the thing is, uzumaki bi junji itou is surreal horror. And surreal horror atually benefits from being largely unexplained. And because the manga has this geniusly simple concepts (making scary stuff with anything resembling a spiral), ha was able to make an ending that is basically just an escalation of weirdness feel like a tight resolution. Also, each chapter was mostly independant.
When talking about lost, I often run to thr phrase "artificial mystery". That is, it's a mystery that exists not even with the intention of ever being resolved. And yes, people will stick around until the very end, the difference is they'll regret having done so. A lot of Lost's famous atmosphere of mystery and confusion now comes off as hollow and cheap since we now know that the questions literally don't have answers. They were never designed to be answered.
the thing is, there are answers, apparently one guy even got the writers to tell him directly what they are but regrets doing it because he felt it robbed him of the ability to think those answers through himself and now refuses to tell anyone else
@@NightShroud092 well, ONE of the creators of lost calls it the mystery box, the other two guys who actually made the whole thing after the first guy left after the pilot hate the concept
I'm arriving 7 years late to this video because at this point in my life I've seen Lost, read all of Attack on Titan, and feel really really strongly about at least one of them and mostly want to use this comment as an avenue to vent about something I hate; not to give the game away, or anything. I figure there's a lot I theoretically could talk about that I personally take issue with, but I wanna stay focused and stick to one or two things cause most stuff I think has enough room for disagreement and there's just some stuff that I care about more than others. Spoilers for Attack on Titan. For me, Lost exists in a tricky personal headspace, cause on the one hand I can't imagine sitting down to watch all of it at time of writing (especially since I am capable of recognizing its faults and am generally quick to bemoan the show it could have been and we never got), but I do find something mesmerizing in its failings. It's a show worthy of criticism, but as I get older the more interesting Lost becomes, almost entirely for its production since at this point in my life I've undergone almost a complete break from the literalism of the plot and narrative necessary to compose storytelling. For me, Lost is more interesting because of what it failed to do, while its accomplishments have remained undigested by my memory. I don't know if I'd still remember it, or even care, if it had its shit together back when it held greater cultural relevance. Anyway, I wanted to start off with that because, now that AoT's mysteries have been answered, I think a lot of Attack on Titan's theming and narrative (probably by accident) reads as a justification of segregation, labor camps, and genocide, while the rest reads as fascist apologia. It has the sort of ending that makes me retroactively embarrassed that this was the anime that got me into anime back in high school, as well as the sort of plot twists that apparently irreversibly has killed my ability to take seriously any story that insists on keeping major story beats hidden while openly advertising that it is in fact hiding something, because it meant for years while the series remained unfinished you as a fan could dodge any and all criticisms of AoT by hiding behind the thin veil of "trust me, it gets good, we just don't have all the answers yet" as the blind lead the blind. In practice, most of AoT is an unserious giant robot show with a melodramatic skew of a totalitarian military complex that pointlessly sacrifices hundreds (thousands?) of lives in the name of freedom, when apparently any old giant guillotine attached to a wall would've done the job. Before I even talk about the ending, I can't help but point out that the Marleyans, AoT's functional stand-in for the Nazis (if the ghettos and arm bands was any indication of AoT's subtlety) basically have a point. Like, they just do: in the context of the series, Eldians can turn into giant zombie fellas when you give em spine juice; they literally turn into killing machines with no control over themselves because of a fake in-universe elixir which is dumb and fake. The audience has spent most of the show watching loads of Titans kill and be killed, and for the most part the killing of a Titan is given no real moral dimension beyond finding out they used to be people, at which point the characters keep killing them because, I mean, what else are you gonna do? Do I even need to explain how nonexistent the question of killing a Titan is, in a culture oversaturated with zombie media? Like, no, it's kill or be killed, there's not much of a conflict to be had; all it takes is a spiked water supply then bam, that's the end of your civ run (heck, a poisoned wine supply was an actual plot point near the end of the series). The Marleyans have a point, and they can back that point up with good reasons for their discrimination and genocide, which, um, sucks I think. Meanwhile, in the real world, there is no good reason for discrimination and genocide; even contemplating it is kinda laughable. I don't think it's the sort of topic that's made better or interesting by being reframed as "well, what if Jewish people and LGTQ+ folk could turn into giant zombies." Then there's the ending, a conclusion where the main character assumes control of the military and the nuclear might to wipe out everyone he reckons he doesn't like because his friends are "us" and everyone else is "them," and while his pals pontificate on how wrong genocide is, Eren gets to wipe out 90% of the world population before being beheaded by Mikasa. Eren commits nuclear holocaust, gets killed by his friends so they look like the good guys, and then they get to live in a world where all their enemies are dead. What a load of shit. AoT gets to soap box about how bad and complicated it is to fall into the cycle of violence, then told a story about how the best way to end the cycle of violence is to commit the most violence, a decision that ultimately super paid off for the story's primary cast: it was effective at accomplishing what it set out to do, the oppressed get liberated (excluding all the oppressed that got melted and stomped, whoops), and the main characters get a happy ending. Wow, that like, sucks, I think. These are the sort of plot choices that are begging to be read as metaphor, because they're total nonsense if you read them literally. But if there is an authorial intent for the text to be read as allegory, it's lost in the very clear parallels to real-life world history. The Holocaust isn't an metaphor, and all that. Knowing what I know now, I honestly think it would've been-- if not better-- at least more interesting if AoT's mysteries remained unsolved; ironically, if it had more in common with Lost. There were a lot of questions in AoT that, quite frankly, I'm not convinced the audience ever needed the answers for. The origins of the Titans in particular was the sort of thing that could've been a mystery forever, because I'm not convinced that any one explanation would've been more impactful than what the Titans meant for the characters, i.e. what they represent. In practice, for me, having the answers to my greatest high school questions shines a spotlight on AoT's ability to convey information as well as its overall quality, it's the point where I am forced to engage with the version of myself that once was so excited to learn what was in Eren's basement, where I have no choice to conclude, "this anime sucks, I'm a fucking moron."
