Why Attack On Titan Drew Inspiration From Real History
"Attack on Titan" is one of the biggest anime of the past decade, a show that broke into the mainstream nearly from the beginning, trending on social media multiple times with each new episode. It even inspired Alex Garland's latest film. Now, the story is finally coming to an end — kind of.
Still, it is easy to see why the show became so popular. From the beginning, it offered a post-apocalyptic world with tons of spooky monsters in the vein of "The Walking Dead," with horrific imagery, lots of gory action, and plenty of horror, but the show also started introducing human elements, slowly leaving its titular titans behind in favor of a more complex, and compelling narrative. The result was arguably the defining anime of its generation.
And yet, "Attack on Titan" has slowly but surely introduced real-world parallels and inspirations, which caused lots of controversy because of its implications. The manga (and its anime adaptation) constantly appropriated imagery and lexicon from our world, particularly from WWII and the Holocaust. These make any attempt at trying to draw parallels between the story of Eldia and Marley's conflict and our world rather problematic. Whether thinking the show is talking about Jewish people, Germany, or even Japan, eventually, you reach a point where any comparison inevitably becomes bigoted and problematic, which is often interpreted as the manga condoning this behavior.
For better and worse, real-world imagery and parallels are intrinsic to "Attack on Titan," but why?
Understanding context without explaining
During an interview with Crunchyroll, manga creator Hajime Isayama talked about being inspired by real history when crafting the world of "Attack on Titan." According to the author, "where there's a hint of truth, it makes a story very believable."
"So when I came up with the design of the world view—for example, the world view map, I kind of flipped it from the real-life world map to something similar, but different. People would be able to understand the context without explaining everything. For example, the Eldian and Marleyans. They're really kind of similar to what the Germanic people and Romans went through 2,000 years ago. That's kind of the unsaid rules that I keep in my stories."
This makes a fair amount of sense. As mentioned, there is not one direct, clean-cut allegory to our world in the show — at most, there is an appropriation of imagery that lets the audience fill in blanks and jump to conclusions based on the use of said symbols and their implications in our reality. But what the use of real imagery does is help the audience understand how the world of "Attack on Titan" works without the need for even more exposition than there already is.
Granted, this is far from perfect, and Isayama's comments about being inspired by the Roman Empire don't really explain the appropriation of Holocaust imagery — which at best feels like a much more insensitive version of Hideaki Anno using Christian imagery because he thought it looked cool — and at worst an antisemitic allegory.
What does save "Attack on Titan" is that Isayama works double time to make sure the story never condones what its imagery may imply. For all the talk about fascism and imperialism, the show couldn't be more anti-war, and anti-fascism. The show works, not because of its imagery, but in spite of it.