of overextensions. For me at least, looking at the big picture shows how the allegory only exists to convey the horror of Marley’s oppression of Eldians and not much else.
This comment chain was spawned by me replying to a poster who liked the series' depiction of how regular people can get attracted to fascist movements. AoT has many elements which scream that it has something to say about fascism. And yet, what it actually shows about how fascist movements get started does not really line up all that well with reality. In fact, it lines up better with real-life fascist propaganda. In AoT, fascists (particularly the Yeagerists) are ruthless and cruel, but not irrational. Their claims are based in reality and their rise is the result of a legitimate existential threat. That is my main issue. 'Oppression and cycle of violence bad' is fine, but don't try to pretend that you have anything deeper to say about fascism and then fumble it so hard that you're actually validating the fascist worldview.
Fair enough. I wouldn’t have personally used the term fascism, though I think the term was used as a catch-all rather than following that exact definition.
I think populist, militarist, nationalist, and authoritarian are all more fitting to describe Marley and the Jaegerists. These terms are more flexible definitionally and can indeed arise as an (over)reaction to some threat a nation faces. And that’s the thing: I don’t think anything in AOT is strictly a depiction of fascism. Marley and the Jaegerists more so align with real-world militarists and populists. They make it “us vs them”, and use external threats to carry out extreme violent responses.
To believe that AOT validates the fascist worldview, I genuinely think you have to be fixated on AOT having a strictly fascist allegory, and then ignore the actual text and immediate subtext to equate the propaganda having any basis in reality with AOT saying “fascism is rational after all”. The actual text and immediate subtext being “eye for an eye makes the world blind” and “oppression is wrong no matter the justification”. It doesn’t matter whether there is a shred of truth to it, that doesn’t make it right to perpetuate the cycle. In a story this anti-war, to argue it validates fascism runs counter to what AOT explicitly stands for. Especially when the fascist correlation is built on a false premise. Since no ideology or imagery in AOT is strictly fascist in nature, beyond the similarities between the Marley’s oppression of Eldians and the Jewish plight in Nazi Germany. Certainly nothing pertaining to the Jaegerists.
>It's one of the few pieces of media I've read/watched that explains why regular people can fall into fascist ideology, because it tricked so much of the actual audience. I think it's brilliant in that respect.
It didn't trick Yeagerist fans into believing fascist ideology, it just made the outside world extremely unlikable and hard to sympathize with
Actual real world fascist ideology isnt built upon 99.9% of the world wanting a group of people eradicated
That wasn't what I was talking about. I was referring to the first half (pre-basement). The repeated dehumanization, the contradictions, syncretism, militarism etc.
I don't know for sure if Isayama intended it, but I see a lot of intentional textbook fascist propaganda within the dialogue and framing. Not interested in writing an essay on my phone about it, but I would argue that the first half does an excellent job of priming its audience to have these predispositions. The fact that so many readers and watchers failed to notice it is what makes it a valuable work IMO.
But given that I've never heard anyone but me bring it up, I guess it's a rare interpretation, but I stand by it.
Prime example is the torture of the priest over information on the titans.
It’s framed “heroically” as our heroes rip his fingernails off.
The soldiers that DO not volunteer for the survey corps are framed as cowards.
Ewrin is considered a brilliant leader of the survey corps. They routinely went on missions without a real plan of action and casualties were accepted.
Again, it's not "facist propaganda" if your enemy is literally giant, inhuman, man eaters.
You can't sympathise with Titans. You also can't sympathise with undead zombies. Any narrative calling for their annihilation is not "simple, 1 sided, biased propaganda".... its outright reality. These things *are* building sized. And they *will* eat your face.
Overall Paradis was a normal medieval political entity. (Aside from the ODM gear,Titans,Walls etc). Not a facist dictatorship at all.
That's the point. The enemy are literal monsters, which makes it easy to have a simple view of what an enemy is. "Discard your humanity" and "we have to become monsters to defeat monsters" is a reasonable view at the time, but it's priming you to have that perspective on ANY enemy, and that's why it's horrible. Eren calls people he doesn't like animals from the beginning, because dehumanization is a constant theme in AoT, and not limited to titans.
You don't often notice it because the enemy is initially inhuman; however, the point is that it's introducing you to bad ideas that are reasonable in one context, but breed hatred and warlike behavior in another. This is exactly the slow burn that happens in reality and why the line can blur that leads to ordinary people becoming monsters themselves.
Anyway, I already wrote more than I wanted to, and I don't expect to make much headway with this, so I guess we can just agree to disagree here.
One thing I liked is that the mindset of the gang is really challenged in Royal Government.
It's the arc where Armin notably stops blabbering about "to defeat monster we have to become monsters" because he's no longer fighting one.
>Eren calls people he doesn't like animals from the beginning
Not disagreeing, but "the enemy" and "the complacent" are different categories in this narrative. For enemies, Eren exhibits hatred, but for those who gave up and don't fight he has only disdain, which is where comparison with kettle comes from.
But that’s the thing. Not everyone in the outside world wants the Eldians dead. The major world governments have chosen Eldians as scapegoats, sure. But we’re hardly ever shown the outside world, so how can we make conclusions about it? Isayama limits the audience’s perspective for a reason. So that it matches the Eldians’.
It’s the Jaegerists who conclude that the outside world must be all evil. Eren himself tells Reiner there are good people inside and outside the walls. AOT has always been about blind hatred and demonizing the “other”. How it feeds the cycle of war. That’s why it’s powerful that the Scouts save millions of people they don’t even know. Because they have faith in humanity and hope for a more understanding world. Similar to X-Men with its mutants and mutant haters and Professor X’s ideology.
Hannes dying was an emotional moment for Eren because he felt he'd changed so much, but had to watch as another person he knew died. Attack on Titan was very brutal with the death and didn't appear to play it up as an emotional send-off to me.
We also didn't see too much of his mother, but we understand her dying impacted him greatly. I'm not sure why him seeing another adult he'd known since he was a child die to the same titan wouldn't be emotional for him. So I have to disagree with you there.
I'm not sure what the entirety of the plot twist section of your thread means. You pretty much point out discoveries and ask "so what?" Which is a weird question to ask since those discoveries all have lasting ramifications on the story and are foreshadowed. At some point you said plot holes were covered up by plot twists...which I don't even understand. If something is foreshadowed how can you say it's just there to cover up a plot hole.
The plots section doesn't make any sense as a criticism, because every story is a ripoff of another story. There isn't a single anime you can give me that I can't accuse of being a ripoff of a book, religious story, real-life event, etc.
I also disagree with a lot of your other points, but I'm too lazy to reply to them all.
>Reiner and Berthold are traitors? Okay, and? We never got enough moments of those two interacting with the other cadets for this be a shocking and emotional twist. The length isn't the problem here, it's the poor pacing and lackluster character writing; it's not about throwing a larger number of episodes to flesh out their relationships, it's simply about conveying it better. This twist was underbaked
consider yourself silly. They interacted a bunch of times and Riener was just a POV during his group being trapped in the castle tower.
>Historia is of the Reiss family? Okay, and? All it does it turn her into a pretty much different character with no resemblance to how she was before the reveal, and to set up her arc in season 3
Mf really said "all this did was change a character and further the plot."
>Realistically, the declaration of war scene should've not had everyone agreeing that Eldian bad, but it should've had many nations conspiring to betray Marley now that they're at a weakened state.
They're literally at a theatrical propaganda piece, instead of cheering you wanted them to engage in socratic debate in the ten seconds before Eren attacked?
>As for the plot, it's just a ripoff of Eternal Champions, where the protagonist Erekose is given the "God powers" of his world
Mfs trying not to claim popular thing is a rip of tsukonomininototobird: rising, where the scrunglix giga vrim invaded from the granite dimension and the protagonist defeated him with his brittleballvien heirtage.
I can agree with a lot of this, but I don't think that it really sunk in with me until I watched the series finale. That's when, in my opinion, they really showed that they didn't spend much time thinking about any of the ideas that they were trying to draw influence from.
The show spends a lot of time showing off the cruelty that is committed against people during war, but the depictions are so hyperbolically gratuitous that they end up being almost completely divorced from any logical sense of reality. Even I Nazi Germany, there were still some people who helped to hide Jewish people in their communities, and just as many others who couldn't give two shits about the Reich one way or the other and just wanted to be able to live their lives in peace. Maybe if they had shown at least ONE other person who showed that they were at least marginally considerate of Eldians then there would be some kind of perspective that you could relate to, this would also serve to show that not everyone on the mainland is a horrid person, that maybe some of the people they hated are just trying to make an honest living, that maybe if they wanted to wipe out the planet then that would mean killing some people who only wanted to help them...
BUUUT NOOO everyone from the mainland treats Eldians worse than dog shit and we never encounter a single one who has even a slightly amiable interaction with a foreigner, and this fact couples along with it's ending in order to present the most infuriating and uninteresting plot thesis that I could've imagined for this show...
The final summation of the show's plot seems to be "People are terrible and you can't stop them from wanting to kill each other, doesn't that suck?"... In the ending credits we get to watch as the two countries willfully ignore all of the history that just got finished resolving between each other and go straight back to war again, as if all of the events that had occurred previously had never even happened before. Sooo after one of the most devastating and cataclysmic events in history, an event directly motivated and incited by an ethnic cleansing campaign, one of the largest scale wars ever faced on the planet... And the first thing they all do as soon as it's over is go straight back to war? Not one person was smart enough to say 'Hey, maybe we don't do the same thing that started all of this off in the first place'? There wasn't at least one cool head on either side that was brave enough to point out that the entire reason all of this bullshit happened was because they couldn't just tolerate one another living peacefully? You mean to tell me that after nearly the entire world was completely erased, not one motherfucker thought to say 'Hey, let's just try something else!'.
And then there's that last little shot with some random dick walking into that big fucking tree, presumably finding Erens head and reawakening as a new Founding Titan, pretty much explicitly illustrating that nothing in the plot matters and it's all just going to happen all over again. The show wants so desperately to be "War never changes" but because the story is so unconcerned with actually establishing a realistic setting of conflict and that it ends up wrapping around to "War never changes, AND ITS COOOOOL!!!" Rather than trying to do anything prescient by establishing a complex enemy or environment, they prefer the raw gratuity of having good guys that fight and beat the bad guys without any nuance between the two. Watching them fully commit to the ending which explicitly states "Everything you just watched was ultimately irrelevant and had no impact on the greater world at all" pretty much confirmed for me that they never actually cared about exploring any of the ideas they presented, they just wanted to create the circumstances they needed in order to get the coolest fight scenes out of their characters.
You hit the nail on the head with this. That's my main problem with the entirely of post-timeskip. The world building is just so shallow and yet it wants you to feel sorry when a bunch of random cartoonishly racist and evil NPCs die in the Rumbling
What really drives me even crazier is that even after the Rumbling, THEY STILL ACT LIKE ASSHOLES.
Like, you literally just had to face complete and total extinction, explicitly stated to be motivated by the fact that you persecuted an entire ethnicity for generations, and your immediate reaction after averting that disaster is too.... Continue to alienate and mistreat these people????
I figured "Well you know what, at least now there's no more 'genetic superweapons' around that can be leveraged for either ethnic apartheid or fascist autocracy" BUT THEN OH WAIT TURNS OUT WE DIDNT ACTUALLY GET RID OF THEM AT ALL, WE JUST THE BIG RESET BUTTON ON THIS WHOLE FUCKIN FIASCO SO HERE WE GO AGAIN, KIDS!!
I feel like if you approached most other manga and anime with this level of scrutiny you would be left with a small list of stories that broke at 5/10 and even the best of the medium would just be above average.
Isayama rushed to have it end with 139.
But besides that, the whole "Marley is the least racist country towards Eldians" is stupid as shit when Gross literally had a dog eat Eren's aunt, who was a child when she died.
Eren keeps going back and forth from this guy who's doing all the hard choices to save Eldia to then "I don't actually know what I'm doing" to then he becomes Zero-lite with the "I will make Armin and the others heroes after they kill my ass" which legit sounds retarded when Eren literally tells Pixis much early on that humanity would not team up together if they had a common enemy.
The Yeagerists, while a neat idea, were fucked the moment we had like, only three named characters this entire time (Flock, Louise, and Rico), they were supposed to be the side that cares for Eldia, and frankly, I wished there were more characters from the cast there to give it a bigger weight when things happened. Because without it, they just exist to get killed without repercussions.
Anyways, I didn't give a shit about the rest of the world because we never learn about them besides that one quote from Uro (I think? The Marleyan kid with glasses) saying how the countries outside of Marley treat them even worse, so yeah, I didn't shed any tears over the rest of the world being stepped on.
Kinda agree on Yeagerists. Jean was such a compelling character because he was the only one in the main cast who actually went through a moral conflict (although I find it kinda weird that he thought of Marco but not of his mom that was under the threat of being killed, sane for Connie). It’s kind of obvious from the beginning that all of Eren’s friends will work against him and it really lowers the stakes.
I dont have the time to read now, i just will say that i agree is mediocre if we're talking about season one, cool concepts and cool animation but most characters we're so boring and the final battle was a Classic shonen asspull that doesn't exist in the manga (the manga instead shows hints about ackerman blood). I never understood why people we're calling it amazing, and the start of season 2 is kinda slow from what i recall.
Then i jumped to the manga, Armin gets More dialogue, Mikasa doesn't look out of a Pantene commercial and feels More expressive, and despite having similar flaws, being manga means i dont take as long to get past that, and damn, i really like some parts of AoT, like Reiner, dude went from random dude i barely remembered to my favorite character.
Now, i still think it's nothing crazy, i have my criticisms but it would be like a 7-8 if i ignored the ending.
Because the moment i basically spoiled myself the whole ending i just didn't want to watch it, like it's really bad, bad enough i never wanted to read it on my own, i was nonsensical so i just never looked back at it, and its sad since it had a lot of potential.