Nailed it. Lol when I saw the final chapter I thought it was a joke. I thought that we had finally been duped and that Isayama had a fake chapter lined up so the actual manga wouldn't be leaked. Nope. He had always said in interviews romance was on the backburner, but that turned out to be a total lie. "Thanks for committing genocide for our sakes!" and Mikasa kissing Eren's decapitated head. Utterly fucked. AOT is a shonen, most of its readers are young and impressionable. There's plenty of people who read it and interpreted genocide as being the right choice unironically, who are also going to see this shining example of a totally healthy relationship and have that as their takeaway from AOT's ending. Beat your girlfriend, she loves you like a lost puppy and will never move on!
Wow, now I’m glad I didn’t stick with the show. I’ve been recently digesting the idea that the author has complete control over their work, and any in-universe lore justification for horrible stuff is irrelevant. (From several other Folding Ideas videos.) So, this is kind of the perfect example of that. There’s genocide in Attack on Titan because the author wanted to. Which is messed up.
Hilarious reading the recent comments on this video now AoT (manga) has ended. People who generally disliked the ending are saying that you called it, and people who generally liked the ending are saying that you got it wrong. I read a summary of the ending on a wiki, and consuming all the information in a torrent of text makes it feel like this nest of conspiracies is what happened, but it could be that it was fairly understandable when presented in pieces, chapter by chapter. I'm not going to read to find out, so I just won't pass judgement. I wonder if Dan will come back to the show at all?
Watching this amidst the final season of Attack on Titan is a trip. I have not read the manga as it feels like far too much to take on before the series finale at this point, but I spent much of the time before Eren and friends came back wondering what the hell happened. So while technically wrapping things up, the emotional core of this point resonates.
He's definitely wrong about AoT here, but this video released around the same time as the chapters about Eren with Historia and Reiss in the crystal cave so he just didn't know. With hindsight, we know how the structure of the world in AoT was built before even starting illustration of the first chapter.
It would be neat to see Dan return to Attack on Titan now that it's over, but this is a video from several years ago that less than 10% of his current subscribers have seen, so I'm not sure there'd actually be a point unless he could build a separate video essay around how AoT ended and just kinda mention the Lost parallel in passing.
Perhaps you should return to Titan, it's undergone a real tonal shift and those mysteries (barring the very opening 40 seconds) have actually both arisen and been resolved in a natural and satisfying way. It seems like for a majority of the initial questions, if you'd asked Isayama about them when he was still writing what would become season 1, he would actually have a decent answer. I feel like I might be mindlessly defending it, but I would like to assert that, now that the manga is in the endgame, it has yet to feel like Lost
On the other hand, there are a lot of details which are tied together by the story as it stands in about the past year. For example, in the beginning we see people with names deriving from all over Europe (obvious german ones, Ackerman is Jewish as is Levi, Eren is Turkish, Rico's surname is Polish etc.). At first this serves to reinforce the atmosphere of being "the last bastion of humanity". However, with the reveals from about chapter 88 onwards, we see the diversity in names is in fact due to the Eldian Empire occupying a swath of territory of roughly equivalent size, so when the retreat to the island was made the population would include representative examples of this geographic spread. Another example is the number of kings between Ymir Fritz' deal and the king that built the Walls, the 145th king retreated to Paradis 1750 years after the deal, which comes out at about 12 years per king, which matches up with the curse. The dates have been known since chapter 50 something and the king number has been known since somewhere in the 60s. Obviously this falls outside of the purview of your video, and it's entirely possible that that was made up in order to foreshadow the introduction of the curse as a plot device in the late 80s, but I find it quite nicely set up and it's enough to colour my impression of even earlier chapters ;) There are, of course, other details which have yet to be described and I'm not sure how they could be. The very first panel/shot of anime and the title of that chapter "To you, 2000 years from now" seems to be a mystery where the story isn't moving in a direction to solve it, and there's plenty going on with Zeke/ royal blood/ titanising that lies somewhere between unexplained and utter bull. However, I'm fairly convinced that the number of early mysteries (I'm just going to put all of the obvious unanswered questions raised up until chapter 88 in this group) that are tied up but replaced by new ones as the plot has moved on is larger than the number of early mysteries that remain by a sufficiently satisfying margin. Still some handwavey rubbish with the Eldian paths, although they are quite convenient for the author. We're both just responding to similar things in different ways, it seems. Love your videos generally, by the way. I enjoy your perspective on a lot of your subject choices a lot, and particularly videos like the Shadow of the Colossus one are real experiences to watch!
Now that Attack on Titan has ended in 2021, I think this video turned out to be incorrect. Even with the ending being very divisive, the reason why it's so divisive isn't because it fell to the traps described here. It wasn't like Lost where *everything* was left to be explained at the end. With AoT, its biggest mysteries had already been answered long before the ending section came about, and most fans consider these answers satifying. The thing that was so polarizing about the ending was the way the final conflict was resolved.
