Warning: Contains Spoilers for the Attack on Titan Anime. Also, Attack on Titan is an incredibly violent show. Proceed with caution.
The Season of Eastertide is well under way. For those non-Catholics who may be reading this, Eastertide is a kind of Anti-Lent: while during the 40 days of Lent Catholics (and Christians of many other denominations) prayed, fasted, and did penance as we looked forward to the death of Jesus on the Cross, we spend the 50 days of Eastertide (from Easter Sunday to Pentecost Sunday) in a spirit of joy and gratitude, reaping the benefits of our Lenten disciplines and enjoying a foretaste of the eternal life that awaits us beyond the boundary of this world, given freely to us by Our Risen Lord’s sacrifice.
On this past Sunday in the Traditional Roman Rite (Pre-Vatican 2), the second after Easter, the Church shifts slightly from the sheer joy and astonishment of the Resurrection to a reflection on the Crucifixion of Jesus, and what it has accomplished for us. From the Gospel Reading:
“At that time Jesus said to the Pharisees: I am the good Shepherd. The good Shepherd giveth his life for his sheep. But the hireling, and he that is not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming and leaveth the sheep and flieth: and the wolf catcheth and scattereth the sheep: and the hireling flieth, because he is a hireling, and he hath no care for the sheep. I am the good Shepherd: and I know Mine, and Mine know Me, as the Father knoweth Me, and I know the Father: and I lay down My life for My sheep. And other sheep I have that are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear My voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd” (John 10: 11-16).
The sheep “not of this fold” are traditionally interpreted as the Gentiles (non-Jews) who will come to follow Jesus after His Resurrection. It was not the first time Jesus preached on this theme: that history and heritage matter far less than actually following the moral law and being responsive to God, and that God is not the exclusive possession of a single bloodline or social class, but desires communion with all people everywhere, especially “those people” outside the bounds of polite society. His audience rarely took it well; at one point his fellow citizens of Nazareth responded by trying to throw Him off a cliff (Luke 4), and it was one of the reasons the Jewish authorities had Him murdered.
It was only 4 weeks ago that the Church’s Liturgy was utterly consumed with expectation of this murder. This was the start of Passiontide, the two weeks before Easter in which the Mass began to look more and more like a funeral. All the brightness and consolation displayed on the Sunday prior (Laetare Sunday) was gone, replaced by hymns and readings that spoke of the impending lynching of Our Lord on Golgotha. The Church’s Divine Office shifted from the stories of the Patriarchs and Moses to the writings of the prophet Jeramiah, whose ministry took place in the last years before Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians and was subject to intense persecution by his own people (not for nothing is he called the “Weeping Prophet”). Finally, all the statues of Our Lord and the saints in the church were covered up, which, if done well, gave them an added air of mystery and solemnity. If done poorly, it gave the appearance that we Catholics had started praying to Scooby-Doo villains
This ancient practice is a reference to the Gospel reading from Passion Sunday (the Sunday before Palm Sunday), in which our Lord, in response to the Pharisees attempting to stone Him, hid himself (John 8:46-59). This Gospel reading presents a sharp contrast to the Epistle read before it at the same Mass:
“Brethren: When Christ appeared as high priest of the good things to come, He entered once for all through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made by hands - that is, not of this creation, - nor again by virtue of blood of goats and calves, but by virtue of His own blood, into the Holies, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkled ashes of a heifer sanctify the unclean unto the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the Blood of Christ, Who through the Holy Spirit offered Himself unblemished unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? And this is why He is mediator of a new covenant, that whereas a death has taken place for redemption from the transgressions committed under the former covenant, they who have been called may receive eternal inheritance according to the promise, in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Heb 9:11-15).
