 Alright, so I know that Attack on Titan, or Shingeki no Kyojin, whichever name you prefer for it, I know that that ended several months ago, and that I am behind the curve on this. But I just finally got around to finishing off the manga. Like, I read it for years and years, and then, a while ago, I can't point to a specific reason why, but I just kind of lost interest in it, and so I stopped reading for a while, and then I heard that it ended, so I put it off for a little while, but I managed to avoid spoilers, and I finally finished it off, and so I think it was a really solid ending, not perfect by any means, but the series as a whole was really, really great, and I kind of just... I wanted to talk about it, so here I am, let's go. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So I'm gonna split this into three brief sections. There'll be a really short non-spoiler section for people who have not read it or watched the anime at all, and then I'm gonna do a minor spoiler section because there are some really big twists early on in the series that, like, it's basically impossible to talk about the whole series as a whole without going into detail on those, and I don't want to ruin that for anybody who doesn't want to get into this, so we'll have that, and then we'll have a major spoiler section where I talk about the ending. So Attack on Titan takes place in a world like a hundred years after these things called Titans appeared, and Titans are basically just giant naked humans. Most of them are, or at least the biggest of them are around 15 meters tall, some of them are smaller than that, and humanity lives in this walled-off area. Like, they have these three giant circular walls, one inside the other, that they live in, and then one day, this kid named Aaron Yeager, just a regular kid who lives near the outermost wall, this colossal Titan appears, which I know it sounds redundant, but this one is multiple times larger than the others, it smashes a hole in the wall, and then all the other Titans pour in, and so humanity loses its entire outer wall of defense, and in all the chaos, Aaron's mother is killed, his father vanishes, he doesn't know what happened to him, and so Aaron just is really pissed off, and he decides, you know, I'm gonna murder every last Titan in existence. And from there, the story unfolds in a lot of different directions. One of the really, really great things about this series that I think attracted so many people to it when it first came out, because I remember when the anime first came out like eight years ago, it was huge with people my age, even those who weren't normally huge into anime, because it was just really grim and violent and dark. Like, this was humanity's last stand as it fought against extinction, and so every moment of fear and panic feels genuine. And the characters, they don't really have like, superpowers, they can't shoot lasers from their hands or anything like you would normally expect from a Shonen manga. They're, for the most part, just regular humans, and they have some really cool equipment and stuff that they can use, like they have this stuff called, I've seen it translated as both 3D maneuver gear and omnidirectional maneuver gear, but it's basically they have two swords and they have hooks on their belts and they can shoot hooks out to like fly around the city, almost like Spider-Man swinging around. It's really neat. And they can use that to kill Titans, but even with training and omnidirectional maneuver gear and cannons and all that, Titans are still extremely difficult to kill, and so when they go into battle, people die left, right, and center. And so every moment of fear and panic feels genuine when it comes about, and there are a lot of moments where beloved characters die, or maybe beloved's not the right word, but there are a lot of moments where minor and major characters die, and they might not all be super well-developed or anything, but watching them get literally torn apart and eaten alive is still horrifying. The story is really, really fast-paced, except for a couple parts, but those mostly come later. Like early on, there's always something happening, there's tons of little twists and turns about what's going on, and there's a lot of mystery about the nature of the world and like what the Titans are, where they came from, and so that really kept me going throughout the early part of this series, both the anime and the manga. And while a lot of the side characters are not super memorable, most of the main cast is really solid. Like Aaron himself, he's kind of brooding and moody and has a tendency to get angry and blow up in people's faces, but it's kind of justified because we see the shit he's gone through in his life that led up to this point. And beyond that, he's not just some hero who says, I want to save my friends, I want to protect the world. Like no, he wants to go out and murder every last Titan in existence. So he has a very clear-cut goal from the beginning, and that does change over time as we understand more about this world, but he's a very focused character and that's something that I feel a lot of protagonists lack, especially Shonen protagonists, and so seeing that was just really great. And honestly, I can apply that to the series as a whole. Like this is still a Shonen manga, but it doesn't really feel like a traditional one at the very least, and so that helps set it apart, and I really wish that we would see more stuff like this, more stuff that's a little more mature and yada yada. And so I think that's it for the non-spoiler section. If you have not heard anything about Attack on Titan and you're interested in it, I would recommend checking it out, like either the anime or the manga, because they're both pretty good in my opinion. The only real criticism I have of the manga that isn't spoiler-related is that I'm not a fan of the artwork. Something about it, I don't know the terminology for it, but it seems like a lot of the characters and everything are... They don't have really defined borders around their silhouettes, and so they kind of fade into the background sometimes. And that works great for action scenes, it really does, but when it's just dialogue scenes or something, it doesn't work great. And on a related note, a lot of characters do have same-face syndrome, because it's such a large cast, so there's people who get introduced and for a moment I'll think, wait, is