Junji Ito's great outcome with Uzumaki is largely an outcome of genre and theme. He was making surreal horror as usual and played very abstract at first, but when he delved further into the town and characters as he had to for the manga to continue, he didn't choose plot as an advancing work, he chose to stick to theme as the connecting strand. It's a gamble; it works well in his usual urban legend touch-of-the-surreal horror style at first, and as things escalate the common characters and town give us a frame of reference to anchor the increasing absurdity and the strong theme gives us the ability to read into, predict, and play along with the 'plot' - we never know what the next chapter will do, but when we see the first few pages, we KNOW the theme well enough to be a page ahead of the characters. And it worked very well in allowing the theme to BE the plot in turning the whole thing into 'spirals all the way down'; making the disconnected and surreal nature of everything not a weakness but its great strength. But it's a gamble, because if he'd got to chapter 8 and ran out of great on-theme developments, the whole thing would have collapsed. Stories usually go with plot as the string between pieces because it feels more concrete and safer - you can't 'fail' to add something to a plot, just do better or worse. But because it's so safe, it gets really obvious when you screw it up. Or stacking mystery boxes; you get a LOT of extra momentum at the start and can string audiences along right up until the last box is opened, but it is a stringing along and it will fail. If the audience watches you open the last of the nested mystery boxes and finds nothing, they don't see an empty box, they see the hand of the writer flipping them off for ever caring.
I think Lost is the most famous example of this, but it's by far not the worst example. Lost actually had a lot of its mythology in place from the very beginning. Check out a fantastic article, okbjgm.weebly.com/lost by former Lost writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach where, yeah, a lot of the broad strokes were always there and didn't just come out of nowhere. Not to say that it wasn't victim to the things you're describing, but you might be surprised how much of the groundwork was developed by the time of the pilot and it wasn't just twists for the sake of twists. The second and third seasons did suffer because ABC wanted to keep their biggest hit on the air as long as possible which meant throttling the plot, but once they were convinced that "Hey this show needs an ending" the last half of the series mostly kept on track of delivering a solid narrative. The show was always about the balance between science and faith, rational and irrational, so things like the numbers or why the island heals people, etc etc, I don't mind them not *really* explaining. Really the show kept to its own internal mythology for the most part, as infuriating as that might be. Now if you really want a poster child for this kind of phenomenon, check out Heroes. A show clearly making up things as they go along, as characters that should have died or been written out are forced again and again back into the spotlight because they're considered fan favorites, as mysteries are set up but are never paid off, as the status quo is constantly being reset so that the audience isn't scared away by any attempts to advance the plot. It's Lost paint by numbers by someone who doesn't know how to count.
Fantastic explanation for this wibbly wobbly mythology phenomena. We take it for granted that episodic TV has, aside from daytime soaps, been a more recent phenomena but we've been reading books for centuries so the concept of a beginning, middle, and end should not be so hard to understand. The main problem with TV vs books is that an author will get their ending published if the beginning is as well. TV doesn't have that guarantee so shows being written as a serial need a show bible but the showrunner and staff have to be prepared for a sudden ending if they're cancelled. That causes these same problems however. I think tho that Lost was forced to be stretched out due to network demand while Heroes has been allowed to run wild because the network allowed it and staff was constantly fired because Tim Kring ultimately didn't want to actually be tied down to an ordered set of rules. Both shows suffered the effects of network bloat but for the opposite reasons. And please god don't let them unleash a second season of Heroes Rewhatevered onto the world. The first season just proved that no one learned from or cared about flaws that decayed the original series.
Big disagreement on Heroes here. I saw it as Marvel/DC comics put on TV, where story arcs and characters are ment to be drastically evolving, almost rebooting in the way it takes new turns, good guys becomes badguys, different timelines explored etc. And it did that near perfectly - including it imploding on power inflation and later getting actually rebooted.
In the middle of rereading Attack on Titan now and this video popped up on my home feed. I sort of wish this was a longer minisode so that he could have brought up more specific examples, 'cause going back and reading through the manga again has made me go "oh yeah this was all pretty obviously planned out WAY in advance". Curious about what the disconnect there is.
So for example there are some heavy imperialist and fascist reading's. Now people take it a little far by claiming ishiyama is Nazi but if the "beyond the wall" plot was thought out ahead of time he wouldn't have needed to use shorthand. Eren also being the will of the Attack Titan was a concept but clearly not one that he had completely solidify. There's a technique in writing were an element of the story is kept vague enough to leave room for additions. Also Anna and Historia were threads given a decent amount of focus but clearly he never had plans for them. Its also already well known that Sasha was supposed to die early but fan backlash kept her alive. Honestly I like the ending though but it also shows how swayed Ishiyama can be because even if people hated it the ending was his choice and his vision no one else's
I just looked it up, in August 2015 the manga was around the Uprising arc, I can totally see why he's come to that conclusion because there were a lot of loose ends and mysteries at that point in the story.
Considering where Attack on Titan is now, this video did not age well. I also don't know that the manga or show ever really introduced mysteries beyond "what are titans?" And "what does the world actually look like beyond the walls?" Both of which would (and did) explain any mystery that is brought up in the course of the story.
