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There's plenty of room to critique the use of imagery and ideas that belong to cultural traumas that aren't your own for the sake of your fantasy story, but aside from that, the actual text of AoT is very anti-fascist. The fascism stuff is usually rendered as some very scary and bad poo poo, except in the anime OPs, which deliberately use gaudy exaggerations of fascist aesthetics for satirical purposes (note how the first OP depicts the First Battle of Trost, except it shows the humans WINNING, which doesn't happen. All the other OPs use other poo poo parodying military march songs while having lyrics that basically amount to "you don't know why you're doing this, but just go die anyway". It's very Veerhoven Starship Troopers in that way.) It's also worth noting that the villains who are framed in a sympathetic light Reiner, Annie, etc aren't really members of their Nazi-adjecent regime, but slave-Janissaries who have no place in the world and intense self-loathing. It's equally worth noting that while Warsaw ghetto imagery is used, it's not the only historical parallel that is drawn for the plight of the Subjects of Ymir, and it's too complicated to pigeonhole poo poo into a 1:1 allegory. Because the Wall civilization is also almost brought to its knees after two big, explosive, mushroom cloud forming attacks on their island nation (HMMMMM), that eventually leads to an international conflict revolving around a stockpile of Colossal Titan weapons (HMMMMM). I don't know how the politics of "man, the atom bomb was hosed" are read in Japan, but my understanding is that it's pretty common subtext in media, especially anime. I mean, I think the atom bomb was hosed, so I'm not sure I'd consider that a nationalist dogwhistle, but I suppose it could be to some. Point is, AoT has consistently characterized racism, militarization, and systemic power structures as very bad things that need to be resisted. It just doesn't always use its metaphors perfectly, nor does it have a particular optimistic outlook for the future - which is fair, I suppose. But I'd honestly say that I read way more fascist poo poo into the likes of My Hero Academia than Attack on Titan, just because the latter is so loving unsubtle about how it feels. As for the alleged Isayama Twitter thing, I'm gonna be honest and I say I don't buy it. The account in question wasn't associated with his name or business or anything, and folks seemed to just get convinced that it was him over a game of internet telephone. I could go further into why I think the series is fundamentally anti-fascist (though falls into a few tropes that are borderline unavoidable in stories that feature superpowers), but I'll stop for now. Also, the last few arcs have been really, really good and I'm amazed at how well this series was planned out. EDIT: The other thing the series wants you to keep in mind is that Eren is not a role model. He's not even flawed in like an Ed Elric sort of way. He is a very hosed up person and you're meant to feel for him as a broken human being, but not actually agree with him or his ideology. Beefstew fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Aug 7, 2020 |
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Aug 7, 2020 07:48
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 18:50 |
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