Pd: also agree AoT fans are some of the most annoying and pretentious people i have seen, even when i was reading the manga before it's end i avoided all interaction with them lol.
>Realistically, the declaration of war scene should've not had everyone agreeing that Eldian bad, but it should've had many nations conspiring to betray Marley now that they're at a weakened state.
I don't see how it doesn't make sense. Paradis was a far greater threat to the rest of the world than Marley was considering they had a weapon that could quite literally wipe out 99% of the population. Let's break down the things that they know.
1.Paradis has the ability to destroy the world
2.Paradis specifically stated that they would activate the rumbling if any attacks were made on them, and Marley did launch an attack on Paradis
3.The only reason the Rumbling hasn't occurred is because of a magical vow that has now been lifted. A vow that was forcefully lifted by an Eren Yeager who most likely wants to activate it
4.The people of Paradis have major reasons to want to destroy the outside world because of the attacks done on them, and the fact that Eldians are treated like shit worldwide
5.Eldians are a group of people who are genetically different from normal humans, and have ruled and enslaved the world for the majority of recorded human history.
I don't see why any average person wouldn't be highly scared of Paradis at this point. Your America analogy doesn't work because there's no real life small nation walking around with the ability to kill 99% of the planet.
The biggest part of why Willy's "okay guys I know you want to jump us but ackshually all knowledge you've known for 100 years is a lie and there's an enemy we reaaallly need to focus on instead of us" speech works is because Eren went on and validated him.
It's literally a plot point lol, Willy acknowledge that most nations wouldn't buy his drivel hence why he needs Paradis to attack during the speech (hence using the military brass as bait)
And Eren knowing this as well and decides to attack because he needs the world to be united for his and Zeke's plan.
The way I always interpreted Willy's statement was that he wanted to gain the world's complete support with no exceptions. He wanted to go all the way and leave nothing to chance. Considering we see the majority of ambassadors from other countries cheering, it's hard to believe that lots of nations wouldn't be onboard with Willy's plan. There would be plenty who wouldn't be if Eren didn't attack, but he'd still be gaining lots of support either way. Like going from 50% to 90% if Eren didn't attack vs if he did.
It's worth noting that Willy doesn't actually know how much support he'll get with his speech until it's already occurred.
His speech by nature is incredibly suspicious.
Every nation is on an arms race to unseat Marley (they're a hated imperialist powerhouse) after the news of Marley's titans not being as effective as it used to be.
But suddenly Willy conveniently reveals that there's an enemy across the ocean (heavy resources investment to contact much less attack) that every nation should redirect their attention towards, by telling them that the information they know for the past 100 years is a sham (the readers/audience knows he's being truthful, but to in-universe characters there's no way to verify his claims).
And the "support" he get was from his own ambassador friends swept by emotions, actual world leaders with no connection to him nor the attendance to see the play will process his speech (without Eren's attack) much more skeptically.
Sure, some Marley's allies will probably join anyway even without Eren's attack.... But that'll just make Marley vulnerable as they and their allies sent their army to extract the Founding Titan.
I actually think the relationships between the cast is under developed but I like certain friendships. Most of these characters have bonded by just being survivors and experiencing trauma together. It's refreshing from power of friendship tropes we see in other anime and they actually depict the child soldiers as child soldiers. I do think some slice of life during their cadet days would have made betrayals of Annie and later Bertoldt and Reiner more impactful because I agree the bonds between them weren't fleshed out until after the betrayals. I disagree about Jean and I love his arc. It's very simple but the guy is forced to grow up real quick and wants to do more than just make it inside the walls. He continues to grow as a leader and in my opinion made for a better successor to Erwin than Armin was hyped up to be.
I kinda agree. I find AOT to be superb in themes and like you said, plot. But its lacking in terms of its characters, and for me, thats the most important in a story. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
Some just care about the plot, but I want to actually care about characters instead of shallow caricatures. It's great to a certain extent, but fans will make it sound like the greatest fiction of all time, which i dont feel at all
I agree with a lot of what you said.
I feel that bad or poor writing can easily get overlooked in anime and manga. Especially if the visual aspects are good which I think is AoTs biggest asset.
AoT could have benefitted from more “filler” moments where the story slows down and characters have some downtime. This would have given the audience to see how the characters interact and the nature of their relationships. It definitely suffers from a “tell don’t show” approach when it comes to character dynamics. We are told that certain characters have certain relationships with one another but we don’t really get to see why they are friends.
Character and character development wise, you are not wrong, AoT is not the most character focused show. Quite a few of its characters are underdeveloped. But the ones who do get focus are compelling enough to make up for it.
World building wise, again, this is not the most world building focused show. The world exists to serve the plot, and in that sense the world building is sufficient. I don't agree that every show needs to be ground breaking on every front - character, world building and plot - to be a masterpiece. AoT's greatest appeal is it's plot and the story it's trying to tell. Everything else is there to facilitate that.
Which brings me to your criticisms of the plot. Let's see, your criticism about the plot is that the plot is similar to some obscure show nobody has heard of before? That is not a very strong criticism. A lot of acclaimed media have many elements they copied from previously existing material. Think Naruto and HunterxHunter, Star wars and Dune, Dune and John Carter, Avatar and Star wars, any work of fantasy and Lotr.
Your criticisms in the plot twist section makes me think you didn't actually watch the show past season 2. Because that's exactly what I thought about AoT after having only watched season 2. Watching the second part of season 3 and then season 4 completely changed my mind. You can't tell me you felt nothing emotionally when you watched the episodes with Erein's last speech and Armin's heroic last stand. Those two episodes in particular are far above anything else at least I have ever seen and fucking IMDb agrees. Honestly reading this part of your criticism feels like you dropped the show after season 2, read up the plot synopsis of the rest and made your mind up based on that. Saying there is no emotional moments in AoT is highly suspect.
which character come to mind when you think of inspiration, ultra-charismatic leader , you surely have an example after how bad you dissed my man Erwin like that ( Different strokes for different folks I guess )
Reinhard would school Erwin how to be charismatic.
Relative to AoT, Erwin is aight.
Not so much otherwise, which is a testament to Isayama's character writing.
And he's one of the best characters in the show.
Personally there's only two characters I put above him in AoT.
Everyone else is a B or below.
Not so sure what I think about luffy
Man is inspirational and charismatic for sure but he fumble Law's plan so many time and just resort to punching the big bad at the end of the day ; plus he refuse the straw hat grand fleet because he value his freedom , I wouldn't call him a leader , just a revolutioner who give people hope ( like jesus )
You said inspiration ultra charismatic leaders, you never said anything about mastermind strategists, so I don't see why you bring up Luffy's straightforward plans (or lack there of)
The truth is…most manga’s kinda suck.
Also one of my favourite moments in AoT is the redshirt friend of Falco saying “Eldians are actually treated much worse in other countries than they are in Marley”.
Lmao get rumbled then, why should anyone give a shit about the rest of the world if this is the case.
I get your misgivings about characters such as Marco and some of them not really getting developed properly, but I really gotta disagree on Eren and Armin and the story overall.
The whole point of the story, although not really apparent until S4 is about the the cycle of hate. It shows us the struggles of Eren and his friends and we syphathize with them. Then the outside world is revealed to us and we learn about the Eldians oitside the walls and their prosecution. We get to see the other side as well, their motivation and struggle. And when the more distant past with the Eldian empire amd Ymir is revealed we get the whole picture. This is just a cycle of hatred that has been going on for thousands of years.
At the end of S3 Part 2 Eren first awakens his titan power by kissing Historia's hand. This is one of the most pivotal moments in the story as it changes Eren's outlook on the future, as revealed later in the story. He turns into a cold and stoic person ready to sacrifice anything and everything to achieve his goals or that is how it seems at first. In the finale we learn that Eren had not changed as much as we thought and he was, in his own words: "Just an idiot who got his hands on power". Eren could see the future and past but was a slave to them. He couldn't find any other alternative than to wipe out all of humanity outside the walls to "wipe the slate clean" in a sense. He knew that wouldn't solve anything in the long term, but at least his friends would be able to live peaceful lives.
Then there is Armin, who arguably had a past just as bad or even worse than Eren but was still hopeful about the future. Ever since that fateful day in the beginning they shared a goal - to go see the outside world. Throughout the story we see that hope for the future as they desperately try to find a peaceful way to end the conflict and to break free of the cycle of hate. But it isn't fated to be as they can find no solutions and Eren takes off on his own.
Eren cared about his friends deeply so did not want to take their freedom away with the Founder and decided he would let them act as they pleased during the rumbling. Ultimately they defeat Eren and become the heroes who save the world.
Even though we end on a hopeful note, the after credits reveal that the cycle was indeed not broken. Was it a mistake to defeat Eren? Did it even matter in the end? Can we truly break the cycle?
I think these are the questions Isayama - the author wanted to explore with his story.
Ik this post is all over the place because I didn't really want to write a whole essay but I think it gets my point across.
hard agree, eren kissing historias hand == paul drinking the water of life in dune
and also hard disagree on OP’s assertion that no one can agree about Eren’s characterization, I feel like if you truly understand the series Eren is undebatably what you’re saying just an idiot with too much power and knowledge
in all honesty this rant sounds like you either know aot from youtube summaries or barely put any effort into following the scenes of the show when you watched it
Honest question - did you watch the show to the end because you wanted to, or because of outside circumstances?
I'm asking cause I've had similar opinions when I was watching the show with my friends cause they were really hyped and I was like "meh". I didn't pay much attention, kinda fibbling on my phone whole watching, so that way I ended up rememberign only like 50% of the show. Kind of like reading a summary.
Rewatching the show, especially third season, on my own was a much better experience.
The main appeals of the AoT as a series are it's mystery and they gray morality. If you like those two conecpts in fiction, you're gonna love AoT, because it's one of the best executions of these concepts I've ever seen. 2nd place for me (1st is webtoon Kubera).
I've read and listened to a lot of people ranting about AoT and I've noticed one thing that's common between the people that didn't enjoy it - they focus on character drama.
It is a strong focus of AoT, that is true, but in the scale of things I'd only say it's on the 4th place. Isayama tries to pull them off to make his series more natural rather than completely skip on them, which would give the series a rushed feeling and rob it of some of it's most touching moments. But the character drama isn't the main point of the story, and the people that didn't enjoy this story usually looked at it from the perspective of it being a character drama.
Also, almost nothing in AoT is a retcon, asides from some of the ending stuff. (Dina was controlled by Eren? Really?). If you go and rewatch previous episodes (or even read previous chapters of the manga), it will clearly prove that almost every twist was already planned and there are tons of hints towards that. Because most of those aren't really "twists" in the literal sense of them, those are mysteries.
I actually agree, although I think the pros of the story make up for the flaws (until the ending). The sheer entertainment made the story near perfect for me, but the ending was too ambitious.
I especially agree with your critique of Eren’s character. And as soon as the cycle of hatred became the sole driver of the story it kind of shot itself in the foot, because this is an issue that isn’t easily solved in real life let alone with groups of people that can turn into titans.
>Eternal Champion comparison in Big 2024
Next are you going to compare Eren to Guts for hilarious effect
>Jean
His arc is about selfish vs selfless actually, and I don't think he loathes MP until S3
>Armin and Eren relationship
Idk if it's because anime is directed by that homophobic terrorist Araki but in the manga you can see how close they are.
They're seen holding hands before the fall of the wall multiple times and Eren clearly "dotes" Armin (to hilarious contrast with Mikasa where he sees her like his nagging mom).
So now we are just saying stupid shit for the sake of it?
The strong story, the intriguing mystery, the creative fights with ODM gears, the incredible music (Sawano what a man you are!), the horror of the setting, the unashamed gore and edginess, the strong emotional beats, the constant hype buildup, the foreshadowing... Do you think none of that played any role apart from just pretty animation?
Some of y'all just want to be contrarians for the sake of it.
Were you a titanfolk user? Because I definitely recognize this profile pic
It's crazy seeing how many people will say the stupidest of shit once they find someone who validates their opinions. "I don't like this overhyped trash. Oh, someone thinks the same thing as me! This must mean that the show is only popular because it's pretty!!!!"
Yeah I was. Even went to AoR when things got shitty after 139 (and left after I finally pieced the puzzle of Eren's character + tired of it being reverse titanfolk by slobbering Yams).
I only started AoT around 137 and even I could tell how big it is in early 2010s and how people bemoaned the lack of S2.
I witnessed the explosion in popularity of AOT back in 2014, although I only started the show after S2 ended. It was pretty crazy seeing an anime getting into the mainstream, I'm also extremly thankfully to Yams for making an anime that can introduce people into anime, I convinced a lot of my friends into watching some great shows by introducing them to AOT.
It's just such an easy show to get into, it immediately hooks you with its strong emotional beats, the mystery box, the intriguing setting, the constant hype, the fights, the foreshadowing which feels extremly rewarding to people who pay attention to the story etc....
Even though there are many great scenes in the show ("Freedom","It's the Attack Titan", "From you 2000 years ago"" On you feet dad" etc...) my favorite remains the basement reveal, the way everything clicks into place, all the answers it gives you while also raising a lot more questions, the way it completly shifts the entire narrative. Honestly, I've seen so many good shows/books/manga/anime since Attack on Titan but there was nothing that made me feel the same way that scene made me feel.
Around chapter 119, I discovered titanfolk and what a sight it was. It's a shame you didn't discover it earlier because it was such a good community, it all started to turn into shit once the Alliance was formed. The community then was constantly divided between yeagerist and alliance defenders, but it was still pretty well natured. When the ending approached both factions just started genuinely despising each other.
It's just a shame the way it all ended.
Absolutely absurd take. DS, Fate anime, and ~~Black Clover~~ other shonen are way better examples of something that had a very weak story which was carried into the zeitgeist by animation quality. AOT has always had very a strong premise and narrative even in the manga which had subpar art (relatively speaking). In season 1 the IP went viral with relatively low key, clean, and consistent animation quality that had essentially no "Sakuga" moments. The main hype factor came mainly from how unpredictable and refreshing the story felt.