@Gilli Weed "Just think of how flat and uninteresting the beach scene was, even though it should have been the most emotional moment of the series" But... it was? "So if we kill everyone outside... can we be finally in peace?" I'm still shivering over that scene, especially if you see where did Eren's character develop later. "Even recently, we had mysteries set up between the two boring ass ethnicities that existed outside the wall" But it fits into the thematic of the manga completely? So obviously SPOILERS, the twist that Elderians locked away in the walls because they ARE the Titans, they are the ones who can transform into them, and the world FEARS them just like they feared the Titans in the whole manga, fits into the "we vs outside forces" theme pretty well, its has a lot of real world metaphors and it gives a obvious message about the dangers of nationalism, but also collective guilt over mistakes which were done by your ancestors, and about racism in general. Also you can see that this was set up intentionally from the first issue of the manga. I don't know... I just can't hate on it, it became something a lot more than just a roller coaster ride about people fighting giant zombies and dying.
I think another interesting point that changes the tonal and introductory plots of the show is that the mangaka (sorry I can't remember your name right now, sir, and I'm too lazy to open a new tab) initially planned at the outset of writing to kill the entire main cast, but upon seeing popular response to his characters and especially after seeing the show, felt he didn't know if he could follow through with that intent anymore. So that creates a huge shift in intent that just doesn't line up with the groundwork already laid. Maybe he'll still kill everyone off. Maybe he won't. But author intent is a usually invisible force that drives a narrative, until the author suddenly changes trajectory, and then it leaves the viewer feeling like... something is off.
...But I gotta say, I'm pretty much just in it for Armin and the 3DMG. >_> Whereas most fans are crying fan-tears for Levi, I just adore that nerdy blond dweeb to bits.
There is one point in the manga that really stands out to me in regards to how clearly the mangaka never really planned the series out beyond the start. *Spoilers follow, you have been warned* The scene in which we finally get the huge revelation that the colossal titan, and the armored titan are actually humans, and not just humans, but actually humans that in the military, and not only that, they're in the very same squad as the protagonist. It should be a huge dramatic reveal. And everything about the scene was just lazy. It came out of literally nowhere. It was as if the mangaka all of a sudden realized that he had no idea how to lead the characters to the reveal, so he just made the characters give up. The following resolution shows that these actions go against any sort of plan that might have been in place for them, and it literally made no sense for them to not at least wait for a moment of privacy with Eren to reveal this information. They just kinda blurted it out while another completely unrelated conversation was going on. In some way it feels like it may have been supposed to be a subversion on the whole "wait 500+ chapters for the dramatic reveal", but it utterly kills the flow of the story, and ruins any and all immersion there was in place. I watched it when it was originally airing, and at some point I just couldn't wait any longer and ended up reading the manga. After catching up to the manga at that point in time, I gave up on the whole series. It became abundantly clear that there was no actual intention of really resolving the story, but rather just, as Folding Ideas said, go the lost route of constantly introducing more and more trite mysteries that will also never go on to actually get resolved.
i don't think the reveal for point one was good. yes it didn't allow tension, but i had never seen anyone do a reveal that big in the background of a panel. not even the fore ground of the panel. mind blown, this technique has potential. but yeah it didn't really give a lot of tension afterwards.
Take in consideration the series has some huge twists befor like eren becoming a titan , The author knew fans would second guess everything and he made the reiners reveal anticlimatic out of a sudden to surprise readers to change parts of the mystery formula.
@@Svefngengill Something that was heavily foreshadowed (in show more obviously) came literally out of nowhere. Character who obviously has mental problem reveals secret while his partner panically protests, that just doesn't make sense. Now there is last arc, pretty much every chapter includes major revelation which people were able to predict months or even years in advance, but yeah, it is abundantly clear that there was no actual intention of really resolving the story...
With the hindsight of 5 years I can definitely say that Attack on Titan was planned. Not every detail was planned, but enough that every mystery introduced in the series has a resolution later down the line. Sometimes a lot later (Annie), but it's coming.
Although, what you describe could be said about "Lost" as well. It's well known, that the final episode of Lost, the conclusion, has been planned from the get go. Just not the "details" how they got there. But while in AoT, the details are still generally part of the over-all plot, in shows like "Lost" the details got carelessly and randomly attached to the main plot and completely overgrew the main story, to a degree that the ending couldn't be satisying anymore.
@@garrettgrisso8180 I don't quite agree. Yes fascism and racism are elements of the story, but neither are endorsed, at least not from a western view point. The series makes it clear that the racism against the Eldians (who are simultaneously a stand in for Jewish people during the holocaust and Japanese people who suffered under Japanese Imperialism, so yeah the metaphors do get mixed) is entirely wrong. Yes I've heard people say that some Titans having huge noses is anti semetic, but I don't agree because all generic Titan faces are super exaggerated in similar ways. As for fascism while it has been in the series from day one, every fascist organization in the narrative is very clearly shown to be bad or even outright evil. Eren embracing fascist genocidal ideology also isn't the narrative supporting that, since theres no way to read the narrative in a way that portrays him as a "good guy" anymore after that and the story shifts to everyone's attempts to stop him. First by attempting to appeal to his humanity and kindness and when that doesn't work outright trying to kill him.
@@Evnyofdeath If you see any depictions of westerners in Japanese media, they are generally depicted with exagguratedly large noses. I do not think this has anything to do with antisemitic sterotypes, this does not have the same history in Japan. The iconografy of the Eldians are definitly based on the holocaust, but I think it is only used as a paralell to mirror Japanese historical event.s The period in Japanese history with most parralels is not WW2, but late Edo and the meiji period(mid 1800s to early 1900s) and Japan meeting the world outside, especially the wetern imperialists who many at first saw as unrefined barbarians, but came to see as a superior foe when the Americans forced Japan to open the borders. There's a lot of valid critizism done against the series, but I think a lot of it is done from a wester-centric worldview.
