Introduction
First things first: Spoilers alert for the entire Attack on Titan series! If you have not watched or read the series and plan to one day, return to this article after finishing it. Following this story is a journey of a lifetime, especially on the first watch, so don’t miss out on the opportunity.
The anime Attack on Titan (AOT) ended in November 2023, 10 years after the first episode aired in 2013. Safe to say this was one of the most phenomenal series of the decade, and as part of The Ridge’s thematic magazine to relive 2023 with our readers, this article is dedicated to the closure of this monumental journey. There are many angles to approach unravelling Attack on Titan, and for this writing I choose to discuss its cultural significance on conflicts and wars. One thing AOT left us with was a lens through which we can unravel these conflicts from a clear bird’s eye view that is usually hard to attain in real life.
Beginnings
Like the first season of the anime, real conflicts seem simple on the surface. The first season had no moral debates; titans were mindless and soulless monsters who killed humans on instinct, and killing a titan did not have an impact on the characters’ moral conscience. Hatred was also easily justifiable in the first season; the cruelty of a world where our protagonist watches his Mom get bitten into half, blood and flesh splattering, body going limp, and the inability to do anything about it except run away. It seems natural that Eren had wound up with so much hatred and desire for vengeance towards the titans, and it was easy for the audience to rally behind that hatred and look forward to his attack on the titans.
Eren after his mom’s death, episode 1
Most of us have been fortunate enough to be away from war, so I could be wrong about this, but I suspect in the heat of war and conflict, enemy combatants don’t appear all that different from titans depending on which side one is on. There is no time nor reason to think for the enemies; they are threats that need to be neutralised.
But as the door to the basement unlocks, Isayama Hajime challenged the ease of this hatred. It is easy to hate pure monstrosity, but what if it wasn’t monsters that committed these atrocities? Where do we channel that hatred if we realise there was a legitimate reason why the atrocity had to happen?
Dissonance
Reiner, Bertholdt and Annie, culprits to the bloodbath and massacre that happened on Paradis Island after the walls came down, were from Liberio—an internment zone on the main continent that lived under violent, state-sanctioned racism and discrimination. Prosperity was an estranged concept, and the Eldians—race of the people living in this internment zone—quite literally lived to have stones thrown at them.
Becoming warriors was their golden ticket out of a lifetime of being shamed: a chance to no longer be limited on where they can or cannot enter, to live as equals to their oppressors, and to live with dignity and respect. This golden ticket is priced upon thousands of lives, but they were raised to believe that these thousands of people were responsible for their horrid treatment. Apathy and hatred, again, come easy. A drowning person will push down anyone approaching them from the front to keep themselves afloat, and the residents of Liberio have been drowning in spit and disdain for their whole lives.
This doesn’t justify the lives these three took in the walls, just like how the lives lost in the walls don’t justify Eren’s subsequent decision to carry out the raid on the Liberio internment zone which destroyed lives in the same way his mother was taken away from him. A massacre is a massacre, and it seems presumptuous to say either side was right or wrong for carrying out such atrocities. To me, the complexity of the situation set in when the added perspective didn’t justify tragedies but explained them. When Eren started learning that there were humans living beyond the walls, he also learnt that these people wanted to destroy Paradis Island and regain the founding titan for their own safety and peace of mind. He learnt that the rest of the world feared Paradis Island the same way he feared the titans outside the walls. Regardless of whether he wanted to or not, the parallels in the situation pushed him to empathise with the attackers of his hometown.
His hatred didn’t cloud his ability to empathise with Reiner, but neither did that empathy wash out hatred. Acquiring an empathetic perspective while harbouring hatred and cynicism over the tragedies that wrecked his home created an extremely frustrating dissonance within him—likely the equivalent of punching soft cotton with all your might when you’re trying to take out your anger on something.
Eren disappointed with life outside the walls, The Final Chapters Special 1
If Eren’s frustration towards this dissonance between hatred and rational understanding was what led to the rumbling and his decision to raze everything to the ground, then both Marley and Eldia’s refusal to face the same dissonance is why the cycle of vengeance was endless in the series. The history of what happened a thousand years ago was written in an ancient language that could not be deciphered; Eldians like Grisha simply decided that their ancestors helped to cultivate the world, and Marleyans simply decided that all the titans ever did was destroy and force-breed other races. None of them knew how history actually went down or had any intentions to learn the ancient tongue. Because dissonance is hard to grapple with and because humans are naturally aversive of dissonance, both sides chose to point their finger at the other and place the entire blame on them. Both made themselves out to be victims seeking righteousness, over the same event in history, without ever stopping to consider if they could be wrong.
