I’m a big fan of worldbuilding and historical lore in shows, so I was pretty impressed with Attack on Titan, plus the characters all seem to have rational motivations, and it was fun to piece together everything on a re-watch.

I’m a bit confused about the claims that the author is fascist. I admit I haven’t looked into in great depth, the biggest evidence I’ve seen is that the character Pixis is based off of Akiyama Yoshifuru, an imperialist general, and that the author has stated he admires him greatly. Granted, that’s not a good look, but I’m not entirely sure about the context on this, for all I know, he might admire him the same way one might admire Genghis Khan, not based on any sort of moral compass, but rather on a “Wow, that’s a lot of conquering.”

But I digress, regardless of the author’s views, just from watching the anime twice with at least a modest amount of literary analysis ability, I can’t see how the show can be interpreted as anything other than anti-fascist. Eren Jaeger is not sympathetic at all once he goes genocidal. Marley is basically a stand in for Nazi Germany and is portrayed as barbaric and monstrous. Most of the atrocities committed by the Titan Holders is based in trauma and is the direct consequence of military indoctrination and nationalistic fervor. I must admit, Armin justifying the slaughter of thousands of civilians left a bad taste in my mouth, I do wish the show went further into exploring his traumatic change in character. As it stands, he’s usually portrayed as the level-headed one, so people might think of him as morally justified. But all in all, it seems like the thesis of the show is that trauma begets trauma, and nationalistic attitude is the root cause of most of it.

I mean, please correct me, I definitely do not want to be militarist apologist, but I’ve heard this sentiment quite a lot on the internet, and I don’t think it’s been satisfactorily explained to me yet.