Why I Love Attack on Titan

Because it is one of the rare works I have seen that truly captures war, humanity, hatred, and the search for meaning.

For Chinese audiences, Attack on Titan comes with a heavy historical burden. It was created in Japan, a country that invaded China directly and carried out massacres here. From a Chinese point of view, it can feel almost absurd when the country that once stood on the side of the aggressor, after the balance of power has shifted, starts preaching peace and asking people to break the cycle of hatred. If Attack on Titan had been made in China, I would have far less hesitation in calling it a masterpiece. At the same time, it is probably true that Japan is the place where a work like this was more likely to emerge. Incidentally, the second Legend of Hei film has a similar spirit, and I would also call it a masterpiece, but that is a topic for another day.

And yet, despite all of that, I love Attack on Titan.

It may be anime, but anime and manga are only the medium. The series is not realistic in every detail, but among mainstream commercial anime it comes remarkably close to reality as I understand it. The characters' actions make sense. We can understand why a kind civilian might take part in invasion, and why people slaughter one another. That is not sympathizing with aggressors. Flattening every enemy into a demon is not realistic. It only makes it easier for people to pull the trigger, and it is more likely a trick used by those with other motives: the Marleyan leadership and the Yeagerists.

That includes Eren. Even if many viewers see him as a fool, his choices have an internal logic. Human beings are born with a capacity for destruction. There have always been too many people who want to trample the whole world underfoot. To free one's people from a thousand years of domination by Titan power, to save the people immediately around oneself, to wipe out 80 percent of humanity, or even to sacrifice one's own family, is not beyond imagination. The complete characterization of Eren, Annie, Reiner, and even Armin explains why human beings can become demons, and how demons can become human again and atone. Besides, Eren knows himself to be a demon. That is far better than Marleyans, Eldians, and people of Earth who call themselves righteous, imagine their enemies are demons by nature, and cut down fellow human beings on the other side without the slightest guilt.

Attack on Titan lays human nature bare. Brave soldiers break down and cry before death. Even Levi, the strongest soldier, does not always know what the right choice is. A father may have just spoken about leaving the forest and letting go of hatred, but so what? Kind-hearted Kaya can still be overwhelmed by rage and want to kill the person she sees as her enemy. Officers who have just promised to live together peacefully raise their rifles again in the final shots, aiming at the Eldians who have returned to human form. At the same time, those who never abandon their principles shine all the more brightly, and those who lose their way and still manage to turn back feel all the more precious. That is what real human beings are to me: lovable, pitiable, and never reducible to a type.

Again and again, the story uses death to show us how cruel and stupid war is. It also gives us stirring moments. We shout "Dedicate your hearts!" and imagine ourselves joining the Survey Corps to wipe out every last enemy. But when the Yeagerists assassinate Premier Zackly with a bomb and the crowd also shouts "Dedicate your hearts!", the slogan suddenly becomes uncanny. The work asks more than once: to whom were those hearts in the slogan dedicated, and to whom should they be dedicated? Some viewers realize that the story has been pointing at them. They realize they have been swept up in a militaristic fervor, and they recognize the danger of that impulse. Naturally, they find themselves opposed to the Yeagerists and start asking what, exactly, they had dedicated their hearts to. Others feel personally attacked. I think that is one reason the series remains so divisive.

Many people expected Attack on Titan to take on the ultimate question: how do we end war? But the work never really set out to answer that. Or rather, it does not believe there is any single way to end all conflict. What it shows us is that there are good people and bad people on both sides of the sea. Even when people can understand one another, they may still have to take up arms in self-defense, or even strike first. Even after the power of the Titans disappears, conflict does not disappear. A century later, the world sinks back into war. This model matches how I understand our own universe. War has continued for thousands of years and is still with us. History repeats itself, and justice is often a matter of where one stands. The world is rotten through. It is simply that cruel. To me, the worldview of Attack on Titan holds together.

Does that make Attack on Titan nihilistic? Does it say that every effort is futile? Not at all. At least, that is not what I think the work is trying to say. It is certainly pessimistic in places, but its central question is this: in a world this cruel, what does it mean to live? The series does offer an answer. It is an old idea, perhaps, and it can be summed up in the famous line often associated with Romain Rolland:

There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it.

The story has figures who embody nihilism, Zeke above all. Human beings should never have been born; the survival of a people does not matter; fear comes from the instinct to reproduce; all these tragedies are caused by the meaningless activity of life itself. Armin answers him.

Because there are companions worth trusting and protecting, and because they are still fighting, the fight has meaning. Because running races with Eren and Mikasa as a child was joyful, life has meaning. Reading at home on a rainy day, watching a squirrel eat the nuts you gave it, wandering through a market with everyone: these ordinary moments are immeasurably precious.

Humanism may be one of the ideas Attack on Titan is trying to express. Human beings are cruel, and hatred may be unavoidable. Even so, for the people we love, we try to understand, to protect, to do what we believe is right, to hold on to our humanity, to fight, and to dedicate our hearts. By contrast, people without love in their hearts simply skip over this part. They never try to understand Armin's thinking. It is not the author who has fallen into nihilism, but the audience themselves.

I see Attack on Titan as a fundamentally anti-war work, not a political tract. It tries to teach people that the world is cruel, that war should not be turned into entertainment, and that the pain and disaster brought by conflict should never be underestimated. It also asks how we ought to live in such a cruel world, and how we should face hatred and conflict.

So I cannot really accept the line that "there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand readers' minds." Of course, great works leave room for interpretation, but that does not mean they have no stable expression. The framing, expressions, movements, and gestures all make it clear that the ideas the author is trying to convey are coherent and consistent. Many people did not understand them. Part of that is the author's own limitation as a storyteller; part of it is the limitation of people living inside their own era. At the very least, Sanae Takaichi watched it and plainly did not understand it.

Looking back, the work itself really does not answer the question of how to end war. It offers no institutional design and no universal solution. Yet at another level, Attack on Titan itself is the answer. Again and again, it places before us the cruelty of war, the absurdity of hatred, and the fact that human beings should still try to understand one another. If this anti-war idea could be truly accepted by Japanese people, Americans, Ukrainians, Russians, Israelis, Pakistanis, and Chinese people as well, perhaps the wars in this world really would become fewer. Perhaps one day they might even disappear.

I hope more people can understand Attack on Titan. Do not be so quick to reject mutual understanding. In our own time, we need works like this all the more.