Summer is long behind us, but the Multiversity Summer TV Binge continues! Although I’ve never been what you would call an anime person, I’m a huge fan of Attack on Titan. I first fell in love with the subtitled version of the show, so I thought it would be fun to revisit the dubbed version. Watch along with me, but be warned, here be spoilers!
1. Eren is a novice
We start with some necessary exposition, as Erwin and Hange Zoe discuss what they know and what they assume about titan shifters. Different shifters have different abilities. The Female Titan summoned a horde of titans to devour her; Eren couldn’t do that. Titan shifting is a skill, and Eren is just a novice. What else can she do that he can’t?
Establishing an intelligence behind the titan threat changes the entire conflict. For all of its fantastical weirdness, Attack on Titan is a zombie story. It’s about people besieged by unstoppable and endless monsters who hunger for their flesh. Evildoers with a plan is a total perspective shift. Imagine if it was revealed that there was a mastermind behind the zombies on The Walking Dead.
2. “I have faith in the Levi squad!”
The whole lesson Eren has been learning in this set of episodes is to trust his team. He was a rogue agent, and a rogue titan, an angry kid with a lust for violence and vengeance. Now he’s got to learn to be a member of a professional squad. So when the traitor turns back into the Female Titan, they tell him to run, they’ve got this. He listens. It… does not work out.
Every member of his squad (except Levi, who is elsewhere) are killed. Brutally, violently, graphically. They’re incredibly badass at first. They work together to blind the Female Titan by cutting out her eyes, then they slice away at her shoulder muscles and her arms to gain the advantage. But we already established that the Female Titan is intelligent and capable of some dirty tricks. She channels her healing power into regrowing just one eye at twice the speed, and she kills everyone, until the forest is littered with their bent and broken bodies. Eren turns around, draws his own blood and…
3. LET THEM FIGHT
We get the best fight this series has ever done. I’m in awe. There’s little I can say that could capture the beautiful brutality of two giant monsters having an epic kung fu battle in a redwood forest, so I’m going to leave it to the esteemed Ken Watanabe:
4. Levi’s dead Kristen Stewart eyes
The fight is peppered with haunting images of Levi finding each of his squad members dead. The animation here is on point. Levi isn’t entirely stony and without emotion, but he doesn’t have time to cry or mourn. He looks like he accepts that he lives a dangerous life, but cannot fathom that all of his friends, who he trained himself, all were killed in one operation gone wrong. Also, we’ve all noticed that Levi looks exactly like Kristen Stewart, right?
5. Marvelous titan hunter team-up
As the fight comes to a close, Eren starts to lose it, and his voice gets more and more monstrous. I don’t remember what it sounded like in the Japanese, but the English dub does a great job at losing Eren in the titan madness, as his anger drives away his humanity. All of his lessons are forgotten as the things anchoring him to his human life are being ripped away from him. Oh, and then the Female Titan unhinges her jaw like a goddamn snake! It’s horrifying. She decapitates Eren’s titan body, and rips his human body from his flapping neck-meats, and pops it into her mouth like a tic-tac.
It’s jaw dropping, and the world falls away. That’s it, that’s the whole ballgame. That is, at least until Miaksa swings in and gives the Female Titan a really good fight. Mikasa wasn’t going to win; the Female Titan just wrecked four of the most elite titan fighters in the world, but it’s still a great fight. Before Mikasa gets squished, she’s pulled away by Levi, the only human with more natural titan killing skills than her. Then the episode ends, but not before teasing you about what’s to come. Mikasa is teaming up with Levi, and together, they might just be unstoppable.