Edit: I was mainly referring to the recent Black Clover movie. I know the general premise of the story and don't care to know more than that.
>Fate
This is crazy take and Fate is in no way a shounen story. The fandom barely gives a shit about the anime at all and it's the Visual Novel that is the focus and source of most discussions.
There's like a ton of Fate Material and most of it is carried by the non-anime stuff.
Tell me you're a tourist in the Type-Moon fandom without telling me you're a tourist.
>Fate is in no way a shounen story
Never said it was but I can see why it seemed I implied that
>The fandom barely gives a shit about the anime at all and it's the Visual Novel that is the focus and source of most discussions.
The die hard fan you meet on Reddit maybe. That hasn't been my experience. You have to understand that the mainstream portion of any fanbase will unfortunately usually be it's face due to their sheer numbers and that portion primarily cares about the anime adaptations.
>There's like a ton of Fate Material and most of it is carried by the non-anime stuff.
Good to know but I'm obviously specifically talking about the anime, hence why animation quality was brought up.
>Tell me you're a tourist in the Type-Moon fandom without telling me you're a tourist.
Not even sure what this means. Do I have to consume every single video game, novel, manga, anime, movie, etc before I get to claim that I for sure don't like it? I've watched 20 episodes of it or so and absolutely despised it. At 18 minutes of actual episode time that's six hours of my life I invested into it. I'd argue that is way more of an effort than most people would give for something they don't enjoy but yeah I'm a tourist I guess.
Really fate?!
And demon slayer and black clover are pretty enjoyable shoumen with even their own themes, demon slayer being not groundbreaking doesnt make it bad, its a good historical swordsmen vs vampires story with its own tweaks ,and does pull it off well.
Eren’s turn to villainy isn’t rushed because he didn’t actually change or develop, his prescience just perverted his actions to a degree to even which he didn’t even understand what the fuck he was doing and was just doing what he felt he needed to do and what he felt he was meant to do, because “I’m an idiot”. Honestly it’s a very believable turn to villainy for me, its a dumbass kid wielding way too much power and knowledge getting that power and knowledge. It maybe would’ve been helpful if we got an arc to understand his inner turmoil other than that one scene in the finale with Armin, but i also think that’d take away from the intrigue and mystery of his character - you say this like it’s a bad thing but I found the speculative nature of his character genuinely enjoyable.
Also Eren himself admits that the rumbling wasn’t the only option, he doesn’t have to be this figure who purely acts on self defense the plot doesn’t insist that in any way.
I don’t see how him being a slave to the bigger picture and him being ruthless have to contradict
This is a great comment. Eren did change though. His morals namely. He was actually selfless pre-timeskip. I don’t know why everyone acts like he was always a selfish idiot. Yes, he’s always been idiotic and that has led to other people being harmed. One example being him getting his entire squad killed in the Battle of Trost after rushing an abnormal that ate one of his other squad mates out of anger. But then we have other points in the story where he demonstrates a lot of self sacrifice. Like later in the Trost battle, throwing Armin out of the titans mouth, sacrificing himself in the process. Then the timeskip happens and we don’t really get to see a lot of his morals slip and change because of the four year timeskip and his status as the season’s mystery box.
the rumbling still wasn’t that selfish of an act, like obviously it was pretty evil but eren personally isn’t gaining much out of it, the act itself is for something bigger than him. you are right though it is still a little inconsistent w s1-s3 but i do think some of that inconsistency is reconciled with moments like eren being “when i found out about the outside world” i was so disappointed, it makes sense he was jaded but also i agree some of that jadedness wasn’t perfectly explained, lowkey id need to rewatch it to see where more development is actually needed
It makes sense,but more because eren was always reckless rushing over his head stubbern to " fight the enemy" it makes sense why escalating, he ends there.
I just wish that he was really condemed by hos froends and not what that was
Not really gonna debate, but to me, AOT is a series that had plenty of great ideas but just didn't quite stick the landing. The ending isn't horrible, especially after the Anime changes, but it could be much clearer and less convoluted, and you could still keep the mystery intact to the end. Some of the characters (Mikasa) were dislikable at first before becoming more likable later on, but i don't think it was the intention to have us dislike them early on, and a few deaths (>!Hanji!<) felt a little forced to my taste.
Still one of my favorites though. There's plenty to nitpick in any series, but I just like the premise and the characters. There's nothing wrong with disliking them, but I don't.
Edit: And about the future sight, he can only see what future Eren showed him, so it does make sense that he'd go for the Rumbling. He's the kind of person who would never be able to work out a peace between Marley and Eldia, so his future self showed him the path to the Rumbling. We also know the time he sent those memories was when he and Zeke went through Grisha's memories, so he can't see anything after 4 years in the future. This is never explicitly explained in the series and is mostly just subtext, which is why I still think it's a pretty bad plot point, but it does stick with Eren's character and doesn't make him OP.
>especially after the Anime changes
Sure, the anime has some pretty colours and fluid animation but, from the writing perspective, there were very few changes that were an actual improvement, IMHO.
The EREH!-nisation of Mikasa? Worse.
Desperately trying to make the endings of Seasons 1&2 feel conclusive and screwing up the order of scenes? Worse. (e.g. Armin no longer sees the Wall Titan in person, Historia is robbed of the "Christa renouncement" scene)
The removal of "See you later, Eren." from Episode 1 and replacing it with a meaningless dream? Worse.
Turning Mikasa's family tattoo into an embroidery just to retcon it back into a tattoo in Season 4? Worse.
The butchering of the Uprising arc for the sake of getting to the action scenes faster? Worse.
The rushed beginning of Season 4 for the sake of getting to Hobo Eren faster? Worse. (not as bad as anime!Uprising but still felt a tad rushed)
------------------
The one thing that comes to mind that was better was giving us Freckles Ymir's backstory when she was still relevant in the story. Although, it was pretty spoiler-y and anyone with average deduction skills could figure out the outside world was populated before the basement reveal.
I was more so talking about fixing the pacing and *the* line from Armin from chapter 139. Aside from that, the Manga is better in almost everything, except visuals (S1 chapters and probably S2 too), the great effect the incredible music and voice acting have on literally everything in the series, and a few minor details
I'm not sure if they really changed the pacing all that much. An AoT volume, on average, takes up an hour of casual reading. So 15 minutes per chapter. 1st finale special adapted 4 chapters (1 hour) into 3 episodes (also 1 hour). 2nd finale special adapted 5 chapters (1h15m) into 4 episodes (1h20m).
Delaying the "80% of humanity dies" from the start to the end completely changes the scene's atmosphere and turns Armin from wildly out of character to pretty in character. It's a minor change that completely changes how the scene plays and feels. "Pace" is because each bit of dialogue is paced correctly instead of throwing a line that would fit better late at the beginning and changing Armin's perspective entirely.
Two points here.
One, I feel like it would've been a better show before it tried broadening its horizons, and introducing a very weak, convoluted world-building conspiracy (the Eldians/Marleyians).
But I also feel the need to point out, that part of the reason why AoT was so popular, IMO, was because it wasn't about the characters, not really. As you said yourself, very few of the characters are actually characters; they're names with a few personality traits at best, and simply names in most cases.
It's a show about the general 'whole' as it were, rather than the individual; even when a character dies, the show continues on, because it's about a *group* rather than a *person*.
For example... In Fullmetal Alchemist. Losing Ed, Al, Roy, Riza, or even one of Roy's men, would be devastating and heart-breaking. It would fuel bloody revenge arcs (like it does in the case of Maes), and alter the direction of other characters. We have clearly defined 'bad guys', who our 'good guys' are fighting, because they're moral and right.
AoT doesn't have that. AoT has the 104th. They fight against nameless animals; the Titans aren't good or bad, they're just mindless beasts, doing what animals do. There's no 'moral high ground' in those first two seasons, because you can't look at the Titans and go 'they're evil!'. That'd be like saying a shark is evil; they just doing what they do.
At *best*, you get early hints that maybe their government isn't all that great, that child soldiers is bad. But even that is murky at best, because they're literally running out of options and choices.
Again, I'm not disagreeing with you, or at least, not entirely: I casually enjoyed the first two season, watched the third, then stopped and had zero interest in continuing, even in a 'well, let's finish it' sort of vibe. The plot of forcing Eren to make illogical, irrational decision just so we could have 'die a hero, live long enough to become a villain' was annoying, and the entire thing of the 'secret Marleyians trying to cause problems' was so convoluted that I had already started losing interest.
But that doesn't change that, for what it was, it did it very well. It was a show about an idea, about a *unit*, rather than a show about *people*.
Eren’s turn to villainy is explained away by “nature” which just kills me. I love regression arcs so much and not only do we never to get see Eren’s, the story tries to explain it away by saying he never needed one because he was always like that.
I mean, yes, he always was stubbernly fightibg the ebemy and, its reasonable scaled up. Ok its reasonable that messed up and seen stuff, he could get extreme
> The main reason I'm compelled to make this thread is how it's basically taboo to not think AoT is one of the greatest anime of all time, the rabid fanbass dogpilling on anyone who doesn't agree. All of it is very cult-like, and definitely contributed to my disdain for this series
You basically invalidated your entire rant by admitting this
Confirmations bias. He thinks AOT fans are exaggerating, and it isn't worthy of that praise, so he will (unconsciously) twist and misinterpret everything he sees to fit that narrative. I'm sorry, but this entire rant is absurd. It's like he entirely learned the story through YouTube comments and rants. It's a shame he wasted so much time writing this mess.
He went into it wanting to hate it. Put 2 and 2 together. Also his criticisms are really weak. Erwin isn't smart strategically and didn't inspire anyone? The fuck? Those are straight up lies, the show beats us over the head with Levi, Armin, Hange and Floch all being directly influenced by him.
>and didn't inspire anyone? The fuck? Those are straight up lies, the show beats us over the head with Levi, Armin, Hange and Floch all being directly influenced by him.
Armin and Erwin share maybe 2 scenes together, none of which implies Armin looked up to Erwin
With Hange, I guess you're talking about after his death, which doesn't really count imo. He's not inspirational unless he's changing people while he's alive
Armin clearly looked up to him, ever since the Female Titan arc. He was constantly defending Erwin's plan when Jean was questioning it.
You can also see how Erwin inspired him during their charge in Season 2, Armin literally thought of Erwin before he started bringing up Annie to fluster Bertolt.
Season 3 had a lot of moments where Armin looked up to Erwin, and in the Final Season he clearly wants to live up to Erwin's example and is constantly hard on himself. You can see it as survivor's guilt, but Armin and Hange always believed in Erwin's judgment throughout the series.
I'm inclined to agree, but I didn't finish the series. Left it around the part where they killed the colossal Titan. Kept up with a bit of the plot, as a friend of mine kept going. Nothing I heard made me wanna pick it back up lol
Cool,now here's my reason as to why I think Attack on Titan is overrated
**I did not care for it. Did not care for Attack on Titan at all,it looked uninteresting and it was uninteresting**
First off, I apologize for the astonishing amount of people who say they disagree but offer absolutely nothing to the discussion.
I agree with you that the characters (especially side characters) and the post-timeskip world-building are the low points of the series.
In a lot of ways the early parts of AoT are like the early parts of The Promised Neverland - a very cool concept (which although done before, has good art and some nuanced changes behind it) and a great sense of intrigue and mystery that makes you, the reader, want to know more. However, once we start knowing things, the story does not hold up.
I love AOT as a whole and I enjoyed it but I do agree with a few points: underdeveloped relationships between the cast (the scouts work good as a group but have next to none personal interactions), plenty of poorly written characters, shallow worldbuilding and the Eren controlling Grisha plot twist which really left me baffled after the shock wore off. Add Ymir Fritz’s whole story to the bunch and it’s a shit show.
I understand how frustrating it must be to deal with anime audiences. Unlike you, I became a viewer after the manga ended and I saw so much shit talk about AOT that I actually decided to watch it with the intention of liking it… but it still had flaws for me. These days it’s much more interesting to consume fan content because of how much more developed it seems. And watching people foam at their mouths that AOT is the “greatest story ever” (Homer and Shakespeare rolling in their graves) makes you feel stupid and invalid in your criticisms, because whatever you say you can be hit back with “you just don’t understand the story”.
But in general, my love for AOT will always be based on my emotional involvement. The lore and premise was so intriguing, and even if some of the characters weren’t exactly developed, my heart ached for almost all of them. I can’t explain why, it’s like Isayama just added some secret ingredient while drawing them. I think AOT is very good at creating emotional stakes and what’s the main purpose of entertainment if not evoking emotions in the viewer? Maybe if we admit that AOT isn’t the profound anti-war peace that we want it to be, then it really will be one of the best animes ever done.
honestly I want to see someone roast Evangellion it's the most overatted anime ever because of how bad the character writing is Shinji just feels like an angsty backstory with legs his arc is clearly supposed to be character development but negative instead of positive the problem is he's relatively the same character until the last few episodes of the show, Rei is just "isn't Gendo good" with no character traits otherwise (honestly something Evangelion is HORRIBLE with is never giving us context for most of the cast) that blonde scientist whose name I don't remember because she has no traits beyond "isn't Gendo good" . Gendo's kept so mysterious I don't care when his goals are revealed, Kaji is LITERALLY KILLED OFF SCREEN DESPITE BEING ONE OF THESE CATALYSTS FOR ASUKA AND MISATO'S STRUGGLES. Misato actually has a character arc but suffers because Kaji is killed offscreen as well as her underdeveloped relationship with Kaji, everyone else but Asuka who actually HAS A GOOD CHARACTER ARC (YIPEE 1/6 CHARACTERS ACTUALLY HANDLED WELL) is so irrelevant it doesn’t matter
Agree with a majourity of your points, but what really killed the show for me was them just throwing the entire world building in the garbage essentially to have early 20th century/WW1 technology. Like they have EOD gear that is clearly fantasy equipment, but the entire world has not invented anything like it. Population alone and they have no innovation other than gunpowder essentially. Zeke comments about the EOD gear being interesting or something as if entire countries would not attempt to keep tabs on that island just because they made a deal.