@@Evnyofdeath All of what you said fails to holds weight when the autor said in an interview that "there are good thinks that have come out of war". Really Isayama is one of those people that read Mein Kampf and think Hitler had "some" good reasons. Your average enlightened centrist.
I feel bad, because I also got it wrong here exactly as Dan did. I came back to AoT only after season 3 came out and it turned out the answers and resolutions have been planned way in advance
Lost had a slightly different problem than what you describe here. my understanding is that there was a concertina-ing of seasons as in, when season one came out there was a plan for a coherent 3 season story with a proper ending etc. then it became a massive success and they were told we want 11 seasons, green lit right now. as it changed in popularity that number of seasons kept being changed between "one more" to "nine more" bouncing back and forth like a yoyo. imagine trying to write something sensible under those conditions!
This video is a cautionary tale on updating your priors given new information. As the manga progressed, we became increasingly aware that Isayama was doing everything but writing by the seat of his pants. In fact, he most likely had major portions of the story planned in advance. It would be cool of you to make a video acknowledging this.
I doubt he will. He already replied to another comment (the one literally made just before yours in the 'comment timeline') that basically told him the same thing and said "I was, in fact, extremely correct about AoT". So he clearly isn't willing to change his mind after all this time despite all of the overwhelming evidence that has piled up as the series progressed proving him wrong. He's also probably jumped on the stupid bandwagon of "AoT is for Nazis as it demonstrates Fascistic themes and ideas" even though it specifically goes out of its way to show those ideas/ideologies in a negative light, deconstruct them and show exactly why they are bad in the first place.
@@mikloshujber1452 Thanks for the reply. I had little hope he would acknowledge being wrong given the opinions he has made publicly available in the past, but thought I'd try anyway. At least, everyone who follows the manga and doesn't think the Earth is filled with Nazis knows he was wrong. Cheers
Guy's the moment he had to use arm bands as short hand you can tell that half the ideas weren't nearly as fleshed out. The Nazi issue doesn't come up if you don't predicate the unbalance of power with clumsy handled imagery. He even had to make changes to the anime because he was afraid the manga content dragged on in places (which I liked but ) because the story wasn't didn't have a clean trajectory The only plan was Eren and sadly that's all anyone fixates on how his twist was planned ahead but not really anything else once you look at the whole series
I honestly really love the way Attack On Titan handled mystery. Even waiting years between watching the first season and the follow-up season, I was very satisfied with the payoff. My best guesses as to what the fuck was going on behind the scene were just flat wrong and I really enjoy a work of fiction that eludes predictability. Also, it did feel like the writers had purposefully intended these revelations all along--i.e. it didn't feel like they just pulled it out of their ass.
Interesting comparison but I recommend checking out the latest chapters (at least like, the last 5 or so). Also, if you're basing your opinions on summaries and fragments of the source material instead of actually reading the whole source material (not to mention unfinished source material), we'd have to take them with a bigger grain of salt. I can't really see how AoT gets on Lost's level of convolution right now (don't remember what part the story was at at the time of this video). Also, another video on AoT could be relevant since season 2 is officially coming out this year.
This problem is inherent to all serialized stories. Some shonen manga avoid it like Jojo's by telling stand alone stories (pun intended) with some connective tissue, or One Piece where the end goal is nebulous to meaningless and the island arcs are their own adventures. It's basically the old Star Trek formula "Enterprise lands, problems ensue, problem gets solved, Enterprise leaves", just more elegant. Other shonen manga are Naruto, made up as they go and frustratingly inconsistent in worldbuilding, themes and plot. The things that work about Naruto were either accidental or abbandoned early on.
I honestly feel like this video has aged quite a bit in terms of even equating Attack on Titan with Lost. For as much as Attack on Titan's ending has spurrred controversy, you cannot make the claim it wasn't the ending that was planned out and executed by the author's intent long before it actually got to the point of the ending itself. Unlike Lost, which was written entirely by the seat of the pants', AoT had a serialized plot and the mysteries were all ones the author had the answers to before he started writing and delivered on them accordingly.
For those of us who are of a little more risk of dying by covid, I learned my lesson with X files - so when Lost came I said "they don´t know where they are going with this shit".
I have always felt that a good mystery... thing (tv show, novel series, comic, anything really that does not have a predetermined run time) has to have a relatively thoroughly planned conclusion for each mystery. If it doesn't have a planned conclusion for each mystery it will be extremely unsatisfactory. For instance, in the original Sherlock Holmes books, they could go on for as long as the writer wished so long as each book was well written and, in the sherlock tv show while each episode was generally considered good (from what I understand) the overall plot was a mess because there was no plan for how to end the tv show as a whole just a plan for each episode. Just my own thoughts.
You need to reread and rewatch AoT. All the mysteries are tied up in a neat little bow by the end of the story. Every storyline is both foreshadowed in previous episodes and resolved by the end of the series.
I’m not sure if I agree with this. I’m not sure how much was out at the time this video was made but attack on titan has, in my opinion, wrapped up almost all its loose ends.
We are now in the last season and fortunatelly, it looks like Dan was fairly wrong about his assesment of the show. Even though we still have a few episodes to go, at the moment it looks like this show knew where it was going right from the get go. Everything looks like it comes together nicely. Most mysteries have alreay been solved, in a way that makes it look very much planned that way. Although, I really can't blame Dan here for his skepticism. After all, AoT really is more the exception than the rule in this regard. Just recently, we had the finale of "Game of Thrones", which, just like "Lost" and just like "AoT" was built on a lot of mysteries, and was presented as if it was building up to something big. Only to then end on a finish which didn't tie up anything in a satisfying way. So, Dan was justified to be skeptical. Fortunatelly, he seemed to have been wrong.
