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Five Thoughts On Attack On Titan’s “The World the Girl Saw”

By | June 23rd, 2017
Posted in Television | % Comments

It’s the Multiversity Summer TV Binge! Although I’ve never been deeply into anime, I’m totally in love with Attack on Titan. Having already watched the first season with subtitles, I thought it would be cool to return to the dubbed version of the series. Be warned, here be spoilers for the sixth episode.

1. Let’s check in with the dead and dying
Holy crap, this episode is an emotionally effective work of art. It’s all about Mikasa, who’s been a quiet presence so far, but first let’s check in with her friends.

Eren is still dead for those keeping score at home, much the the chagrin of cold-hearted Ymir. She insults Armin for living while more useful soldiers died, and in any other episode, I’d call her a psychopath, but as we will soon see, Ymir is one of the rational ones. Still, she’s lucky Krista tolerates her shenanigans. Those two don’t make any sense to me yet, but they’re clearly a pair. And speaking of couples, Franz and Hanna didn’t stand a chance. Introduced last episode as very in love and in high spirits, it was only a matter of time before Armin find Hanna failing to resuscitate a long-dead Franz. Armin is on the edge of sanity himself. He’s either about to give up in a pool of his own blood or become a psycho killer himself.

2. Oh, this A-hole and his damn wagon

The present day parts of the story mostly concern a selfish merchant, who blocks a narrow gate with his wagon of goods, content to let all of his neighbors die. This guy is the most awful human we’ve met yet, so intent on being an asshole that he doesn’t even make sense. He berates his own men for struggling to move the overloaded wagon through a clearly too-small gate, berates the soldiers fighting and dying to protect him, and berates Mikasa for standing up to him. What’s his plan? Insult his own guys until the titans eat everyone, himself included? Much to my disappointment, Mikasa doesn’t kill him outright in the street. She takes out his thugs non-lethally and threatens him at sword point. This dude at least deserves a small maiming… wow, this episode even turned me into a psycho killer.

3. “The world is cruel, but I have a place in it”

We finally get a Mikasa origin story, and it’s nothing you’d expect. The distant Mikasa was once a cute little girl, doing needlepoint with her mother and father in a rural hunting cabin. Then some human traffickers came to kill her dad, and sell her and her mom into sex slavery, hoping to get a bonus because they’re two of the last Asians (or “Orientals” as these racist creeps say in the dub) left in the world.

Let’s take a moment to unpack all of that. This show hasn’t shied away from terrible things, but something about human trafficking, particularly this disgustingly racially motivated human trafficking is the most upsetting thing I can possibly imagine. Human trafficking and slave trading is a very real problem, even in the world today. I guarantee that if you heard a statistic, it would be alarmingly higher than you’d guess, and closer to your home than you’d assume. It’s one of the most dehumanizing things imaginable and the episode goes all out in depicting it.

The racial element is also fascinating, especially given the slew of whitewashed anime adaptations of the last few years. Race does play a role in the story of Attack on Titan, and judging by most of the names, the architecture, and the terrain, we seem to be in post-apocalyptic Germany and not a fantasy world. Still, some ethnic diversity exists, as in real life, and it still affects the lives of people, apocalypse or no.

4. “The only way to live is to fight!”

You thought that the death of his mother was the inciting incident that made Eren into the intense killer he was? Nope, that kid was stabbing people from the tender age of eight or so. He terrifyingly murders two of Mikasa’s kidnappers. Mikasa, who’s too traumatized to do anything at first, barely has time to warn Eren about the third criminal, before baby Eren is being choked out. Eren yells some terrifying for a pre-teen philosophy about killing or being killed and then something changes.

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Mikasa remembers that she’s been surrounded by death her whole life, from the first time she saw a bug kill a butterfly, from the times her dad brought home dead animals for them to eat, to just today, when she witnessed the brutal murder of both her parents. The realization effects her so profoundly we zoom into her brain and watch it crackle with electricity, as the new synaptic connections make her into a killer. She charges at the kidnapper so hard, she shatters the wooden floor, and impales him through the back from behind with Eren’s knife. Eren was always a psychotic killer, but Mikasa became one. Nature and nurture.

5. The red scarf

The final moments of transformation are when Eren wraps his red scarf around Mikasa’s whole head, both to keep her warm and to shield her from the world. Eren and his dad invite Mikasa to live with them and suddenly the thread is clear- we understand why Mikasa is so distant, so brutal, and so protective of Eren. We also, somewhat less importantly, see why she’s so attached to the scarf, but it remains a potent metaphor. She wears it to separate herself from the cruel world, even though she knows that the kind girl she once was is somewhere inside it. It comes out when she threatens (and ultimately) spares the awful merchant, and when she rescues children. It comes out when she protects Armin. In fact, the most unhinged part of Mikasa’s whole worldview is her pathological need to repay Eren, protecting him like he protected her. She’s gonna be pissed when she finds out what happened.

This was a doozy of an episode.


Jaina Hill

Jaina is from New York. She currently lives in Ohio. Ask her, and she'll swear she's one of those people who loves both Star Wars and Star Trek equally. Say hi to her on twitter @Rambling_Moose!

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