Who is the True Enemy of Attack on Titan?

I mean even on you computer they're given under who do you think the real enemy is this question is posed in episode 15 of the first season of attack on Titan and while within the context of the scene the question is adequate it struck me as strange at the time the phrase is so focused on that I was certain that author Hajime isayama wanted to pose it to the reader / viewer as well but what would a question like that even mean in a series like attack on Titan after all it's just a story of humans fighting giant zombies it should be obvious that the Titans are the enemy right well if you have kept up with a series in any capacity past season one then you might know that things sure have changed so much so that now in 2019 it's very much an interesting question to try and answer so join me and let's talk about the true enemy of attack on Titan the concept of the enemy starts out deceptively simple in attack on Titan we are presented with a world overrun by otherworldly mindless monsters focused on devouring humanity this setup immediately creates an expectation our minds as survival stories have been done to death most of us have developed mental heuristics to quickly predict what's gonna happen humanity will work towards overcoming its differences and rally together in the name of survival and from this prediction alone the question of who the enemy is seems pretty superfluous however this is a yama we're talking about so inevitably we got bamboozled indeed the simplistic setup doesn't stick around very long as it is quickly revealed that our main character Aaron is in fact a Titan himself this reveal immediately sets off a change in a story's relation with the concept of the enemy Aaron's transformation alongside conflicting information regarding a Titans and their biology causes the Titans to turn from relatively straightforward evil beasts to a mysterious almost untanned able force what are they and what do they want why do they eat humans if they just vomit them out anyway as the questions start piling up the Titans become less of a malicious faction and more of a mystery to be solved meanwhile the fact that Aaron can transform into one blurs the lines between humans and Titans further muddling who exactly the enemy is supposed to be once the female Titan appears the concept is made slightly clearer it together with the armored and colossal Titans now presents the enemy factions the shifters hell-bent on the eradication of humanity for yet unknown reasons and while Aaron being able to shift does still make this way less clear-cut than the Titans were at the beginning the narrative starts focusing on the shifters as the main threat however this again ends up being complicated this starts as early as the end of the female Titan arc as ice tears flow before Aaron can devour her through this ISA yama begins implanting the idea that the misery caused by the shifters isn't done out of a malicious evil but perhaps due to more difficult reasons at the same time the series begins expanding on the idea that humanity isn't as united as it should be with the military police being a bunch of currents and the church hiding vital information slowly but surely the Titans get sprinkled in an empathetic light while the seeds of suspicion get planted within humanity itself the story doubles down on this as now shifters begin popping up left and right with people like Raina comrades-in-arms turning out to be the enemy conspiring with the ever elusive Beast Titan to do what at this point the questions begin piling up with no real answers in sight at the same time the perspective of humanity is even further put into question the government is corrupt a human can control the titans and the royal family has been mined wiping the populace for years it's in this unsure uncertain atmosphere that our protagonist set out into shegaon China for the supposedly final clash with the supposed enemy and this does play out like an all-out battle for survival between good and evil that being said we still get glimpses into the complicated nature of the Warriors and their mission and the conflicting feelings they have on their situation nevertheless the battle is won and we of course get the iconic reveal in the basement this of course further complicates the question of the enemy as now the world is expanded infinitely and with it the enemy as well now it's not a bunch of mindless monsters nor is it a small faction of shifters instead it's the entire nation of Majerle alongside many other countries who would prefer seeing the aliens wiped out now this is as far as the anime has gone with the end of season 3 and before we enter the forbidden territory of the manga I would like to quickly summarize how the idea of the enemy has worked thus far isayama has up to this point continuously expanded the horizon of what the enemy actually is and with it continued to put into question the motives and mechanics of said enemy with something like the Titans at least the way they are initially presented you don't really need much of a motive as it is the quote advantage of using monsters as enemies however because of the introduction of shifters the question of motivation becomes more urgent and with it things get complicated what do they want what's their motive and is it justified you couldn't really ask these questions regarding pure Titans however even with these questions the enemy is still at least somewhat present while Ryan and battled struggles do put things into a bit of a conflicting perspective the glimpse of Marley that we see through gurcius memories is by and large the glimpse of an immensely powerful and generally malicious enemy between the oppression of aliens and the authoritarian military abuse of power it's pretty clear at this point that the bad guys are the marlins so while questions do exist this section of the story has mostly focused on expanding the idea of the enemy starting with a simple Titan threat going into a more organized group of shifters and finally revealing a full-on nation of opposing forces