@@demonking-zm3rs At this point, yes. But I need to point out: Don't know how the story ends. I don't read the manga, I only watch the anime. And there, we are still half a season away from seeing the end.
I wonder if Titan has a distinction from Lost in that the conflict is clearer and the "mystery" is based implicitly in the solution of the conflict. In Lost, no matter whether or not the inhabitants of the island find out what's up with this cukoo island, it isn't immediately apparent to the viewer how The Island will help those on it leave. Titan though is ostensibly building to something - when all is shown about The Titan's Origin the hope of the characters (and audience) is that knowledge will help end the conflict.
+Robert Richter I generally think that depends on where the anime comes from. Some studios come up with an idea and set out to make that. They have a clear story and they tell it and end. Others are adapting manga, the one I'm most aware of being adaptations of shonen jump, these titles are run essentially by a survey in each weekly volume (essentially people say which ones they picked up the issue for and which they didn't even bother to read) the ones that no one reads get given a month or two to wrap up and the ones that everyone is obsessed with the creator is basically told "You are going to write this for six more months". This means that a lot of manga is designed specifically to last forever with a few chapters pre-planned by the author that they can drop in as an ending at any point (as far as I understand it) which means that lots of manga (especially popular ones like Naruto, Bleach and Attack on Titan) is designed specifically to last forever which leads to anime adaptations that suffer from the same problems. And this is made even worse since a lot of these long runners begin adapting to anime before the series is even finished, and since weekly manga plots can move really slowly filler has to be made to slow the anime down so it doesn't overtake the manga and run out of ideas.
Set lengths do exist in anime (Cowboy Bebop, Elfen Lied, etc.) but a lot of the most popular animes have always been set to go on potentially forever. This ranges from the days of Astro Boy and Speedracer to modern day. Just look at Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon. Both franchises are capable of going on forever and both franchises are big parts of the reason anime is so popular in the US.
It's funny that Attack on Titan as of 4 years ago was amazingly simple and straight-forward compared to where the manga is circa 2020. A lot of issues have actually been pretty well resolved at this point. though the narrative structure has really suffered to get us to this point (exacerbated by the fact that so many characters and so many locations look so similar due to the art style). LOST fell apart not just because they were asking all sorts of questions and creating so many mysteries, but doing so with no goal in mind and no intended payoff. They hoped that they would just find a resolution as they went, but then they cut short at 6 seasons and ran out of time. It's exactly like what's happening right now with the Disney Star Wars movies: lots of setups, twists and inverted expectations, but all done without an end goal in mind and no real plan for how everything would pay off in the end.
I haven't read the manga, but I didn't see this on the anime. I hated Lost from early on because as you say I saw that the draw was the mistery and that they weren't going to be able to deliver. But even if Attack on Titan does have a mistery, and I don't think that's the draw. What makes it work is the feeling of certain doom. Victories are pyrric, and you can't see a way out. I can guess they'll eventually reach some kind of resolution, but what intrigues me the most is not who or what the Titans or what's the deal with Eren's father but what will be the price of their final resolution? Will it be worthy? Will they have a choice?
I watched the anime and then went to read the manga. I would say unlike in the anime, the action is not part of the draw in the manga. There is only one action scene in the manga that I think was interesting and it was because it was one of those battles of wits. Action scenes themselves (in my opinion of course) are not very well drawn. So the mystery is a lot more important in the manga. However, I also think that the mystery is not bad. Some twists are absurd (in the sense that if you pay too much attention to detail they don't make sense) or sometimes big revelations are down played, but it doesn't seem like it is going to leave loose ends.
Attack on titan has a constant worlsbuilding, begins with knowing little vto reveal more revelation for revelation. And the author never contradicts himself or the world he build. And doesnt makes them up for shockvalue, he plans them from full panned out storyline.
The unresolved mysteries of Lost never really bothered me.I just loved the characters so much that I was happy with the resolutions to their individual stories.
the question of whether AoT can end on a satisfying note given how polarized the fanbase has become over the main character is up for debate, but I think this video is wholly wrong about the mysteries in attack on titan being written without answers in mind. It is head and shoulders above Lost in terms of introducing and then resolving mystery boxes.
@@fightingmedialounge519 Which resolution did you not find satisfying? I liked the explanations for some of the former mysteries. I liked how most of them were kind of realistic. Gonna go into spoilers now so be aware of that. The revelation that the "home town" of Reiner, Berthold, and Annie turned out to be a relatively normal country seemed weird to me at first. I expected a magical titan-town or something. It makes sense that a country would use titans as a military weapon though and the way in which the people who could have this power are suppressed is kind of a neat twist on the relationship between the characters and their home. The whole thing regarding memory-manipulation was kind of weird and a strange device for telling the story, as far as I can remember. I can't remember enjoying that part. Regarding a more recent reveal, I enjoyed the way in which the myth about that first titan ever was revealed to be nothing like a fairytale and more about a monarch abusing his power. I also enjoyed the direction they went with regarding the main character in the current chapters. Sure, it's super edgy, but it kinda makes sense for someone growing up under circumstances like this to basically become a genocidal maniac out of desperation. Of course, not all reveals were super satisfying, but Attack on Titan is probably a fair bit above the average manga of that type when it comes to how well the story is crafted. They often served to develop the plot and characters, expanded our view of this world, helped to make a story about naked giants fighting more realistic, and didn't have any internal contradictions I spotted as a person not too invested in every detail of the story. What would you have wanted from reveals like these to be more satisfying? If you agree with me on the examples I've mentioned, do you mind providing your thoughts on a reveal you found lacking?
