Small things first: Japan could give two shits about its overseas markets. As far as they're concerned, any success they have outside of Japan is a happy accident they barely have anything to do with.
To the main point: I
seriously think the people I've interacted with in this thread are hyperfixated with obvious WWII allusions that they aren't taking in the gestalt in which said references participate. I've mostly read the manga in isolation so I may be generally uninitiated, but this unironic circling back to the Jew/Nazi dynamics nettles me.
I can recognize that the treatment of Eldians resembles that of the German Jews inasmuch as they were put into ghettos and have to wear armbands that distinguish them as a scapegoat race, I really can. I can recognize that the Eldians being put on ɹɐɔsɐƃɐpɐW is a minor reference to the Nazis' initial plans to ship them off there. But that's where the similarities end and at that point we're talking the appropriation of aesthetics and superficial details--
unless you're willing to argue that Isayama is
actually creating a WWII fanfic where he has to necessarily justify Jewish oppression as to equalize sympathy given to both Eldians (the Jews) and Marleyans (the Nazis) by making it so that the former were
acktually an exceedingly brutal world superpower that the latter barely overturned and so while they treat the former poorly, what they do is understandable in the context of war.
That would have lessened the sympathy the reader had for the Eldians, except for the fact we're necessarily made to empathize with the Eldians because we largely don't get fed Eldia's plight through its geopolitics, but through individuals with decidedly smaller or simpler ambitions struggling against the forces of said geopolitics just so they can live their lives. That, and the narrative blatantly argues that said people who had no hands in said geopolitics ought not be condemned to suffer because of them.
Now I'm still here with my dick in my hand trying to figure out the
functional resemblance that the Eldians have to the Jews beyond the fact that they were oppressed at all...
especially since they used to be the oppressors. At what point did the Jews dominate anything beyond the Levant
by themselves? I don't remember the Jews packing any kind of war-winning firepower truly of their own since the
menorah. The Jews weren't being kept in ghettos because of some genetic superfactor Hitler wanted to cultivate for national security. The propaganda against Eldia was made
after what was effectively a Marleyan victory in order to keep Eldians from being inspired to rebel, but the
Dolchstoßlegende was concocted after Germany's
loss in WWI in order to cope with the fact that Germany sucked. The Jews existed in Europe largely as a product of the Jewish diaspora following the Bar Kochba revolt and there were no attempts to suppress that history or any of their other history, but the Marleyan Eldians were hardly privy to even their own history due to getting mind-wiped by their king and propagandaized by Marley. If you put the history of the Jews and the narrative of the Eldians side-by-side,
how much do they rhyme?
My issue isn't that the insistence in question touts an alleged 0.6:1 allegory for the German Reich-- it's that the resemblance is like, 0.05:1. It's not the fucking armbands and ghettos that make a Jewish allegory when there's so much more characterization (and Jewish history) beyond that.
If I wrote a story about a people who were forced into ghettos and had to wear self-identification to denote their race which is reviled by the rest of the populace, but they were all of a kingdom that until two years ago was an effective world hegemon, are you going to tell me that those people are supposed to be Jews? They take
cues from Jews, but they're not Jews, because nearly everything that makes the Jews "the Jews", in all the historical contexts in which they've existed, is not alluded to in the historical construction of the Eldians. If you think that they are, you're forcing a circular peg in a large star-shaped hole.
To illustrate what I
do think of when I think of allegory:
- The Chronicles of Narnia has animal Jesus with the narrative arc of actual Jesus.
- Animal Farm clearly details the issue of instituting communism even from the best of intentions using the Bolshevik Revolution as a narrative framework onto which farm animals are superimposed.
- The Crucible colors a critique of McCarthyism with the color palette of the Salem witch trials.
- 1984 deliberately patterns its depicted society after Stalinist Russia for the purposes of its critique.
- The allegory of the cave uses sunlight to signify knowledge and the cave to signify a low-information environment to demonstrate the alienation that knowledge can cause as well as how the value of and the status conferred by revolutionary knowledge can be lost on those that haven't the means to interpret it or its signs.
Attack on Titan is a war allegory, all right-- but it's not an allegory for specifically WWII's European theatre. For that, you'd have to assume that Isayama and/or his crew are either failing so hard at making such an allegory that whether or not they're trying is immaterial, or they're justifying the mistreatment of Jews under Hitler through a fanfic that ascribes a slew of fundamental properties to the Jews (e.g. the presence of a world superpower with a unique weapon) that they never had, necessarily meaning that he's describing a people that are essentially not Jews.