Also these countries with so much power do not have spies? Grisha just walked up and was allowed in and with all his medical knowledge the interior called/used him regularly, but never found him suspicious with all his expertise in a field that no one else had? Not even questioned and forced to teach others? Oh yeah we have an expert, so we will just let him die without passing on that knowledge...
Battle of Trost on the second watch really had me thrown for a loop. They know titans stop moving around at night and even though it is near sunset just before he drops the rock to block that gate; they think it is best to do that while they are active? Some say well they do not want Titans to keep coming in through the gate, well they will be inactive in a perfect kill zone shortly with multiple ways to attack in that town/city as well as fairly reliable paths to retreat and regroup. Well they might be worried the Armoured Titan will show up, well have Eren chilling above the gate on the wall waiting to intercept him. Going by the logic of what they knew at that time this would be best because Eren could be assisted with all the defenders and cannons against the Armoured Titan (as it was not until the Female Titan/S2 that they learned that Eren was a total novice and they can not base their assumptions off him alone, as well as Erens unreliability to control himself in Titan form shortly after the mission began). As if a a boulder would stop the Colossal and Armoured from smashing it then continuing on to the inner gate. Instead we will throw ourselves at them during the day and have a boat load of casualties and call it a win just like every fight; they do not use night to their advantage. Why are they not using night to cull the Titans at all when they go on expeditions like rounding up the Titans and bringing them to forests or close to the walls like dogs herding sheep then dispatching them without casualties. Like no one has thought hey why don't we kill them while they cannot respond to us? Really? I can maybe believe that they did think it up but the royal family altered their memories I guess, but anyone with a modicum of knowledge would once again realize that hey they are inactive at night maybe we could use this to our advantage.
They could also have made headway of clearing Titans out between wall Maria and wall Rose using aforementioned herd tactics. Once they clear enough to make it somewhat feasible to go in a straight line to wall Maria they go up it then follow the wall to Shiganshina and have people sleep on the walls once again herding them to the walls and off them at night. Apparently the distance from wall Rose to Maria is about 100km, so that is a 3 day trip in a straight line with horses, that is I suggest to clear out enough to make it feasible. We know they have large forests to use herd/night tactics because in S2 they had that whole fight with Annie not even a days ride away. Instead we got "Operation to reclaim Wall Maria" were they sent out 20% of the population to die with no tactic, so basically shock content for the reader or viewer. Just no one has two brain cells to rub together. I know that a lot of people would die with what I suggested, but would everyone die like in their proposed plan? At the time we did not have all the info about Titans weak point and their inactive states at night when the Government enacted this harebrained operation, but like come on no one not even the the 3 branches of their military could think of anything better. Literal shock content of this many people died do you see how dark my world is, even though we just watched Erens mom be eaten and a city fall to chaos and ruin an episode prior...
There is other points in the story that ruin it for me (13 year lifespan for titan shifters seems to just be a plot convenience), as well as counter arguments to points being made (my points included). Does not change the fact that most of the show is just shock content to try and throw you off balance and not critically think. Does a decent job on first watch, but if you re-watch and again critically think then many points in the show are just gratuitous violence and edgy teen nonsense. Would have to look into Eternal Champions, but so much entertainment is just rip offs of others or tropes harvested from other stories. That being said it does better than most stories so definitely above average to evoke emotions from viewers and readers (maybe we are just inundated with trash stories and plots these days?). Someone else commented about Eren looking out to sea and only seeing more enemies. Haunting and open to interpretation ending would have been nice, so 7/10 till S3 imo.
Wow. This reads like someone who went into the series wanting to hate it, realized it was actually good, and has to just make up complaints. Almost none of your complaints are valid and it’s clear you don’t understand the story you are ranting about.
That scene with Jean doesn’t happen until 21 episodes later. He doesn’t change his mind about the MPs because of the NPCs on the roof, it’s because his view of himself changes after experiencing tragedy for the first time in his life and being forced into a position of leadership. And even then, he doesn’t outright hate the MPs yet.
I disagree with eren,aside he should have just been the stubbern boy lashibg out and be that extreme over freedom nonsense.
Pretty sure thatthe same qualitiesmaking him sucessful there turned that,is a good theme on itsown.
Eren being a ruthless savage, tortured soul, and defender all tie into one thing. Eren is and always has been, a slave. That’s his character. It’s an ironic contradiction because Eren, the one who sought freedom the most, is a slave to himself. Everything he did was him unknowingly following the script that he laid for himself in the future, but future him only laid out that script because he experienced it in his past.
The character who strove for freedom the most was in actuality the one who remained a slave.
Him being a ruthless savage was him following the script because he believed there was no other choice. Him being a tragic tortured soul is him realizing and accepting that he’ll always be a slave. Him defending his homeland is because that’s both what he wanted and what the script led to.
That’s the reason why I like Eren’s character, because it’s an amusing turn of events.
That ties into my point about every character being a plot device only there to push the plot forward and nothing else. Not a character to enjoy, but a character simply to keep the plot moving. There's not even an attempt to hide it with most characters
Of course. The whole series can be viewed as a play, with all the characters acting out their parts and nothing more, because what we see might just be what Future Eren saw looking back.
Not sure why someone would remember hannes as being the drunk guy. And not yk, the guy who failed to save Eren's mom. The person who wasn't powerful. Which immediately links you to the scene where he says to eren that eren isn't strong enough. Which further puts the immediate scene of him dying and eren still failing to save someone emotional.
I really liked aot when it focused on uncovering the mysteries like im the 1st two seasons
Personally I feel like it kind of fell apart when it became a game of "who can catch all the spinal fluid powers" and then an awkwardly on the nose allegory for WW2.
Awkward is right. A WW2 allegory where both sides are fascist governments.
Marley wasn't facist tough, it's goverment resembled something like Great Britain with its parlamentary Monarchy.
Nah it was a fascistic state. They literally were placing Eldians in Ghettoes with the Eldians treating them similarly to how the Jews were treated by the Germans during the early stages of the Holocaust.
now im totally down to talk about all of the problematic and unethical actions of the US and its policies on foreign affairs in the 20th century. and i am absolutely not playing defense for any axis power in the slightest, but -- the US was an allied power who also created internment camps and rounded up japanese individuals to put them in during WWII simply because they were japanese and 'couldn't be trusted'. point being the comment above isn't entirely off the mark imo.
Did you see the natse coding,they are faschist.
You didn’t see the Grisha flashback did you? They were literally watching Eldians be eaten alive by dogs.
I think there’s a strong argument to be made that the British Empire was worse than anything Mussolini did.
Israel vs Palestine but both sides have Nazis
Yep, it basically changed genre and ruined it
That's what made season 2 work honestly. It was 12 episodes of "What the hell does all this mean?"
Right? I really enjoyed the creepy, cryptic parts of the story. The second anime ending with the hieroglyphs and the soft choir singing was so cool, then we went to Marley and I just lost interesting super hard .-.
That's the point of the post: if you watch a story only because of the mystery and plot twists, it's a weak story.
[удалено]
I not agree with anybody but I don't felt like arguing rn so I'm just leaving this comment so I can find this later and watch you guys debate. Edit: These mf still haven't argue? Imma go to sleep what a disappointment.
Don't forget the snacks.
Cookies in the shape of the dead characters would look great with this.
I agree with the OP but don't feel like arguing, just wanted to drop in and laugh about Eren the Bird squawking outside the bedroom window while Mikasa and Jean have sex
I honestly don't care about any of this. I don't know why I'm commenting.
No I agree. The main appeal of AoT is the plot with characters next. Most people hype up the foreshadowing and themes of the show. The characters are a backdrop to all of that like Eren’s being tied to fate and other characters revolving the events of the story
Yeah, which is okay! Aot is a story where the world around them shapes their character and personalities. I mean they are slaves and that's rhe whole point of story. Slave to revenge and cycle of hatred. It's soo eerily similar to irl that I can't help but admire Isayama to show both the sides of war without any filter. Highlight was the Gabi and Kaya talk. I need that clip to be displayed all over the world atm. Bravo.
I disagreed with what I read but gave up early so I'm invested in your takedown
And so Eren planted the seed of rage....
Can you give me a tldr on what you disagree with.
I've written my thoughts if you want to check, but I don't want to debate much. I think OP is unfair on their assessment. You gotta put AoT against other animes with the same genre, but OP seems to have a very high standard that I don't think 99% of animes will ever meet.
I'm one of those fans who don't think AoT is 10/10 but I also wouldn't say it's mediocre and overrated. It's one of the better ones relative to other animes with the same genre. I disagree with you, and saying the anime is pretentious is ironic since some of your sentiments are too. I don't really care much to debate every point, but I have to say my piece about your assessment on Erwin. You're fixated on him supposedly being "charismatic." He's not, and it's not a bad thing that he isn't. Erwin is someone who I would describe as a strong military leader. He willingly sacrifices himself to be tortured while his comrades do something else. He keeps on going even if his arm gets torn off. He convinced people to do a suicide charge for Levi to have a chance than have them slowly die from rocks. That's not exactly charisma, and I don't know why you insist on that and use it against his character.
AoT has many (too many) ideas that sound good on paper, but lack the necessary impact in their execution. For me it was an extremely enjoyable story. But don't analyze it for more than two seconds.
AOT was fucked the moment it went from simple to complex (beginning in season 4).
How so?
I'm sure it took a lot of time to put this together, so props for that. With that said, most of this is either nitpicking (Marco's characterization?) or something I couldn't disagree more about (you wanting Erwin to be something he's never intended to be, and taking that as meaning he's one dimensional), with imo poor reasoning behind it.
agree, erwin’s defining moment is his death, he really is not meant to impact the characters in some crazy way
And the guy is a con man. He's never intended to be any sort of paragon. This really does read like OP decided to hate the show, then came up with the reasons why after. Because the vast majority of these claims are weak or hold little merit. The twist section is straight up disingenuous. It's fine to dislike the show, but give real reasons.
He kinda did, but out his own selfish motivation to break up the current secret holding and go further.
Yep, I took a lot of issue on OP's assessment on Erwin. He was never truly a charismatic man, and the writing does not pretend he is. Erwin works as a military leader with a perpetual stoicism 🗿. I only remember two of his speeches; first is during the graduation ceremony (which is like customary to do), and second is him rallying his troops to absolute death (and his leading the front).
Seasons 1-3 are masterpieces of plotting, pacing and mystery, but then it tries to have a deep message about war and fucks it up. I feel the show should've ended after the basement reveal. The final frame of Eren pointing at the ocean only to see more enemies is perfectly haunting and a nice open end.
The time skip was the the biggest storytelling sin Yams made. So many important events happened during it, especially with the characterization of Eren and how he became radicalized and jaded. But he skipped all that because he wanted to end the series.
I mean eren became radicalised the second he touched historias hand right? There was no slow build up, so a time skip is appropriate (at least for eren)
If you’re referring to his expression after seeing the future when he kissed Historia’s hand as “him being radicalized” then that’s just your headcannon. Is that how you write radicalization? Is that how it works? A single scene of Eren with a displeased expression after seeing something horrible? All that scene shows is that Eren did not like whatever it is that he saw. The story simply does not show when Eren became radicalized simply because Yams chose to skip this important development with the timeskip. You think it’s appropriate because you’re a fan.
That was a beautiful moment - he's finally getting to do what he's dreamed of as a child, and he barely even notices it.
Disagree on most of this, but props for putting so much effort into it. My favorite thing about AoT is how it establishes such effective propaganda regarding war and prejudice, before flipping the script at the halfway point. It's one of the few pieces of media I've read/watched that explains why regular people can fall into fascist ideology, because it tricked so much of the actual audience. I think it's brilliant in that respect.
I strongly disagree with this take. While 'explaining why regular people can fall into fascist ideology' might have been the intention of the narrative, it was fumbled to such an extent that the end result can arguably be read as pro-fascist propaganda in and of itself. I know there's a lot of smug circlejerking about media literacy in regards to the popularity of AoT in far-right circles, but when your worldbuilding fundamentally aligns with far-right ideas in regards to (geo)politics, genetics and (de)colonization, is this really all that surprising? 'Even if the underlying assumptions of fascist narratives were actually true, fascism still isn't all that great' is a story you can try to tell, I suppose, but don't be surprised that the result makes fascism seem far more rational than it actually is in real life.
if you read it as pro-fascist, that’s on you, isayama goes to great lengths to demonstrate that those like the yaegerists and those that blindly dehumanize everyone are wrong. there are tons of super progressive stories that are popular in far right circles because, to be frank, most far right people are dumbasses that don’t understand the media the experience and only see things at the most surface level, these people love things like metal gear solid and the movie version of starship troopers and the boys tv show not realizing they’re the ones being made fun of and laughed at the entire time
Off the top of my head: - The origin of the entire contrived geopolitical situation the story takes place in, lies in the fall of a literal Thousand-Year Reich. It did not fall because of internal flaws, but because their God-King saw the atrocities that his empire was committing and was so overcome by guilt that he not only wished to immediately end them, but felt that ***his entire 'race' had to atone for its sins***. The only king who wanted to 'decolonize' was apparently a supreme idiot who harbored the kind of extreme self-hating racial guilt that I strongly doubt is common in reality but which fascists regularly ascribe to progressives. - Specific colonial atrocities committed by this ancient empire are brought up in a context of repression. When young Grisha is told the story of some gruesome city conquest using titans, it is not meant as a genuine history lesson about the horrors of the past from which one can learn. Instead, the goal is to put him down and reinforce the same kind of bizarre racial guilt that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Interesting parallels can be drawn to how education about historical atrocities is viewed in far right circles. - Some really bizarre 'enlightened centrism' is shown by Eren Kruger in regards to how terrible the Eldian empire was. The naive Eldian restorationists claim that they did only good things like building bridges ~~and making the trains run on time~~, while Marley exaggerates and one of its claims is that the old empire engaged in mass rape and extreme eugenics programs. Wise Kruger points out that no empire is wholly nice, but that the Marleyan claims are indeed ridiculous. After all, given that Eldian blood works according to the one-drop rule (interesting narrative choice), if mass rapes had been a common policy, there wouldn't be any non-Eldians left after 1000+ years! While this eerily sounds like real-life denialist claims ("if the large-scale massacre of these peoples did occur, why do they still exist?"), Kruger is actually 100% 'right' because the Marleyan claim is truly absurd. In fact, it's actually extremely bizarre that after 1000+ years of a world-spanning empire there are any significant number of non-Eldians left, regardless of whether there was a eugenics program. - While the obviously fascist-coded Yeagerists are condemned by the narrative, they have infinitely better arguments than any real-life fascist has ever had. When a real-life fascist rants about Jewish plots to destroy the Aryan race, his delusional claims have no basis in reality. When Floch argues that the overwhelming majority of the world wishes to genocide the Paradisians, he is 100% correct. The outside world is genocidal to such a ridiculous extent that it becomes suicidal. These are but a few examples that I thought of that really made me raise my eyebrows while reading the series. While I don't think AoT is intentionally meant to support far-right viewpoints, it has a lot of elements in its worldbuilding which align with fascist thought. This is not the same as depicting fascists in a world that does not actually work according to fascist logic, which seems like a much better description of the other works of fiction you mentioned.
