Attack on Titan

Apart from being incredibly depressing to the point it'll put you in a bad mood for the rest of the week. This Japanese anime series is an incredibly good watch.



I actually found a pretty lighthearted photo which is good because wow, is it depressing. Attack on Titan is about a small society of people who live in a walled city protected from Titans. Titans are giant people basically who like killing humans for apparently no reason. One day the Titans break through one of the walls and after that event three friends Eren, Mikasa and Armin must join an elite group of people dedicated to wiping out the Titans once and for all.

What I like most about the show is not the beautiful, painstaking animation or the breathtaking action sequences of which I imagine is incredibly hard to create in animation, but is actually the characters. Throughout the one series we see these characters age five years and are given more and more back-story.

Every character is significant and complicated. Its not just a case of humans-good, Titans-bad. Frequently the three protagonists are up against everyone else as well. It covers everything, its a coming-of-age story but its also about finding your place in the world. To me even though it's called Attack on Titan it isn't really about the Titans at all, they just symbolise 'the enemy'. The Titans could just as easily be war, famine or an ecological disaster. What the show is actually about to me is how humans deal with these sort of situations and how human nature can sometimes become just as bad as the big evil.