Review of Attack on Titan

The fact that so many bloggers still name Shingeki no Kyogin “the greatest or most significant or most influential" anime series of 2013 only tells you how anime still is from becoming a serious art. Anime critics have long recognized that the greatest anime series of all times are Neon Genesis Evangelion and CardCaptor Sakura, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all times. Other critics rank the highly controversial Aku no Hana over classic anime who were highly popular in courts around Japan. Teenage bloggers are still blinded by commercial success: Shingeki no Kyojinsold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. True anime critics grow up watching a lot of anime of the past. Shingeki no Kyojin fans are often totally ignorant of the anime of the past, they barely know the best sellers. No wonder they will think that Shingeki no Kyojin did anything worth of being saved.

In a sense Shingeki no Kyojin are emblematic of the status of modern anime criticism as a whole: too much attention to commercial phenomena and too little attention to the merits of real anime. If somebody composes the most divine anime seires but Crunchyroll refuses to hype it up and stream it around the world, a lot of bloggers will ignore it. If every teenager on MAL hype up an anime series which is as stereotyped as one can be but launches it worldwide, your average critic will waste rivers of ink on said series. This is the sad status of modern anime criticism.

Shingeki no Kyjin sells not because it's the greatest anime series of the decade but simply because it is easy to sell to the masses: it has no difficult content, it has no technical innovations, it has no creative depth. It's just a bunch of gritty 3-minute action scenes which teenagers like to overhype and rave about how "epic" it was. If somebody had not invented "Shingeki no Hype" in 2013, you would not have wasted five minutes of your time to read a page about such a trivial anime which is mediocre at best.