Welcome back! Prepare yourself! Hunker behind these walls and smell that fascist smell. It’s time for another episode of Attack on Titan. This is the part where I let you know that I am very much not a regular anime watcher, but this strange, at times horrifying show has really grabbed my imagination and never let go. We are continuing on through the third season, as part of our 2020 Summer TV Binge. Let’s get into it! Buckle up your Omni-Directional Movement gear and lets swoop into Attack on Titan season 3, episode 11, ‘Bystander.”
1. Queen Dorkus
Before we move on to the main event, this episode checks in with Queen Krista/Historia. And the reviews are glowing. There’s a long scene where her former comrades (now subordinates) talk about what she’s like as queen: angelic. She spends her days playing with orphans and refugees. There’s a lot of fiction about the nuances of leadership (and indeed, this story has gone there on occasion) but that’s not what’s important to Queen Historia’s reign. She’s going to approach every decision with the goal of decency, and that’s going to be her guide. I don’t know what’s going to happen when she meets back up with her ex-girlfriend though. That sounds like good drama.
2. A tool for tyrants
Meanwhile, Eren has been hard at work mastering his titan powers. Between his hardening abilities and the crystals in the cavern, new titan fightin’ technology is now possible. That’s what happens when you mix a weird superpower, a magical resource and Hange Zoe, the love of my life. So what do they do with all of this new swag? They use it to build a titan gigantic titan guillotine. Baller move.
There’s also one of those quick scenes the show likes to do to disseminate a lot of information very quickly. Through it we learn that the army has been purged and everyone left is now part of the Survey Corps. This leads to an interesting confrontation between Jean and a fellow graduate of the 104th training corp. The loudmouth starts coming at Jean, but even he is forced to admit there’s something different about the Levi squad. They’ve just been through… whatever it is.
3. The shadow of Shadis
Commandant Keith Shadis is back! You remember Keith, he was the sort of cliched drill instructor who originally trained our favorite squad. Much like the last episode belonged to Kenny, this is mostly a Keith episode. It’s told largely in flashbacks, which are pretty great. The animated ‘cinematography’ is still excellent. I especially like a shot of two shadows moving across the grass. In live action when you get a shot like this, you’ve got to figure that someone with a good eye noticed how the light was catching the actors. Here, it had to completely come from someone’s imagination.
And Keith knew Eren’s parents! In fact, he was the one who discovered Grisha Yaeger wandering in from outside the walls, much like Ymir did. From the show so far, it is clear that there is some sort of society that exists outside the walls (and I assume this has been deeply explored in the manga) but it is all so very mysterious. Grisha gives off the vibe that he is undercover- he’s a little too flattering of the Survey Corp- but Keith never really picks up on it.
And I really enjoying how Keith’s weird look slowly comes to be. His beard gets pointier and his eyes get more sunken with every time jump. It’s little artistic touches like that which make me admire the craft of this show so much.
4. The space between spaces
Like any good flashback sequence, we fill in a lot of holes in the story. Some are welcome but unnecessary, like seeing how Grisha became a trusted doctor or how he met his wife (and Eren’s mom RIP) Carla. But some of them are earth shattering. That early episode when Eren mastered the busted ODM gear? Keith sabotaged it! He was trying to fulfill a promise he made to Grisha to “leave Eren out of it.”
The biggest reveal though is a return to one of the most mysterious scenes in the series. In one of the earliest episodes of the series we saw Grisha inject Eren with… something. It was a nightmarish scene, almost unreal which makes sense given Eren’s incomprehensible trauma. Through the series so far we’ve been able to piece together that the injection was titan juice, and that this is a thing that happens sometimes. But now we know that Grisha led Eren away, and that it was part of his master plan. I guess in hindsight we didn’t learn too much, but returning to that scene helps place us in the timeline and the scene had the requisite impact.
Continued below5. Don’t wanna be a passerby
I don’t necessarily plan to use my last though every week to talk about fascism and politics, but it may happen organically. Specifically, I am fascinated by the main theme of the episode, which I think is best articulated by Keith Shadis himself: “Special people exist, I just realized I wasn’t one of them.” I’ve read a bit of the manga (but never to this point) and I think the politics of Hajime Isayama are pretty well documented. He paints a lot of fascist imagery really beautifully, and lovingly references a lot of Japanese (and sometimes German) World War II era fascists. The classic kind, who were into swastikas. (And people sometimes like to @ me when I mention that, but it is very well documented and textual. We can have a conversation about how those themes are expressed, but I am not interested in someone telling me they are not there).
The thing is, my hot take has always been that Attack on Titan is essentially the anime equivalent of Starship Troopers. The novel, by Robert Heinlein, has always been a fascist text. But when put in the hands of holocaust survivor Paul Verhoeven, the movie adaptation became anti-fascist. So even as Keith paints the world into followers and ubermensch, the show has a lot of compassion for him. Hange Zoe calls him a coward in so many words, but they look like a dick. Eren shows compassion, and it’s a really good look on him. As always, the show illustrates what fascist thinking looks like, but I think ultimately it is a message about love and understanding. Keith isn’t lesser than Eren, but he is a man who encountered a crisis and for that he deserves support, not condemnation. The makers of this anime understand that and as always, I think there’s a lot of nuance in how this world is presented.