I think Uzumaki wandered a bit through the middle. There was a repeating formula for chapters/ issues. Which I think is a trap of episodic content, star trek being a great example, where in you end up with 3 or 4 reoccurring types of episodes with a 1 off now and again to keep things fresh.
I think your biggest mistake here is not takin into account differences between manga and TV-show productions. When you making a TV-Show your stakes are really hight. Making TV-show is expensive. This is why long-runners are so vital to networks - they already have strong following, so you don't have to worry about raiting so much. It's more profitable to continue existing show than making new one. Add this to having a lot of people working on both script and direction and hight dependence on network... Yeah. Manga on the other hand is way, waaay cheaper. And author have almost unlimited creative control over it. He dosen't have to artificialy stretch up his work, he can tell every story he want. And Isayama clearly have a story to tell.
One thing to remember with lifespans of shows is that what a network wants is a. The show makes it to the third season b. They hit 100 episodes so the show becomes valuable for syndication fees then c. See how far it can go while carrying high viewership numbers. It's very rare that shows on network and cable TV are kept around as a 'passion project' that an exec loves (such as Hannibal) but the success of the commercialless format that streaming services can use is forcing networks to look more towards serial shows to compete. I know this is purely technical business babble but it's also very real concerns that (at least American) show creators need to keep in mind when creating their show and deciding how to write and pace their story. If your viewing numbers are bad you're probably done but if they're good you run the risk of the network stepping in and fooling with any non-malleable timeframes you may have initially planned for. It's a very narrow fence to walk on making a show. Vince Gilligan was not sure Breaking Bad would come back another season for most of the show's run but the studio acquiesced to his request to end at 5 seasons. They all made history and at least now it's a bit easier for showrunners to be given more of a chance. Networks still want their 100 episodes though so that is often a showrunner's main goal.
Agreed on lost. Not agreed on AOT. I don't know where the manga was when he did the research, but the general plot seems to have been laid out beforehand. Most of the mysteries have been answered for a while now, meaning that the show has lost a major hook and has taken a not-too-welcome turn.
It really didn't beat any odds. It just performed how Anime generally performs in this context. Loose end mysteries aren't really a thing Anime often does.
I hated Lost. But in its defense it brought the idea that a show that could maybe tell a story with a beginning middle & end into television. If it came out now it would be 12 episode seasons or maybe a single season event show. I’m glad for the shows it’s inspired.
I wonder how many people are going to send you emails about how supposedly the writer for Titan has said that he had the story mapped out from the beginning. (I only know of this because I hear it a lot.) I wasn't a big fan of Attack on Titan because the mysteries that it promised answers too just weren't interesting enough to make up for what felt like a needlessly too bleak story. After episode 5 I just grew numb to any emotional moment the show put in front of me.
@@alaraplatt8104 I dropped the series when I heard a rumor about the creator ran a Japanese nationalist Twitter account. Believe me, I've looked into the series and found the exact opposite of what you're claiming. The series is overtly anti-fascist.
There _is_ one example of a mystery which keeps unfolding, every answer revealing new questions and inadequacies in our understanding of the material. It's called science, and it's fascinating after centuries-if not millennia-of new episodes. I'd love to see a supernatural mystery thing where the mysteries kept unfolding like they do in science, but the overlap between mystery authors and people who love and understand science is probably minimal.
UA-cam forgetting I watched this back in the day and recommending it now that everything in AOT has come together amazingly well is sure some bad timing.
Maybe but... was anyone actually reading Homestuck for the *lore*? Really? *Really?* Like, I guess... but I feel like Homestuck's problems were really more with the overarching plot structure rather than a desire to keep the nonexistent mystery going.
I think a really good example of how to avoid this was the show The 4400 on USA. It was also a mystery show from the mid 2000s like Lost but unlike Lost new mythology elements weren't just put in willy nilly. We started with one central mystery and as we got answers, those answers very naturally led to more questions. There was some branching in all of this, of course, so that there were several plot threads left hanging when the show was cancelled due to the writer's strike (damn it) but there was always a sense that there was a bottom of the mystery that we were always getting closer to. Of course the show doesn't have a proper ending due to the cancellation so there's no way to know if it would have been satisfying or not, and I suspect the writers were still making it up as they went along judging by a couple of minor plotholes, but they had the sense to use restraint and build, slowly but surely, on this system of questions naturally leading out from answers.
The 4400 are great. The developement of the characters They knew how to tackle the conflict of several fractions with good and bad sides during one show. They even wrote a realistic cult. And the makers of the show had to write novels to continue from the next season like ending in the latest episode.
Definitely Attack on Titan's author wasn't making it up on the go. Of course the first time I comment on a Folding Ideas video it's the one time I don't agree, so whenever you read this Dan, consider this also as a positive comment on almost every other of your videos XD But whatever people may think of the ending, there's no way that there wasn't a lot of planning going on under the surface, from the very beginning of the story. It's blatantly apparent.