that someone else we already know? No, no, okay, that's a new person, they just look too similar. So that's annoying, but on to minor spoilers. Holy shit, is that a titan?! You know, I heard they'd be naked, but that's a lot more naked than I expected. Okay, so minor spoiler stuff. The first half of this series is absolutely phenomenal. The second half is still really good, but it does slow down quite a bit more, because, you know, Aaron gets his titan powers, or at least he finds out about having his titan powers, and everyone's like, what the fuck is... How does this even work, what's going on? And he doesn't know how these powers work, where they came from, anything like that. And so just the process of him learning about that is really great. And even once he gets mastery over his powers, and even later he starts gaining more unique powers, he's never... how do I put this? He's never too strong, I don't think. Like, there's never any points where he can just blow through his enemies with no problems. Like, all of... not just Aaron, but all of the other titan shifters as well, like the colossal titan and the armored titan and the others that show up, they all have weaknesses, they all have ways that they can be defeated if they're not careful. So both the heroes and the villains have to be kind of tactical in their battles, and that's always a lot of fun. One issue is that in the early series, regular titans are absolutely terrifying, especially in that first real battle where Aaron is killed. But... just as time goes on and he can turn into the assault titan whenever he wants, or not whenever he wants, but most of the time, and we start being introduced to more characters like Levi, who regular titans are nothing to him. I like Levi, he's super badass, but you know, regular titans are absolutely nothing to him. So they become less scary over time. And for a while, yeah, that does make the series a bit less... it lacks that dark intensity factor that I had at the beginning, where, like I said, every moment of fear and panic felt genuine, but this part, from this point on, it just doesn't quite have that. Until we hit another really big twist, I'd say about three quarters of the way through the whole series, which I'll leave that for major spoilers again, but like the nature of the world completely warps when that happens, or at least the perception of the nature of the world, but that's kind of semantic, whatever. The point is, from this point on, Aaron continues to get more and more development, like he realizes, okay, I can't just go out and start killing titans with no purpose. Like I have to work with other people, I have to learn to rely on them, and I also have to get better so that they can rely on me. And he kind of calms down a little bit. I feel very focused and very driven, but he calms down a lot, and I liked that. There is a whole story arc, because like the government of Attack on Titan from the beginning is implied to be extremely corrupt, and it's also implied that they know a lot more than they're letting on about like where the titans came from and how the walls were constructed and all that. And so there's a really long story arc, about halfway through the series, where they, um, well, sure, why not, this is a minor spoiler. The main characters have to try to work to overthrow their government and replace it with a better one, which, I mean, that sounds good on paper, but it just lasts a bit too long. And that's something I would say for a lot of parts of the series is that they just outstay their welcome a little bit, especially the climax, the last, let's say, 20 chapters, I think really only needed to be 10 or 11 chapters. And granted, there's a lot of action and everything, which is really cool, but it's like they keep introducing new scenarios. It's like, okay, now we saved the day. Wait, no we didn't? Okay, now we saved the day. And that's a little obnoxious, and that sort of thing happens a lot during the overthrow of the government arc as well. And part of the reason for this is Attack on Titan's really weird plot structure, or maybe not really weird, but sometimes what they'll do is they'll show events, like they'll show some crazy event happening, and then they'll show flashbacks for a while to show what led up to that. And then they'll just go normal for a while, and then crazy event, and then flashback to show what went up to it. And that means we spend a lot of time on flashbacks, not all of which are always needed. Most of the time it's fine, but there are a couple of flashbacks where I just go, eh, we really didn't need that to be there. Like if you remember in my Manga I Like and Dislike video, I mentioned one called Witch Hunter. That one has a similar structure, and it's not great if I'm being honest. Like if you want to do that once or twice in a long series like this, that's fine, but they do it a lot more than that. So overall the first half of this series is, well it's better than the second half, but not by a lot. At least in terms of plotting. Now, once we get to that part that I mentioned where your whole perception of the world shifts, things do start to get a little more intense again because you realize how much danger all these people are in. Like something I've noticed in a lot of things is that when you open up a story in this strange mysterious world and you don't understand that much about the world or how it works and the characters don't understand that much about how it works and finding out these mysteries is their driving desire, I guess, their driving motivation, that's the word. And it's super dangerous and you don't know what's going on. Then that beginning part is really great and it's super tense and yada yada. It's really fun and I noticed the same problem with Kingdom Hearts actually. But then later on, once you understand at least part of all this you don't necessarily need to know everything but once you start to explore more of the world and it becomes less mysterious and less scary you lose that intensity factor. Like in Kingdom Hearts this is when you first do the whole Destiny Islands thing and then you go to Traverse Town and Sora gets separated from his friends and he's like, what the hell is going on? What are all these heartless attacking me for? Why do I have this Keyblade? And then later on he starts to learn more about oh, okay, all these Disney worlds are out there and these Disney villains are