Note: Spoiler alert for the anime series Attack on Titan and its final episode that aired on November 19, 2023.
Hajime Isayama‘s Shingeki no Kyojin, also known as Attack on Titan, is a manga centered around its main protagonist, Eren Yeager, and his quest for freedom and liberation from racial discrimination and an apartheid state. Eren, from a young age, grew up in a world where humanity lives behind walls and strives to see the outside world and the open sea after finally defeating the Titans, a race of giant man-eating humanoids, under whose tyranny all hopes of human agency have been relinquished. Eren is driven by a vengeance to seek the truth, the truth of why they have to be held captive and be dangled as bait to the monstrous horrors that live outside the walls.
Shingeki no Kyojin is a great tragedy, perhaps one of the greatest tragedies ever written. The story is of an unfair world where everybody is dealt a cruel hand of fate. Every character, regardless of their personal ambitions, desires, or motivations, seems to share a cataclysmic destiny. They rise by the humanity of their actions, and fall through them. Their actions are so very human that they can’t seem to help but fall for their humanity. It’s scary being so human. We are privy to our selfish desires to rule and gain power. We are unwilling and unable to understand each other at the best and worst of times. We yearn for true peace, and we are willing to kill and die at its behest. It’s so scary being human. And Shingeki no Kyojin is a testament, an ode to this very fact. A beautiful elegy. A destructive dream.
Dystopian fantasies are generally regarded as cautionary tales extrapolating a negative future from the present and thus persuading the reader of the danger of the decisions one makes at a relative present time. A lot of Shingeki no Kyojin incorporates Norse cultural myths and Nietzschean philosophy of pain and suffering. Shingeki no Kyojin’s world is modeled on a dichotomy of Norse culture: ingards (a space where the laws of a community are held) and utangards (an outer space of lawlessness). The world-building surrounds an immensely powerful ape-like Titan, and control here acts as a meta-theme. It is revealed that The Eldians are an ‘act of terror’ in themselves as they keep themselves captive. The Eldian race, because of their genetic make-up, is capable of transforming into the Titans inducing their entrapment on the Island of Paradis, excommunicated from the entire world. This is where Eren and his friends grow up. Inside the walls, surrounded by titans that come from their own ancestral race. They act as executioners of their own race while being the punishment and deprivation in themselves. Eren thinks of the Titans as monsters until the bitter truth comes to surface, that he is one of them, one of their race.
How far are you willing to go to fight for your loved ones? How far are you willing to go to achieve true freedom? How far is too far? In the very first episode, Eren wakes up crying. As tears stream down his face, he confesses to Mikasa that he cannot remember why he is crying at all. Perhaps a dream, a very bad dream but now he can no longer remember. And so begins the tale. His fight to master his fate. His search for the path that will lead to his freedom, and the freedom of his people from the oppression they have been born into. He will be able to see the sea again, know of it by sight, feel the breath of freedom on his face. From across a vast ocean, unencumbered by any walls, he will know what it is like to be born free. And he is willing to fight for it. No matter how long, he will fight. The only thing he can do is fight. He has nothing else.
And so Eren does. He keeps his promise and he fights. For as long as he can, he fights the Titans. He breaks through the walls of Shiganshina, his home since birth, and he goes to the sea. He stands on the sea shore with his two best friends, points across the sea to the land beyond and wonders, “If we defeat all of them, will we be free then?” This is perhaps the greatest plague that haunts humanity. We kill and we kill and for what? How much do we have to kill to set ourselves free? How is it any different from the killing we have endured? After a certain point, who do we even declare freedom from? Isayama wonders. Eren was dreaming of going to this world beyond the walls where there was nobody and there was nothing. When he does get across the wall, he sees that the world, Marley (the land across the sea that subjugates his brothers and sisters), and beyond is really not that different from what’s within the walls, in the world that he already knows.
As Eren arrives by ship to look at the life of Marleyans, he already knows what he is going to do. He wants Paradis to be free, and he wants every Eldian to live a life free of subjugation from the world. He never wants them to be ridiculed, their blood besmirched, their bodies held hostage, tormented for another eternity. And he knows there is but one answer to his question. The death of humanity. All else must die for his blood to exist. What is true peace?
Somewhere in his journey, the question is lost. Eren knows of only a dream, his very first dream of freedom. Not every ideology in this world can be defined as simply right or wrong. It’s all about perspective. On one of his visits to Marley, Eren and his company find themselves on the outskirts of the city, in a refugee slum. Eren breaks down in front of a kid, begging for forgiveness, begging to be forgiven for the carnage he is going to commit. The absolute despair he is going to inflict only too rife on his face, he admits he was disappointed in the world he saw beyond the walls. What does that say about his dreams?
He knows of the horrors of war, the violence only too well but he doesn’t know a different answer. He, as much as the child being brought up in Marley to grow up and be a trained soldier, is a product of violence. They both wish to kill for the sake of the survival of their people.
So long as humanity exists, conflicts and wars are going to happen. We exist in doctrines. Absolute peace is wishful thinking. What we can do is aim for concord instead of nurturing prejudice and hatred. The world of Shingeki no Kyojin is steeped in putrid hatred. The children are taught nothing else. The faces of the Titans often have grotesque traits that are vaguely suggestive of their human origins. Their bodies are often misshapen, and the depiction of their dreadful acts are drawn in grisly detail.
Eren says in the final episode that he had no choice but to follow the future that he saw, that he was powerless against the powers of the Founding Titan. Armin even asks if he’s really free. Perhaps Eren would forever be entrapped with what he had envisioned as a kid, the freedom he had grown up wanting. Perhaps he was at mercy of his own dream. Perhaps he was shackled by his own desire for freedom. Perhaps he could have changed. Perhaps he never could. The answer to it all is perhaps.
Watching Eren undergo his rite of passage, from this ambitious and driven teenager into someone with so much hate and disdain for the world beyond the walls, was heart-wrenching to watch. Hearing Eren talk about how he didn’t want to die, how he wished he could change what was going to happen, to stay and live with everyone while Armin begged and cried was painful. He was still that kid waking up crying from a dream to Mikasa, who had been forced to grow up too fast, and learn only too quickly of the violence in this world. He never stood a chance against a world that hated the blood that ran through his veins and that despised him simply for existing and so, he gave in to the hatred. He could know nothing but hate, for this world could only teach him that. He became that hatred.