I absolutely love Attack on Titan and it’s one of the best anime’s I have ever seen. Even the clown show ending from the manga has been fixed to an great extent in the anime. The anime has so many excellent moments which are some of the best written scenes in anime.
The fanbase is insufferable though. It’s either full of “Eren is literally me” mfs or glazers with no sense of reality and I’m pissed at liking the same thing as them.
I would have liked it less if it was the “I win” button that got slapped in every fight. But sliding it in at the very end as a plot-hole filler was lazy but ultimately fine.
spoiler
There are a number of scenes I enjoyed. The choice over who gets saved by the Colossal Titan investiture and the passing of the Jaw Titan was great. The various betrayals have been well-motivated. And I genuinely like the origin story of the Titans, as these things berthed from an ultimately used up and abused slave people.
The idea of power as a social construct is what resonates through the whole storyline. Memory manipulation as a stand in for mass media is a bit forced and lazy, but the value of history as a motivating force is appreciated. The Eladians getting a very straight line drawn to jewish ghettoes is overused, but the various turncoats expressing their rationales for siding with this or that group remains compelling.
It is, all in all, a well done story with strong and enduring themes that resonate across the entire narrative arc.
The endless fixation on “Is this anime fascist?” is exhausting. Because it is, at the end of the day, a Young Adult cartoon. And these cartoons always end up embracing childish politics because they are stories for children.
But the history and the setting and the various lead characters all create the kind of space that is fun to think about and explore. I suspect we’ll see its influence resonate through the storytelling medium for years to come.