In the one place, the author of Hebrews speaks of Christ entering the Temple (albeit a heavenly one). In the other place, John’s Gospel shows Christ being driven out of the Temple. Many of the Church Fathers have interpreted this as a symbol of the Old Covenant being abolished by the New, or else of Christ, as mentioned above, leaving the unfaithful Jewish authorities in favor of the Gentiles who desire to follow Him. While these are perfectly applicable, these readings seem to point to something else not often commented upon: how Christ is both at the center of the Cosmos and yet on the outskirts of society.
In other words, He is both inside and outside at the same time. This contrast is even more apparent on Palm Sunday, whose Mass begins with recounting how Jesus was welcomed by cheering crowds into Jerusalem and ends with Jesus being driven out of Jerusalem and crucified. Yet these two aspects are intertwined: His rejection, betrayal, and murder are the very things that cause His eventual triumph, and His Passion is a direct result of His Holiness offending the egos of the powerful. His Glory and His Shame cannot be separated, and indeed, are the same thing.
The Outside is like the Inside.
This is not a novel concept exclusive to Christianity. There are undertones of it in Judaism as well. For example, in the Old Testament, notorious sinners were taken outside the camp to be killed by stoning. Stoning was chosen as the method of execution not only because of its communal nature (society rejecting the sinner) but also because it allowed the executioners to avoid touching the condemned, sparing them from ritual defilement. And yet, if we look at the Tabernacle, and the Temple that followed it, we also find a place of sacred killing (albeit of animals rather than humans) and that the sacred objects therein were forbidden to be touched, under pain of death (touching the Ark, for example, carried the risk of being instantly struck dead by God). Ritual killing, in other words, is found both in the center and at the outskirts of Old Testament Society, and Holiness and Sin are treated with the same amount of caution.
The Outside is, in this respect, like the Inside.
Nor is this concept exclusive to the Judeo-Christian worldview. It pops up again and again in world mythologies. The gods of Greece may oppose the Titans, but the Titans are their parents; they are different branches of the same divine family, and their leaders, Zeus and Kronos, both got their positions by overthrowing their fathers.
In Norse Mythology, Odin leads the Asir gods in defending the world from the Jotunn, the giants who will destroy everything at Ragnarök. And yet Odin’s father/mother is Ymir, the first Jotunn, and Odin’s son and great champion Thor is half-Jotunn. (Loki, the leader of Jotun armies at Ragnarök, and Odin, the King of the Gods, might even have originally been the same person!) And in Japanese mythology, the lead gods of the Shinto Pantheon (Amaterasu the sun goddess, Tsukuyomi the moon god, and Susanoo the storm god) are born from the god Izanagi washing himself of his impurities after escaping the underworld. In short, all across the religious landscape of humanity, the Pure Ones are born from impurity. The principle of Order comes from the principle of Chaos. The gods and monsters are made of the same stuff.
The Outside is like the Inside.
This isn’t an original observation on my part. The great Rene Girard based his entire mimetic theory on, among other things, this observation. I’ve covered Girard and Mimetic theory before, especially in my article on In/Spectre a while back, as well as it’s modern political implications. The short version: Human beings acquire their desires by observing and copying the desires of others. (This can be seen in fashion trends and the beauty standards of any given time period, as well as why we all desire more of that otherwise worthless paper or digital code that we’ve collectively agreed is worth something). But human desires far exceed whatever desired thing is available, and as we imitate others in their desire for a thing, so we imitate their use of violence in obtaining the thing, until the thing is forgotten and our sole desire is to defeat the other person, or persons, who dared to want the thing we wanted.
Violence escalates in the community, with each party blaming the other and becoming more like the other, until the eyes of the crowd find someone, typically some kind of outsider, who is different enough from everyone else to draw attention to themselves. The crowd, as if by instinct, pins the blame for everything on the outsider, and the outsider is demonized and lynched. But this lynching acts as a cathartic release valve for the crowd, and the lynch mob comes to see their victim not only as the source of chaos and violence, but also of peace and order. The former criminal becomes a god, a supernatural being able to preserve or destroy their lives and community, and reenactments of the community’s founding murder are done in public ceremonies in order to prolong the effect of the original lynching. This, according to Girard, is the origin of archaic religion and sacrifice. Thus the devil becomes divine, the criminal becomes the lawgiver, the impure one becomes the standard of purity, and the descendants of the original lynch mob start to resemble and behave like the person their forefathers found so hateful as to be worthy of death.
