Attack on Titan sucks
Kind of. And not for the reasons you might think. (Spoilers ahead).
Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin) is deceptive. When it’s in form, it’s an addictive mystery show where the characters slowly piece together the secrets of their world. At its low points, it’s a show with uninteresting characters, shallow relationships, and a completely incoherent plot. The story really only gets going over halfway through, once the mysterious world’s backstory finally gets uncovered. These revelations are enough to make up for the predictable, shonen-trope laden beginning.
The manga and anime are extraordinarily popular at the moment, and many wouldn’t hesitate to put Attack on Titan on lists of greatest manga of all time. For this reason I figured it would be good to clear the air on some of the controversy surrounding it.
The central conflict in Attack on Titan is between the “Marleyans” and the “Eldians”. After centuries of conflict, the Eldians have been banished to an island where they live within three walls — completely cut off and sheltered from the outside world. Fed an alternate history, they live believing they are the last bastion of humanity in a post-apocalyptic world. Meanwhile, in Marley (a hegemonic regime that resembles the height of the British Empire in its global influence and military might), remaining Eldians are subject to apartheid, having to wear distinguishing armbands and forced to live in segregated labor camps. Within the walls, the Eldians cower in fear of supernaturally powerful “Titans”, whose diet solely consists of human flesh. It’s later revealed that Titans are actually Eldians, who we learn have the inborn power to transform into Titans when injected with Titan spinal fluid (and can also become super-Titans if they eat someone with super-Titan power. Ridiculous, but hey, that’s anime). It’s not surprising that the show was banned in China (and it honestly might have had nothing to do with the political elements of the story, but wholly due to the gratuitous violence and mildly disturbing content throughout).
As one is probably familiar with, there is an ugly side to all this, as cancel culture and deeming things “problematic” has become essential to the current zeitgeist. Isayama Hajime’s opus is no exception. Twitter is rife with multi-tweet threads about how Isayama supports Japanese imperialism (hard to find an English source on this one but I for one believe it), how the material is anti-Semitic (this isn’t so clear; it can be argued and will be touched upon below), how it uses Nazi imagery (I didn’t really notice this, maybe my knowledge of history is lacking, but it seems like a stretch), how it pushes hard nationalism (no, not really, but I suppose it could be argued — especially without knowing the full context of the story).
The plight of the Eldians appears on the surface to be allegorical and an allusion to historical situation, immediately bringing attention to the centuries-long persecution of the Jewish people through direct allusion (concentration camps, armbands, being experimented on, etc.). Though, that particular comparison is fraught, since the Eldians (the main protagonists are all part of this race) seem to have been imbued with some of the most vile of antisemitic tropes — like having strange transforming abilities and ultimately being a people who once controlled the world and desire to again. So the comparison to Jews really ought to be examined more carefully: in the real world, Jews aren’t a secretly a different species, never actually controlled the world, and they certainly don’t secretly hold such ambitions to do so again — while Eldians do check all of these boxes. They transform into Titans. They did have an empire at some point. And in a darkly ironic plot turn, the majority of Eldians support a fanatical nationalist movement once they learn all this.
The fact about racism is that it claims certain negative tropes about a certain race. Isayama, the writer, surely knows this and still decides that the Eldians should have the Power of Titans: he is making anti-Eldian tropes a reality in his universe. Why give racism such a compelling justification? Isayama is almost provoking the audience to ask themselves: at a certain point, if the Eldians do have the ability to transform into man-eating monsters, is segregation justified?
If Attack on Titan is intentionally an allegory about Jews, then it’s easily read as pro-Nazi or at the very least mildly anti-Semitic: for Isayama, Eldians pose an existential threat to the world. There’s really no historical analogue for this situation, even metaphorically. In history, it tends to be the case that oppressors are the ones with power and the oppressed are powerless. Isayama’s story is the inverse: the powerless Marleyans oppress the powerful Eldians. It makes no sense then to project Nazi Germany onto it: the story’s power dynamic — the most crucial element of oppression — doesn’t make any sense.
