I absolutely love Attack on Titan and it's one of the best anime's I have ever seen. Even the clown show ending from the manga has been fixed to an great extent in the anime. The anime has so many excellent moments which are some of the best written scenes in anime.
The fanbase is insufferable though. It's either full of "Eren is literally me" mfs or glazers with no sense of reality and I'm pissed at liking the same thing as them.
Great worldbuilding but ultimately it is ruined by it's childish politics.
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The deus ex machina they gave the attack titan (literally omnipresence!) also ended up ruining it for me, show lost the little seriousness left it had.
I would have liked it less if it was the "I win" button that got slapped in every fight. But sliding it in at the very end as a plot-hole filler was lazy but ultimately fine.
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There are a number of scenes I enjoyed. The choice over who gets saved by the Colossal Titan investiture and the passing of the Jaw Titan was great. The various betrayals have been well-motivated. And I genuinely like the origin story of the Titans, as these things berthed from an ultimately used up and abused slave people.
The idea of power as a social construct is what resonates through the whole storyline. Memory manipulation as a stand in for mass media is a bit forced and lazy, but the value of history as a motivating force is appreciated. The Eladians getting a very straight line drawn to jewish ghettoes is overused, but the various turncoats expressing their rationales for siding with this or that group remains compelling.
It is, all in all, a well done story with strong and enduring themes that resonate across the entire narrative arc.
The endless fixation on "Is this anime fascist?" is exhausting. Because it is, at the end of the day, a Young Adult cartoon. And these cartoons always end up embracing childish politics because they are stories for children.
But the history and the setting and the various lead characters all create the kind of space that is fun to think about and explore. I suspect we'll see its influence resonate through the storytelling medium for years to come.
i don't think that fascism should allowed to slid because its 'for children'
I don't think guys with green magic rings doing stunts in airplanes is fascist.
That's all the kids see
No, but slap an American flag on the plane and BAM fascism.
Slapping a sticker on a vehicle does not make it fascist. That's entirely superficial.
Superman does not become more or less fascist based on whether he crash lands in Kansas or Ukraine. Spiderman does not become more or less fascist based on whether he's swinging through New York City or Shanghai or Jakarta or Rio. There's plenty to criticize in Green Lantern, particularly when it leaned into the Space Cops motif. Just pointing at the plane Hal Gordon was crashing when he got his ring and saying "Fascist because American" doesn't cut it.
If the worst thing John McCain ever did was crash an F-16 in New Mexico while colliding with magic jewelry, he wouldn't have earned that tumor.