The Outside becomes the Inside, and is the sole means for keeping the rest of the Outside at bay.
Which brings us to this week’s anime: Attack on Titan.
The story and world of this sublime dark fantasy anime is far too massive and complex to contain within a few paragraphs. One might as well try to summarize Game of Thrones in a couple sentences. The comparison is apt: both take place in alternate worlds that borrow liberally from Europe’s past. Both are centered around fearsome, mindless monsters kept at bay by mysterious walls, advancing on a humanity more interested in political infighting than in fighting off said monsters. Both involve ancient conspiracies, bloody battles, horrific betrayals, a lost princess, characters who have to deal with the consequences, and trauma, of their parent’s decisions, and ruling classes who care more about prestige, power, and arbitrary ideologies than the welfare of their own people.
In short, Attack on Titan is what Game of Thrones would be if George R.R. Martin was obsessed with early modern Germany instead of Medieval England, gave up the porn, and tried to be original instead of being such an obsessive tsundere for Tolkien.
The other main difference between Attack on Titan and Game of Thrones is that in Attack on Titan, the monsters are already here, and they’ve apparently already won. The world of Attack on Titan has been taken over by a mindless race of flesh-eating humanoid giants, called Titans. Think of them like giant zombies who not only do not decay, but heal from their wounds almost instantly. They seemingly possess no language or higher metal faculties, only an instinctual hunger for human flesh (They don’t even need to eat to survive; when they’ve filled their stomachs with human remains, they simply vomit them out so they can eat more humans). They can only be killed by injuring the nape of their necks, a feat that requires sharp swords, grappling hooks, a sort of steam powered jet pack, and immense skill with all of these tools to even have a slight chance of success.
The last known humans are holed up in an area roughly the size of Sweden, protected behind three massive circular walls. Naturally, the King and the wealthy elites live in behind the inmost wall, while the poorer citizens live closer to the outside. It is in one of these outer towns, Shiganshina, that we meet our main characters: Eren Jaeger, a hot headed boy who dreams of living beyond the walls, his stoic and deadly adopted sister, Mikasa Ackerman, and their bookish friend Armin Arlert.
Their relatively peaceful life is shattered when a massive Titan suddenly appears over the wall, kicking down the gate and allowing the Titans outside to swarm inside. Shortly after, a Titan encased in armor appears and runs through the inner gate, leaving the entire outer circle of the wall exposed to Titan attack. Though Erin and his friends are able to escape to the safety of the inner walls, many people are devoured by the Titans, including Eren’s mother. Erin’s father, a famous doctor named Grisha Jaeger, is missing and presumed dead, although Eren has a strange dream about him, in which his father gives him a key and injects him with a strange liquid, telling him that the key to defeating the Titans can be found in the basement of their old house. Eren wakes up to find the key in his grasp, but no sign that his father was ever there.
Eren, Mikasa, Armin, and many of the other refugees enlist in the military, hoping to reclaim their homes from the Titans and discover the secret hidden in the Jaeger basement. This is the overarching goal of our heroes through most of the series. To say there are complications along the way is a MASSIVE understatement.
Five years later, just as Eren and his friends complete their basic training, the Titans attack again, breaking into the city of Trost, just inside the second wall. During the attack, most of the trainees are brutally devoured, including Eren himself. But when all hope seems lost, a strange Titan enters the battlefield, one which ignores the humans and only attacks the Titans. Taking advantage of the distraction, Mikasa, Armin, and the other cadets escape. Just as they make it to safety, they see the strange Titan collapse from exhaustion, and a human figure emerges from the nape of its neck: Eren Jaeger.
