It didn't take me long, watching Attack on Titan to come up with my preferred alternate title, Trauma Corp. I think it sums up the heart of the show the best, expresses what the show is really about, beyond the enormous, cannibalistic eunuch monsters.
I didn't have any experience with anime television before this, I had seen plenty of films but never taken the full leap into a series. A friend of mine recommended AoT to me and at the beginning of the summer I started watching it. He couldn't figure out why it was taking me so long to watch the episodes, he told me he had burned through them pretty quickly. I told him that I needed to take long breaks after each episode because of how emotionally devastating each ep had been. He figured he had seen so much anime that he was desensitized to that kind of thing at this point and he seemed to genuinely be jealous of my animated innocence. (He was also envious of my newb status when I first started playing PS3 a few months and I'd be stunned speechless by the graphics in Bioshock, a 7 year old game)(Granted, even not knowing that much about video games, I think it's probably safe to say that part of Bioshock's continued popularity is how not dated the original looks still, but then again, I don't really know anything)
What is it about AoT that has everyone so crazy for the thing? So crazy that people who have never watched a full anime series before are watching it and loving it? I know what it was that got me into it and it's something that comes up time and time again in the creative genre works that I fall in love with. I can connect with a fucked up cast of characters. And not "fucked up" in The Devil's Rejects way, you don't know what I look like or what I'm about so you could read that in the voice of someone with a nu-metal shirt on who does all his christmas shopping at Spencer Gifts, the kind of person who still wears shirts like "You're Just Jealous Because The Voices Talk To Me" or "Come To The Dark Side We Have Cookies".
No, I mean that I like stories with damaged characters, because I can relate to damaged characters. That's why I've never understood why people like James Bond. Who can relate to a suave, rich, physically dynamite, booze swilling, danger defying, international playboy with a penchant for murder and puns related to murder? Very few of us I'd wager. And I'm sure that people like Bond for escapist fantasy reasons, maybe they like to imagine that they're the suave, rich, physically dynamite, booze swilling, danger defying, international playboy with a penchant for murder and puns related to murder. But I don't feel any connection with a character like that, I don't feel anything I can root for there.
So I love shows like Fringe, Supernatural, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica and even the argument could be made, True Blood. Shows where they may have appealing adventures but you'd never want to actually live there. You'd never actually want to be on the Fringe team or live in Sunnydale. You'd never want to live in the world of Attack on Titan.
This show isn't the disturbingly regressive and out of date sensibility that the main stream still shows for genre storytelling, that is GOOD VS BAD = HAPPY. Far too often when there are stories about genre from the mainstream they seem to be drawing their research from a 1950s playbook. Attack On Titan isn't about a plucky bunch of daredevil ne'er do wells who are gonna save the day from the big baddies and be home in time for dinner and a backyard game of lawn darts. It's a genre story with characters that look (AND ACT) an awful lot like the people that we see everyday (in the so called "real" real world). Watching AoT at times the viewer may find themselves thinking "Come on! Why would they do that? Why can't they just work together to stop the oncoming apocalypse? Why all this petty power grabbing and fanatical religious insanity in the face of an ever encroaching global death-tastrophe?" And then one may find oneself staring out the window and thinking "Oh right, yeah, that's why that felt so familiar."
And the characters are real, I don't think there's a single episode of AoT where at least one character isn't completely traumatized or dealing with the effects from being completely traumatized. And the titans are terrifying. The titans are terrifying because 26 episodes in and we have no idea (really) what they want, where they're from, what they're about, or anything. That makes them so much more frightening than a goofy bastard in a cape shouting demands through a bullhorn or tying a damsel to the tracks (NOW who has an out of date sensibility??)
26 episodes of soul punching, eye gouging, action packed, thrills, chills and chemical spills (except without the chemical spills, it just fit the rhyme scheme). The story twists are inventive and insane, I haven't seen the dubbed episodes, but I've heard that even the dubbing on the show is top notch (that being said the original voice cast is incredible). People can't stop talking about Attack On Titan and it's for like, a billion good reasons. You should already be watching it so we can talk about feelings together.
No comments:
Post a Comment