4/27/2023 0 Comments Aot saluteFalco’s selflessness and optimism seem very much in line with Armin’s, while Gabi feels like a more upbeat version of Eren, and both are Eldians living in Marleyan internment. The first two episodes introduce us to a new cast of characters who feel like parallels of our main cast from previous seasons. Instead, the final season of Attack on Titan feels like a sort of reconstruction of everything the show did before. That we can’t really nail down a specific message speaks to the tone-deafness of the imagery being used, more so than the show articulating a clear and coherent message about our world. You can interpret the portrayal of armbands and internment camps as mirroring the Holocaust in Europe, but the last couple of episodes that have been released through simulcasts on Crunchyroll, Hulu and Funimation have also invited another comparison: that the story of the historically aggressive and oppressive Eldian Empire collapsing under its weight and in turn becoming oppressed at the hands of another empire it once invaded mirrors the relationship between Japan and the United States during and after WWII. Sure, some of the imagery can be interpreted as reflecting real world politics, but depiction is not necessarily endorsement. The Seasons 1-3 protagonists of Attack on Titan (l to r): Armin Arlert, Mikasa Ackerman, Levi Ackerman and Eren Jaeger. But as the story progresses in Season 4, the likelier it seems that manga creator Hajime Isayama is twisting these allegories to create a story that is familiar, but also completely new and complex that uses tropes and imagery ripped from history to make a broader statement about the toll bigotry and nationalism can take on people. The backlash against Attack on Titan came down to a debate of whether the show’s sympathies would ultimately side with its oppressed or its oppressors, and the concern that it was co-opting fascist imagery from real-world history to demonize a fictional oppressed group, just as the Nazis did in the years leading up to the Holocaust. All of this can feel tremendously uncomfortable to watch in 2021, especially for a show that has in the past relished opportunities for hyperviolent action and explicit bloodshed. The Eldian people living in the Liberio internment zone, wearing armbands to identify themselves as Eldian, and there is a shot of Eldian soldiers in the Marleyan military doing a salute to their officers that looks like a Nazi salute. It’s hard not to think of Nazi soldiers marching when watching the Marleyan soldiers in the new opening sequence, a shot followed by flying war zeppelins and several exploding bombs. The show is still heavily borrowing from WWII and Holocaust imagery to tell its story of the Eldian people’s subjugation. These are the people we previously saw as monstrous villains, and the new season dares the audience to understand them. The newest episodes throw us into the other side of the conflict and takes us to Marley, where we meet characters with the same Eldian heritage as our main characters, but who live and work under the oppression of Marley itself. Thankfully, it seems like the show’s fourth and final season is finally unwrapping its real-world imagery to reveal the show’s stance on its core theme.Īfter the huge revelation last season that there is a world beyond the walls of the show’s city-state settings, but it’s a world where Eldians, people with the same blood and ancestry as our main characters, are treated as inferior and penned in concentration camps, Attack on Titan’s final season pulls another surprise on the audience. The zeitgeisty anime phenomenon Attack on Titan, based on the manga of the same name, is no different, having taken inspiration from Germanic imagery for its world since the show began, but when Season 3 appropriated imagery and lexicon we associate with the Axis powers of World War II and the Holocaust, it sparked outrage. George Lucas has repeatedly said that the evil Emperor in Star Wars was modeled after Richard Nixon, and Fullmetal Alchemist used imagery from the Iraq War in its depiction of the fictional Ishval Civil War. Using real-world imagery and events as inspiration for a fictional world is nothing new. In Season 4, Attack on Titan is finally telling us what its use of disturbing imagery and allegories really meant.
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