I am just reading the manga after all of this and I have to really impeach a lot of the points made ITT, In this essay I will expose what I think are some flaws and strength so far and keeping in mind the overall work.
As per the first volumes this manga
had a lot of heart, it had comedy relief, it had action, it had drama and it had mystery.
It is noticeable that, yes, there is a lot of foreshadowing and you can see that a lot of what is yet to come is mentioned: Maria, Sheena and Rose, for instance, with their respective faces referring to the daughters of the Eldian King are there from the beginning, subjects of Ymir are brought up quite early and so on.
I am really falling in love with this story even though I know what is coming my way, and I think it really is a shame.
These chapters are not chapters a sociopath or an autistic man would have written, even if corny at times, they are full of soul, genuinely funny and heartwarming at times.
The Sasha-Connie duo, Jean as The Rival or Levi as the jerkass, cold-hearted captain (Byakuya Kuchiki coming to mind) were working just fine and they all would have been very useful on a properly executed Hero's Journey, even if the Hero's Journey turned out being a Villain's Journey.
It is very clear to me that, while the story was meant to be on the darker side, it was always meant to be very much
not far off from the Jump gold standard. At times it does read like
Bleach, and I imagine a prospective reader twelve years ago would have been expecting just that sort of story, if a bit darker.
And I think, in hindsight, Isayama should have embraced these expectations. Shall the story go unabashedly crazy, as all shonen end up being, it would have been fun crazy though.
But I think this series was, unfortunately, a product of its time. Its time being that the Big 3 bar One Piece had collapsed (Bleach) and the other had barely managed to reach a dignified conclusion (Naruto), and everything Jump had tried to fill the gaps later with had been a failure. At the time, AoT had gotten exposure to western turbonormies through Netflix, and, at the time, western turbonormies were enthralled by Game of Thrones.
And, at the time, all of us thought Game of Thrones, and A Song of Ice and Fire, was top quality. That is me, and also you. All of us, there's no point in denying. At the time, we were all into the whole grimdark deconstruction fleet shit, and you can deny it all you want but that was the sign of times, and that was one of the reason AoT was touted as 'not like all the other shonen (therefore 'shonen' as a slur)
And I can perfectly see Isayama somehow being aware of these new expectations and believe he was above the tried and tested shonen formula, especially given the 'revolutionary' writing coming from the west, the 'failure' of traditional shonen trends, and himself being paraded as the new face of shonen.
Very few people prior to 2015 were able to predict that GRRM was a big hack and that the showrunners were even bigger hacks, and very few people were yet to have learned to beware of JJ Abrams Mystery Boxes. In 2014, there were still people vindicating
Lost and JJ Abrams as a genius! Emulating his mystery boxes was something aspiring writers at the time were combining with GRRM kill'em all strategy, and all of it, all of them who managed to bring out some form of media with these (terrible) examples had similar, now-predictable outcomes.
In fact, only people who had read
Game of Thrones back in the 90s had been able to somewhat predict how all of this was going to end, because they had been already acquainted with the fatman (and his friends)., they had already experienced years after years of waiting for increasingly disappointing installments while newcomers were all bingeing on the show and the books and some of them were starting to suspect it was never going to amount to anyhing.
But this is not an ASOIAF/GoT thread, so I won't go into the fall of that franchise.
The thing is that, I think, should Isayama have written AoT in 2001, it would have played out very different, because the zeitgeist was different. As he developed his series in Current Year, they are impregnated by Current Year shit, in this case deconstructivist, nihilist, grimdark shit.
But I honestly think some people in this thread has gone deranged over Isayama's supposed autism/sociopathy or his supposed political ideology, I quite honestly can't see any of this for the reasons explained above.
For me, this is just the story of a man trying to get a piece of the big cake by hopping on what he perceives is being popular (and that he, at the times, perceives as quality work as much of us did) while increasingly started to wrestle with both editorial pressures and the inevitable collapse of the world/characters/story (which is something that happens easily just by trying to write straightforward, tried and tested stories and becomes and inevitable catastrophe as one gets into GRRM/HBO trademark deconstructivist grimdark fuckery, as history shows time and time again)
Also, to all of you who have been pointing up how much of a sociopathic, absurdly violent, pointlessly aggressive Levi is (
@Secret Asshole @Bunny Tracks ) , I don't know if it's been mentioned in this thread, but Levi is based in
Rorschach from
Watchmen, so it's pretty much in-character.
The problem lies in that Isayama seems to have seen Rorschach as a cool, badass hero when he was at best a chaotic anti-villain. Again, he's far from the only one to have this take on Rorschach, but Levi's character, if he's not going to be softened like Byakuya was in Bleach (And no, the hilariously shitty childhood doesn't count, as it didn't for Rorschach), if he's playing straight the sort of character Rorschach is, then he should have been played as a villain or, at best, a very flawed anti-hero, not an out-and-out hero, lest it causes (one of the many) cognitive dissonance.