Unbeknownst to anyone, including himself, Eren has the ability to turn into a Titan at will, which is how he survived being eaten. Rather than executing him as a monster, the military uses his power to successfully retake Trost from the Titans. But Eren is not the only Titan Shifter. It is soon revealed that some of his comrades also have this power. But unlike Eren, these Shifters come from outside the walls, and their goal is to kill everyone in the walls and capture Eren.
The idea of using an evil force’s own power against it is widespread in stories ancient and modern, from ancient creation myths to Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider. So it is not surprising to find it here, especially since it gives its author the opportunity to insert flesh and blood mecha fights into his story.
But the theme goes far deeper. During a Titan fight at the end of the first season, part of the innermost wall becomes damaged, allowing our heroes to see what lies inside:
The Walls, the Holy Walls worshiped by the institutional church, are made of Titans. The very thing that threatens to destroy humanity is the same thing that protects humanity. What’s more, they soon discover that all Titans, even the mindless ones, were once human beings. (This first hint of this horrifying revelation is the sudden presence of Titans within the second wall. Our heroes don’t find a breech in the wall, but they do find an empty village with no signs of battle, save a deformed Titan stuck in the ruins of a character’s old house that bears a strong resemblance to his mother.)
The Outside is like the Inside.
As our heroes attempt to unravel this mystery, their own government comes after them. It turns out that the King is just a puppet. The real royal family changed their name over 100 years ago, and have been hiding in plain sight as a minor noble family. In addition to being the power behind the throne, this family, the House of Reiss, possesses a Titan, the most powerful one of all, that they have passed down from generation to generation. In addition to the standard transform into a giant monster ability, this Titan, the Founding Titan, has the power to control other Titans and even to erase the memories of the entire population within the Walls. As to how their Titan, or any Titan is passed down: that required the prospective heir to be turned into a Titan and eat the current possessor, in a kind of blasphemous parody of the Eucharist.
At present, the Reiss Family no longer has the Founding Titan: it was stolen by Grisha Yeager, Eren’s father, himself a Titan Shifter from outside the Walls. As the Titans were attacking Shiganshina, Grisha devoured the Founding Titan and slaughtered all but one of the Royal Family, before passing his own Titan and the Founding Titan to Eren. The last surviving royal, Rod Reiss, seeks to capture Eren and feed him to his bastard daughter Historia (the afore mentioned lost princess, and one of Eren’s comrades).
The implications of this revelation are horrifying. For one, Eren ate his own dad! But even more disturbing, the entire narrative we’ve been following since the beginning, the world our heroes have been living in, is a total farce. There was no need to send brave soldiers outside the walls to fight the Titans. There was no need for Eren’s mother or any of the other innocent people to be slaughtered by the Titans. The Royal Family could have used the Founding Titan’s powers to put all the attacking Titans to sleep, have them march into the sea, or just lay down and die at any time. But they did not. Grisha even begged the former possessor of the Founding Titan to use her powers to stop the attack, and only attacked when she refused.
As to why, there is a catch to the Founding Titan. It’s full powers can only be used if its possessor is of royal blood. However, any person of royal lineage who inherits the Founding Titan is possessed by the First King, the founder of the Kingdom of the Walls. Struck with guilt for the many lives destroyed by his ancestor’s use of the Titans to conquer a massive empire, the First King gathered his wealth, his most loyal nobles, and their subjects onto a massive island called Paradis, building the three walls out of Titans and erasing the memories of his subjects. The First King believes that his people, called Eldians, have committed crimes so terrible that they and all of their descendants, including his own family, deserve to die, and he uses this belief to justify possessing his descendants for generations, using and abusing his subjects and living large off their labor, waiting for the day that the Titans outside the Walls break in and kill them all. (This is also why Rod Reiss wants his daughter to inherit the Founding Titan rather than taking it himself. He wants his “god” to return, but he’s not willing to give up his own mind to make it happen.)
