ATTENTION: Content warning for descriptions of blood, gore, and human experimentation. Also, this article will feature massive spoilers until up about chapter 90 of the manga. You’ve been warned! Also, yes, you can use this article to tell people Attack on Titan is a fascist show.

This article is a collaboration between Ruben Ferdinand and Elliⓞt!

The very first one-and-a-half minutes I watched Attack on Titan, I was filled with a sense of glory. Like I could do anything. The music, the animation, the contrast between brutal imagery and intense combat, I was on the edge of my seat for an opening. And afterwards, I felt like going for a 5-mile run. Five years later, now I know how to write good thinkpieces, I’d like to know why and how it made me feel that way. (I’ve since then put on the soundtrack everytime I go for a jog, which, let me tell you, works very well.)

Attack on Titan is a fantasy-horror story with pseudo-zombie enemies called Titans. It takes place in a hodgepodge pastoral Germany where angry teens with names like Connie get drafted into the military and are trained as Spidermen With Swords. What remains of humanity lives under an authoritarian-monarchist state, isolated and protected from the outside world by three massive concentric walls. Dressed in snappy uniforms stamped with striking emblems, the teens utilise the toll-taking ‘3D maneuverability gear’ to get the upper hand on Titans. The first thing that happens in the series is Titans breaching through the walls, a hundred years of peace at its end. The world quickly becomes dark, gorey, and traumatic. Death by cannibalisation is a constant, ever-present threat, even when the Spiderteens start to take the fight to the Titans. Watching the mindless monstrosities rip into innocent townsfolk, then the proud nationalist troops rip into monsters, it’s hard not to feel a type of way: excited, repulsed, powerful? It’s a way of being affected.

Affect can be described as the feeling immediately after seeing or hearing something not under your control, an emotional reflex of sorts. Affect is not arbitrary and uncontrollable, though— it can be directed and utilised for a specific purpose in conjunction with story, narrative, and, most importantly, aesthetics. Attack on Titan affects its audience not only with its visceral sequences of blood and blades, but with the cusp-of-war European imagery it consistently applies to its characters and locations. With paced-out dialogues, overdetailed facial close-ups, and sudden violent escalations, Titan conveys a constant sense of dread, capturing it within a historically and allegorical context. Series mangaka Hajime Isayama draws from an imagined past, but a past nonetheless, and Elliot and I believe that these aesthetics — those of horror and those of militarism — are the key parts to figuring out: how does this series instrumentalise this ‘affect’ and to what end does it do that?

Titans: the affect of horror, the propaganda within dehumanisation, and nationalism.

Most, if not all modern zombie narratives start with an ‘outbreak event’ (the irrupting pandemic and subsequent apocalypse) that are about 1) containing the threat, and 2) surviving after the first step fails. Titan flips the script from the start: humanity is the contained faction, pitted against a horde of seemingly endless, endlessly tall and nude cannibals that were already there. This ‘walling in’ part is important, because it lends credence to a central metaphor. Namely, that humanity is under siege. The city is home to all that’s left of humanity, making its besiegers attacking all of humanity. Concurrently, those attacking humanity are automatically branded as belligerent and inhuman: you tend to side with the people trapped in the cage, not those out of it. We can ideologically frame these dehumanised monsters as ‘enemies of mankind’ without feeling too bad about their expiration or being too concerned with their motivations. Also, I mean, look at them.

Doing a visual analysis of these things is the worst thing I’ve done to myself.

Part of what makes the terror of Titans so effective is their bodies. For one, they differ heavily in size. Ranging between ‘3-meter classes’ and ‘50-meter classes’, they easily tower over the average person. But it’s not just the fact that they’re giant — it’s that they look like Really Weird People. Their distorted proportions and elongated limbs only vaguely adhere to the human body plan, but they still resemble a human phenotype: hairy or bald, thin or big, happy or sad. Throughout the manga’s nearly decade-long run, you’ll seldom find two Titans that look anatomically identical. Their mannerisms underline this, too: during the Female Titan arc, the Survey Corps (Scouting Legion if you’re nasty) encounters many ‘aberrant’ Titans that don’t follow the normal behavioural conventions of zombies. These aberrants run, move on four legs, or stand completely still unless annoyed. All of this suggests a wide variformity in Titan physiology and behaviour, making them more monstrous through their uncanny yet unpredictable resemblance to humanity.

As mentioned, creatures in horror operate on a set of rules. Ghosts take possession of people but can be exorcised; zombies eat people but are slow, etc. These are discernible guidelines that expose a monster’s vulnerable points and/or their origins, providing a solution. Most monster horror stories clarify where the monster comes from, because it lets the main cast figure out its weaknesses. Titan makes its monsters scary not just through visual design and visceral display, but by delaying this learning process. The rules for killing Titans can’t adequately inform a combat strategy other than ‘try to kill them, I guess?’ In general, Titans can only be killed if you cut out their nape. This puts the military at an enormous disadvantage, seeing as Titans are simply too tall to reach normally and slicing requires a lot of strength and momentum. So although their principal weakness is known, it’s still extremely difficult and dangerous and in many cases lethal to act on it.

