#and my mind goes AHA! CONNECTIONS AND CONSPIRACIES!

[note-boom]

My favourite grasping at straws parallel is the one where I thought Kyouka falling off the train into the water to symbolise her breaking away from the PM was a great callback to the way Dazai likes falling off things and drowning and he's left the PM....

[sableaire]

AOT, since it's applicable atm.

Okay, so this is for this post, and I am going to assume that people reading this post have watched the anime and maybe read a bit further in the manga. With that in mind, the top 5 things I would change about AoT/SnK are under the cut:

1) Eren, Mikasa, and Armin’s relationshipThey grew up together, they love each other, and yet looking back, I can’t really feel the sincerity in their character interactions. The bare bones are there to tell you how they are important to each other, but the story doesn’t allow their dynamic room to grow and breathe. It kind of expects the established backstory to carry their friendship, and as someone who thrives off strong platonic relationships, it just didn’t cut it for me.

Basically, it’s a matter of ‘show, not tell’ - the story tells us that the three care about each other deeply. However, the narrative doesn’t give the trio enough time with each other for the audience to see this for themselves. What little we’re given demonstrates Mikasa’s near obsessive devotion to Eren and Armin hovering at the edges. We aren’t given many displays of reciprocation from Eren, which is fine - he’s focused on revenge - but in that case, I would have enjoyed some more scenes from Mikasa or Armin’s point of view focusing on how Eren has changed and how they’re worried, either for him or their relationship with him. This would also have given the three characters some more dimension than they currently do in the story.

The trio’s relationship is kind of treated as a given thing, but that’s not how relationships work. Every kind of relationship is an active effort, and Attack on Titan needs to either present a balanced, active investment in Eren-Mikasa-Armin’s relationship, or they need to show the fallout of them failing to equally contribute.  As is, the narrative does neither, and I feel the story suffers for it.

2) Taking focus off the titansIf you read a little further into the manga from where Season 1 left off, the characters’ focus shifts from outside the walls to inside the walls, and there’s a whole political fiasco going on. This is when I first began to realize that Attack on Titan was not going to be the kind of story that I signed up for. Personally, I would have preferred if politics were an undercurrent, a beta plotline that goes on at the same time as the fight against the titans. 

Instead, the story takes the spotlight off the titans for several chapters in order to sort out these internal affairs. Now, I enjoy a good political narrative - but that wasn’t what I wanted out of Attack on Titan. In fact, the more the story offered mysteries, the more signs of political corruption, the more the narrative hinted at some larger human-involved conspiracy regarding the titans, the less interested I became. I suppose this is because of my personal expectations out of this story - I was hoping for a story where no one knew anything, and then the Survey Corps would discover some kind of devastating unknown truth. This kind of story would also have kept the titans center-stage.

As it stands, the titans are only a tool for a larger story at play. The titans lose the edge of their ‘completely unknown entity’ status that made them so horrifying, and the heart is removed from the Survey Corps. This started out as a story about a group of individuals seeking freedom and expanding their world in the face of impossible odds, when everyone else has lost hope. It was people against some unknown creatures (that might unknowingly be former humans). Now it’s a story mostly about people against other people, and that just wasn’t what I wanted out of this story.

3) The American Name ahaThe Japanese name Shingeki no Kyojin does not translate into Attack on Titan. In fact, the literal translation is something like “The Giant of Advance [in a military sense]”. Now, I see why they couldn’t have translated it literally, since that isn’t catchy or cool at all, but Attack on Titan is stilted and inaccurate, though I commend the use of ‘titan’ over ‘giant’. 

Even so, the author recently did a title-drop in the manga, and I read it wondering how the English translators plan to handle that, since it doesn’t work anymore. I guess the best translation that preserves both meaning and usage would be “Advancing Titans,” but I can also see how that might not be quite as marketable. Ultimately, this is just something I have a problem with, but I don’t necessarily have a solution to offer.

4) A Glimpse at the Common PeopleIf the story gave us more of a look at how the common people are living, the ones with no means of fighting against the titans, the lives of the refugees, I feel the story could have held more meaning. We stick with the Survey Corps so long that past the first few moments of the story, we see soldiers dying in the line of duty, with less-than-ideal tools to fight but tools nonetheless. 

However, I would have appreciated a look at the common people. What are the stories that parents tell their children? What do they say when the children ask what the titans are, if the titans will come back, if they’ll be eaten? How many of them have nightmares, contingency plans for when they do attack again? 

Sure, we see a lot of common people die when the titans do attack, but they’re background characters, a split second of shocked expressions before bloodshed. Sure, the reader cares, but we can’t exactly grasp the sheer terror of the moment. These titans are unknown, monstrous entities that have ruined their lives - the titans probably consume a large portion of their daily thoughts. What are those thoughts?

It’s one thing to see Eren, someone who has vowed to kill all titans, obsess over the titans. It’s another to see soldiers devoted to fighting titans think constantly abut titans. It would have been another thing entirely to see the common people, who just want to live their lives and raise their children, remember the titans again and again, unable to move on.

5) The World of the Story I recently caught up with the manga because I found out that we had finally learned what the titans are. If you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading here, but in the end, I was just disappointed by the manga’s direction. In any case, spoilers below because I’m going to just talk about where the manga is.

Actually, that’s inaccurate - I don’t mind the origin of the titans. In fact, there’s a lot of possibility there, even though it was not the theory I was personally rooting for. However, the origin of the titans is a footnote compared to the larger revelation that the outside world is alive and well beyond the walls. The story of Attack on Titan pans out, and we see that the extent of the world we have seen thus far is just a small kingdom on a small island off the coast of a whole continent, and the outside world is technologically advanced and fighting a completely different war.

Perhaps some people are delighted by this turn of events. I am not. I feel that the story, told like this, loses its focus and what had been set up to be its core narrative themes. We’ve panned out so far that we can’t even see the main characters anymore. The manga is throwing aside the emotional connection hoping the audience is intrigued enough to stick around for new information, but frankly, that isn’t working out for me. I started reading Attack on Titan for the emotion, after all - for the story of a little boy who watched his mother devoured before his eyes, whose father’s last act before disappearing was to jab a needle into his son’s neck and give him a key. I was never in it for the mystery itself, I was in it for what the mystery meant to Eren.

However, it’s clear lately that the story is almost an exercise in worldbuilding, where the world constructed and the glimpses of character lives we see is supposed to be enough to keep the audience interested. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the kind of storytelling that I was reading Attack on Titan for, so I’m let a little bit disappointed.

((That’s not to mention how knowledge of the author’s increasingly nationalistic viewpoints recontextualizes recent developments in the manga, but I don’t know too much about that so I’m staying out of that debate.))