doing bad things and then Ansem shows up and so the world while it does still have mysteries to it is no longer as scary as it once was because it doesn't feel as big as it once was and Attack on Titan has that for a while but then once you find out what's in the basement it shifts again and everything's scary again. So overall if you're a person that has read or watched some Attack on Titan but for whatever reason you just haven't continued I would recommend you continue because the series it is about more than just fighting Titans, you know, it's not just oh Titans are attacking, let's fight them off oh Titans are attacking, let's fight them off you know it's not like The Walking Dead or zombie stuff like that there is a lot of interpersonal conflict between various factions in like the government and the military and things like that which are much more intelligent you know people can't just brute force their way through it or come up with a smart battle strategy or anything like that they have to actually work with people and find out how to convince people of their ideals I suppose and they have to well politically maneuver stuff and it's actually done really well for the most part it's just out stays its welcome a little bit and like I said there's a lot of characters who die no one ever really feels that safe except for like the core cast but that's pretty common in most forms of media and so all the minor spoilers stuff yeah I just I still recommend this series it's really good it's not a traditional shounen it's pretty mature in a lot of ways go check it out you know it's a real good way for burning off calories okay so now as for the ending okay I cannot sit here and explain all of the exposition for the ending because we're gonna be here all fucking day so I'm just going to do this assuming that you also have read slash watched up until the end of the series because there's there's just too much there so once Aaron gets the power of the founder Titan he decides yeah I'm gonna do the rumbling where he releases all the colossal Titans in the walls and he's just gonna destroy the entire world he's gonna kill everybody who isn't on Paradise Island so that he can save his friends save his people and then his friends have to go to great lengths to stop him and even then they don't manage to stop him all the way he still wipes out substantial portion of the planet's population and that really sucks but then it turns out at the end that he was like no I'm just gonna kill a bunch of people and then my friends are going to kill me in the process which will make them seem like heroes and because they're Eldians it will make people not hate Eldians that much which is stupid and then the series ends with Aaron being dead and the the world is not exactly at peace anymore because or anymore not exactly at peace because the ultra hardcore ethno-nationalist Eldians took control of Paradise Island and the rest of the world knows that the Eldians attacked them and almost killed all of them and just because some of the good ones as they might call them came along and saved them they might not necessarily still like Eldians they're probably still going to hate them so that bit's kind of stupid and so the series doesn't have a complete happy ending which I do like I do like how it's like okay things we saved the day that one time but things are still not great right now we're still gonna have to do a lot of work to make things work out properly so yeah I did like that aspect of it I just wish it had been thought out more because here's the thing even with the technology that they've been able to steal slash build over the past couple of years the Eldians on Paradise Island are still at a huge disadvantage that compared to everybody else and everybody else still controls most of the special Titans I forget what they're called but like the Assault Titan and the Warhammer Titan and the Armor Titan all that they still control most of them and well there aren't that many Titans left to use like regular ones to just throw at anybody really and so the world has calmed down for the moment but it seems like it's just going right into another conflict so it seems like Eren killed a whole bunch of people for no reason and then sacrificed himself for very little reason this reminds me of the ending of Code Geass in a way which is one of my favorite anime I'll fully admit to that where Lelouch takes over the whole world and makes himself like an evil tyrant like the most evil tyrant of all time and then lets himself be killed so that people will unite around that they'll be like yes we hate this guy we're all united now that he's gone everything's great which really doesn't work that well in real life but at least it was set up in a way in such a way in the show where it does make more sense like because in real life for example World War II the Axis powers everybody hated them but then when they came together and defeated them the Cold War happened right after they weren't friends forever one thing I do have to add about this ending is that some people have accused it of being fascist and no I really don't think it is because the ethno-nationalist Eldians are pretty much portrayed they're the bad guys you know they want to wipe out the entire world at the end and the good guys the main characters have to fight to defeat them and when they were mostly successful they killed like what was it four fifths of the entire planet they killed or maybe it was just that one continent I'm not totally sure but they killed a lot of people and they're unequivocally the bad guys there and likewise you have the other groups like the Marlians and the other people who like hate the Eldians and oppress them like crazy like they are explicitly drawn and treated they're drawn in such a way to evoke imagery of the holocaust is what I should say like they wear armbands with stars on them like they're forced to do so they're forced to live in these little ghettos and they can only leave with a specific permission at one point near the end they're in a train and they're fleeing the rumbling trying to get somewhere safe and it just shows this one panel of the inside of the train which looks exactly like the inside of a cattle car like the trains that would get sent to Auschwitz and shit so it's pretty clear that mistreating people based on like their ancestry or ethnicity however you want to put that is portrayed as a bad