Titans

It happens in seconds. The wall cracks, a roar, and they’re pouring through—massive, naked, grinning things—blood everywhere, limbs, screaming. One of them plucks Eren’s mother off the street like a doll and snaps her in half, then eats her while he watches. He’s maybe ten. He screams a vow right there. That moment is the show.

My girlfriend had to catch up on some German soap, so I fell into Attack on Titan instead. This anime about humanity compressed into one last kingdom somewhere in a warped version of Germany, trapped behind three massive walls—Maria, Rose, Sina—that somehow got built centuries ago and nobody knows by who. Outside the walls are these things. Regenerating, relentless, completely impassive except for those grins. They don’t eat to survive. They just seem to enjoy tearing people apart.

The military trains kids to fight them with this ridiculous rig—essentially grappling hooks and wires and swords—because the only way to kill a titan is a deep slash in the back of the neck. Everything else bounces off. So kids strap in and swing through the air like spiders and hope they’re fast enough.

At first it’s just gore. Constant gore. Bodies bursting against walls, blood fountains, bones snapping, people screaming. The animation goes hard on it, relentless frequency of death that’s genuinely shocking. But the more you watch, the more you realize each of those deaths belonged to someone you’d started to care about. They don’t give you time to mourn the important ones—sometimes they’re dying at the edge of the frame while the orchestra is still swelling over the real hero moment. A lot of them get maybe two episodes of character building before they’re paste.

Anyone who watched Game of Thrones knows the appeal of that arbitrary bloodshed, and this show doesn’t pull back. It goes harder. People in the middle of their speeches die. You think someone’s clearly the main character and they’re gone. There’s no narrative armor here. All that matters is survival of the species, and they’re losing.

I binge-watched like five or six episodes straight because each cliffhanger just made me angrier and more confused. Every mystery you solve opens up three new ones. There’s talk of keys and fathers and faces and some kind of weapon, but nothing makes sense. The German words get repeated over those Japanese orchestras—”Jäger,” Zerstörer, Schöpfer—and it should sound ridiculous but it just sounds ominous.

If Evangelion did anything for you, this will too. Same futility wrapped around a kid convinced he can change things, same slow realization that everything is much worse than stated. It all happens so fast.