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For a series that's all about a plethora of characters yelling loudly, Attack on Titan definitely finds itself whining a lot this season. Even with the aptly titled final episode, "Scream", AoT rarely finds breathing room to develop its scenario or characters past bluntly exposited backstory or nauseatingly boring dialogue. For everything it lacks in subtlety, it thankfully makes up for in bravado, as this season, even in its shorter length, is louder, dumber, and more abrasive than the last.
Don't get me wrong, I actually prefer shorter seasons in anime and I was happy to see that we won't be sitting through twenty four episodes of Attack on Titan. Especially if Season 1 is any example, there would most likely be a very tedious air about it all. With a shorter, more compact season, AoT had the opportunity to tell a more impactful story with better animation, presentation, and a tighter narrative.
Unfortunately, I can't say that it succeeded. Much like the first season, Attack on Titan feels incredibly inconsistent in presentation and narrative. One episode feels like it is totally inconsequential while another feels like everything is moving by at lightning pace. I rather have the pacing be fast, rather than crawling to the finish line like some abnormal titan, but this constant rubber-banding can become tedious. Season 2's shortened length definitely proves beneficial to the short narrative being told.
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[Story, character, and resolution]
There is a distant focus on our protagonist as the writers adapt a more wide scope of characters onto the screen, trying their best to create sympathetic and morally intriguing humans that pepper this sprawling landscape. I very much enjoyed this change, since our protagonists, Eren, Mikasa, and Armin aren't very interesting or charismatic. There's a squeaky blond kid who shouts a lot, the main protagonist Eren, fueled by revenge, who shouts a lot, and Mikasa, who's soft spoken but also totally insipid as a character. They're a complete bore.
Although the first half of the season really struggled to maintain my interest, I still appreciated them trying to develop a vast array of characters. I will unfortunately say that they don't do this too well. A lot of the episodes focused on certain characters, especially our favorite potato-lover, Sasha, feel totally redundant and misplaced. Her conflict or specific idiosyncrasies don't come off as clear or well-thought out and she gets completely sidelined as the season continues.
On the other hand, Reiner and Bernholdt get a lot more attention and end up providing much of the shows fast-paced narrative, which is welcome. Although their characters and motivations are left so vague that it often feels stilted, as in, I don't find the way they speak to be realistic of the situation they are in. They purposefully keep things vague which makes it sound like they are hiding from the viewer, rather than the characters.
The last group of characters that gets the most focus is Christa and Ymir, who are responsible for probably the most compelling, albeit cheesy story of the season. Spurned lovers and the like. Some of their choices made them seem stupider than what the writers may have wanted, however, in the end, at least there was some emotion there. Comparing that to our protagonist and their motivations, that is a major positive.
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As the season progresses, there is an obvious escalation happening, and Erin is unfortunately at the center of it. While I will say that the latter half of the season is more entertaining from a popcorn fun perspective, it is also where the show becomes completely off the rails as a story. More on that in later sections.
There are constant monologues during the fights, which create for tension-less encounters that are often back-ended by meaningless cliffhangers that lead to nothing. Each episode ends on a cliffhanger and each cliffhanger rings less and less true or interesting. It's a crutch that most Shounen action series have.
Erin is often praised by the characters, however, I never felt as though he should be. He is painted as completely bullheaded, yet that is a positive. In one scene one character monologues to another about how Erin would charge into a fight against five people all stronger than him and risk his life, but that's a good thing, apparently. To me, it just comes off as stupid. It doesn't make me like this already shallow, revenge-driven character more.
Mikasa is virtually just the girl who's a badass during the inconsequential action scenes and then is reserved to just yelling "Erin" really loudly during the parts that yield narrative results. Of course during the climax she gets sidelined because god forbid these characters ever work together. The entire climax felt cheap.
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[Presentation]
I'm getting the boring parts out of the way before I talk about some of the more interesting elements of the series and what comparisons I can draw from it. The presentation here is fine. Much like the rest of the series it is horribly uneven, drifting from impressive animation to some really hokey and pathetic CG filler scenes that pepper most of the series. Every episode we got one or two filler cuts where a bunch of characters ride their horses along a texture wrap, and they're horses look really stiff and lifeless. The entire thing gives me flashbacks to Berserk(2016). It looks awful.
On the other hand, when WIT decides to put in some time there are some pretty engaging and fun action scenes, albeit poorly choreographed, as most of the time I really didn't understand the distance between objects. Coming off the heels of Kabaneri, I really was hoping for more in terms of animated fidelity here. Kabaneri, the last, and probably equally mediocre series that WIT worked on had significantly more impressive animation, character design, and set pieces, which made Attack on Titan feel like a pale imitation, which is all the more strange since Kabaneri was the actual imitation.
It was really clear that most of the effort was put into the first episode and the last few, since those are the episodes with the most consistent level of animation. As I said, when WIT decides to put that work in, it looks great. There are plenty of spectacularly designed and perhaps unintentionally hilarious Titans that waddle about on screen, and I maintain the notion that the titans are perhaps one of the coolest baddies I've seen. There are some genuinely fun designs here and those are often backed up by funny animation cycles which makes some of these abnormal creatures more memorable than many of the human characters.
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The music is about as solid as ever. The OP is a shadow of season 1's initial opening, but it is still fine. The ED is better, and I appreciate that these openings and ending credits are actually attempting to be relevant, rather than just a super-cut of the characters flying through the air and posing.
The musical cues are amazing. From the electric guitar riffs to the awesome distorted violins, each one is memorable and never fails to bring your attention back to what is happening on screen. The shift into the orchestral themes of the series are alright, although I can't say they are as engaging.