thing whereas fascism is usually like there is a hierarchy of people and being part of one group just automatically makes you better than being part of other groups it's a lot like racism and in most cases it is just straight up racism but it's not quite the exact thing like sometimes this is based on like religion or wealth or something like that well it's always based on wealth let's be honest but that is a pretty fascist ideal and this series is like a straight up refutation of that so no the ending is not fascist and as for like the actual climax like the fighting and all that I think that is amazing because the last like 30 chapters of the series is just like constant bam something's happening something crazy is happening something crazy is happening and the heroes never get out of their whatever situations they're in easily like there's not a single point where they just get out with no sacrifices and with no trouble like that does not happen every time they run into trouble they have to use ingenuity to get out of it and a lot of times they lose people along the way like this is one of those climaxes where a whole lot of characters die like both side characters and major ones and so it's a bit heavy to read through sometimes like I said earlier I do kind of wish it had been trimmed down a bit because you know you have that big battle between the Marlians and the Eldians at Shiganshina and then Eren gets the founder Titan and they defeat all the Marlians and so like the day's saved but then the rumbling happens and they go off to destroy everything so they're like oh okay we have to we have to go and save everybody and they're like okay maybe we can get ahead of it with this airplane that we have so they're like okay let's go to that airplane but then that is being held by soldiers who want to destroy the world the hardcore Eldian nationalists they're usually called Jagerists it's being held by them so we have to come up with a plan to get past them and then we have to fight past them and we lose people along the way and that's all difficult and that takes up time and then they get ahead of it a little ways and it's like oh we run into more trouble which is kind of bullshit in some ways like apparently a soldier held on to the side of their boat for like the days it took them to get to wherever they were going and then he shoots at them and he doesn't even do that much damage really he just hurts their plane a little bit and they manage to patch it up it's kind of dumb and doesn't really lead anywhere and then they finally get to fighting the founder Titan let's call it and all the rumbling and they're fighting it and it looks like oh we won and everything stops and it's like oh no we're still going it just they could have cut it down quite a bit and one really annoying bit as well is how in order to give like a face to all the civilians or civilians and innocent soldiers semi-innocent soldiers let's say because we don't know exactly what they've been doing the past couple years but anyways all these civilians and soldiers who don't want to die in the rumbling they need to give a face to that so they just keep cutting back to Annie's dad among them and the problem is that Annie's dad is introduced like right as the rumbling starts and we don't know that much about him we certainly aren't attached to him before this point so like I don't care that much you know like it would almost be better if it was like hey we just need to save these faceless crowds because there is a scene where like we see this infant all wrapped up and it's in a crowd of people trying to flee or rather it's mom is carrying it in a crowd of people trying to flee from the rumbling and they reach the edge of a cliff and people start getting pushed off because others are trying to just move away from the Titans and the mom like just holds the infant up and other people start grabbing it and passing it back and mom like gets pushed off the cliff more people behind her keep getting pushed off and so like this one faceless baby or not faceless per se but this one baby who we know nothing about I think that just does the job a lot better and it takes up a lot less time than Annie's dad because it's kind of like the ending of Amazing Spider-Man 2 where like Electro shuts down all the power and there are two planes that are about to crash into each other but they don't know it and it's like oh we have to save the people on the planes but we don't know anybody on the planes so instead it keeps cutting back to Aunt May in the hospital but Aunt May is not even really in any danger so it's just weird like if you were going to do something like that you should have just put a character we like such as Aunt May on the plane but really most of that is pretty nitpicky I'll be totally honest it's not that big a deal I really really liked Attack on Titan I am not afraid to admit that it's a pretty great series even if you have heard about this ending here and you haven't read the series you're probably very confused about all the terms and everything I just used and I'd say hey check out the rest of the series so that you know what's going on because just trying to learn all of the mysteries behind all this is really compelling and if you don't already know it then it'll probably still surprise you a lot of the time and it's just a good story it's well paced for the most part it's very tense very action heavy action packed but that's not all there is to it a lot of the characters are really likeable and even the ones that aren't necessarily likeable are still good and it takes place in kind of an interesting world I think that once you get into the world outside the walls it's a little bit lazy but it's not too bad like just overall I really like Attack on Titan it's been like an 8 year journey of my life before I got to this point and I'm a little upset with myself that I didn't get caught up earlier and finish it off earlier but hey I'm here now Hello to of Patreon of to the people $10 and up Oppo Savalainen, Olivia Rayan Brother Santotis, Carolina Clay, Christopher Quinten Echo, Great Griebo Joel, Carcat Kitsune KR Stevenson, Liza Rudikova Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett Marilyn Roxy, Microphone Moritz Fuchs, Sad Martigan Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie and Vaivictus you of to be grateful of to of to Patreon request please help channel grow subscribe and like video bye