How bad aot ending compared to Usagi drop, domestic girlfriend ,tpn and wonder egg

I finally finished this manga and now I just need catharsis. I'm an older anime fan, so I remember just how huge Attack on Titan was when it first came out. Especially the anime back in 2013. I'm going to be perfectly honest...I've never liked Attack on Titan. It's not like I thought it was cool as a kid and now I'm embarrassed because I'm trying to put on airs and I see this series as a reminder of my less culturally refined past. I'm dead serious, I have NEVER liked this franchise. I've basically been hate reading this manga on and off for the last 8 years.

Let's start at the beginning. We have a dystopian world where our heroes are constantly besieged by stupid, drooling giants. It's standard zombie apocalypse tropes but with brainless giants. Also the heroes need to fight the giants using zip lines and swords. That part was actually pretty creative, it looked cool, and it's what made Attack on Titan instantly stand out. Eren is the edgy, rage fueled protagonist who lives simply to exterminate every last giant. He's not a particularly nice person or developed character in the beginning. He's basically the "Goblin Slayer" only he's the Giant Slayer. Then you have Armin Arlert, whose name is a really cringeworthy pun on "armed and alert". Although Armin is a real German name. He's the quiet, nice guy who is the straight man in this crazy world. You have Mikasa, who is the quiet, beautiful, and badass chick. Then you have Levi and his character in the first arc is that he's cool. He's like Legolas from Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy as a manga character. He also has this adorable little cleaning quirk because it's manga. The art in the early manga is BAD, but it doesn't really matter. The Walking Dead was HUGE in 2010. This is like the Walking Dead only flying on ziplines to kill giants! How could any teenager avoid loving this?! I was 25 when I first started the manga and I was a little more jaded. It just never really clicked with me.

Now we get to part 2 and this is where the manga hits its stride. We learn there is some kind of secret going on with the government of Paradis. We learn that Titans used to be human, but we aren't sure who the first Titan was or how it happened. What's up with the Beast Titan?! What's in that basement!? This was 2013-2015 when the series was at its zenith of popularity and social media was exploding in size. Video essays on Youtube are becoming huge and fan speculation on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Youtube, and everywhere else is off the charts. EVERYONE is talking about Attack on Titan. EVERYONE has their own theories and their own head canon. Even as someone who didn't like the series, I was still excited. This was Game of Thrones for Weebs!

Now we reach part 3 in which the series tries to be more political and things get messy. So there is an ethnic group called the Eldians, who all have names like Schmidt and Müller and Schröder. Years ago, they used magic and super science to create an army of stupid giants and try genocide the rest of the planet to create Lebensraum for their master race. I thought at first that the Eldians were supposed to literally be ethnic Germans and this was some Wolfenstein future, but Isayama didn't go quite that far. They're clearly Germans, but we don't call them that. Eventually though, the allies turned the tide on the Eldian war machine and transformed the once proud, giant Wehrmacht against their own. The Eldian leader felt such guilt over his people's crimes that he walled them all in on the island of Madagascar and wiped their memories. The rest of the world still hates them and wishes to exterminate them as revenge, but the King has basically resigned his people to eventual genocide out of "Eldian Guilt". The whole reason for choosing Madagascar is a reference to the "Madagascar Plan" in which the Nazis would ship Jews to Madagascar rather than killing them. The series actually switches between portraying the Eldians as Jews and Germans because the symbolism is careless and Isayama flat out admits he just likes adding historical "easter eggs" because it's cool. Japanese liberals along with Korean and Chinese online communities actually attacked Isayama for Japanese nationalism and felt that he was saying Japanese are the Eldians and the Japanese government is cucked and dooming the Japanese people to Chinese domination out of WW2 guilt. However, Isayama never actually meant to say anything. It's all just careless, edgy bullshit and it comes CRASHING down in part 4.

We get a bullshit time jump, which is always a good start. Eren has become shonen Hitler and is obsessed with Operation Let's Get Ready to Rumble! He's going to use an army of retarded giants to literally step on every non volksdeutsche on the planet! Isayama is SO smug at this point. He's literally thinking "Haha! I tricked you kids into rooting for shonen Hitler! I got you!" He seems completely oblivious to the fact that at least half the fans are unironically rooting for Eren either out of sheer edgyness, because it's hilarious, or because this series unfortunately has a far right problem. It's a bit of all 3. Any subtlety or nuance is just gone now. It now wants to teach this simplistic, shonen moral of hate begets more hate and Eren is the clear cut villain. He dies, but only after killing the majority of the planet and leaving Eldians as the majority ethnicity on Earth. However, no lesson was actually learned by the common people. The war is still ongoing at the end of the manga, so either the surviving Eldians are going to finish the job or the tide turns and the Eldians are finished. There is no possible good ending, but I'll try write an acceptable ending myself. The Eldians and non-Eldians hold a temporary truce and sign a non-aggression pact. As a result of scientific breakthroughs, Humanity flees Earth to escape the planet now devastated by the Rumbling. After a brief Golden Age, an Eldian tyrant named Rudolph von Goldenbaum who is a distant relative of Eren, ushers in a new dark age of mass murder and oppression. The surviving non-Eldians band together with some conscientious Eldians to form the Free Planet Alliance, directly leading to a better series.

After 8 years of reading this edgy, stupid, bullshit I can finally close this chapter of my life. The series actually has some good elements. It's not a terrible series all around. However, the sheer level of acclaim that it got both confuses and infuriates me. There are plenty of flawed, trashy, silly series that I like. I'm certainly not saying I'm somehow casting judgement on Attack on Titan fans. However, Attack on Titan was able to get away Scott free with being juvenile, poorly written, edgy garbage for a decade and only now is it just beginning to get called out on it! If you're an SAO fan, you get made fun of so hard that you probably don't want to discuss anime online. You're the untouchable of the anime community, all because a couple Anitubers turned one of the most popular light novels of all time into this essential punching bag. If you're a Gundam fan, you have to always be on your backfoot if you're away from your safe space on 4chan /m/. Everyone else you fear might think you're an autistic weirdo who has a fetish for giant robots and you have to explain, "well actually, there are very complex and well realized themes in Gundam. You see, the Earth Federation was meant by Tomino to symbolize..." If you're an Elfen Lied fan like me, you will face a pretty frequent stream of random strangers who want to dunk on you. You're on your backfoot so often that you begin to deeply question the acceptability of your own taste. You have to seriously practice your online debate skills just so everyone won't think you're a slack jawed, uncultured moron with an IQ of 80. That's the immediate assumption that people online will have. The fact Attack on Titan fans have gotten a free ride loving this stupid garbage for so long is just indescribably frustrating. All I can say is thank fucking GOD it's over!