Remember the Titans: An ‘Attack on Titan’ Reading List
February 06, 2025 at 04:30PM
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Despite coming nearly a century after the art form’s birth, Attack on Titan may be one of the most genre-defining anime Japan has produced. The original manga, about a war between humans and the colossal creatures who attack them, has some 140 million copies in circulation. The televised adaptation that began in 2013 expanded anime’s global audience. There’s even a stage musical—performed in Osaka and Tokyo in 2023 and New York City in 2024. And now, the series is officially a piece of history: Next week, the anime’s final two episodes, which first aired in 2023, arrive in movie theaters as a single film.
At the series’ outset, we’re told that the last remnants of humanity erected a network of concentric walls to fend off the Titans, and meet the three preteens living behind those walls who become our initial protagonists. That premise quickly proves to be knottier than expected, however; this is no simple humans-versus-megamonsters kaiju like Godzilla or Pacific Rim. While Hajime Isayama’s saga might begin as a dystopian fantasy, it soon twists into a speculative, discomfitingly realistic meditation on imperialism, war, genocide, hubris, and cyclical violence.
As any fan of the series knows well, Attack on Titan is full of complexity: confusing and clarifying, comforting and disturbing, seeped in cynicism and hope. The below pieces, when placed in conversation with the series, draw on Attack on Titan’s key themes, point to how it compares and contrasts to other kaiju texts, and lay bare the myriad ways Isayama’s illustrated world reflects our own.
Taking Solace in ‘Attack on Titan’ (Joy Hui Lin, Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2017)
In this piece, writer Joy Hui Lin offers one of the most succinct descriptions of Attack on Titan I’ve ever heard: “a death opera.” It is violent, dramatic, and at times protracted. However, the essay reminds us that “while . . . death comes to us all, how we live our lives still matters independent of how dire the circumstances are around us.” Life is cruel, but it is also beautiful. Taking solace in the latter is important, but not so much so that we escape reality at the expense of others. One of the most evocative aspects of Attack on Titan is how intensely the characters care about and protect one another. Lin reminds us that we owe it to each other to do the same:
The show and manga’s credo, perfectly encapsulating its fatalistic bent, is, “Life is cruel, but beautiful,” echoing the essential tenet of Buddhist philosophy that life is suffering. There’s no minimizing the traumas of this brutal world, and most importantly, no looking away. The temptation to stop paying attention to the suffering of others — from endangered immigrants here at home to civilian victims of drone strikes abroad, living their own post-apocalyptic nightmare thanks, again, to political decisions in the United States — to shield our own psyches is an act too complicit in abetting the injustices we strive to prevent.
The Secrets of Godzilla (Richard Brody, The New Yorker, April 2014)
Before the Titans, there was Godzilla. In this comparison of the famed kaiju as depicted in Japan versus its US-created incarnations, film critic Richard Brody points out how Godzilla has been decontextualized over the years. Hollywood’s versions sand down the creature’s origins as a critique of the nuclear arms race, the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan’s ensuing traumas. Godzilla has become increasingly iconic, sure, but not “for anything other than iconic value,” as Brody puts it, which is troublesome for kaiju everywhere:
The main problem is that Godzilla itself isn’t very interesting. The monster is a principle of pure destruction: it’s not feeding on human flesh or farm animals or asphalt or electricity; it’s just laying waste to whatever’s in its path, stomping and swatting and smashing and exhaling a fiery dragon breath for the sheer hell of it. In theory, the idea of a nihilistic monster is as good as the idea of a reflective one, a tormented one, or a hungry one—provided that it’s developed. Godzilla, the lord of the land and sea, has no objective, no goal, no guiding principle; it has been jolted from its somnolence, its habitat has been despoiled, and now it despoils ours. Godzilla is a premise, a device, and a look, but not a being; for all its violence, it’s essentially static.
Unlike Brody’s characterization of Godzilla, the Titans in Attack on Titan are fully developed and dualistic, making for a far more interesting monster. Isayama’s Titans are nonhuman creatures bringing about pure destruction, but they are also humans feeding on fellow human flesh. They are equal parts victim and perpetrator. Their mindless nihilism isn’t for the love of violence; they are bred, generation after generation, to be a ruling empire’s weapons of war akin to the atomic bomb. While Godzilla might be static, the Titans are provocatively unstable—and the legacy of kaiju media is surely better off because of it.
How Reading and the Thirst for Knowledge is at the Heart of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Heather Cass White, Literary Hub, August 2021)
It’s certainly not hard to argue that Victor Frankenstein is more of a monster than the monster that he created out of corpses and chemicals. Heather Cass White considers the hubris of Frankenstein’s unrestrained pursuit of knowledge and power—a pursuit that Attack on Titan’s main character, Eren, is intimately familiar with. In her analysis, White points out how popular reimaginations of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel often remove the monster’s literacy, instead portraying a mumbling, thoughtless creature. Whereas the Hollywood monster is simply a monster, “frightening, chaotic, and destructive,” Shelley’s version is a match for the doctor’s intellect, and thus a villain: monstrous, yes, but “also, inevitably, seductive.” In delineating the distinction, White’s writing sounds like she could be describing Eren:
A monster and a villain both might kill you, but a villain may convert you to his cause first. A villain is usually just a step away from being a story’s hero. A monster’s muteness can also evoke our pity, allowing us, in conquering it, the possibility of a double victory: defeating a monster eliminates an external threat, while pitying it restores our internal sense of power that fear takes away. Monsters can be made into pets—villains cannot. Frankenstein’s Creature, in the grunting, illiterate form the movies have given him, is less menacing to our egotism than the creature Shelley imagined. Once that creature can tell his own story—once he knows himself as having a story to tell—he is lost to us as a pure object of pity or terror. He is a self without reference to us at all.
