Personal Context: AOT's anime started in 2013, when I was twenty and living near my university campus. Some friends decided to start watching it as a group, and I joined in. I lasted six episodes before I gave up. I had already read Walking Dead and the available Song of Ice and Fire books, so the "anyone can die at anytime" means of building tension wasn't anything new to me, and I found the world and characters to be small and uninteresting. Fast forward ten years to 2023, the manga is over, the anime has one episode left. The series has become one of the largest media franchises of the last decade, and debates about the series had been raging for years. I had been spoiled about the main twist and the ending, though I was generally ambivalent to the spoilers as an outside observer, but I decided to read the manga as part of my own weird drive to understand battle Shonen. And so I read the series in about two weeks, and thought it was generally better than my initial impressions from a decade ago, but I was still too old to connect with it in any meaningful way.
Art: I wanted to get this out of the way immediately, AOT's art is brutally bad. Characters are frequently off model, despite there being little to differentiate them. Character proportions are constantly odd, which is exacerbated by the survey corps jacket, which consistently shortens characters torsos, and the arms aren't drawn long enough to compensate for the jacket, so characters end up having huge lower halves and tiny upper bodies. These issues of anatomy are compounded during action sequences, where Isayama struggles with perspective, especially when using foreshortening to attempt to draw the eye along the action. He also relies to heavily on speed lines to fill out back grounds during these scenes, but I'm generally forgiving of that in battle Shonen. The art does improve over time, but Isayama never reaches a point of artistic proficiency where I would ever call him good.
Characters: Being heavily spoiled before reading this was definitely a benefit for Isayama's character writing, since it meant I was already aware of Eren's genocidal choices, and read the manga looking specifically for how Eren would grow into that character.
Eren: The best thing I can say about Eren's character is that his arc makes sense. Eren is a an extremely simple character, his goals are stated early in the narrative and generally don't change much over the course of the series. Personal freedom defines his character, and limitations to that freedom are his enemy, whether that be the titans, Paradise Island's government or the entirety of the rest of the world. The scope of his goal changes, but he doesn't. Its simple writing, but it has clearly connected with the target audience. I don't find him particularly interesting due to his simplicity, and I find the scope of his choices monstrous and incredibly selfish. But he is a child and he is effectively written that way.
Reiner: Reiner was probably the character I found most interesting in the narrative. There's a film from a few years ago called "Son of Saul" about a Jewish man in an internment camp who unloads the trains for the Nazi's. The film follows his own personal crisis as he reckons with his choices to better his own situation at the cost of his own people, including children. Reiner's arc reminds me of this film, as an Eladian who grapples with the humanity that he finds on Paradise Island, and the actions he takes to protect his mother and cousin, at the cost of his friends and other Eladian children. Though I find his split personality plot line simplistic and a bit childish in the first half of the narrative, his suicidal depression and reckoning with his own actions in the second half is so much more interesting then Eren's character arc that I wish he were the main character.
I don't have any real impressions of the majority of the rest of the cast so I'm just going to blast through some of the major ones in a sentence each. Levi is a cool guy I guess, his revenge plot is fine, and his abusive upbringing could have been interesting if it was given more time. Mikasa was barely a plot device, I would usually forget that she was in the narrative. Armin, Sasha and Connie were all there. I could've written a paragraph about Erwin, but it would've devolved into me wishing that he and Reiner were the main characters. Zeke's genocide would be the morally justifiable genocide I suppose, but his writing as the beast titan, particularly during the retaking of Wall Maria makes him out to be particularly cruel, that it makes him hard to sympathize with later on when he's trying to justify his own particularly brand of genocide. Sasha's dad is maybe my favorite character, his ability to forgive and the amount of empathy that he displays made him perhaps the most naive and adult character in this manga.
Themes: AOT abandons themes and picks up new ones almost as fast as JoJo abandons ideas that aren't working. However, unlike JoJo, whose tone and pacing is most comparable to improvisational jazz, AOT is trying to develop a cohesive world, so this writing style comes at the cost of the overall meaning of the narrative. Early on the church of the wall is introduced, and with them comes themes of the interplay between church and state, and how the two systems use their influence the control their populace. The church side of this is quickly dropped. I’m not wholly against this, as a lt of transitional media struggles with religion beyond presenting the basic concept that perhaps organized religion exists as a simple form of social organization and therefore “control” from the point of view of teenagers. After this, AOT delves more into issues of how states control their populations through propaganda, both on Paradise Island and in Marley. This is the strongest that AOT ever is from a thematic point, and it plays wonderfully into Reiner’s character arc. But after that idea has been played out, AOT struggles with its ideas about oppressed group of people. This is not an issue isolated to AOT, as many narratives want to use oppressed minorities as their point of view characters, its easy to make their struggles understandable and relatable to teenagers. However AOT fails where many of these narratives fail, by giving these groups super powers. In reality, persecuted groups are usually ethnic and religious minorities that simply don’t have the numbers to oppose majority opinions in whatever state they reside in. They become effective targets of government rhetoric because they’re different and don’t represent a large enough portion of the population to effectively change these narratives or literally fight back. African Americans, the LGBTQ+ community, and the Jewish people to name a few have simply not had the numbers or influence to combat the dogmatic oppression that has been levied against them historically. But the nature of oppression falls apart in the face of super powers. To compare with another narrative that has similar themes to AOT, the oppressed people allegory falls apart in multiple X-Men stories, because Magneto has super powers. Yes, both Eren and Magneto come from groups that are subject to racism and state enforced systems of oppression, but both of them have super powers that allow them to make individual choices that can killed thousands to billions of people. Racism has historically been based on the idea that ideological or visual differences between groups can be exploited, but super powers radically change that idea. In AOT’s case the Eladian’s have the genetic background to become literal monsters, who have already conquered the world. Other ethnic groups and states have a very good reason to be terrified of Eladians, because at anytime, the Eladian king could unless an unstoppable global genocide, that already has established precedent. And because of this Eren’s views become monstrous, he simply plays to existing and justifiable fears of his people, and kills billions. It’s a monstrous act, that’s handled so childishly by Isayama, because he has no real world equivalent to effectively draw from. This action is not like Black Panthers in the USA attempting to organize communities in self defence, it’s something more akin to an angry white boy who vindicates his classmates fears about him by getting a gun and shooting up his school, except its on a massively larger scale. I won’t say that presenting this idea in transitional media aimed at kids is dangerous, but its handled too simplistically for an audience that generally needs a more guided approach to difficult topics.
Plot: I won’t say much about AOT’s overall plot, because most of my thoughts on it where covered while going over AOT’s themes. I was generally uninterested in its basic zombie and battle shonen plot until the time skip happened. While the story is in Marley and fills out the world and characters effectively I was engaged, and finally when it has to justify Eren’s actions and how the magic system worked, I just had to shut my brain off to deal with the titan nonsense and the middle school interpretation of ethnic conflicts.
Conclusion: AOT was fine. It’s an ugly series, with some flat characters and a childish approach to themes that the author is not ready to handle. But overall, the story presents new ideas and twists fast enough that I understand why teenagers and young adults are engaged by it. If it had come out when I was younger, it may have ended up being a formative piece of media for me. But I had already experienced works that used a similar writing style and covered similar themes, so I feel a little cold towards it.