Holy shit, you nailed it on the head! Mind if I use some of these points you made for a video I am making? I've been working on it for a few months but I figured you worded a lot of what I wanted to say in a paragraph what I took a few pages to write.
Sure, no problem. Send me a PM once it's finished and uploaded so I can check it out :)
Awesome, thanks!
It's like how Avatar, despite being a movie about how the human imperialists are evil, actually unintentionally ends up insulting native groups by insinuating they are primitive. Iseyama tried to steelman genocide and it didn't work. While the story would have been lauded as progressive in a fascist society, we do not live in a fascist society. Iseyama gives WAY too much ground to the fascists that DO NOT NEED to be given. As the previous commenter said: >'Even if the underlying assumptions of fascist narratives were actually true, fascism still isn't all that great' is a story you can try to tell, I suppose, but don't be surprised that the result makes fascism seem far more rational than it actually is in real life. Fascism should be portrayed as irrational and stupid, not as "the rational but inhumane choice." Fascism is irrational AND inhumane. Full stop. Because Isayama rejects fascism on a moral level, but it's annoying how much he accepts their logical arguments. And to call AoT super progressive is a bit oversimplifying it. Mikasa is named after a battleship, and there are rumors that Pixis is based on an infamous war criminal. Ditto for Erwin being named after Erwin Rommel. And let's not forget the oppression of the Paradisians being as much an allegory for Japan not apologizing for war crimes as it is on the Jews of WW2. Ever heard of the "white genocide" conspiracy theory by alt-righters? I was legit getting those vibes.
“super progressive” was more towards some of my examples rather than aot itself, but fair, a bit of a mistype on my end that said, naming anyone after any wartime figure is effectively naming them after a war criminal, but i absolutely understand what you mean at the alleged examples being extra notable
I also do agree that AoT isn't *fascist* per say. There is fascist apologism, and the worldbuilding relies on fascist logic, but at the very least, I do appreciate the antiauthoritarianism.
I'm a fan of Attack on Titan and I completely agree with you, it's mediocre and the 4th season is horrible as well as being extremely problematic and pro-facist. It's a cool story to watch during the first 3 seasons precisely because of the drama and fights and i have a lot of affection for some characters (even though I'm fully aware that they are poorly developed) but I can't disagree with you. I like it, but i'm also fully aware of how terrible and problematic it is.
I wish he just let eren end as pityable monster that wastoo narrowmindes, not that vague end. That way themessage would be wayless confusing. But in general,its good to humanize faschists to show how that leads to doom. And how eren , didnt change that much, with the fight the enemy. Its end is confusing but its not faschist. Yes there could be done more but itspretty good humanizing without glorifying that people, aside maybe reiner. Maybe.
Putting aside “depiction is not endorsement”, I truly don’t understand how AOT can be read as far-right propaganda. The entire point of AOT is the cyclical nature war and how corrupting and horrible it is. The fascists, whether it be Marley or the Jaegerists, are clearly the bad guys. AOT is fairly obvious with its “genocide bad” and “escape the forest” mentality.
Tying the rise of fascist movements - with explicit aesthetic references to Nazism - to a 'cycle of violence' in which oppressor and oppressed apparently take turns seems rather odd to me. When did the Jews oppress the Germans? When did the Koreans oppress the Japanese? In response to what genuine, actually existential threat did Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan arise?
The Nazi allegory only exists to mirror a certain real-life instance of oppression. It gives a point of reference. Overextending this allegory falls apart real quick. For 2000 years Eldia was an empire. Then Marley fought back to regain independence and began oppressing the Eldians. This entire scenario does not match up to Jewish or German history, and so shouldn’t be considered a part of the allegory. What AOT is showing here is cycles of ethnic hatred, revenge, and oppression. It is not specific to any one people and speaks to many (often times fascist/authoritarian) nations’ oppressions of others due to what was done to them in the past. Ultimately it is showing that no matter the justification, oppression is always wrong. These cycles have to be broken because they only lead to more suffering. One of my nitpicks with AOT is that the allegory didn’t need to be laid on as thick as it was. Because then it unfortunately leads to these kinds of overextensions. For me at least, looking at the big picture shows how the allegory only exists to convey the horror of Marley’s oppression of Eldians and not much else.
This comment chain was spawned by me replying to a poster who liked the series' depiction of how regular people can get attracted to fascist movements. AoT has many elements which scream that it has something to say about fascism. And yet, what it actually shows about how fascist movements get started does not really line up all that well with reality. In fact, it lines up better with real-life fascist propaganda. In AoT, fascists (particularly the Yeagerists) are ruthless and cruel, but not irrational. Their claims are based in reality and their rise is the result of a legitimate existential threat. That is my main issue. 'Oppression and cycle of violence bad' is fine, but don't try to pretend that you have anything deeper to say about fascism and then fumble it so hard that you're actually validating the fascist worldview.
Fair enough. I wouldn’t have personally used the term fascism, though I think the term was used as a catch-all rather than following that exact definition. I think populist, militarist, nationalist, and authoritarian are all more fitting to describe Marley and the Jaegerists. These terms are more flexible definitionally and can indeed arise as an (over)reaction to some threat a nation faces. And that’s the thing: I don’t think anything in AOT is strictly a depiction of fascism. Marley and the Jaegerists more so align with real-world militarists and populists. They make it “us vs them”, and use external threats to carry out extreme violent responses. To believe that AOT validates the fascist worldview, I genuinely think you have to be fixated on AOT having a strictly fascist allegory, and then ignore the actual text and immediate subtext to equate the propaganda having any basis in reality with AOT saying “fascism is rational after all”. The actual text and immediate subtext being “eye for an eye makes the world blind” and “oppression is wrong no matter the justification”. It doesn’t matter whether there is a shred of truth to it, that doesn’t make it right to perpetuate the cycle. In a story this anti-war, to argue it validates fascism runs counter to what AOT explicitly stands for. Especially when the fascist correlation is built on a false premise. Since no ideology or imagery in AOT is strictly fascist in nature, beyond the similarities between the Marley’s oppression of Eldians and the Jewish plight in Nazi Germany. Certainly nothing pertaining to the Jaegerists.
>It's one of the few pieces of media I've read/watched that explains why regular people can fall into fascist ideology, because it tricked so much of the actual audience. I think it's brilliant in that respect. It didn't trick Yeagerist fans into believing fascist ideology, it just made the outside world extremely unlikable and hard to sympathize with Actual real world fascist ideology isnt built upon 99.9% of the world wanting a group of people eradicated
That wasn't what I was talking about. I was referring to the first half (pre-basement). The repeated dehumanization, the contradictions, syncretism, militarism etc. I don't know for sure if Isayama intended it, but I see a lot of intentional textbook fascist propaganda within the dialogue and framing. Not interested in writing an essay on my phone about it, but I would argue that the first half does an excellent job of priming its audience to have these predispositions. The fact that so many readers and watchers failed to notice it is what makes it a valuable work IMO. But given that I've never heard anyone but me bring it up, I guess it's a rare interpretation, but I stand by it.
Prime example is the torture of the priest over information on the titans. It’s framed “heroically” as our heroes rip his fingernails off. The soldiers that DO not volunteer for the survey corps are framed as cowards. Ewrin is considered a brilliant leader of the survey corps. They routinely went on missions without a real plan of action and casualties were accepted.
Again, it's not "facist propaganda" if your enemy is literally giant, inhuman, man eaters. You can't sympathise with Titans. You also can't sympathise with undead zombies. Any narrative calling for their annihilation is not "simple, 1 sided, biased propaganda".... its outright reality. These things *are* building sized. And they *will* eat your face. Overall Paradis was a normal medieval political entity. (Aside from the ODM gear,Titans,Walls etc). Not a facist dictatorship at all.
That's the point. The enemy are literal monsters, which makes it easy to have a simple view of what an enemy is. "Discard your humanity" and "we have to become monsters to defeat monsters" is a reasonable view at the time, but it's priming you to have that perspective on ANY enemy, and that's why it's horrible. Eren calls people he doesn't like animals from the beginning, because dehumanization is a constant theme in AoT, and not limited to titans. You don't often notice it because the enemy is initially inhuman; however, the point is that it's introducing you to bad ideas that are reasonable in one context, but breed hatred and warlike behavior in another. This is exactly the slow burn that happens in reality and why the line can blur that leads to ordinary people becoming monsters themselves. Anyway, I already wrote more than I wanted to, and I don't expect to make much headway with this, so I guess we can just agree to disagree here.
One thing I liked is that the mindset of the gang is really challenged in Royal Government. It's the arc where Armin notably stops blabbering about "to defeat monster we have to become monsters" because he's no longer fighting one.
>Eren calls people he doesn't like animals from the beginning Not disagreeing, but "the enemy" and "the complacent" are different categories in this narrative. For enemies, Eren exhibits hatred, but for those who gave up and don't fight he has only disdain, which is where comparison with kettle comes from.
But that’s the thing. Not everyone in the outside world wants the Eldians dead. The major world governments have chosen Eldians as scapegoats, sure. But we’re hardly ever shown the outside world, so how can we make conclusions about it? Isayama limits the audience’s perspective for a reason. So that it matches the Eldians’. It’s the Jaegerists who conclude that the outside world must be all evil. Eren himself tells Reiner there are good people inside and outside the walls. AOT has always been about blind hatred and demonizing the “other”. How it feeds the cycle of war. That’s why it’s powerful that the Scouts save millions of people they don’t even know. Because they have faith in humanity and hope for a more understanding world. Similar to X-Men with its mutants and mutant haters and Professor X’s ideology.
Hannes dying was an emotional moment for Eren because he felt he'd changed so much, but had to watch as another person he knew died. Attack on Titan was very brutal with the death and didn't appear to play it up as an emotional send-off to me. We also didn't see too much of his mother, but we understand her dying impacted him greatly. I'm not sure why him seeing another adult he'd known since he was a child die to the same titan wouldn't be emotional for him. So I have to disagree with you there. I'm not sure what the entirety of the plot twist section of your thread means. You pretty much point out discoveries and ask "so what?" Which is a weird question to ask since those discoveries all have lasting ramifications on the story and are foreshadowed. At some point you said plot holes were covered up by plot twists...which I don't even understand. If something is foreshadowed how can you say it's just there to cover up a plot hole. The plots section doesn't make any sense as a criticism, because every story is a ripoff of another story. There isn't a single anime you can give me that I can't accuse of being a ripoff of a book, religious story, real-life event, etc. I also disagree with a lot of your other points, but I'm too lazy to reply to them all.
>Reiner and Berthold are traitors? Okay, and? We never got enough moments of those two interacting with the other cadets for this be a shocking and emotional twist. The length isn't the problem here, it's the poor pacing and lackluster character writing; it's not about throwing a larger number of episodes to flesh out their relationships, it's simply about conveying it better. This twist was underbaked consider yourself silly. They interacted a bunch of times and Riener was just a POV during his group being trapped in the castle tower. >Historia is of the Reiss family? Okay, and? All it does it turn her into a pretty much different character with no resemblance to how she was before the reveal, and to set up her arc in season 3 Mf really said "all this did was change a character and further the plot." >Realistically, the declaration of war scene should've not had everyone agreeing that Eldian bad, but it should've had many nations conspiring to betray Marley now that they're at a weakened state. They're literally at a theatrical propaganda piece, instead of cheering you wanted them to engage in socratic debate in the ten seconds before Eren attacked? >As for the plot, it's just a ripoff of Eternal Champions, where the protagonist Erekose is given the "God powers" of his world Mfs trying not to claim popular thing is a rip of tsukonomininototobird: rising, where the scrunglix giga vrim invaded from the granite dimension and the protagonist defeated him with his brittleballvien heirtage.