The ‘Smiling Titan’

In taking on the Titans, technology plays a huge part. They can’t be shot or destroyed through conventional means — cannons and most exposives are woefully ineffective — , so only with the 3D maneuver gear do our Spiderteens stand a chance. Hookshots, gas cannisters, and giant box cutter swords look wildly out-of-place, even sci-fi compared to the historical muskets and the simple artillery the rest of the army uses. The 3D maneuver gear symbolises superior technology that stands out in efficiency and design.

Given Titan’s aestheticisation of history, it’s not a stretch to compare it to Prussia at the turn of the 19th century. Prussia prioritised mobility and shock tactics over numbers and raw manpower. Even so, the maneuver gear is extremely experimental and bears a high and unforgiving skill ceiling (mortality rates for recruits are very high). Moreover, the mobility doesn’t guarantee success. Even though the Spiderteens are fast and agile, it only takes one Titan to raise its arm and grab the wires, or place a well-timed chomp for a painful death to lay ahead.

Knowing their weakness doesn’t solve the bigger problem of infinite huge cannibals, however. The only thing that’s known about Titans is obtained from what they’ve already been doing to humanity: they eat. But, again, why? This most common and frightening aspect of the series’ visual language is never accurately addressed. What’s mentioned at one point, however, is that Titans don’t have to eat to survive. For some reason, they only need sunlight to energise, which bizarrely puts them in the same taxonomy as plants. Titans, then, don’t gore and vore people for nourishment, and their fully-functioning digestive tract (Eren spends some time in a Titan stomach) is apparently entirely rudimentary.

There’s a scene in the Female Titan arc where a couple of characters discuss this. When they arrive at this hypothesis, they freeze up. None of them say it out loud, they look disturbed by the thought, but the suggestion permeates the room that, maybe, Titans eat for entertainment? Suddenly, the Titans make a bit more horrible sense: their baby-like proportions, their awkward, almost playful body language, their puerile attitudes and vacant smiles… The characters may know, but they never say it: here, the learning process gets outsourced to the audience in an intrusive way. Attack on Titan instrumentalises the power of suggestion, leaving just enough room audience-side for an affective terror.

Affect is ultimately rooted in what we can’t compartmentalise. We can know we’re scared, but not knowing why we’re scared is even scarier. Establishing and exposing these monsters as truly mindless, violent, and abhorrent gives the narrative an impenetrable excuse: the extermination of Titans is indubitably a good thing. This is reified in Eren’s endearing character trait: yelling in a shrill voice “I’ll kill them all” before getting owned super hard. Titans embody no political message, nor do they hold any agency; they are a canvas on which a faceless antagonism can be smeared and heroic sacrifice can be made. It’s not about the zombie menace, it never has been, it’s about humanity’s reaction to it. It is a narrative device that is both the cause and the excuse for nationalism (or worse). This brings us to more problematic parts of Attack on Titan’s aesthetics: its military.

Military: the brutalisation of necessity, the instrumentalisation of glory, and also still nationalism.

Situating Attack on Titan’s military politics is hot potatoes given the series’ publishing history. In 2010, series mangaka Isayama Hajime admitted to have modelled military commander Dot Pixis after Imperial Japanese general Yoshifuru Akiyama, who led the Japanese occupation of Korea until 1930 and was directly responsible for numerous bloody suppressions and countless civilian deaths. Then in 2013, the South Korean newspaper Electronic Times wrote an article accusing the series of having a militaristic message that supports Shinzo Abe’s controversial political stance of revisioning Article 9, the anti-war clause. Later that year, a blogpost appeared which detailed some Twitter beef, in which Isayama allegedly downplays the brutal atrocities the Imperial Japanese army committed during its occupation of Korea. The same year, following the release of the anime, countless articles popped up pointing out nationalist, militarist, and propagandistic imagery. These critiques (though in the third and other cases, ideological commendations) comment on the series’ convincing authoritarian aesthetic.

This seems to slot the series into a wider, ultranationalist trend in Japanese pop media: Strike Witches (2008), Girls und Panzer (2012), and Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress (2016) to name a few. All invoke the aesthetics of powerful Imperial Japanese war machines, while conspicuously dodging all of the historical context and political connotations of utilising such assets in favour of cute, affable characters fighting for Japan (or a heavily implied Japan-analog). Among the most popular is the free-to-play game and massive media franchise Kantai Collection (2013), which anthropomorphises ships of the Imperial Japanese navy as cute and affectionate girls who go to war for you in a play-friendly Pacific Theatre. It’s also developed revisionist history, depicting the Japanese as victorious in the decisive Battle of Midway.

It can’t be denied that in Titan, there is an aesthetic and narrative emphasis on the glory of military, the necessity of sacrifice for the greater good, and terror and death at the hands (and teeth) of an enemy horde. Humanity under threat isn’t a new concept, and the premise of Attack on Titan is no exception. Through the Titans, the series introduces an absolute morality that constructs its military forces as a literal ‘army for humanity’, making all its actions seem tragic and cataclysmic, but ultimately justified against the onslaught of monsters. The plot pivots around an us-vs-them duality, and when there is no coherent identity to ‘them’, it’s crucial to look at ‘us’. Titan’s uses a historical allegory, but what type of history does it mean to show to us? What things are highlighted, what is given weight, what is omitted? The image of this distilled society tells us many things about an author’s own ideas about what mankind is, who gets to be a part of humanity, and how it should be.