Historia, however, refuses to eat Eren, and rebels against her father. In the end, Rod Reiss and his supporters are killed, Historia is made Queen, and the military takes over the government. This done, our heroes launch an assault to retake the outer wall from the Titan Shifters. After a hard fight, the wall is retaken and the Titan Shifters are driven off, and Eren at last reaches the basement of his old house. Inside, he discovers the truth about his father and the world beyond the walls.
The outside world has not, in fact, been overrun by Titans, but is populated by many different human nations. The most powerful of these is Marley, a nation conquered in ancient times by the Eldian Empire. Since the departure of the First King, the Marleyans have risen up and enslaved the Eldians the First King left behind. While the Marleyans cannot turn into Titans, they are more than happy to turn the Eldians in their midst into Titans and, without a trace of irony, use these Titans to forge an empire of their own. According to the Marleyans, Eldians are the spawn of the devil, and their Titan powers come from a bargain their ancestor Ymir made with the devil. They use this to justify using the Eldians as Titans, soldiers, and even suicide bombers against their enemies, while forcing them to live in ghettos and wear gold star armbands to distinguish them from “normal people.”
Imagine a world where the Nazis, instead of trying to exterminate the Jews, decided to weaponize them.
There are only two types of Eldians not treated this way in Marley. One is composed of those in the Warrior Program: those Eldians who volunteer to become Titan Shifters, fighting in in Marley’s wars until they die in battle or their own power kills them (in exactly 13 years), in return for their families becoming “honorary Marleyans.” The other group is the Tybur family, a noble house from the old Eldian Empire that sided with the Marleyan hero Helos, and the current holders of the War Hammer Titan. Officially, the Tybur family are private citizens who take no part in politics. In reality, however, the Tybur family are the real rulers of Marley. Like the Reiss family inside the walls, the Tyburs have adopted an ideology of self-hatred, using it to justify the oppression of their own people and hold on to their wealth and power (The current head of the family, Willy Tybur, knowing that he will probably be assassinated as he tries to convince the nations of the world to attack Paradis instead of Marley, chooses to make his appeal from within an Eldian Ghetto, so that only “Filthy Eldians” will be killed in an attack.)
In short, both Paradis and Marley are nations ruled from the shadows by self-hating Titan Shifters, who take their guilt out on their own people rather than themselves, and have no qualms about repeating the sins of their ancestors to maintain their own power.
The Outside is like the Inside.
Eren’s father Grisha was raised in a ghetto in Marley, and he and his wife Dina, the last royal descendant living outside of the walls, were part of an underground rebellion to throw off the Marleyans and restore the Eldian Empire. But they were sold out by their own son, Zeke Jaeger, who now leads the Warriors as the Beast Titan. Grisha was saved from being turned into a mindless Titan at the last minute by an Eldian spy and Titan shifter, who passed his own Titan on to Grisha before sending him to Paradis to steal the Founding Titan. (Grisha’s wife, unfortunately, become a mindless Titan, the very titan who kills Eren’s mother.)
Armed with the truth about the hostile outside world, Eren and the inhabitants of Paradis begin preparing for war, going so far as capturing Marleyan soldiers and using their technical skills to bring Paradis’s technology up to the level of every other nation. And even though some of these “Brave Volunteers” defect willingly and there is comparatively little violence involved in coercing the rest, the fact remains that the Eldians of Paradis are treating their Brave Volunteers in the same manner that the Marleyans treat the Eldians: relying on their special skills, but otherwise despising them as evil. The parallel becomes much more obvious when Eren does to Marley precisely what the Titan Shifters were trying to Paradis: He infiltrates their society with a false identity, uses a would-be friend as a tool, and assassinates the secret head of their government (Willey Tybur) and steals his family’s Titan, all while killing hundreds of civilians.
