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hopeymchope · 5 years

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So, I'm trying to understand this, from a person who has next to no knowledge on the series. What exactly is going on with Attack on Titan? And I'm more than willing to read a long rant if it means I get an explanation.

If you’re wondering why the tag for the manga blew up in recent weeks, that’s one specific thing - a character “death” (or at least, character-serious-injury) that’s got fans freaking out.

If you’re wondering why everything has been sucking for like two straight years of manga and people like me keep making very salty posts about it, that’s a whole other topic.

And that’s what I’m gonna cover in this rant: How Attack on Titan has been shitting its own bed for more than a year now.

Basic Setup: Attack on Titan takes place in a world where the remnants of humanity live in a walled city. The city’s walls protect them from gigantic, grotesque “Titans” who attempt to devour people on sight.

…but naturally, as the story went on, it got way more complicated.

Most of the problems with the manga began circa the time-skip (which is also where the Anime is going to catch up to once the current season 3 is finished). Rarely has there ever been a time-skip in fiction that’s been wonderfully received, but the four-year gap between “Return to Shanganshima” and the “Marley” arc has to be one of the worst.

But the whole crash-and-burn kind of starts right before the time-skip, when we first learn the name “Marley,” begin to learn the true origin of Titans, and uncover true enemy opposing our heroes via a forced flashback. For the purposes of this little essay, let’s just put all of the Marley-related information into one big collection - I’m not gonna separate the last couple chapters pre-timeskip from all the tons we’ve had afterwards. All things dealing with the aforementioned “enemy” will just go into one big fuckpile.

SO. The time-skip jumped forward fouryears into an arc that lasted almost a year without letting us see any of our established protagonists. Instead, we follow… the enemy I just mentioned.

And since Attack on Titan begins and goes for most of its duration without any clear enemies outside of “TEH TITANS” and “general assholes within the system,” this is where I have to put a spoiler cut.

A Rant on Titan

So the enemy of the characters we know so far is Marley, the actual source of the titans. The world isn’t destroyed at all, naturally. Our heroes just live in one isolated place on the planet, which is forced to be surrounded by Titans because Marley shoved them into that walled city and then created Titans on the regular.

Marley is a nation of………………

…*SIGH*…

okay, look. I could try to call Marley a “Nazi Germany allegory,” but the allegory is so thin that they’re basically just incredibly overt Nazis. They’re a military-focused nation of incredible genetic pride where purity is celebrated and where one particular race - a group of both different genetic descendancy than them AND of different religious beliefs - are treated as inferior garbage. The Marley government sees “Eldians” as disposable. They are forced to wear armbands with stars on their arms (YES, REALLY) to identify them in public, and they also make them lived in fenced-off, separate communities.

Marley’s science experiments on Eldians (yup, they tossed that in, too) resulted in the creation of the TITANS. It turns the Eldians into mindless prisoners of their own bodies who grow in size, deform, try to eat people instinctively, and long only for their own deaths.

If they made a third AOT video game, it’d have to be something like this. …. So maybe we shouldn’t.

ANYWAY. During this Marley story arc, we mostly follow child soldiers. They’re of “low birth” because of their race. They chose to enter military service in exchange for having their families treated like regular human beings one day, if they earn their way to become titan-shifters. Nevermind that titan-shifters all die within seven years because of the power of turning into a titan - it’s worth it to raise their family’s status beyond just your regular Jews Eldians, right? Nevermind that they’d never really be seen as equals. Even those who have elevated their own rank by becoming shifters are shown to still be subject to some snark and disdain,but yknow - you were just born that way, so you’re shitty regardless, right?

Through this horrific scenario, we follow a few kids in particular - most notably Falco, who is gradually seeing reality and realizing how they don’t deserve to be treated like shit and that this is all a work - and Gabi, who is becoming increasingly militant and more zealous over time.

RELEVANT SIDE NOTE: Gabi’s character design is based upon a sketch Isayama once did of a gender-shfited Eren Jeager (Eren Jaeger is the main protagonist of the series). For that reason, you might be inclined ot think that Gabi is some kind of alternate/parallel Eren.

Except that’s fucking ridiculous, of course!

