Attack on Titan

Every once in a while a video circulates online. It might be from a restaurant, a convenience store, or a recorded customer service call. In the clip, someone tries desperately to deal with a person who refuses to listen no matter how much is explained. The viewer becomes angry, shares the clip, and eventually forgets it.

The public health center where I work is no exception. I have stood in front of a complainant who would not accept any explanation. What you feel in that moment is not simply frustration. And after leaving that situation, a familiar question always follows. Have I ever become that kind of person to someone else?

Everyone knows the fear of facing someone with whom communication is impossible. What we easily forget is that we ourselves can become that person.

Manga artist Hajime Isayama also understood that fear. When he was working part time in Tokyo, a drunk customer grabbed him by the collar. In that moment of confusion, where not a single word could be exchanged meaningfully, he said he felt the terror of confronting a being with whom communication was impossible. That fear became the foundation of his work.

That is where the Titans were born. But those Titans were not simply monsters.

The form of the Titan contains a long tradition of imagination in Japanese animation. It is the idea that a human enters something far larger than themselves and controls it from within. The lineage runs from Tetsujin 28-go to Mazinger Z, Gundam, and Evangelion.

Pilot and machine. The machine moves only when a human boards it, and it stops when the human leaves.

Attack on Titan stands on this lineage as well. The true body of the Titan is the human inside its nape. The giant body moves only because a human inhabits it, and the moment that human leaves, the body loses its function. The materials have changed from steel and circuits to muscle and blood vessels, but the structure is essentially the same.

It is not unusual to interpret this imagination as a reflection of postwar Japanese society encountering overwhelming forces beyond its control, which were then repeatedly expressed through giant robots and monsters. This work inherits that tradition while pushing it further, turning the human body itself into the flesh and bone of a weapon.

The boundary between the one who controls and the thing being controlled disappears. And the moment that boundary vanishes, the story opens toward an entirely different set of questions.

Although it begins as a survival drama, the center of gravity of this work eventually shifts toward the problem of history and memory. The story begins with humanity inside the walls fighting Titans outside them. But in the latter half of Season 3, when the world beyond the walls is revealed, the narrative shows a completely different face.

The battle against monsters moves into the background. In its place comes the clash between groups carrying different memories.

For those who grew up on Paradis Island, that island is their only home. But for the people of Marley, the same land is the base of an enemy that once oppressed them. The same place holds entirely different meanings depending on who remembers it.

The work does not declare which memory is correct. It simply shows that both memories exist.

What is more uncomfortable is that these memories are forced upon the next generation regardless of personal choice.

Those who inherit the power of the Titans also inherit the memories of their predecessors. A collective sense of victimhood and the glory of the past are injected through bloodlines. Memory survives not merely as records but as sensation.

When those memories bind an individual, a person becomes a prisoner of history.

That is where the tragedy of Eren Yeager begins.

Eren’s story is tragic not because he failed. It is tragic because the destination he reached while longing for freedom was already enclosed within a predetermined chain of cause and effect.

The ability to see the future did not give him freedom of choice. Instead, it became a punishment that drove him toward a single inevitable tragedy. Just as Oedipus walked deeper into his destiny the more he tried to avoid it.

At the heart of this tragedy lies the question of choice and cost.

Throughout the work, one recognition repeats itself. If you want to protect something important, you must give something up. Those who risk nothing change nothing.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote in Skin in the Game, real decisions require that your own body be placed on the line. Almost every character in this story lives under that condition.

And the cost is always paid.

The opening song of Season 3 is titled Red Swan. This is purely a personal association, but whenever I hear that title I think of Taleb’s other concept, the Black Swan.

Taleb published The Black Swan in 2007, and the global financial crisis the following year imprinted that idea on the world. Attack on Titan began serialization in 2009. Whether Isayama knew this concept is impossible to confirm, but the timing suggests it was entirely possible.

A Black Swan is an event that is unpredictable and produces extreme consequences. A red swan feels like a variation of that idea.

Turning points in history often carry that character. No one predicts them, and only after they occur do we realize that everything has changed. In this story as well, history moves in that way.

Ultimately, this work asks about human choice and historical responsibility.

What turns us into enemies of one another. How history traps individuals within it. How much weight a choice must carry.

The story begins as a battle against monsters, but what remains in the end are these questions.

And those questions return to the moment Isayama once experienced in a gaming café in Tokyo.

The fear of facing a being with whom communication is impossible. That fear gave birth to the Titans.

But if we look back carefully, another question always hides on the opposite side of that fear.

Am I living as someone whose words can reach others. At some moment, have I myself become a Titan to someone else.

When I felt anger watching those viral videos online, how different was I really from the people in them?