The Outside is like the Inside.
But Eren’s attack had another objective: to distract the Marleyans so that Zeke Jaeger can defect to Paradis. None of our heroes, save Eren, trust him, but they need him. It has to do with those Titans inside the Walls. The First King not only built the walls as a defense, but as a last ditch weapon. As he left for Paradis, he left behind a warning that if his kingdom were ever attacked, he would awaken the Titans in the Walls, and use them to exterminate all life on Earth. Of course, he never intended to follow through with that threat, and his successors, enslaved by his will, didn’t either. The threat was made so that, eventually, the outside world would have a reason to come and wipe his kingdom out. Still, this nuclear option is Paradis’s best hope for frightening more technologically advanced countries from attacking, but they cannot use it. Eren possesses the Founding Titan, and because he is not of royal blood, he cannot be possessed by the First King, but he also cannot use the Founding Titan’s powers to awake the Wall Titans and cause the “Rumbling.” The only work around is for Eren to touch a Titan with royal lineage, and Zeke is the only one left. (Queen Historia isn’t a Titan, and her friends are determined to keep it that way).
In return for his life, Zeke promises to help awaken enough of the Wall Titans to make a show of force, one not intended to exterminate the outside world, but scare them into making peace.
Unfortunately, both Zeke and Eren have their own agenda, and almost as soon as they return to Paradis they lead a coupe against the military government. Their followers, consisting of Brave Volunteers loyal to Zeke and Paradis soldiers loyal to Eren, call themselves Jaegerists, and they are just as fascist as Marley, even adopting a color coded armband system and planning world domination. But that is not Zeke’s plan. Rather, Zeke plans to use the power of the Founding Titan to sterilize every Eldian on the planet. Since only Eldians can become Titans, Eldians going extinct will end the Titans forever.
As of the end of Season 4 Part 1, this is where the story stands: Two half-brothers, born on opposite sides of a war, both Titan-Shifters exalted by their respective sides, betraying their nations and deceiving their friends (and possibly each other) in the name of solving all the world’s problems with genocide.
The Outside is like the Inside, and the man Eren Jaeger, the man we’ve followed since the beginning of the series, seems to have completed the best trauma victim turned idealistic hero turned straight-up villain arc of all time. At the very least, he’s doing it far better that Daenerys Targaryen did.
This lengthy plot summary only scratches the surface of the story, just enough for the sake of this analysis. As with any story of this size, there is something for everyone, whether you like Spider-Man style acrobatics, kaiju fights, political intrigue, excellently written characters dealing with their past and family legacies, or just haven’t recovered from the trauma of that first episode and need to see what happens next. A story of this scope, covering so many elements of life, begins before long to look a lot like life itself, not in spite of, but because of it’s fantasy setting. This kind of story triggers a reaction inside our deepest selves, pulling us in by hitting all, or most of, the same notes as any mythology or religious experience, leaving an impression that we’ve stumbled on to something important, some earth-shattering perspective on life that strikes at the deepest root of reality, even if we don’t have the words to describe it. What else could cause Attack on Titan’s many fans to have spent years digging to find deeper layers in the story, or drawing insightful parallels between this show and world history, Norse mythology, and Christianity?
However, I think the greatest element of Attack on Titan is that the characters, and we the audience with them, are continually discovering that they are not in the story they thought they were. Unlike Game of Thrones, which truthfully billed itself as a darker, edgier deconstruction of Tolkien, Attack on Titan goes from a story of brave humans vs. monsters, to humans and monsters vs. monsters, to humans vs. humans, to it’s current season where the monsters and humans are impossible to tell apart, and brave idealists on both sides have turned to despair, nihilistic violence, or both. It maps out what all of us have experienced at some point in our lives, in which our view of the world was challenged and overturned by the arrival of a Grisha Jaeger, bringing forbidden knowledge from outside our experience like a Prometheus or a fallen angel. (Grisha as a fallen angel would, appropriately, make Eren one of the Nephilim, human-angel hybrid giants from Genesis and the Books of Enoch, known for their power and violence.) We fear such circumstances, in which everything we knew about right and wrong comes undone and right answers seem impossible, and seeing beloved characters in such circumstances makes us hope all the more that they come through to a good end.