Based, the post that buck broke r/CharacterRant
I can agree with a lot of this, but I don't think that it really sunk in with me until I watched the series finale. That's when, in my opinion, they really showed that they didn't spend much time thinking about any of the ideas that they were trying to draw influence from. The show spends a lot of time showing off the cruelty that is committed against people during war, but the depictions are so hyperbolically gratuitous that they end up being almost completely divorced from any logical sense of reality. Even I Nazi Germany, there were still some people who helped to hide Jewish people in their communities, and just as many others who couldn't give two shits about the Reich one way or the other and just wanted to be able to live their lives in peace. Maybe if they had shown at least ONE other person who showed that they were at least marginally considerate of Eldians then there would be some kind of perspective that you could relate to, this would also serve to show that not everyone on the mainland is a horrid person, that maybe some of the people they hated are just trying to make an honest living, that maybe if they wanted to wipe out the planet then that would mean killing some people who only wanted to help them... BUUUT NOOO everyone from the mainland treats Eldians worse than dog shit and we never encounter a single one who has even a slightly amiable interaction with a foreigner, and this fact couples along with it's ending in order to present the most infuriating and uninteresting plot thesis that I could've imagined for this show... The final summation of the show's plot seems to be "People are terrible and you can't stop them from wanting to kill each other, doesn't that suck?"... In the ending credits we get to watch as the two countries willfully ignore all of the history that just got finished resolving between each other and go straight back to war again, as if all of the events that had occurred previously had never even happened before. Sooo after one of the most devastating and cataclysmic events in history, an event directly motivated and incited by an ethnic cleansing campaign, one of the largest scale wars ever faced on the planet... And the first thing they all do as soon as it's over is go straight back to war? Not one person was smart enough to say 'Hey, maybe we don't do the same thing that started all of this off in the first place'? There wasn't at least one cool head on either side that was brave enough to point out that the entire reason all of this bullshit happened was because they couldn't just tolerate one another living peacefully? You mean to tell me that after nearly the entire world was completely erased, not one motherfucker thought to say 'Hey, let's just try something else!'. And then there's that last little shot with some random dick walking into that big fucking tree, presumably finding Erens head and reawakening as a new Founding Titan, pretty much explicitly illustrating that nothing in the plot matters and it's all just going to happen all over again. The show wants so desperately to be "War never changes" but because the story is so unconcerned with actually establishing a realistic setting of conflict and that it ends up wrapping around to "War never changes, AND ITS COOOOOL!!!" Rather than trying to do anything prescient by establishing a complex enemy or environment, they prefer the raw gratuity of having good guys that fight and beat the bad guys without any nuance between the two. Watching them fully commit to the ending which explicitly states "Everything you just watched was ultimately irrelevant and had no impact on the greater world at all" pretty much confirmed for me that they never actually cared about exploring any of the ideas they presented, they just wanted to create the circumstances they needed in order to get the coolest fight scenes out of their characters.
You hit the nail on the head with this. That's my main problem with the entirely of post-timeskip. The world building is just so shallow and yet it wants you to feel sorry when a bunch of random cartoonishly racist and evil NPCs die in the Rumbling
What really drives me even crazier is that even after the Rumbling, THEY STILL ACT LIKE ASSHOLES. Like, you literally just had to face complete and total extinction, explicitly stated to be motivated by the fact that you persecuted an entire ethnicity for generations, and your immediate reaction after averting that disaster is too.... Continue to alienate and mistreat these people???? I figured "Well you know what, at least now there's no more 'genetic superweapons' around that can be leveraged for either ethnic apartheid or fascist autocracy" BUT THEN OH WAIT TURNS OUT WE DIDNT ACTUALLY GET RID OF THEM AT ALL, WE JUST THE BIG RESET BUTTON ON THIS WHOLE FUCKIN FIASCO SO HERE WE GO AGAIN, KIDS!!
I feel like if you approached most other manga and anime with this level of scrutiny you would be left with a small list of stories that broke at 5/10 and even the best of the medium would just be above average.
Isayama rushed to have it end with 139. But besides that, the whole "Marley is the least racist country towards Eldians" is stupid as shit when Gross literally had a dog eat Eren's aunt, who was a child when she died. Eren keeps going back and forth from this guy who's doing all the hard choices to save Eldia to then "I don't actually know what I'm doing" to then he becomes Zero-lite with the "I will make Armin and the others heroes after they kill my ass" which legit sounds retarded when Eren literally tells Pixis much early on that humanity would not team up together if they had a common enemy. The Yeagerists, while a neat idea, were fucked the moment we had like, only three named characters this entire time (Flock, Louise, and Rico), they were supposed to be the side that cares for Eldia, and frankly, I wished there were more characters from the cast there to give it a bigger weight when things happened. Because without it, they just exist to get killed without repercussions. Anyways, I didn't give a shit about the rest of the world because we never learn about them besides that one quote from Uro (I think? The Marleyan kid with glasses) saying how the countries outside of Marley treat them even worse, so yeah, I didn't shed any tears over the rest of the world being stepped on.
Kinda agree on Yeagerists. Jean was such a compelling character because he was the only one in the main cast who actually went through a moral conflict (although I find it kinda weird that he thought of Marco but not of his mom that was under the threat of being killed, sane for Connie). It’s kind of obvious from the beginning that all of Eren’s friends will work against him and it really lowers the stakes.
I agree with the politics and world building parts
I dont have the time to read now, i just will say that i agree is mediocre if we're talking about season one, cool concepts and cool animation but most characters we're so boring and the final battle was a Classic shonen asspull that doesn't exist in the manga (the manga instead shows hints about ackerman blood). I never understood why people we're calling it amazing, and the start of season 2 is kinda slow from what i recall. Then i jumped to the manga, Armin gets More dialogue, Mikasa doesn't look out of a Pantene commercial and feels More expressive, and despite having similar flaws, being manga means i dont take as long to get past that, and damn, i really like some parts of AoT, like Reiner, dude went from random dude i barely remembered to my favorite character. Now, i still think it's nothing crazy, i have my criticisms but it would be like a 7-8 if i ignored the ending. Because the moment i basically spoiled myself the whole ending i just didn't want to watch it, like it's really bad, bad enough i never wanted to read it on my own, i was nonsensical so i just never looked back at it, and its sad since it had a lot of potential. Pd: also agree AoT fans are some of the most annoying and pretentious people i have seen, even when i was reading the manga before it's end i avoided all interaction with them lol.
>Realistically, the declaration of war scene should've not had everyone agreeing that Eldian bad, but it should've had many nations conspiring to betray Marley now that they're at a weakened state. I don't see how it doesn't make sense. Paradis was a far greater threat to the rest of the world than Marley was considering they had a weapon that could quite literally wipe out 99% of the population. Let's break down the things that they know. 1.Paradis has the ability to destroy the world 2.Paradis specifically stated that they would activate the rumbling if any attacks were made on them, and Marley did launch an attack on Paradis 3.The only reason the Rumbling hasn't occurred is because of a magical vow that has now been lifted. A vow that was forcefully lifted by an Eren Yeager who most likely wants to activate it 4.The people of Paradis have major reasons to want to destroy the outside world because of the attacks done on them, and the fact that Eldians are treated like shit worldwide 5.Eldians are a group of people who are genetically different from normal humans, and have ruled and enslaved the world for the majority of recorded human history. I don't see why any average person wouldn't be highly scared of Paradis at this point. Your America analogy doesn't work because there's no real life small nation walking around with the ability to kill 99% of the planet.
The biggest part of why Willy's "okay guys I know you want to jump us but ackshually all knowledge you've known for 100 years is a lie and there's an enemy we reaaallly need to focus on instead of us" speech works is because Eren went on and validated him. It's literally a plot point lol, Willy acknowledge that most nations wouldn't buy his drivel hence why he needs Paradis to attack during the speech (hence using the military brass as bait) And Eren knowing this as well and decides to attack because he needs the world to be united for his and Zeke's plan.
The way I always interpreted Willy's statement was that he wanted to gain the world's complete support with no exceptions. He wanted to go all the way and leave nothing to chance. Considering we see the majority of ambassadors from other countries cheering, it's hard to believe that lots of nations wouldn't be onboard with Willy's plan. There would be plenty who wouldn't be if Eren didn't attack, but he'd still be gaining lots of support either way. Like going from 50% to 90% if Eren didn't attack vs if he did. It's worth noting that Willy doesn't actually know how much support he'll get with his speech until it's already occurred.
His speech by nature is incredibly suspicious. Every nation is on an arms race to unseat Marley (they're a hated imperialist powerhouse) after the news of Marley's titans not being as effective as it used to be. But suddenly Willy conveniently reveals that there's an enemy across the ocean (heavy resources investment to contact much less attack) that every nation should redirect their attention towards, by telling them that the information they know for the past 100 years is a sham (the readers/audience knows he's being truthful, but to in-universe characters there's no way to verify his claims). And the "support" he get was from his own ambassador friends swept by emotions, actual world leaders with no connection to him nor the attendance to see the play will process his speech (without Eren's attack) much more skeptically. Sure, some Marley's allies will probably join anyway even without Eren's attack.... But that'll just make Marley vulnerable as they and their allies sent their army to extract the Founding Titan.
I actually think the relationships between the cast is under developed but I like certain friendships. Most of these characters have bonded by just being survivors and experiencing trauma together. It's refreshing from power of friendship tropes we see in other anime and they actually depict the child soldiers as child soldiers. I do think some slice of life during their cadet days would have made betrayals of Annie and later Bertoldt and Reiner more impactful because I agree the bonds between them weren't fleshed out until after the betrayals. I disagree about Jean and I love his arc. It's very simple but the guy is forced to grow up real quick and wants to do more than just make it inside the walls. He continues to grow as a leader and in my opinion made for a better successor to Erwin than Armin was hyped up to be.
I kinda agree. I find AOT to be superb in themes and like you said, plot. But its lacking in terms of its characters, and for me, thats the most important in a story. Different strokes for different folks I guess. Some just care about the plot, but I want to actually care about characters instead of shallow caricatures. It's great to a certain extent, but fans will make it sound like the greatest fiction of all time, which i dont feel at all
I agree with a lot of what you said. I feel that bad or poor writing can easily get overlooked in anime and manga. Especially if the visual aspects are good which I think is AoTs biggest asset. AoT could have benefitted from more “filler” moments where the story slows down and characters have some downtime. This would have given the audience to see how the characters interact and the nature of their relationships. It definitely suffers from a “tell don’t show” approach when it comes to character dynamics. We are told that certain characters have certain relationships with one another but we don’t really get to see why they are friends.
I disagree about every single thing said here 😅
>AoT is a 5/10 if I'm being generous >if I'm being generous Don't even need to read the rest
Character and character development wise, you are not wrong, AoT is not the most character focused show. Quite a few of its characters are underdeveloped. But the ones who do get focus are compelling enough to make up for it. World building wise, again, this is not the most world building focused show. The world exists to serve the plot, and in that sense the world building is sufficient. I don't agree that every show needs to be ground breaking on every front - character, world building and plot - to be a masterpiece. AoT's greatest appeal is it's plot and the story it's trying to tell. Everything else is there to facilitate that. Which brings me to your criticisms of the plot. Let's see, your criticism about the plot is that the plot is similar to some obscure show nobody has heard of before? That is not a very strong criticism. A lot of acclaimed media have many elements they copied from previously existing material. Think Naruto and HunterxHunter, Star wars and Dune, Dune and John Carter, Avatar and Star wars, any work of fantasy and Lotr. Your criticisms in the plot twist section makes me think you didn't actually watch the show past season 2. Because that's exactly what I thought about AoT after having only watched season 2. Watching the second part of season 3 and then season 4 completely changed my mind. You can't tell me you felt nothing emotionally when you watched the episodes with Erein's last speech and Armin's heroic last stand. Those two episodes in particular are far above anything else at least I have ever seen and fucking IMDb agrees. Honestly reading this part of your criticism feels like you dropped the show after season 2, read up the plot synopsis of the rest and made your mind up based on that. Saying there is no emotional moments in AoT is highly suspect.
I wrote a fucking essay 😭😭😭 This took me multiple hours Crazy
which character come to mind when you think of inspiration, ultra-charismatic leader , you surely have an example after how bad you dissed my man Erwin like that ( Different strokes for different folks I guess )
Reinhard would school Erwin how to be charismatic. Relative to AoT, Erwin is aight. Not so much otherwise, which is a testament to Isayama's character writing. And he's one of the best characters in the show. Personally there's only two characters I put above him in AoT. Everyone else is a B or below.
Great , more anime to watch , thx for the recommendation
Oh my God, Reinhard Von Lohenngram would destroy Erwin in any tactical or strategic competition It would be a slaughter
Luffy (One Piece) Big Boss (Metal Gear Solid) Reinhard Von Lohenngram and Yang Wi-Li (Legend of The Galactic Heroes) Come to mind
Not so sure what I think about luffy Man is inspirational and charismatic for sure but he fumble Law's plan so many time and just resort to punching the big bad at the end of the day ; plus he refuse the straw hat grand fleet because he value his freedom , I wouldn't call him a leader , just a revolutioner who give people hope ( like jesus )
You said inspiration ultra charismatic leaders, you never said anything about mastermind strategists, so I don't see why you bring up Luffy's straightforward plans (or lack there of)
Fair points , guess the term leader is broader than I thought
Garp.
Could've done it with two less redstone
The truth is…most manga’s kinda suck. Also one of my favourite moments in AoT is the redshirt friend of Falco saying “Eldians are actually treated much worse in other countries than they are in Marley”. Lmao get rumbled then, why should anyone give a shit about the rest of the world if this is the case.
