As somebody who only read the part of the manga which isn't animated yet , is there anything which the anime left out or "ruins"? Thank you.
Oh god yeah, I have endless gripes with the anime. Definitely read the already animated bits of the manga if you have the time. Here’s a brief summary of my grievances. You’ll know Point 2 already, but I felt like it really need to be included on this list of complaints.
1) Eren’s Relationship with Annie
The anime cutting out the above scene really hurt the Female Titan reveal and both Annie and Eren’s characters. This takes place after Eren takes down Jean with Annie’s moves. It showers a sweeter side to Annie that was absent from the anime, so most anime-onlys I know just think of her as evil.
It also establishes Eren and Annie’s bond that was likewise absent from the anime: she spent a lot of time training with him and taught him how to really fight in melee combat. Although they kept in the Season 2 scene of them training together, it’s not so apparent how much of a regular thing it was.
And it came too late - we only see that after the Female Titan reveal, so the huge emotional impact of that scene is totally blunted. In the first place, anime-onlys have been given no reason to like Annie, so the twist doesn’t mean much to them. But they also can’t understand why Eren is so reluctant to believe Annie is a Titan when they barely interacted in the first place. For a manga reader, the scene is devastating as Eren is forced to fight his mentor, and his emotional torment much more understandable.
But the greatest anime sin was how they portrayed the final fight between the two of them, for which I will forever be salty. The fight is a pivotal moment in the manga as Eren is forced to fight without hatred for the first time. For the first time, he’s seeing his enemy as a human being. It is absolutely crucial to his development.
But what does the anime do?
Turn him into a rage monster! They take his pained, thoughtful inner monologue while fighting Annie that just wants to know why she did it, and make it be said in a really angry voice that sucks the point out of it.
In the manga, Eren, who lost to Annie before because he couldn’t control his emotions, is able to win this fight by bringing them into check and fighting in spite of his emotions. The anime misses all of that when they have Eren win just by getting really angry. It doesn’t make sense except for his weird fire power-up.
They also cut this scene in Season 2:
This is also important for the dissolution of his black-and-white morality that I mentioned before. When he thinks about Annie, he gets confused as to where he should direct his anger, whereas before he could just say “the Titans” in a heartbeat.
Season 2 decides to show Ymir’s past, which was revealed to us in the manga after the Basement reveal. This was a terrible decision. I understand why it was made as they needed to stretch out the arc to fit 12 episodes, but it basically gave away the biggest reveal of the series before it even happened. It showed that there were large amounts of people in a functioning society still alive outside the walls, and it showed how they turned people into Titans.
There are also thematic reasons why the placement of her past is important (as well as Marco’s death scene, similarly displaced), which I expand on here.
3) The Whole First Half of the Uprising Arc
I really can’t fit everything here since so much got skipped over and horrendously compressed into that two-episode breakneck summary. What was included wasn’t given the time it needed to breathe, and what wasn’t was sadly lost in the ether.
The emotional numbness of Historia’s true self,
Connie and Sasha’s hang-ups on the uprising in addition to Jean’s,
The mutual respect Reeves builds with Levi and his fleshed-out moral redemption, making his death have impact,
Insight into Erwin and Nile’s past, foreshadowing Nile’s support for the coup later on,
Levi bullying Historia into becoming Queen,
And more and more good stuff, including longer Frieda build-up and more developed character moments in general. Even the little lines that got cut could have a great deal of depth to them, but if I were to get into them this post would go on forever. I have many a gripe, but these are the major ones.
I watch the anime and can enjoy it, but really, nothing beats the original.
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