According to Girard, as I mentioned earlier, human societies have typically only come through such chaos via the murder of a universally despised scapegoat. But this no longer works in the modern world, and the reason is Jesus Christ. Most mythologies featuring murder accept without question that the victim had it coming, whether it be the Latin Remus, the Babylonian Tiamat, the Hindu Perusha, or the Nordic Ymir. In the Christian Gospels, however, the victim is innocent. One does not have to be a Christian to notice this, or to have their thinking affected by it. Indeed, once one hears the story of Christ, it becomes much harder, and eventually impossible, to fully buy into a scapegoating myth. (Notice, for instance, that the phrase “witch hunt” brings to mind not a band of brave adventurers, but an irrational lynch mob.) The Scapegoat mechanism only works if its victim is universally despised, if its slander is universally believed, and once it enters into our minds that the victim, any victim, might be innocent, the power of the scapegoating illusion is broken.
In terms of Attack on Titan, it is as though we are free of the domination of the Founding Titan, that all powerful false god demanding human victims, but because of that we also have no way of controlling the Titans in our midst. Likewise, we are free of those systems and patterns of behavior that encouraged violence, but we are also without the restraints on violence they provided. Knowledge is, unfortunately, not enough to curb our scapegoating habits and ideologies, even if they no longer work. That requires a different focal point, a figure that can unite all humankind as both origin and goal, who is like us and yet beyond us, who can absorb all our hatred and give in return only boundless compassion, to those both inside and outside our own communities.
In short, we need Jesus Christ. We need most especially to imitate His compassion on all and resignation to suffering without retaliation. This is a tall order, even if we have knowledge of Christ and the examples of His saints before us.
The world of Attack on Titan does not have this, or even a fantasy equivalent. What I mean is that there is no unifying figure for the characters to unite under.
All Eldians are descendants of Ymir, but this fact does not unite them with each other, but only nurtures hatred between those who demonize Ymir and those who do not. Eren and Zeke may have a common father, but their alliance is based not on their common heritage, but their common hatred of the Titans. What they do have, however, is the break down of whatever systems and ideologies they had in place for containing and/or monopolizing violence.
We see this in real time with the Kingdom of Paradis, but it’s well underway in Marley before the story begins. While Marley has spent the last century using the power of the Titans to build and maintain a world-wide empire, their remaining enemies have developed modern weapons capable of countering the Titans. Marley’s attempt to steal the Founding Titan was motivated by their own system breaking down.
We might liken this once again to modern scapegoating ideologies, whether political (Nazi, Communist, etc.) or religious, (ISIS and other such groups), who try to bring back the ancient power of the scapegoat by throwing more and more bodies into the sacrificial fire. But it cannot be recovered. We know too much.
According to Girard, (and I believe he is right), our only hope to avoid never ending violence and potential extinction is to embrace Jesus Christ as our model, and choose to love and forgive our enemies, even if it kills us. As Girard put it, “We must love each other, or we are all going to die.”
The Attack on Titan story has reached a point where even a “good” ending will require some form of genocide. Whether our world reaches the same point, is entirely up to us, and whether or not we choose to follow and imitate the Good Shepherd, who has laid down His life for us all, both inside and outside of our Walls.
If you like what I write here, be sure to check out my novel, Cain Son of Adam: A Gothic Tragedy, available in paperback and eBook formats on Amazon, and free to read on Kindle Unlimited.
Stay tuned to this space for more Catholic and Anime content. In the coming weeks, I’ll be giving the same treatment to Doki Doki Literature Club.
Thanks for reading, and God bless.