Post by Mr Momentum & the Sidesteppers on Nov 18, 2021 2:29:59 GMT -5
Well, actually I hate to say it, but Representative Andy Biggs is completely in the wrong here. You see, Shingeki no Kyojin, which should be correctly translated as "The Attack Titan" as opposed to "Attack on Titan", is not about the alienation young people feel within their culture. It's actually about a young man named Eren Jaeger who goes on to commit the worst genocide in all of human history for the sake of saving his own subjugated race, the Eldians. It's also the greatest love story ever told, about the woman who is forced to behead her beloved to save the world, because the man she loved chose to become the worst enemy of all mankind, in order to broker peace for the Eldian race and end the Titan curse. Basically, it has nothing to do with alienated youth at all.
Really, the story arc of Eren Jaeger's journey to become the titular Attack Titan who wreaks havoc across the Earth fundamentally teaches us nothing except of mankind's own capacity for total brutality in the face of extermination. There is no hero here, Eren Jaeger is a weak willed boy who sacrificed his own mother, his friends, his brother, his father and his father's ex-wife all for the sake of achieving his own goals which, realistically speaking likely could have been achieved without the deaths of millions of people. If there's supposed to be some deep meaning behind Eren Jaeger becoming the very thing he hated, well I'm pretty sure the entire audience missed it. Astounding how Isayama was able to dispel a decade of fan goodwill with two utterly awful chapters right at the end. The worst part of all is Eren grovelling like a bitch in front of Armin about how he never wanted to see Mikasa with another man, even Armin tells him to just shut the fuck up.
And that's just the really sad part to me. There was so much potential here for a deeply compelling story about the human spirit, the brutality of war, love on the battlefield. You could have had an ending that actually tied into the first chapter where it turns out the Founding Titan was acutally used to create a timeloop that Eren trapped himself in to save the Eldians, there's a huge load of corroborating evidence in the first and second last chapter of SnK as well as various other chapters. And yet... nothing. The resolution we are provided with teaches us nothing. This is not simply a failure in terms of manga and anime, this is a grand failure in storytelling itself. It's honestly appalling to anyone who wants to write. Isayama, what the fuck happened man?
Maybe I'm just reading too deep. Maybe Isayama just really likes drawing giant monsters killing people and formulated a likeable cast of characters, lore that created years of fan speculation and theories, only for the sole purpose of dabbing all over his fans and then ruining their dreams of SnK actually having a good ending. I don't actually think he gets to bath in the tears of his fans, because we're not sad; we're just upset because he tricked us into thinking he had a good story to tell. Basically what I'm saying is, Isayama simply enjoys drawing people being killed. And quite frankly, if that's all there is to it, I see nothing wrong here.