Similar to Victor Frankenstein, Eren becomes exceedingly consumed by his own ego and goals for retribution, ultimately leading to his demise. But Eren also contains shades of Shelley’s villainous monster; Isayama simply structures his story so that the audience gets to know Eren the human before we are confronted with Eren the Titan. As White notes, “a villain is usually just a step away from being a story’s hero.” First, Eren is our hero, then he becomes our villain—Frankenstein and his monster all at once.
Megan Thee Stallion and Anime – Or, the Male Gatekeeping of Fandom Spaces (Stitch, Teen Vogue, November 2020)
If the Titans needed a public-relations makeover, they could do worse than to tap artist Megan Thee Stallion to lead the cause. “I’m the female Titan, I’m steppin’ on bitches,” she raps on GloRilla’s song “Wanna Be.” The moral complexities of stomping through cities suddenly fade away when Megan ushers in Hot Kaiju Summer.
More seriously, though, Megan Thee Stallion has long made her love for anime and manga known over the years. If cosplaying characters or referencing manga in her songs weren’t enough evidence of this, a few months after her collaboration with GloRilla, Meg dubbed herself the “Otaku Hot Girl” with the release of her third studio album of the same name—otaku meaning a passionate consumer of anime, manga, and video games.
In 2020, after one of her many times cosplaying—this time as Kakegurui from the eponymous manga series—Megan received both praise and hate. In this op-ed essay, writer Stitch confronts the latter, which largely came in the form of men claiming that Megan’s interest in anime was just for clout. Stitch confronts those that cast doubt on Megan’s sincerity with a simple, precise question: “When someone says, ‘she only cares about anime to get us to care about her,” who exactly is ‘us’?” The answer, Stitch notes, clearly isn’t nerdy Black women like Megan:
Every single time that folks are reminded that Black women, in particular, may like nerdy things like anime, a rush of people trying to defend “their” thing from outsiders quickly follows. Fear of “fake geek girls” comes from an inability to share “your” toys with people you think don’t deserve them. In the case of Megan and other Black girl anime fans across the internet, it’s the belief that they visibly don’t belong to the fandom spaces; that there’s only so much oxygen in the fandom, and that anyone who isn’t like you is wasting a precious resource. To men, and some women with internalized misogyny and what I like to call Lone Geek Girl syndrome, Black girl nerds are the ultimate “fake geek girls” because we really don’t look like the ideal image of anime fans in the United States. I know this because I lived it.
Bunker Down (Emily Harnett, The Baffler, October 2024)
Perhaps one of the most apropos parallels to Isayama’s Titans is the fact that, from 1959 to 2005, the US possessed an arsenal of expendable rockets known as the Titan family. Until 1987, the series’ first two versions, the Titan I and II, were a part of the Air Force’s intercontinental ballistic missile fleet. In this essay, writer Emily Harnett visits site 373-4 in Searcy, Arkansas, a missile silo that housed one of the 54 Titan II missiles launched by the US from 1963 to 1987 and where, in 1965, a fire turned the silo into the site of the most lethal missile facility accident in US history, killing 53 men.
At the start of Attack on Titan, the Titans’s origins are unknown—all that the characters do know is the fear that the Titans induce as they approach, and the destruction that they leave in their wake. The truth about the US’s Cold War-era missile silos is similarly evasive; as Harnett writes, they are not available on public maps, laying fertile ground for capitalism to step in and revise history as it pleases:
But disappearance isn’t the right word to describe the vanishing of places that were never quite visible to the public in the first place. Even when the sites were active, Soviet intelligence often had a more precise idea of where America’s land-based missiles were stationed than many of the people who lived alongside them. That irony points to the difficulty of memorializing a conflict that spanned forty years and yet had no active front—a war whose operations were undertaken in stealth or in secret. In recent years, a number of ventures have arisen that would seem to address this difficulty by offering up their own interpretations of America’s Cold War past. Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton has recently secured congressional approval to establish a National Cold War Center in his home state, at the former Eaker Air Force Base, where two B-52 bombers were placed on airborne alert during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In that same state, you can now book a $500-a-night stay at Titan Ranch, a Titan II silo that has been converted into a luxury Airbnb.
The commercialization of former Titan silos glosses over their darker pasts, turning the realities of nuclear warfare into spectacle. Isayama’s Titans don’t evoke the missile fleet in name or destruction only; in keeping with kaiju convention, Attack on Titan turns nuclear warfare into spectacle. Where the likes of Titan Ranch and Tom Cotton’s museum attempt to revise the past, however, Attack on Titan aims to confront and critique it.
Both atomic attractions seem poised to participate in a venerable tradition: for more than half a century, Americans have engaged with the nuclear era primarily via triumphalist kitsch and cheap spectacle. Once, Vegas showgirls posed for photo shoots as “Miss Atomic Bomb”; today, influencers camp out in missile silos for clout. If all goes according to plan, the National Cold War Center will eventually be, in Cotton’s words, “a boon to local tourism”; its website promises “an immersive and authoritative experience.” It seems doubtful, however, that either the museum or Titan Ranch will capture the legacy of the state’s nuclear era as honestly as the ghost stories of the Titan II missileers. However apocryphal or embellished, their accounts are a reminder that the most immediate danger that Arkansans faced during the Cold War was not a strike launched from overseas but the Titan II missile itself.
Aaron Boehmer is a writer from St. Louis, Missouri. His work has also appeared in Texas Monthly, Literary Hub, The Nation, and Eater, among others.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/06/attack-on-titan-reading-list/
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