Gabi is shown to only care about her own rage against the people within the walls of “Paradis” (the sarcastic name for the walled city where all of our heroes come from) above ALL else. She doesn’t care about her family at all, never noticing her brother’s suicidal tendencies and pain even as Falco is acutely aware of it. The fact that her parents are pained by her following her brother’s dark path to becoming a shifter. She doesn’t notice or care. The more evidence that is put in front of her that the other side might not be as evil as she thinks? That just makes her want to commit murder MORE.

Oh, and she DOES murder people. And try to murder more. A lot. She even successfully murders a fan-favorite character - a character who shows her mercy by pointing a gun at her, seeing she’s only a child, and opting to let her live. Gabi repays this mercy by shooting that character in the back later and boasting excitedly about it to anyone who will listen for multiple chapters in a row.

She then tries to top that by attempting to murder that character’s little adopted sister, who is like, maybe 10 years old, tops? Gabi is then protected from harm by Mikasa and now seems to be on the path towards some kind of “redemption arc” because… uh…………..

………………..because Isayama is shitty?

By contrast, Eren struggles throughout the ENTIRE NARRATIVE to bring harm to people who betray him/those he cares about or those who try to kill him/those he cares about, but often runs into incredible challenges when fighting these douchenozzles. The entire time we followed Eren up until now, he always prioritized his family and friends above EVERYTHING. He would risk ANYTHING to protect them and his comrades in the Paradis military… this was true from when he was a young boy at the start of the story up through him being a young man at this point. And he is ESPECIALLY intense about protecting his closest friends, Armin and Mikasa, who he’s known for nearly his entire life. They grew up together.

That’s set in fucking stone for like 90 chapters, so we’re good. Yeah?

Oh, sweet summer child. Perhaps you were so unprepared for Isayama’s Nazi mallet that you didn’t see his secondary weapon coming?

See, the post-timeskip Eren treats his friends like shit. He lies to them, betrays their trust, runs off and starts a literal war on his OWN, and then tells them how much he hates them. Claims he always hated them.

So in the course of just a couple chapters, he goes from saying this:

To swiftly saying THIS:

Note that devastated look in her eyes. Wonderful.

And yes, he’s GOT to be lying, because I don’t think Isayama would juxtapose those two scenes so closely together in some unwitting fashion. But he’s doing so much damage to them by now that I honestly don’t even know if it matters?

Take Hange.

She’s the intelligent leader of the team, the one who always has a wild, unlikely plan. She’s a science whiz and comes up with longshot plans that always seem to weirdly… work out.

We’re told that, three years ago, she was presented a plan to overthrow Marley by Zeke - a fucking bastard who is clearly a member of the enemy, he’s lived with them his whole life, as a child he betrayed his parents to them and had them executed for being disloyal to Marley, and he’s killed COUNTLESS comrades of our heroes - and Hange decided Zeke’s plan was the only possible option and came up with no alternatives for four years. So she made them ally up with the least trustworthy person IMAGINABLE for a terrible plan,b because Hange’s… a stupid sucker now, I guess.

And why is it a terrible plan — aside from the fact that there is literally zero reason to ever believe anything Zeke says to you, since he’s the most evil fucker in the world? Oh, because it hinges HEAVILY around forcing another member of the team — Historia — into a pregnancy to churn out a baby they intend to use for the country’s gain.

Historia’s big character arc in “Attack on Titan” has been her coming to terms with her own identity and OWNING it. She’s been hiding under another identity or been controlled by other people much of her life. She finally comes out under her true name, declares that she’ll never leave in fear or be maniuplated ever again, and then—

… oh wait.. she’s manipulated into being barefoot and pregnant against her own wishes, because their greatest enemy asked for it.

There’s a lot to hate about the post-”Return to Shinganshima” Attack on Titan, in short. From characters becoming inversions of themselves to full fanatical Nazis being treated like redemption babies to complete destruction of self-actualization of other characters and the fact that, even if this is part of some larger plan being manipulated by multiple players (which seems likely), it still won’t really make up for much of the damage… and for that matter, how plausible would it even be?

But basically, there’s going to have to be quite an 11th-hour ass-pull to make this turn out decently in my eyes by now. And that’s not IMPOSSIBLE.

But it’s looking pretty unlikely.

#anti-gabi braun #attack on titan negativity #shingeki no kyojin negativity #snk negativity #aot negativity #aot spoilers #snk spoilers #attack on titan #shingeki no kyojin

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