Attack on Titan: from Idealism to Internment Camps
The expanded finale of acclaimed Japanese anime Attack on Titan was in select North American theatres on Monday (February 10). I attended. I only wish I’d hooked my kids on it, so we could have gone together.
While it superficially begins in the team of heroes-battling-monsters genre, the show steadily, subtly then shockingly reveals itself to be far more. Think of the shift as we move from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings – or imagine Marvel’s Avengers movies slowly morphing into The Wire.
I’d like my kids to watch it before they get to voting age, because the show makes real-world issues more meaningful than dry text. I’ve made the pilgrimage to Noam Chomsky’s department at MIT, but Chomsky is a very niche figure; it’s low odds my kids will read him. Chomsky writes about facts (and maybe overlooks other facts), but facts are boring; they don’t stir emotions the way stories do. Michael Moore has been far more impactful because his critiques punctuate compelling visual narratives. And so it is, with Attack on Titan.
Set in exotic 19th century Europe (remember, Europe is exotic to Japanese people) in a three-walled town based on Nordlingen, Germany, the show is about teenaged soldiers fighting monstrous titans who have killed off the rest of humanity. The first episode sees titans breach the outer wall and eat protagonist Eren Yeager’s mother before being repelled.
Humanity retreats to the inner two walls, Eren enlists in the military, and we watch his team’s adventures unfold. As the world-building unfolds, the narrative bumps into darker complexities like government propaganda; state secrets; the power of the free press; torture; monarchies and military coups. It ticks more than few boxes from the French revolution.
This carries us through the first three seasons of Attack on Titan, which can only be fully appreciated through the build-up. It’s like how the three seasons of escalating conflict between Walt and Gus in Breaking Bad create the catharsis of their endgame. There was little payoff in the end-of-20-minute-episode confrontations in the Transformers cartoons I grew up watching. Deepen the conflict and raise the stakes across 20 hours, and you can understand why YouTube reaction videos to the three climactic episodes skitter between anguish and awe. (I won’t link to iMDB to avoid visual spoilers, but this first “Holy Trinity” comes in at 9.7, 9.8 and 9.7 stars, respectively.)
Just as the last season of Breaking Bad serves up something different – a world where Walter White has become the drug lord – the last season of Attack on Titan does, too. We jump forward in time and see the world from the other side, which sees our protagonists as barbaric terrorists – the Devils of Paradis. And we watch them create an "Eren Yeager" of their own to deal with.
Our heroes merely perpetuate the cycle of violence, creating more victims who seek more vengeance, guaranteeing more violence in the future. To quote a rueful military figure:
“We took advantage of hate, instilled it and fostered it, believing it would bring us salvation. All the problems arising from our faults we dumped onto [our enemies]. As a result, that monster was born, and now it’s marching our hatred back at us.”
It’s incomparably more profound than the “don’t do drugs / knowing is half the battle” taglines stitched onto the North American cartoons of my youth.
The image above is of commander Erwin Smith, who led humanity to its first victories over the titans with his rallying cry of “dedicate your hearts”. Instead of being a brash Julius Caesar, he broods over the mountain of corpses it took to get there. In Edwin Starr’s words, war can’t give life, it can only take it away.
In the last season we see Erwin’s “dedicate your hearts” co-opted by a fascist, genocidal secondary villain. It’s a perfect betrayal of his legacy, and a lesson that slogans are only as good or evil as the speaker who speaks them – the kind of knowledge you’d like hormone-riddled teenaged minds to have before they’re old enough to vote.
I wonder if creator Hajime Isayama meant this as his analogue to Buddhists who saw their hooked cross appropriated by fascist, genocidal Nazi Germany. (A common symbol, Buddhists inherited it from Hinduism; it also appears in African and Indigenous American faiths.)
Racism and internment camps come to the foreground in the last season – as they’ve done in the real world, thanks to Donald Trump. There are armbands too. I am very worried Trump (and his rabid copy-dogs in Canada’s Maple MAGA movement) will try to re-normalize them.
Early in the series, when the world still seems black and white, Erwin asks protagonist Eren what he thinks the enemy is (first image after the title). The answer seems obvious: monsters.
The fourth season affirms that the real monsters are us. Deeper than the conceit of heroes and villains, our shared enemy is our universal propensity for hate and violence. It always will be, and we can only choose better or worse ways to diminish, defang or decapitate it.
One of the highest praises I can give Attack on Titan is that as races to its finale, many viewers become unsure who to cheer for. The deuteragonists – our now-humanized villains and now-blemished heroes – continue their struggle, but they're not even sure what they're fighting for.
When their respective leaders’ plans are revealed, we learn that one wants to eliminate violence from the world by sterilizing side “A”, so they eventually die out and there’s no one left to fight. The other wants to eliminate violence from the world by genociding side “B”, so they immediately die out and there’s no one left to fight.
And so, in fiction as in life, it is the task of those deuteragonists – people like us – to stand together against the horrors those fanatics pursue.
It’s a message that in my life has never become truer.
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