Attack on Titan

Attack on Titan is a Japanese anime. I watched it when it first came out in 2013. It became super popular. It’s about these titans, zombie-ish giants that eat humans, invading a walled city. To fight them, the main characters use steam-powered maneuvering gear that lets zip around the city and titans like Spiderman. It’s gory, and many people die. But the story is intriguing, and kept me on the edge of my seat.

I’m watching the final season now. It will end in a couple weeks. It’s surprising when I reflected back tonight that it has been 9 years in the running (although it wasn’t airing this entire time). I have a lot of memories from when I first watched it. I switched universities and started studying Japanese and made Japanese friends for the first time. There was one Japanese friend who was a big fan of Attack on Titan and we hit it off. We even went to an anime convention together.

I think it was after the second season, I wanted to know more, so I started reading an English translation of the manga. The manga finished last year, so I already know the ending. But sometimes anime changes the endings. You know how people often complain about movies not being like the books their based on? The same goes for anime and manga. But Attack on Titan is an exception where the animation really exceeds the original work. Since it’s following the source material pretty closely, it’s amazing to see it animated, especially certain key scenes.

Despite all this, I didn’t connect with the characters that much. Since you never know when they would die, I didn’t get attached. So in one sense, I don’t care that much about it, and only watch it for the entertainment (as compared to, say, Naruto). (I was super obsessed with Star Wars before the latest trilogy, but don’t connect as much with Marvel superhero movies, even though I like watching them.)

All in all, I’m glad for this show to finally be over. After the first season, it was difficult waiting. And even though I got confused about what was going on in the middle part while reading the manga, the anime made it clearer. I look forward to watching the climax and ending.