But first, a little bit of context. The year is 2006, a 19 y.o. amateur manga artist Hajime Isayama submits a one-shot to everyone's favorite Japanese magazine, Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump. The one-shot contains horrible drawings of naked people that later become known as titans, exposing the embarrassing fact that the young man still can't grasp correct human proportions despite studying at an art college. The editorial department tells him the style isn't quite Shonen-y nor Jump-y enough so he has to do something better. The author submits the work to publishing competitor Kodansha instead, where he's given a rookie award, a hearty pat on the back, and a go-ahead for serialization... so long as he actually learns to draw human bodies.
Fast-forward three years: Isayama is finally able to produce passable art, and the manga enters serialization in Kodansha's brand new Bessatsu Shonen Magazine. Fast-forward again to 2013: Shingeki no Kyojin is a money printing machine the likes of which Kodansha hadn't seen since Hajime no Ippo, the anime debuts to a success never seen *ever*, Shueisha editors rip out their last remaining hair and swear they will never turn down a potentially popular one-shot for stylistic disagreements again. Enjoy reading the likes of Chainsaw Man in Jump? Light a candle for your man Isayama who made it possible.
Back to the manga at hand, SnK sure took a few sharp turns over the course of its run, much to the dismay of many fans who were unable to adapt to the change in tone. At first most people thought this was some sort of a high-octane slasher where a named character could die any moment (I mean, who doesn't like those? That's kind of how Game of Thrones got from a niche fantasy book into the mainstream), so they became confused when it suddenly slowed down and dove deeply into politics and psychological thriller territory. Just as the audience had gotten used to that, the series abolished that angle altogether to show an entire arc from the antagonists' point of view which made it feel more like a somber war drama. What was first expected to be the next coming of shonen has turned into a surprisingly thoughtful and impartial treatise on the politics of both civil and international warfare, its social impact, the psychological trauma dealt to those involved, and the moral choices they are forced to make during and after the conflict. The manga was continuously reformulating what it was about, urged the readers to rethink their allegiances and reconsider who the actual bad guys were. This was a feat you wouldn't normally see in the medium, and it made it stand out to those of us who have stuck with it through the genre rollercoaster.
But it had to end with the most messy, haphazardly written, ham-fisted final arc that all but forgot about dozens of previously set up plot points, threw many characters under the bus and made others behave inconsistently, all sprinkled with embarrassingly tone-deaf dialogue and paneling the closer to the ending it got. A literary vomit that could not have come from under the same pen that produced many amazing chapters just a couple years prior. An unfortunate mistake that could've been adequately remedied with perhaps another couple volumes' worth of properly paced content. It would be unfair to say that the series hadn't had problems before the final arc, but what the arc did was effectively exacerbating these problems instead of trying to rectify them. And in doing so, made me feel disgust towards the characters, and they did not deserve it.
So, what went wrong? It's hard to say. Maybe Isayama has buckled under the immense pressure of expectations that drove him so far as to abolish the originally planned ending and go for an overall lighter tone. Maybe all the fame has stressed him out and made him want to do away with the manga sooner rather than later. Maybe he's lost the line of thought that guided his protagonist, or met a dead-end he couldn't resolve in a more concise manner. Maybe it's all of it, I don't know. Unless he does a post-mortem interview addressing the problematic ending, we may never know.
Should you read SnK even knowing that? I'd say yes. Just the themes it ends up exploring and the way it manages to manipulate your perspective on the world alongside the characters' are nothing short of spectacular. The story may have failed in the end, but the overall experience is still strong and worth going through.
Just, uh... ease on the expectations, m'kay?
