My Favourite Stories - Part 7: Attack on Titan
I’m not the first person to rave about Attack on Titan online, and there’s a good reason for this. It has everything a story needs for me to place it in my top twelve.
I watched the first episode of the anime when I was about thirteen. Arguably I was a bit young to be watching monstrous beings eating people alive. I have no regrets about it, even though I may have developed an irrational fear of massive quasi-humanoid creatures with an appetite for my flesh.
What first captured my attention was the absolute banger of an opening. Just listening to that opening song one time made me fluent in German, permanently raised my testosterone by twenty percent, and gave me a new appreciation for the military industrial complex. The music throughout the whole series, combined with an invigorating speech from Commander Erwin had me fully willing to lay down my life for this totally fictional cause.
While some anime only have their soundtracks going for them, that wasn’t the case with Attack on Titan even slightly. I was fully enrolled and invested in Hajime Isayama’s vision from the beginning. The depth of his worldbuilding made for a setting that felt more than real.
Furthermore, his characters are complex and unique from one another in very noticeable ways, which is an easy pitfall one can collapse into when creating a large cast. More importantly, his willingness to kill off characters at the drop of a hat made the chronic danger of the world feel all the more present. That underlying anxiety that nobody is safe from a horrifying death puts me on the edge of my seat for every single episode.
The story is elevated by the incredible work of the animators, who really bring everything to life. There are several battle scenes that live rent-free in a penthouse apartment in my head. Among them is Levi versus Kenny’s squad and Levi versus The Beast Titan. (No surprise that they both feature Levi Ackermann. This short king is so badass, it has me seriously considering naming my firstborn son after him)
What makes the action all the more engrossing is that it really serves a purpose within the story. The stakes are always high, time is always running out, and the consequences will be dire.
The final aspect of this story which makes it so praiseworthy is just how meticulously planned out the plot is. It follows a somewhat linear trajectory at first so this isn’t as apparent for the first part of the story, but after rereading or rewatching it becomes apparent just how much thought is placed into every part of the narrative. The fact that Isayama accomplished this for a series he wrote over the course of a decade is nothing short of incredible.