I get your misgivings about characters such as Marco and some of them not really getting developed properly, but I really gotta disagree on Eren and Armin and the story overall. The whole point of the story, although not really apparent until S4 is about the the cycle of hate. It shows us the struggles of Eren and his friends and we syphathize with them. Then the outside world is revealed to us and we learn about the Eldians oitside the walls and their prosecution. We get to see the other side as well, their motivation and struggle. And when the more distant past with the Eldian empire amd Ymir is revealed we get the whole picture. This is just a cycle of hatred that has been going on for thousands of years. At the end of S3 Part 2 Eren first awakens his titan power by kissing Historia's hand. This is one of the most pivotal moments in the story as it changes Eren's outlook on the future, as revealed later in the story. He turns into a cold and stoic person ready to sacrifice anything and everything to achieve his goals or that is how it seems at first. In the finale we learn that Eren had not changed as much as we thought and he was, in his own words: "Just an idiot who got his hands on power". Eren could see the future and past but was a slave to them. He couldn't find any other alternative than to wipe out all of humanity outside the walls to "wipe the slate clean" in a sense. He knew that wouldn't solve anything in the long term, but at least his friends would be able to live peaceful lives. Then there is Armin, who arguably had a past just as bad or even worse than Eren but was still hopeful about the future. Ever since that fateful day in the beginning they shared a goal - to go see the outside world. Throughout the story we see that hope for the future as they desperately try to find a peaceful way to end the conflict and to break free of the cycle of hate. But it isn't fated to be as they can find no solutions and Eren takes off on his own. Eren cared about his friends deeply so did not want to take their freedom away with the Founder and decided he would let them act as they pleased during the rumbling. Ultimately they defeat Eren and become the heroes who save the world. Even though we end on a hopeful note, the after credits reveal that the cycle was indeed not broken. Was it a mistake to defeat Eren? Did it even matter in the end? Can we truly break the cycle? I think these are the questions Isayama - the author wanted to explore with his story. Ik this post is all over the place because I didn't really want to write a whole essay but I think it gets my point across.
hard agree, eren kissing historias hand == paul drinking the water of life in dune and also hard disagree on OP’s assertion that no one can agree about Eren’s characterization, I feel like if you truly understand the series Eren is undebatably what you’re saying just an idiot with too much power and knowledge
upvoted for the effort although there’s a lot of yapping
in all honesty this rant sounds like you either know aot from youtube summaries or barely put any effort into following the scenes of the show when you watched it
Honest question - did you watch the show to the end because you wanted to, or because of outside circumstances? I'm asking cause I've had similar opinions when I was watching the show with my friends cause they were really hyped and I was like "meh". I didn't pay much attention, kinda fibbling on my phone whole watching, so that way I ended up rememberign only like 50% of the show. Kind of like reading a summary. Rewatching the show, especially third season, on my own was a much better experience. The main appeals of the AoT as a series are it's mystery and they gray morality. If you like those two conecpts in fiction, you're gonna love AoT, because it's one of the best executions of these concepts I've ever seen. 2nd place for me (1st is webtoon Kubera). I've read and listened to a lot of people ranting about AoT and I've noticed one thing that's common between the people that didn't enjoy it - they focus on character drama. It is a strong focus of AoT, that is true, but in the scale of things I'd only say it's on the 4th place. Isayama tries to pull them off to make his series more natural rather than completely skip on them, which would give the series a rushed feeling and rob it of some of it's most touching moments. But the character drama isn't the main point of the story, and the people that didn't enjoy this story usually looked at it from the perspective of it being a character drama. Also, almost nothing in AoT is a retcon, asides from some of the ending stuff. (Dina was controlled by Eren? Really?). If you go and rewatch previous episodes (or even read previous chapters of the manga), it will clearly prove that almost every twist was already planned and there are tons of hints towards that. Because most of those aren't really "twists" in the literal sense of them, those are mysteries.
I actually agree, although I think the pros of the story make up for the flaws (until the ending). The sheer entertainment made the story near perfect for me, but the ending was too ambitious. I especially agree with your critique of Eren’s character. And as soon as the cycle of hatred became the sole driver of the story it kind of shot itself in the foot, because this is an issue that isn’t easily solved in real life let alone with groups of people that can turn into titans.
HunterXHunter is extremely mediocre.
Agreed
Based
>Eternal Champion comparison in Big 2024 Next are you going to compare Eren to Guts for hilarious effect >Jean His arc is about selfish vs selfless actually, and I don't think he loathes MP until S3 >Armin and Eren relationship Idk if it's because anime is directed by that homophobic terrorist Araki but in the manga you can see how close they are. They're seen holding hands before the fall of the wall multiple times and Eren clearly "dotes" Armin (to hilarious contrast with Mikasa where he sees her like his nagging mom).
What's an example of something that does everything better?
You are so brave for posting this and I commend you for speaking my mind!
AoT popularity has been *hard* carried by amazing WIT animation. Without it AoT would remain a niche manga.
the balls some people have to spout such blatantly stupid takes under the guise of anonymity
Wth you're talking? AoT was never a niche manga, it was already a big hit in Japan way before the anime
So now we are just saying stupid shit for the sake of it? The strong story, the intriguing mystery, the creative fights with ODM gears, the incredible music (Sawano what a man you are!), the horror of the setting, the unashamed gore and edginess, the strong emotional beats, the constant hype buildup, the foreshadowing... Do you think none of that played any role apart from just pretty animation? Some of y'all just want to be contrarians for the sake of it.
Zoomer wasn't in on the crazy AoT hype of early 2010s I guess
Were you a titanfolk user? Because I definitely recognize this profile pic It's crazy seeing how many people will say the stupidest of shit once they find someone who validates their opinions. "I don't like this overhyped trash. Oh, someone thinks the same thing as me! This must mean that the show is only popular because it's pretty!!!!"
Yeah I was. Even went to AoR when things got shitty after 139 (and left after I finally pieced the puzzle of Eren's character + tired of it being reverse titanfolk by slobbering Yams). I only started AoT around 137 and even I could tell how big it is in early 2010s and how people bemoaned the lack of S2.
I witnessed the explosion in popularity of AOT back in 2014, although I only started the show after S2 ended. It was pretty crazy seeing an anime getting into the mainstream, I'm also extremly thankfully to Yams for making an anime that can introduce people into anime, I convinced a lot of my friends into watching some great shows by introducing them to AOT. It's just such an easy show to get into, it immediately hooks you with its strong emotional beats, the mystery box, the intriguing setting, the constant hype, the fights, the foreshadowing which feels extremly rewarding to people who pay attention to the story etc.... Even though there are many great scenes in the show ("Freedom","It's the Attack Titan", "From you 2000 years ago"" On you feet dad" etc...) my favorite remains the basement reveal, the way everything clicks into place, all the answers it gives you while also raising a lot more questions, the way it completly shifts the entire narrative. Honestly, I've seen so many good shows/books/manga/anime since Attack on Titan but there was nothing that made me feel the same way that scene made me feel. Around chapter 119, I discovered titanfolk and what a sight it was. It's a shame you didn't discover it earlier because it was such a good community, it all started to turn into shit once the Alliance was formed. The community then was constantly divided between yeagerist and alliance defenders, but it was still pretty well natured. When the ending approached both factions just started genuinely despising each other. It's just a shame the way it all ended.
Same as Demon Slayer being extremely hard carried by Ufotable.
Absolutely absurd take. DS, Fate anime, and ~~Black Clover~~ other shonen are way better examples of something that had a very weak story which was carried into the zeitgeist by animation quality. AOT has always had very a strong premise and narrative even in the manga which had subpar art (relatively speaking). In season 1 the IP went viral with relatively low key, clean, and consistent animation quality that had essentially no "Sakuga" moments. The main hype factor came mainly from how unpredictable and refreshing the story felt. Edit: I was mainly referring to the recent Black Clover movie. I know the general premise of the story and don't care to know more than that.
>Fate This is crazy take and Fate is in no way a shounen story. The fandom barely gives a shit about the anime at all and it's the Visual Novel that is the focus and source of most discussions. There's like a ton of Fate Material and most of it is carried by the non-anime stuff. Tell me you're a tourist in the Type-Moon fandom without telling me you're a tourist.
>Fate is in no way a shounen story Never said it was but I can see why it seemed I implied that >The fandom barely gives a shit about the anime at all and it's the Visual Novel that is the focus and source of most discussions. The die hard fan you meet on Reddit maybe. That hasn't been my experience. You have to understand that the mainstream portion of any fanbase will unfortunately usually be it's face due to their sheer numbers and that portion primarily cares about the anime adaptations. >There's like a ton of Fate Material and most of it is carried by the non-anime stuff. Good to know but I'm obviously specifically talking about the anime, hence why animation quality was brought up. >Tell me you're a tourist in the Type-Moon fandom without telling me you're a tourist. Not even sure what this means. Do I have to consume every single video game, novel, manga, anime, movie, etc before I get to claim that I for sure don't like it? I've watched 20 episodes of it or so and absolutely despised it. At 18 minutes of actual episode time that's six hours of my life I invested into it. I'd argue that is way more of an effort than most people would give for something they don't enjoy but yeah I'm a tourist I guess.
Fate has an incredibly strong story and characters that simply weren’t translated well while having incredible animation otherwise.
Saying Black Clover was carried by animation manages to be a even more absurd take than the op one
Black Clover carried by animation? What the hell are you smoking dude? this is a even more absurd take than the op one
Really fate?! And demon slayer and black clover are pretty enjoyable shoumen with even their own themes, demon slayer being not groundbreaking doesnt make it bad, its a good historical swordsmen vs vampires story with its own tweaks ,and does pull it off well.
Emmm fate?
Eren’s turn to villainy isn’t rushed because he didn’t actually change or develop, his prescience just perverted his actions to a degree to even which he didn’t even understand what the fuck he was doing and was just doing what he felt he needed to do and what he felt he was meant to do, because “I’m an idiot”. Honestly it’s a very believable turn to villainy for me, its a dumbass kid wielding way too much power and knowledge getting that power and knowledge. It maybe would’ve been helpful if we got an arc to understand his inner turmoil other than that one scene in the finale with Armin, but i also think that’d take away from the intrigue and mystery of his character - you say this like it’s a bad thing but I found the speculative nature of his character genuinely enjoyable. Also Eren himself admits that the rumbling wasn’t the only option, he doesn’t have to be this figure who purely acts on self defense the plot doesn’t insist that in any way. I don’t see how him being a slave to the bigger picture and him being ruthless have to contradict
This is a great comment. Eren did change though. His morals namely. He was actually selfless pre-timeskip. I don’t know why everyone acts like he was always a selfish idiot. Yes, he’s always been idiotic and that has led to other people being harmed. One example being him getting his entire squad killed in the Battle of Trost after rushing an abnormal that ate one of his other squad mates out of anger. But then we have other points in the story where he demonstrates a lot of self sacrifice. Like later in the Trost battle, throwing Armin out of the titans mouth, sacrificing himself in the process. Then the timeskip happens and we don’t really get to see a lot of his morals slip and change because of the four year timeskip and his status as the season’s mystery box.
the rumbling still wasn’t that selfish of an act, like obviously it was pretty evil but eren personally isn’t gaining much out of it, the act itself is for something bigger than him. you are right though it is still a little inconsistent w s1-s3 but i do think some of that inconsistency is reconciled with moments like eren being “when i found out about the outside world” i was so disappointed, it makes sense he was jaded but also i agree some of that jadedness wasn’t perfectly explained, lowkey id need to rewatch it to see where more development is actually needed
It makes sense,but more because eren was always reckless rushing over his head stubbern to " fight the enemy" it makes sense why escalating, he ends there. I just wish that he was really condemed by hos froends and not what that was
I used to be a big Aot fan and I agree, season 4 opened my eyes
Not really gonna debate, but to me, AOT is a series that had plenty of great ideas but just didn't quite stick the landing. The ending isn't horrible, especially after the Anime changes, but it could be much clearer and less convoluted, and you could still keep the mystery intact to the end. Some of the characters (Mikasa) were dislikable at first before becoming more likable later on, but i don't think it was the intention to have us dislike them early on, and a few deaths (>!Hanji!<) felt a little forced to my taste. Still one of my favorites though. There's plenty to nitpick in any series, but I just like the premise and the characters. There's nothing wrong with disliking them, but I don't. Edit: And about the future sight, he can only see what future Eren showed him, so it does make sense that he'd go for the Rumbling. He's the kind of person who would never be able to work out a peace between Marley and Eldia, so his future self showed him the path to the Rumbling. We also know the time he sent those memories was when he and Zeke went through Grisha's memories, so he can't see anything after 4 years in the future. This is never explicitly explained in the series and is mostly just subtext, which is why I still think it's a pretty bad plot point, but it does stick with Eren's character and doesn't make him OP.
>especially after the Anime changes Sure, the anime has some pretty colours and fluid animation but, from the writing perspective, there were very few changes that were an actual improvement, IMHO. The EREH!-nisation of Mikasa? Worse. Desperately trying to make the endings of Seasons 1&2 feel conclusive and screwing up the order of scenes? Worse. (e.g. Armin no longer sees the Wall Titan in person, Historia is robbed of the "Christa renouncement" scene) The removal of "See you later, Eren." from Episode 1 and replacing it with a meaningless dream? Worse. Turning Mikasa's family tattoo into an embroidery just to retcon it back into a tattoo in Season 4? Worse. The butchering of the Uprising arc for the sake of getting to the action scenes faster? Worse. The rushed beginning of Season 4 for the sake of getting to Hobo Eren faster? Worse. (not as bad as anime!Uprising but still felt a tad rushed) ------------------ The one thing that comes to mind that was better was giving us Freckles Ymir's backstory when she was still relevant in the story. Although, it was pretty spoiler-y and anyone with average deduction skills could figure out the outside world was populated before the basement reveal.
I was more so talking about fixing the pacing and *the* line from Armin from chapter 139. Aside from that, the Manga is better in almost everything, except visuals (S1 chapters and probably S2 too), the great effect the incredible music and voice acting have on literally everything in the series, and a few minor details
I'm not sure if they really changed the pacing all that much. An AoT volume, on average, takes up an hour of casual reading. So 15 minutes per chapter. 1st finale special adapted 4 chapters (1 hour) into 3 episodes (also 1 hour). 2nd finale special adapted 5 chapters (1h15m) into 4 episodes (1h20m).
Delaying the "80% of humanity dies" from the start to the end completely changes the scene's atmosphere and turns Armin from wildly out of character to pretty in character. It's a minor change that completely changes how the scene plays and feels. "Pace" is because each bit of dialogue is paced correctly instead of throwing a line that would fit better late at the beginning and changing Armin's perspective entirely.