The one-sided understanding of war reflects how history is taught in real life, and this is very much observable around us: the stark contrast between mainland China’s and Taiwan’s history textbooks, the avoidance (or in the past, straight up denial) of Japanese officials towards war crimes of Nanjing Massacre and practice of comfort women, the downplay of racism towards African Americans in US history textbooks, etc. Clearly, these examples are far from exhaustive, but just these three examples alone contribute to some of the sharpest divides between populations in the world. Ignoring historical nuances and past misdeeds put countries in a position of moral high ground, and it is a tactic that has been consistently practised across different societies and cultures in our world.
So, if deception and hypocrisy is always going to be a part of nations, are we doomed for conflicts eternally?
Conflict
Honestly, Isayama’s answer to this was pretty much a resounding yes (or a rumbling yes if you will), but that wasn’t the entirety of it. Isayama did not stop at showing the nuance and inevitability of war and conflict. After he laid out the entire cycle of vengeance, the last part of Attack on Titan was on how to move forward with conflict. Do we obliterate the enemy in the name of stopping the cycle of vengeance “once and for all”, with disregard for the destruction of innocent lives along the way, which was Eren’s decision? Or do we insist on having dialogue and seeking out common ground to avoid the tragedy of war, which was what Armin and Hanji desperately sought for?
Thing is, talking is a possible resolution to decades of hatred, which was what Gabi and Kaya’s storyline was dedicated to showing. Both girls have had important people killed in front of them for sins committed by their ancestors. Gabi killed Sasha, who was Kaya’s life saver. This heroine in Kaya’s life was in turn the cold-blooded murderer of guards and soldiers that Gabi grew up with. Both held intense hatred for each other, but through repeated interactions and being pushed by circumstances to save each other’s lives, they eventually came to understand that none of them were villains. They both lost loved ones and their homes for reasons they are not responsible for, and ultimately they are both victims of war.
Gabi’s realisation, episode 77
What is not possible, however, is expecting this process of forgiveness to be replicated across the millions of people involved in conflicts. Gabi and Kaya were placed in an environment of shared circumstances, through which Kaya got to learn Gabi’s personality and on some level befriended her before she was revealed as Sasha’s killer. In other words, Kaya got to know Gabi before her personal hatred set in. The moment she knew who Gabi was, her instantaneous reaction was to stab Gabi, which was only avoided because Sasha’s father stopped her. It is not possible to expect this sort of circumstance to replicate itself for every person, or even just a majority of each side, who lost someone in war. If two people took this much time and effort to reconcile, how can we expect genuine reconciliation between millions of people on different sides of history? It was not possible in AOT, and it definitely is not possible in real life. And that is why it is so easy to label diplomacy and dialogue in conflict as inefficient or straight up useless—it is not (always) because diplomats are chronically ingenuine and only have their own interests in mind, but because de-escalating a conflict without violence while balancing expectations fuelled by pride and hatred cultivated through generations of hurting each other is genuinely a herculean task even when there is a genuine intention to mend broken bonds.
This judgement of discourse as needless or useless is in turn the most dangerous thought of all. Eren’s rumbling was an indiscriminate killing of every living thing outside of Paradis Island, including children, including infants. It doesn’t seem possible to justify it, but yet an indiscriminate killing of this scale and nature has happened in our world’s history when two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended World War II by killing over two hundred thousand civilians in Japan. The bombs were dropped in the name of ending the war, but the truth is, the moment those bombs dropped, we lost any opportunity of finding out if the war could have ended in a less cruel manner.
I don’t know if Isayama meant to answer this dilemma through Attack on Titan, but my personal interpretation of the series’ ending is that dialogue should never stop no matter how difficult it is to listen when you hold prejudice and hatred towards the other side. Alternative destruction costs too much in terms of life, but also because no grand ideology or historical burdens should be more important than the smallest, simplest enjoyments in life. The rumbling wasn’t stopped through a grand philosophy in the end; it stopped when Armin reminded Zeke that life was meaningful because of the tiniest things that he enjoyed, which was as simple as playing catch with his father figure. Zeke was another character that believed in destruction over dialogue, but when reminded of his fondest memories, he decided that at the end of the day his memories and feelings weren’t less significant than ending the conflict. It is as Carla said in the very beginning as she cradled Eren in her arms: Eren was special for no reason other than being born. Each of us has a unique path ahead of us the moment we entered this world, and this invaluable path is worth our protection.
Carla saying baby Eren’s special, episode 48
And that’s the message I think the series left us with. Dialogue about the biggest disagreements need to continue so that the smallest things we enjoy in life can continue. And maybe, these dialogues are not meant to end conflicts, because conflicts will always exist in tandem with diversity. So long as differences exist across societies, conflict will continue. But in a world riddled with these disagreements, maybe we should not only evaluate dialogue through its failure to end ongoing, highly visible conflicts, but also through its success in protecting us from the conflicts that could have happened but did not.