Review of Attack on Titan

Hey look! Another Attack on Titan review. This is one of those anime that is hotly debated. You've got fans that say it's one of the best anime of its era, and you've got critics saying it's overrated. The unfortunate and unsatisfying answer to the question, "is Attack on Titan good or bad?" is that it's both. It's easy enough to see what people like about it; great animation and great sound design for starters. Watching Mikasa or Levi fight in ODM gear, watching Erin punch a titan and seeing the reverberations go through his body, hearing the music swell right before a big moment, it'sjust cool. There's probably a dozen scenes from the season I could watch and it'd be enough to make me want to rewatch the show right now.

There's also a lot of heart that goes into the show. I loved the scene when Mikasa was ready to give up and her body just won't let her, or pretty much any scene involving Jean progressing from Grade A Douchebag to say sympathetic dude, or Levi comforting a soldier who's friend died, or Annie pretending to be apathetic despite, maybe, being a good person at heart.

The problem is that the real impact moments, the climaxes to arcs, the scenes that will stick with people for years are treated equally to some of the dumbest scenes in anime. Erin making a fool of himself in a courtroom? Overlay it with dramatic music and dramatic camera zooms. I might be over using the word dramatic, but that's because they overuse its elements. There's too much shouting, too much swelling music, too many tearful flashbacks, it's just numbing. Watching this series one episode after another just becomes taxing because I don't care anymore, I don't care if anyone dies, if Erin screams about murdering all the titans one more time I might be happy he dies. It lays the drama on so thick at the beginning that by the end, I just wanted it to be over.

It also has quite a few basic writing mistakes. The aforementioned shouting, especially from Erin, is really unendearing, Erin is a legitimate psychopath and needs to get institutionalized. A lot of the characters are unbearably stupid. There's a theme of the upper class being self serving and incompetent, but the way the show demonstrates that makes them out to also be inhumanely stupid. It mistakes being smart with being omniscient by making one of the officers able to perfectly guess a situation despite limited information. And of course, the show forgets to make us care about people before they die.

It all adds up to a very mixed bag. As much as there is to like, the entire time I felt the need to keep my guard up, like at any time they could throw something dumb at me and I didn’t want to get blindsided. The one really great thing I have to say is that the show knows how to learn from its mistakes. The first arc had too many faceless redshirts nobody cares about die? The second act puts more effort into giving every important character backstory and likable qualities (it doesn’t do a perfect job but it does do a good enough job). The second act has too many loud, over dramatic climaxes, the last episode features some subtle, quieter scenes that provide nice contrast and lend just as much weight. Season 1 may be incredibly flawed, but the series is going in the right direction and I’m excited to see where it ends up.