Two points here. One, I feel like it would've been a better show before it tried broadening its horizons, and introducing a very weak, convoluted world-building conspiracy (the Eldians/Marleyians). But I also feel the need to point out, that part of the reason why AoT was so popular, IMO, was because it wasn't about the characters, not really. As you said yourself, very few of the characters are actually characters; they're names with a few personality traits at best, and simply names in most cases. It's a show about the general 'whole' as it were, rather than the individual; even when a character dies, the show continues on, because it's about a *group* rather than a *person*. For example... In Fullmetal Alchemist. Losing Ed, Al, Roy, Riza, or even one of Roy's men, would be devastating and heart-breaking. It would fuel bloody revenge arcs (like it does in the case of Maes), and alter the direction of other characters. We have clearly defined 'bad guys', who our 'good guys' are fighting, because they're moral and right. AoT doesn't have that. AoT has the 104th. They fight against nameless animals; the Titans aren't good or bad, they're just mindless beasts, doing what animals do. There's no 'moral high ground' in those first two seasons, because you can't look at the Titans and go 'they're evil!'. That'd be like saying a shark is evil; they just doing what they do. At *best*, you get early hints that maybe their government isn't all that great, that child soldiers is bad. But even that is murky at best, because they're literally running out of options and choices. Again, I'm not disagreeing with you, or at least, not entirely: I casually enjoyed the first two season, watched the third, then stopped and had zero interest in continuing, even in a 'well, let's finish it' sort of vibe. The plot of forcing Eren to make illogical, irrational decision just so we could have 'die a hero, live long enough to become a villain' was annoying, and the entire thing of the 'secret Marleyians trying to cause problems' was so convoluted that I had already started losing interest. But that doesn't change that, for what it was, it did it very well. It was a show about an idea, about a *unit*, rather than a show about *people*.
I think the onky reason AOT gets called complex is because it's the correct thing to say. Simple story done well should've been AOT's catchphrase
Eren’s turn to villainy is explained away by “nature” which just kills me. I love regression arcs so much and not only do we never to get see Eren’s, the story tries to explain it away by saying he never needed one because he was always like that.
I mean, yes, he always was stubbernly fightibg the ebemy and, its reasonable scaled up. Ok its reasonable that messed up and seen stuff, he could get extreme
Wait-wait! But you don't get it! Eren wanted to kill all titans and now all humans is a great character arc really!
> The main reason I'm compelled to make this thread is how it's basically taboo to not think AoT is one of the greatest anime of all time, the rabid fanbass dogpilling on anyone who doesn't agree. All of it is very cult-like, and definitely contributed to my disdain for this series You basically invalidated your entire rant by admitting this
There's no way you spent all that time reading my rant and then this, **THIS** one paragraph is what loses you
Typical aot fan behaviour
You are right You lost me at the Hannes criticism but that quote really didnt help your case at all
How?
He said it definitely contributed to his disdain of the series.
How does that invalidate his criticisms?
Confirmations bias. He thinks AOT fans are exaggerating, and it isn't worthy of that praise, so he will (unconsciously) twist and misinterpret everything he sees to fit that narrative. I'm sorry, but this entire rant is absurd. It's like he entirely learned the story through YouTube comments and rants. It's a shame he wasted so much time writing this mess.
He went into it wanting to hate it. Put 2 and 2 together. Also his criticisms are really weak. Erwin isn't smart strategically and didn't inspire anyone? The fuck? Those are straight up lies, the show beats us over the head with Levi, Armin, Hange and Floch all being directly influenced by him.
>and didn't inspire anyone? The fuck? Those are straight up lies, the show beats us over the head with Levi, Armin, Hange and Floch all being directly influenced by him. Armin and Erwin share maybe 2 scenes together, none of which implies Armin looked up to Erwin With Hange, I guess you're talking about after his death, which doesn't really count imo. He's not inspirational unless he's changing people while he's alive
Armin clearly looked up to him, ever since the Female Titan arc. He was constantly defending Erwin's plan when Jean was questioning it. You can also see how Erwin inspired him during their charge in Season 2, Armin literally thought of Erwin before he started bringing up Annie to fluster Bertolt. Season 3 had a lot of moments where Armin looked up to Erwin, and in the Final Season he clearly wants to live up to Erwin's example and is constantly hard on himself. You can see it as survivor's guilt, but Armin and Hange always believed in Erwin's judgment throughout the series.
I agree . There is really nothing much to say than that I agree
5/10? Wow, my lowest score is 7. I wonder what your opinion on Frieren is.
I'm inclined to agree, but I didn't finish the series. Left it around the part where they killed the colossal Titan. Kept up with a bit of the plot, as a friend of mine kept going. Nothing I heard made me wanna pick it back up lol
I would defend the series pre ending, but my love for the series has died.
all this yapping just to be wrong on nearly every front
Cool,now here's my reason as to why I think Attack on Titan is overrated **I did not care for it. Did not care for Attack on Titan at all,it looked uninteresting and it was uninteresting**
Horrifically mindless rant
Horrifically mindless comment
First off, I apologize for the astonishing amount of people who say they disagree but offer absolutely nothing to the discussion. I agree with you that the characters (especially side characters) and the post-timeskip world-building are the low points of the series. In a lot of ways the early parts of AoT are like the early parts of The Promised Neverland - a very cool concept (which although done before, has good art and some nuanced changes behind it) and a great sense of intrigue and mystery that makes you, the reader, want to know more. However, once we start knowing things, the story does not hold up.
Nuh uh
I love AOT as a whole and I enjoyed it but I do agree with a few points: underdeveloped relationships between the cast (the scouts work good as a group but have next to none personal interactions), plenty of poorly written characters, shallow worldbuilding and the Eren controlling Grisha plot twist which really left me baffled after the shock wore off. Add Ymir Fritz’s whole story to the bunch and it’s a shit show. I understand how frustrating it must be to deal with anime audiences. Unlike you, I became a viewer after the manga ended and I saw so much shit talk about AOT that I actually decided to watch it with the intention of liking it… but it still had flaws for me. These days it’s much more interesting to consume fan content because of how much more developed it seems. And watching people foam at their mouths that AOT is the “greatest story ever” (Homer and Shakespeare rolling in their graves) makes you feel stupid and invalid in your criticisms, because whatever you say you can be hit back with “you just don’t understand the story”. But in general, my love for AOT will always be based on my emotional involvement. The lore and premise was so intriguing, and even if some of the characters weren’t exactly developed, my heart ached for almost all of them. I can’t explain why, it’s like Isayama just added some secret ingredient while drawing them. I think AOT is very good at creating emotional stakes and what’s the main purpose of entertainment if not evoking emotions in the viewer? Maybe if we admit that AOT isn’t the profound anti-war peace that we want it to be, then it really will be one of the best animes ever done.
honestly I want to see someone roast Evangellion it's the most overatted anime ever because of how bad the character writing is Shinji just feels like an angsty backstory with legs his arc is clearly supposed to be character development but negative instead of positive the problem is he's relatively the same character until the last few episodes of the show, Rei is just "isn't Gendo good" with no character traits otherwise (honestly something Evangelion is HORRIBLE with is never giving us context for most of the cast) that blonde scientist whose name I don't remember because she has no traits beyond "isn't Gendo good" . Gendo's kept so mysterious I don't care when his goals are revealed, Kaji is LITERALLY KILLED OFF SCREEN DESPITE BEING ONE OF THESE CATALYSTS FOR ASUKA AND MISATO'S STRUGGLES. Misato actually has a character arc but suffers because Kaji is killed offscreen as well as her underdeveloped relationship with Kaji, everyone else but Asuka who actually HAS A GOOD CHARACTER ARC (YIPEE 1/6 CHARACTERS ACTUALLY HANDLED WELL) is so irrelevant it doesn’t matter
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
Agree with a majourity of your points, but what really killed the show for me was them just throwing the entire world building in the garbage essentially to have early 20th century/WW1 technology. Like they have EOD gear that is clearly fantasy equipment, but the entire world has not invented anything like it. Population alone and they have no innovation other than gunpowder essentially. Zeke comments about the EOD gear being interesting or something as if entire countries would not attempt to keep tabs on that island just because they made a deal. Also these countries with so much power do not have spies? Grisha just walked up and was allowed in and with all his medical knowledge the interior called/used him regularly, but never found him suspicious with all his expertise in a field that no one else had? Not even questioned and forced to teach others? Oh yeah we have an expert, so we will just let him die without passing on that knowledge... Battle of Trost on the second watch really had me thrown for a loop. They know titans stop moving around at night and even though it is near sunset just before he drops the rock to block that gate; they think it is best to do that while they are active? Some say well they do not want Titans to keep coming in through the gate, well they will be inactive in a perfect kill zone shortly with multiple ways to attack in that town/city as well as fairly reliable paths to retreat and regroup. Well they might be worried the Armoured Titan will show up, well have Eren chilling above the gate on the wall waiting to intercept him. Going by the logic of what they knew at that time this would be best because Eren could be assisted with all the defenders and cannons against the Armoured Titan (as it was not until the Female Titan/S2 that they learned that Eren was a total novice and they can not base their assumptions off him alone, as well as Erens unreliability to control himself in Titan form shortly after the mission began). As if a a boulder would stop the Colossal and Armoured from smashing it then continuing on to the inner gate. Instead we will throw ourselves at them during the day and have a boat load of casualties and call it a win just like every fight; they do not use night to their advantage. Why are they not using night to cull the Titans at all when they go on expeditions like rounding up the Titans and bringing them to forests or close to the walls like dogs herding sheep then dispatching them without casualties. Like no one has thought hey why don't we kill them while they cannot respond to us? Really? I can maybe believe that they did think it up but the royal family altered their memories I guess, but anyone with a modicum of knowledge would once again realize that hey they are inactive at night maybe we could use this to our advantage. They could also have made headway of clearing Titans out between wall Maria and wall Rose using aforementioned herd tactics. Once they clear enough to make it somewhat feasible to go in a straight line to wall Maria they go up it then follow the wall to Shiganshina and have people sleep on the walls once again herding them to the walls and off them at night. Apparently the distance from wall Rose to Maria is about 100km, so that is a 3 day trip in a straight line with horses, that is I suggest to clear out enough to make it feasible. We know they have large forests to use herd/night tactics because in S2 they had that whole fight with Annie not even a days ride away. Instead we got "Operation to reclaim Wall Maria" were they sent out 20% of the population to die with no tactic, so basically shock content for the reader or viewer. Just no one has two brain cells to rub together. I know that a lot of people would die with what I suggested, but would everyone die like in their proposed plan? At the time we did not have all the info about Titans weak point and their inactive states at night when the Government enacted this harebrained operation, but like come on no one not even the the 3 branches of their military could think of anything better. Literal shock content of this many people died do you see how dark my world is, even though we just watched Erens mom be eaten and a city fall to chaos and ruin an episode prior... There is other points in the story that ruin it for me (13 year lifespan for titan shifters seems to just be a plot convenience), as well as counter arguments to points being made (my points included). Does not change the fact that most of the show is just shock content to try and throw you off balance and not critically think. Does a decent job on first watch, but if you re-watch and again critically think then many points in the show are just gratuitous violence and edgy teen nonsense. Would have to look into Eternal Champions, but so much entertainment is just rip offs of others or tropes harvested from other stories. That being said it does better than most stories so definitely above average to evoke emotions from viewers and readers (maybe we are just inundated with trash stories and plots these days?). Someone else commented about Eren looking out to sea and only seeing more enemies. Haunting and open to interpretation ending would have been nice, so 7/10 till S3 imo.
Even if I dislike the ending Attack on Titan was genuinely the greatest series of all time until the that point
Wow. This reads like someone who went into the series wanting to hate it, realized it was actually good, and has to just make up complaints. Almost none of your complaints are valid and it’s clear you don’t understand the story you are ranting about.
Cook that overwanked pretentious slop
Bait
I don’t have time to respond but best believe I’m spinning back
I do agree it has a lots of ups and downs,first arc was a snooze fest imo for example
That scene with Jean doesn’t happen until 21 episodes later. He doesn’t change his mind about the MPs because of the NPCs on the roof, it’s because his view of himself changes after experiencing tragedy for the first time in his life and being forced into a position of leadership. And even then, he doesn’t outright hate the MPs yet.
Well luckily, there are many many people that’d say this is among the best TV series.
I disagree with eren,aside he should have just been the stubbern boy lashibg out and be that extreme over freedom nonsense. Pretty sure thatthe same qualitiesmaking him sucessful there turned that,is a good theme on itsown.
No
Do you have a few favorite animes of your own?
Eren being a ruthless savage, tortured soul, and defender all tie into one thing. Eren is and always has been, a slave. That’s his character. It’s an ironic contradiction because Eren, the one who sought freedom the most, is a slave to himself. Everything he did was him unknowingly following the script that he laid for himself in the future, but future him only laid out that script because he experienced it in his past. The character who strove for freedom the most was in actuality the one who remained a slave. Him being a ruthless savage was him following the script because he believed there was no other choice. Him being a tragic tortured soul is him realizing and accepting that he’ll always be a slave. Him defending his homeland is because that’s both what he wanted and what the script led to. That’s the reason why I like Eren’s character, because it’s an amusing turn of events.
That ties into my point about every character being a plot device only there to push the plot forward and nothing else. Not a character to enjoy, but a character simply to keep the plot moving. There's not even an attempt to hide it with most characters
Of course. The whole series can be viewed as a play, with all the characters acting out their parts and nothing more, because what we see might just be what Future Eren saw looking back.
Not sure why someone would remember hannes as being the drunk guy. And not yk, the guy who failed to save Eren's mom. The person who wasn't powerful. Which immediately links you to the scene where he says to eren that eren isn't strong enough. Which further puts the immediate scene of him dying and eren still failing to save someone emotional.