Hi mx gun could you help me understand something about snk? Or maybe link a post if you don't feel like it cause I know that manga is pretty bad. Basically, I need to explain to a friend how is it bad lol, but a lot of the discussions I've read online just say that first, the rumors about Isayama being an imperialist, supporting people who did atrocities and such aren't confirmed, they are just rumors. And secondly, people say that Isayama is trying to represent gray morality in his manga, he never asks you to be on eren's or the other guys side, he shows that every side has their reasons, how they are all human beings, etc. Which is kind of true, but I think that's actually the problem? From what I understand, he makes analogies to historical events that simply can't be interpreted with gray morality, they are literally black and white; there were bad people and there were victims, nothing else. A lot of people say that nothing is black and white, that you have to be open minded, etc. But I feel like while this point of view is correct in many cases, it isn't in this case. Is that what's mostly wrong with snk or am I missing something? Sorry for the long ask, and thank you for taking your time.
There’s a lot of denial about this, but that’s all it is—denial. Even if one chooses not to believe that the anti-Korean tweets attributed to Isayama weren’t actually him (which would be a braindead decision to make, given that the account had insider knowledge of SNK releases), the first red flag is the very concept of the story: Soldiers from fantasy Germany (and exactly two Japanese people) defend national borders from monstrous outsiders. Right off the bat, this story is about an ethnically homogeneous society securing lebensraum.
Isayama is clearly a nationalist, and he based characters who are shown in a sympathetic light after actual war criminals. For example, the character Erwin Smith shares a first name and a birthday with Erwin Rommel, a literal nazi who the SNK wiki claims went against Hitler, despite the overwhelming historical evidence that the guy gladly participated in imperialist war efforts for Nazi germany. Isayama openly admitted (you’ll need to use google translate) to basing Dot Pixis off of Yoshifuru Akiyama, a general in the imperial Japanese army during the first Sino-Japanese war. The same Sino-Japanese war in which Japan massacred thousands of Chinese civilians. Isayama expressed admiration for this man in his comments. Mikasa shares a name with an imperial Japanese warship from the Russo-Japanese war era. Like, he is so clearly a nationalist and a war crimes apologist.
The most blatantly awful thing, which should be obvious even to a westerner who knows nothing about Japanese imperialism, is the fucked up holocaust parallel, which was one of SNK’s biggest plot reveals. In short, the extremely, obviously Jewish-coded group of people...are the titans. That’s right! Those scary foreign monsters that Eren and co. are fighting with the power of human experimentation (nothing weird about that coming from a Japanese nationalist, rite????) are Jewish analogs! The narrative frames them as oppressors who were targeted for genocide because they were just so evil and monstrous that everyone else had to get their revenge. Jewish followers and friends, please say something if I’m overstepping my bounds, but it seems to me that making the titans jewish-coded (armbands and everything! It is not a subtle holocaust allegory!) is a form of next-level blood libel.
There is nothing salvageable about Attack on Titan. It is not an oppression metaphor that tries to make a statement against oppression but is executed poorly. It is not a normal story with some racist elements. It is, at its core, a nationalist’s poorly-drawn story about protecting the borders from the scary monstrous Jewish invaders. That’s the plot. Anyone defending it lacks a brain and a spine.