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[Character death and you]
Oh man, I remember having an argument with someone on reddit about the character deaths in the series. They, for some absurd reason were set on the notion that Attack on Titan was successful due to its characters being in constant threat of dying. He compared it to the likes of Game of Thrones, which I found preposterous since I don't believe Attack on Titan's characters are under any threat whatsoever.
Game of Thrones has revolutionary narrative structure, visuals, and compelling character motivations, dialogue, and so on. Attack on Titan doesn't really have any of that, but more important, GoT truly excels with keeping you on the edge of your seat with character deaths solely because it lacks a protagonist. There is no "plot armor" here because there is no main character. Attack on Titan obviously has main characters which are obviously in no real danger, so that fear is coming from nowhere but from the viewers mind.
So with this in mind, none of that concept ends up ringing true. Characters in Attack on Titan do die, and I appreciate the length of which the director and animators go to show that death in this show is brutal. But it really doesn't feel as though everyone is at risk. With that being said, the violence here is actually pretty entertaining. I say that with the idea that violence in television and film is inherently entertaining and anime really kind of sucks at violence.
Attack on Titan is far from what I'd call a "gory" series, however, it is definitely a few nice steps above what I'd say is a "regularly bloody anime". The censorship rules in Japanese television, which are unfortunately in affect for most anime, are really disheartening, since nothing really feels spectacularly gory. All the blood here looks like ketchup and there are no guts or bones or anything like that. All the humans can get dismembered with a spurt of ketchup and that's that. This is surprising to me since Japan is definitely a body-horror oriented audience, with the "horror" genre being huge in Manga and some of the greatest horror films in Japan having these elements.
But that's a problem for another day. Attack on Titan at least tries to shock its audience with the horrors transpiring, and while they aren't really that effective when compared to the likes of, once again Game of Thrones, or even a significantly inferior and somewhat awful series like The Walking Dead. Even through all these unfortunate restrictions I still found myself enjoying some of the more horrific elements in the series, which is definitely a positive since not many anime really impress me in that aspect.
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[Shounen action cliches]
Inevitably, we have to touch on Shounen action shows and the cliches that come with them. Attack on Titan is undoubtedly a Shounen action series with the target demographic of boys ages thirteen through seventeen. Which is expected, as by definition Shounen is a teenage-oriented show. With that said, Attack on Titan is far from a mature series, despite it's 17+ rating. Sure there is blood and a hint of moral gray, but it really never strays any further than that.
The themes are blunt, the story is clear, and there isn't much depth beyond man-eating titans and the crazy plot-twists that end up coming with that. Which leads me to my next point, and a trope of Shounen action that I call "escalation". Where the show starts at one point in terms of situation and narrative, and then as the story progresses it escalates the drama and action to the point of absurdity.
When Attack on Titan started it was a series oriented around survival. Man versus beast, and that was the show at its best. For the first five episodes of the series, I really loved it. However, as it progressed and that escalation started occurring it shifted from survival to flat-out action and became more of a flesh-mecha. That unfortunately cheapened a lot of elements from the show, and I personally just don't find that concept all too interesting. It continued like this and as the season 2 finale shows, it really isn't stopping this escalation. I'm convinced that in a few seasons we'll have the moon reveal itself to be a titan and crash down into the earth as Eren becomes an amalgamation of all the titans to fight it. Or something like that.
It really could go anywhere, and that escalation unfortunately ruined a lot of potentially good shows. For example, Full Metal Alchemist:Brotherhood became absurd towards the end, breaking any and all verisimilitude and left me disappointed. As the series progresses, AoT feels as though it will begin to do the same. The plot developments are all either really obvious or so hilarious ridiculous that you can't help but laugh at them. Which isn't a big positive for a show that is incredibly devoid of humor through much of its run-time.
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[Conclusion]
I have a natural bias against superhero programming. I'm going to be honest here. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy some or fully avoid others, it just means that by concept, superhero shows rarely interest me in concept. The idea that some random kid gets insane powers without even trying is lame to me. I much rather see people work to get where they are. Attack on Titan became a superhero show the second Erin got this ridiculous power out of nowhere and now is, as plenty of characters made it clear, the "last hope of humanity." It really plays as generic and uninteresting. Even the moral conflicts are all just cliches at this point.
So with Erin inhabiting this role, I find myself with a blase ideology when watching this series. I have absolutely no interest in this escalation specifically because I know it will escalate. However, Attack on Titan still manages to keep things fresh by throwing some decently engaging fight scenes and some characters that I find myself a little more interested in than our protagonists. Christa and Ymir's story this season was definitely cheesy, but it was a nice kind of cheese, like a fine a ricotta, rather than the stale american that this show often forces down my throat.
Attack on Titan is a shounen through and through, and that occasionally prevents me from really just enjoying it for its action. It is the little things, here. For example, when a character is in a scary situation with Titans piling on top of them and then another character tries to speak to them, all the titans just kind of stop moving to let them finish talking. These blatant over-sites aren't as innocuous as you may think, since each moment that rips you out of the scene adds up to you not treating this show with any respect or care, making for a fake experience.
The finale continues to elevate the series' stakes without managing to create a world in which those stakes feel feasible. The twist was obvious, however, the implications of it are yet to be explained and I'm sure they'll need another thirteen episodes of the already announced third season to do so. A lot was supposedly happening this season, and some of it was pretty fun, however, the plethora of honestly disorienting flashbacks and blunt, repetitive dialogue created a lack of interest that continued through the season. This made the entire experience feel grand, yet completely mediocre at the same time.
Unless it really fumbles, I feel like this is the kind of attitude Attack on Titan will have for its run-time. It is undoubtedly carried by its genuinely creative premise and spectacular monsters, however, it falls short in the narrative and dialogue, making the entire experience palatable, but not something you'd want to eat every day.
