“Hello, my name is Hajime Isayama and this is my manga. It’s about a world dominated by monstrous humanoid cannibals, and the last vestiges of mankind (Germanic Europeans) must fight to maintain their borders and slaughter those horrible creatures that have subhuman intelligence and weird-looking faces and no dicks whenever they intrude.“
“The plot takes a shocking turn when the inhumans begin to act intelligently and it’s revealed that some of the heroic military officers the story follows are actually inhumans having infiltrated our society to destroy us from within. The heroic military officers must purge the inhumans while also dealing with ungrateful citizens who think their taxes should go somewhere other than the military.”
“And then the ultimate reveal…The Germanic heroes are actually a race imbued with superhuman power from the source of life itself, and they once ruled over other humans as literal titans. But then the other humans rebelled and started committing reverse racism on them- making them into second class citizens that wear identifying armbands and live in ghettos and internment camps instead of the other way around! The German race was forced into borders that are paltry compared to the great empire they once ruled, and the current generation has no memory of the greatness of their ancestors- the people of Ymir the Nordic frost giant! By the way, have I mentioned that the commanding officer of the good guys is named Erwin Rommel Smith?”
Wow, Attack on Titan is literally an unironic version of the fictional Dream of the Swastika in Iron Dreams by Norman Spinrad. That book was about how if you dress nazi ideology and aesthetics in fantasy, people eat it up. And here it is, in real life - literal Nazi Ideology being celebrated as just fantasy. Something that was old hat and being satirised in the early 1970s.