and what does ISA yama do next well this is where we part ways with the anime onlys as we head into major spoiler territory this is the only warning you'll get we good good as the story enters the Marly Ark we the readers are put into a similar situation as the young warriors infiltrating the walls we are entering enemy territory expecting to be subjected to all the cruelty we know they are capable of we are ready to see the true Devils of this story but that simply doesn't happen instead just like Rayna and his gang we witness something even more shocking humans we expected monsters yet what we get is a country filled with people just trying to live out their lives in relative peace and quiet even the government while largely corrupt and cruel houses some people who only want to live without any malicious intent in short Marley isn't really all that much different from the populace inside the walls there is good and bad on both sides oppression and propaganda in both regimes and just as this reality starts dawning on us Eren attacks libero slaughters countless innocent civilians and provokes a large-scale conflict with Marley for his own agenda surely after Aaron betrays the island of parody and escapes to follow his own plans with the help of Zeke and the Jaeger ists so now we have learned that our enemy is not as homogeneously evil as we'd like them to be while our protagonist has committed a war crime and has basically become an antihero and it is in this conundrum where we find the answer to evans question who is the real enemy well as things stand humanity's true enemy is humanity itself and that is brilliant we thanks for knowledge of common storytelling expect the central antagonistic force to appear as one person or group this is how it usually is especially in Shonen manga as long as there is a bad guy that our hero can punch in the face we can cheer them on and watch as all the problems are solved but this is of course incredibly naive just like Aaron in the earlier seasons we cling to the idea that there must be a palpable enemy that our protagonists can destroy in order to bring peace and all that but attack on Titan doesn't accommodate for that and instead takes a more complex approach the suffering scene in the series isn't the result of some evil master plan concocted by a malicious super villain nor is it the consequence of mindless beasts instead the true perpetrator of this world is humanity and its never-ending struggle for survival and desire for competition the aliens just want to survive and the Marlins just want to feel safe but because of greed power hunger apathy and selfishness on both sides the situation continuously escalates into cruelty and violence no one party here is inherently fundamentally evil but because of the historic circumstances and the states of their ruling organs they are thrown into pain and misery time and time again not because of any one villain but because of humanity's infinite desire to survive at the cost of others attack on titan was never a story about good versus evil the irony here is that even though the start of the series obscures many things the original set up already establishes that the idea of a central villain is something we as the audience began attaching to the series as the shifters started popping up however this misled us as the story began not as a conflict between hero and villain but instead as a tale about survival but instead of humanity trying to survive the titan onslaught the story reveals itself to have been about humans trying to survive alongside and against each other and the reason this is brilliant is because it as a result gives us a very similar perspective as Aaron our simplistic idea of how good and bad are supposed to work in a story like this get dissolved and destroyed bit by bit as the reveals start piling up until we realize that we were just like Aaron trying to oversimplify an incredibly complex situation in order to rationalize our protagonists fighting against the enemy we wanted a villain that we can hate but instead we got people the aliens are certainly not in the wrong for just wanting to live without oppression and the Marlins aren't wrong to fear the resurgence of a genocidal Empire in possession of an apocalyptic weapon but because of ignorance division blind hostility and the absolute refusal to actually talk and communicate both of these parties find themselves in a continuously perpetuated state of conflict and suffering which in turn breeds more rage and cruelty this has gone on for so long for as long as humanity has existed that people are just chained by it there is no getting out of it anymore both Berthold and Marcos say as much there was nothing any of us could have done we haven't even had the chance to talk things out and I find that this not only works incredibly well in immersing the reader as we experience all these steps gradually but it also manages to parallel the real world as well there isn't one central villain in real life that we can defeat to make everything fine and dandy and equally the conflict of attack on titan echoes this by not having one single enemy that one can defeat to solve every problem so in the struggle of the Titans against the humans it turns out that ironically the humans were both the monsters and its own greatest enemy the hell everyone is trapped in is a hell of humanities making a result of continuous apathy and selfishness of ignorance and small-mindedness of the vision and lies the real enemy wasn't the Titans to shifters and definitely not Aaron none of this happened because of one person or party rather it happened because humanity and the world it lives in are just that cruel thank you for watching subscribe if you haven't ring the bells so you can see when I upload [ __ ] take care and be safe bye bye

Channel: Oceaniz

Views: 68,776

Rating: 4.9131727 out of 5

Keywords: Attack On Titan, Shingeki No Kyojin, Eren Yaeger, Zeke, Reiner, Ymir, Grisha, Founding Titan, Marley, Enemy, Villain, Time

Id: imvl_KnYclU

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 12 2019