Attack on Titan anime series now in the midst of its final episodes, and a terrifying Titan-induced apocalypse besides, the theme of humanity’s total destruction permeates the work, as it in many ways has since the cannibalistic giants first appeared to crash through Wall Maria and eat Eren’s mother right at the beginning.
The predominate theme of existential dread has a greater historical resonance in understanding the story than simply to entertain: it is a necessary part of Isayama’s total social message, namely the need to forsake bigotry and hatred in the interest of avoiding intergenerational conflict at a fundamental level. In other words, it is a story of what happens when a cycle of oppression, in which races of people successively alienate each other socially and politically, spins out of control into a nightmare fever dream.
Attack on Titan Is About the Intergenerational Trauma of Bigotry
For much of the outset of the story, the logic of Attack on Titan’s world remains a mystery to the reader. It is not until well over halfway through that the source of the walled city’s monster infestation is explained: the people in that city, on what turns out to be an island called Paradis, are the descendants of a dominant clan of people known as Eldians whose royal family, after centuries of ruling the mainland, decided to surrender and flee to Paradis (or abdicate according to which version is told) leaving their former subjugated peoples, the Marleyans, in charge. As the royal family had possession of the Founding Titan, which granted them total power over anyone with Eldian blood via a magic link, this allowed them to obfuscate this knowledge from the other Eldians for almost a century by the time the story begins.
What becomes apparent after the diaries of Grisha Yeager are found is that this has led to pre-Holocaust-like conditions for the remaining Eldians in the Empire of Marley. Forced to live in ghettoes and endure brutal racial oppression, these Eldians’ cruelest fate lies with their potential to be turned into Titans, which the Marleyans use as a form of punishment. The actual source of the Titan infestation on Paradis is revealed to be Eldian prisoners whom the Marleyans have transformed into mindless Titans, being used as a form of psychological warfare against the Eldians on Paradis in retaliation for their peoples’ supposed cruelty. Ironically, the Paradis Eldians were oblivious to this conflict, due to the royal family wiping their collective memory, and the Marleyans likewise did not know of the Eldians’ ignorance.
What is clear, however, is that the Marleyans are depicted as hatefully cruel towards the Eldian refugees, with Grisha’s own sister Faye being brutally murdered by a Marleyan military officer as a child. These Eldians are forcibly indoctrinated into a set of beliefs that cast them as born monsters whose sole living goal should be to serve their adoptive state of Marley. So powerful is their indoctrination that it even causes the young Zeke Yeager to betray his own parents and plot his own people’s extinction. This environment of prejudice is expanded upon during the succeeding Marley arc, which demonstrates the multilayered and systemic indoctrination the Marleyan “Warriors” are subjected to, for the purpose of supplying Marleyan military needs.
Attack on Titan Shows the Danger of Turning People Into Monsters
Eren, though possessing the powers of the Attack Titan, is often portrayed as an outcast among his colleagues in the Survey Corps, mistrusted by his government for his powers, and often used as a pawn by his enemies. Prone to impulsiveness and fits of rage, Eren is at once a sympathetic figure, as well as an unrepentant villain, instigating a series of atrocities in the final act leading to what eventually turns out to be an attempt at genocide against the rest of the world: “The Rumbling.”
Eren’s act is seemingly not without cause as he was witness to the culturally-intractable hatred the people of Marley held for the Eldians, including the Marleyan Eldians themselves. Faced with the possibility of his people facing genocide, as Marley began an all-out assault on Paradis, Eren makes the unforgivable choice of using his Founding Titan powers (attained from his father’s eating of the former Founding Titan) to unleash the army of Colossal Titans inside the massive walls of Paradis’ city, set to literally crush the rest of humanity to death. While his heel-turn was quite shocking for fans, in the context of the historical reference to World War II, the analogy foretells Isayama’s intended lesson.
The Eldians and Marleyans have been in conflict for so long that neither truly either knows who is right, or who is in the right. Both sides act as aggressors in the conflict, with Eren himself perpetrating a terrorist attack in Liberio (an Eldian ghetto) following the Marleyans’ declaration of war, pointedly against his friends’ wishes. Despite Eren's incredible capacity for death and destruction, Isayama takes great pains to demonstrate that, from Eren’s point of view, he is merely responding to the world’s relentless and visceral hostility, and that this state of existence is one that often leads to emotional isolation. And it was this sense of isolation that led him to villainy.
What Eren’s lack of comionate heroism demonstrates is that his fear of being “the other,” a person constantly at odds with his environment, oppressed by the powers that be above him and his colleagues around him as an eternal outsider, is what caused him to become this monster. In part a criticism of the typical shonen fare, in which an adoptive team of heroes becomes a ive family for one another, Eren’s ultimate abandonment of his friends in the Survey Corps is meant to demonstrate that, as he has witnessed humanity’s rejection of him, including them, so does he reject their sense of morals.
This fear of social alienation and rejection is not limited to Eren exclusively. His fear is echoed over and over again throughout the story, in Mikasa’s sadness over Eren’s rejection of her, in Reiner’s obsessive need to atone for his Eldian heritage as a Warrior, in Zeke’s betrayal of his parents. In short, this is the cost of bigotry, according to Attack on Titan: it does one of two things. It either kills off a large number of political undesirables in a sickeningly organized fashion or creates a society of broken people who are willing to sacrifice all they hold dear simply in order to belong. It is a stark message, but one still relevant in a world where bigotry and prejudice remain. It is a testament to Isayama's skill as a writer that Attack on Titan's twists all make sense when viewed through this thematic lens.
