I think that if someone watched part one of AoT it’s reasonable to look back and critically analyse it as failing the vibe check, but part two (post-timeskip) rounds it out into something that I wouldn’t describe as problematic.
Naturally it does suffer the Starship Troopers / WH40K problem of large swathes of the viewership thinking the Yeagerists are totally based and that genocide is the answer.
i wish to marry the cart titan
we’re pieck enjoyers in this house
the only good thing to come from marley
I like Annie’s nose. Need more aquiline nose representation out here.
A problem related to this that’s present in these settings as well as Attack on Titan (for severely different reasons) is that, in some instances, it is the creators of said franchises themselves that have quite a lot to blame for that sort of behaviour taking enough root to be a widespread bother.
An example of this that comes to mind is how Warhammer 40k’s style in art, writing, and music about the Space Marines and the Imperium slowly got far less and less sinister, and dived head-first into the realm of more grandiose heroism, even when it’s completely undeserved.
As for Attack on Titan, I hope I don’t need to explain why its author might be interested in painting something like the Yeagerists in something of a ‘morally ambiguous’ light.
annie is a certified baddie in all senses of the word
It’s probably also worthwhile to point out that the ‘hero’ of Attack on Titan is not Eren, it’s Armin. The guy who’s much more of a soyboy (translation: doesn’t want genocide, violence is his last recourse, will compromise wherever possible).
Does not help that a lot of this history stems from pre-WW2 japan - isayama based a side character on real-life Japanese general Yoshifuru Akiyama, who is alleged to have been involved in some of Japan’s war crimes in then-occupied-Korea and China - which means that many sources are in 3 different languages, none of which I know - but I can’t find much about it because the english-language wiki article of Yoshifuru mentions the controversy but doesn’t cite a single thing that would explain what the controversy is or what he is alleged to have done aaaaaaaaa
Aha, found it - there was a private twitter account that was linked to Isayama, where a few tweets were made visible and defended imperial Japan.
He also gets the girl at the end which is more than Eren can say.
I guess it partly depends on who this Japanese general inspired in the story.
Yuck. Definitely yuck. I don’t think those views are represented in the manga/anime, but yuck all the same.
Right, but that just links back to the “as long as the right guy is in charge, it’s fine” idea. The loss of Erwin (who was the main force behind the coup) is constantly referred back to a major problem, with the implication that if he’d survived it would have been ‘fine’, an idea only repudiated far down the line (after a bunch more screwups and problems) in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment.
The messages and themes are muddled but the aesthetics and some of the lingering concepts (associating the explicitly Jewish-coded Eldians with both operating a shadowy puppet government in the Tyburs and being deadly world destroying monsters that need to be contained because of what amounts to a blood curse) is definitely a vibe-check fail.
Like even if the author doesn’t hold anti-semitic views, and even if it’s not quite that ‘simple’ in the actual series, it’s definitely uhhh
concerning
I did appreciate that the author went out of his way to make Eren look like a massive incel in that one panel.
Oops, I had that in an earlier edit - Dot Pixis.
Mikasa is also named after a battleship in the war between Japan and Russia for control of Korea
no not pixis please 
Yeah I just googled it and okay bad Isayama, bad. Dot Pixis in the story is regarded as brilliant and extremely opposed to killing other humans.
pixis literally one of the purest souls in the show so if he was inspired by this general then it was very badly inspired
Its hard to tell because Japan is notorious for censoring its own war crime history.
Like, read this dude’s wikipedia page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akiyama_Yoshifuru
Does he sound like a bad guy? Can’t tell! His military history and involvement is almost entirely glossed over, and when you look at what it does say it’s like
Today in Japan, Akiyama is widely recognized as a leftist who denounces conflict. Akiyama heavily regretted his time serving in the military and mourned the spirits of his subordinates and the victims during his military era for the rest of his life. Akiyama disliked the totalitarian flow Japan was gradually heading for and tried his best to hide his military achievements.
That sounds like it probably does fit Pixis, as it was.
But is it historically accurate? idk, I’m not a historian. And if it wasn’t, would the authour know that? Again, idk.
Frustrating.
Not just that, but specifically, some very, very obscene comments that made people stare in horror even in Japan. While the main rhetoric of that side of politics in the country is outright denial of such events, Isayama straight up said that what Japan did was beneficial to the region, and that he’s proud of it.
Why I understand how Attack on Titan could have gotten so many people missing ‘the entire point of the message’ behind the story is that the person writing it either doesn’t understand the message he is transmitting with his story, or, he’s actively making a parallel with his IRL views and the ones he has written.
Sure, we can pin it all on media illiteracy and call it a day, but I think it’d be a little more productive to point out the fact that the author who wrote on a personal twitter about how ‘actually, this genocidal messed up empire that did all kind of atrocities were actually very beneficial to the people they massacred and tortured in the long run’ went on to write an entire story which’s double plot-twist was exactly the point he was making on said private twitter, with a dash of ‘actually, most of all that didn’t actually happen’.
Usually, I would heavily separate literature from the writer’s views, especially if we’re talking about something like manga or genre fiction, but given the context of the kind of vile things he has been spewing, his storywriting certainly does read a little more grim than he had probably intended to let on.
Now that I got reminded of Elise Starseeker, can Blizzard please decide on her hair color? It’s inconsistent between her different card art, as well as between the card art and WoW.
Yoshifuru is revered in Japan and many Koreans hate him to the extent that the interview where the connection was shown inspired a lot of death threats - I can’t find sources linking him specifically to anything but given that Korea was occupied by Japan until 1945 and Japan still denies a series of war crimes their empire committed I am willing to extend some belief.
AoT is outright banned in China, but given the context of China’s government it’s difficult to draw any particular conclusion from that