I finally found an article really describing the problems with attack on titan (I myself stopped reading right before the 4year timeskip) and it's honestly pretty terrible how little people know of Japan before ww2. There was a character inspired by a general from the war with China and Korea and isayama admits to being inspired by them blah blah. But like I don't think a lot of westerners really understand how terrible the Japanese were. Like, it's true. Their whole goal was creating an empire of their own, and they believed they were bringing "civility" to their poor neighboring East Asian countries. They killed more civilians over a few months in China than civilians died in the entirety of ww2. They raped constantly. They made sex slaves of girls as young as they could find (as they'd have no disease). They practiced cannibalism, and many great Japanese generals believed eating the liver of their enemies was good for them. Their whole plan for supplying their army was oftentimes "forage", ie steal from every peasant you can find. It is completely unsurprising to me that there are Japanese people today (like the aot author) that believe their conquering in the early 1900s was a good thing. Japanese imperialism goes incredibly deep, and nobody talks about it because America dropped the nukes on them, because we sent thousands of pounds of napalm on them before that (which ill argue was worse than the nukes because of the quantity of bombs we dropped, but nobody talks about that either.) the Japanese government knows this, and they absolutely use what America did to them in ww2 to make westerners (and their own people) forget about the atrocities they committed during their imperialism. It's good that people are aware of this when it comes to aot, but remember that this isnt just an isayama problem. This kind of thinking has long roots within the Japanese right.