Taking a brief detour from the main topic: let’s talk about Racecraft by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields. The central idea is that there is no meaningful genetic boundary between races, and that our conceptions of race are learned and not “real” in any measurable sense. It’s explained more carefully than simply asserting that “race is a social construct”; rather, it’s the idea that racism and race are two sides of the very same coin. The authors use the term “Racecraft” in order to conjure up the notion of witchcraft — an example of something irrational for which the belief in it itself causes it to manifest in the world. Something like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Ultimately, the concept of race itself doesn’t have to hold such power over us. Note that the point of Racecraft isn’t the same thing as “I don’t see color”. That would be denying that race/racism matter at all, and to reject examining one’s underlying biases and irrational belief. For Fields, race exists, but in a sense that it isn’t based on scientific methods but rather something more fluid. It’s a subtle distinction that everyone should think long and hard about before dismissing it offhand.
Attack on Titan doesn’t want to be read as a historical allegory. If so, it would be asserting that racial hierarchies and inborn differences are significant and that those differences necessitate conflict. Read specifically as an allusion to Nazi Germany, we run into significant anti-Semitic implications since it is clear in Isayama’s universe that Eldians/Jews pose a grave threat to humanity.
Let’s be charitable towards Mr. Isayama and throw out this type of reading altogether. Summing up: to answer the question “Is Attack on Titan anti-Semitic?”, we reject the premise that it’s about the Holocaust. Does this absolve Isayama of anti-Semitism? No, but I think it’s reasonable to give his work the benefit of the doubt.
It’s clear that the conflict between the Eldians and Marleyans is intentionally portrayed as morally ambiguous. It’s made clear in the show that both peoples in the past have filled the role of dominant oppressor. History, in the universe of Attack on Titan, is written by the victors. Propaganda stokes the flames of nationalism and hatred: a majority of walled-in Eldians, upon finding out the truth of the outside world, want to destroy it — but only because they’re fed a hyper-nationalist narrative by Eren Yeager (the foremost protagonist of the story). One of the best elements of the story is Eren’s journey from every-shonen-protagonist-ever into a terrifyingly cold and ruthless villain.
There’s a certain moral stance that people take — often those in academia — who wish to take a sort of impartial distance from morally gray matters: in search of nuance, they abandon principle. This is Isayama’s M.O. — first you create a situation in which it isn’t super clear who the bad guys and the good guys are. Then, sit back and enjoy watching the idiots on Twitter argue over this and that, smirking to yourself about how clever you are for creating a story that no one is smart enough to understand. No, he’s not fascist, nor is he a Maoist, nor does he have any ideology at all: he just wants to sit in his ivory tower of moral nuance and laugh at the peons.
The takeaway is then that the sweeping plot of Attack on Titan is nothing more than a political Rorschach test — up to interpretation — and that interpretation can reveal much about the subject. It can be literally about the Jewish people, it can be about mainland China’s subjugation of Hong Kong, it can be about white guilt or “white fragility”. It can be about Japan’s imperial ambitions. There really is no wrong answer, but there isn’t a correct one either. Attack on Titan is the ultimate one-size-fits-all apolitical piece of politically charged media — it takes no ideological stance of its own.
Really, the notion that Attack on Titan is imperialist propaganda is hilariously wrong: by the end, the heroes are a coalition of Marleyans and Eldians working together to try to prevent Eren Yeager from razing the entire world. It’s arguably “problematic” in other senses that won’t be touched on in great detail: a strange plot revolving around a superhuman race and a royal family, the bizarre fixation on genetic determinism (the Ackerman stuff is so weird), and I haven’t even touched upon the flat characters and mildly problematic relationships. Isayama’s greatest crime isn’t being an imperialist; rather, it’s that he isn’t anything at all (other than maybe a guy with a few weird ideas about race). The author is absolutely dead here: Isayama’s personal views (rather his lack thereof) really ought to play no part in interpreting the material.
Tying everything together: Isayama’s personal views regarding imperialism (which don’t get me wrong, are probably sus) don’t really play a role in critiquing Attack on Titan. But his penchant for contriving scenarios where “both sides are equally bad” is annoying and reeks of a sort of above-it-all, academic, impartial distance — especially icky when racism is involved. History is not always “both sides are equally bad”, as power dynamics aren’t so balanced in the real world. In real life, big guys tend to stomp the little guys. Isayama, in asking “what if the little guys were actually man-eating monsters?” creates a world that’s hard to make sense of when interpreted in historical context. In creating such an elaborate and colorful yet morally devoid world, he leads people down the wrong road: towards contradictory beliefs and vacuous claims. I — half-jokingly — believe this is his intent as an artist. Isayama wants to watch the world argue about him and his work, because there’s few greater statuses as an artist than being persecuted and misunderstood by the masses.