It's funny you compare AoT to Lost as I used to be a huge fan of Lost and have made that exact comparison, only the difference is that AoT was what Lost could've been and is a mystery that does right everything Lost did wrong. Lost got progressively more ridiculous and threads were constantly invented and dropped, rewatching from Season 1 gives you absolutely no clues that you missed before since after watching it to the end you know they don't mean anything. It's all just fate, or magic, or that people were idiots. Yes, the explanation was literally just "magic" in the end. Or "ghosts". If they had revealed that the whispers were "ghosts" and the smoke monster was pretty much magic I'm sure a huge chunk of people would've stopped watching. What's most painful is that the fans of Lost have come up with so many geeky theories that MADE SENSE and were way more fascinating than what we ended up with, which was religious mumbo jumbo. All the Producers had to do, was go on line and pick a fan theory, and we literally would've gotten a way better ending to the show. But no, they decided to go with magic. Ok then. AoT however, managed to weave all these elements together and the mysteries have gotten only more interesting as we find out more. The difference is, THEY ALL MAKE SENSE. Rereading from chapter one, you find out so many throw away lines of dialogue, so many innocent shots or comments or gestures that foreshadow future events. Fans have come up with tons of engaging possibilities for the answers to the mysteries and they're all fascinating. Compared to Lost, where you can't even come up with one that makes any sense at all. Isayama the author of AoT has proven time and time again that he had at least 80% of the outline of his story in his head before he started drawing chapter one. It's extremely rare for an author to create such a well thought out mystery action series and is largely part of the reason why it has been the success that it is. It's unfortunate that you decided to spoil yourself and not read the manga or even watch the show properly, but especially in light of the past 5 chapters or so that pretty much revealed 70% of the mysteries (and yes they all fall into place) the comparison to the incoherent mess that Lost became is rather insulting.
I like attack on titan for its action scenes, the battle plans that get carried out , and we get diagrams to show us the battle field. i think these are really well done. but the story itself seems to lack something. which might actually be a story, since it is pretty much just plot.
It drags at times, but in the manga they seem to head toward a resolution to a major conflict that will pay off. It also works as a Anti war drama. The author definitly has a laid out plan and doesnt make bs up every season like lost. They didnt even developed the mystery what about the lighsource in the island is so important. And the los finale sucks with a few good moments of ben and hurley.
Actually, Supernatural is the epitome of The Simpsons syndrome: things just drag on far longer than they need to be and everything new feels like a rehash of previous seasons.
Brian MacLeod that's more of like the "Dragon Ball Z" syndrome and a narrative version of power creep. "This guy is the strongest guy we've ever faced! He can blow up mountains!!" Cut to the next story arch-> "This guy is the strongest guy we've ever faced, he can blow up PLANETS!"
+LegendLeaguer BTVS is another great example of this. "This is the most powerful vampire in the world, we're all going to die!" [kills boss vampire, cut to even tougher baddie that is about to unleash its plans to blow up the planet, end of season cliffhanger]
I think attack on titan season 1 (and possibly the equivalent manga chapters) had some failings that pushed some people away. But as with other commenters, I agree that Attack on Titan is not Lost (yet; we still have final season pt 2 to see). You never want to hear someone say "wait until season blah, that's when it picks up," but at the same time that's exactly how I feel about it. The groundwork of season 1, as plodding or confusing as it was at points, did set up future seasons to have some really great stories. I think to that extent, lining up a completed, long-running American tv show to a Japanese manga adapted to anime should allow for a bit more nuance than yellow flags.
I don't know if AoT does this mass production of mysteries, it seems like most get resolved, but I am glad that I'm not alone in feeling this way about it. More, I feel it piles all of its mysteries on over the first 3 seasons, with almost no clues or tasty crumbs to keep the audience wanting more. As the audience, you're supposed to be able to follow along with the story, and you can't if you have no idea at all what's happening, and cant get emotionally invested. You feel like an alien, not an active viewer.
God-damn it. You called it, Yams bit more than he could handle, and then some more. Even in literally the last fucking chapter, after not tying all the knots, he was bringing up new mysteries. It was frustrating. And the fact that people overlook this and praise him and AoT's ending as being "superbly great" makes me mad. I do look forward to you taking a new look into it after the series' ending, though!
Hey, I was just wondering if you have any particularly major examples of mysteries in Lost that you feel weren't resolved satisfactorily. I ask because while I hear that charge leveled against the show constantly, nearly every example I've seen given of a supposedly unresolved mystery or dangling thread really does have a solution or resolution somewhere. Like, for instance, people seem really hung up on the polar bear - I have read and watched and listened to rant after rant after rant lamenting that the finale "never explained the polar bear," which is just bizarre to me given that the polar bear's presence had been justified since at least the beginning of season 3. To be sure, that's just one example, and some of the other mysteries really are less explicitly resolved than that one, but I've honestly yet to hear any truly pressing questions that I haven't been able to answer, and I have definitely looked. That being said, not once in this video did you claim that they were all just dead the whole time, thereby clearing the tragically low bar for legitimate Lost criticism, and for this I thank you.
I didn't notice all that many mysteries piling up as I read Attack on Titan, but I did end up dropping it like... 80 chapters in or something like that? Not because I got bored with the story, but because I caught up to where it was being written, left it for a few months to let more chapters happen, and then when I came back I couldn't tell who anybody was because the art isn't good enough to distinguish between generic randos and half the main and supporting cast if you're not on top of things enough to know *exactly* what everyone looks like and where they are. I also couldn't remember a lot of the supporting cast because there were a bunch of them.
Currently keeping up with the anime as it comes out, I would say that Attack on Titan managed to avoid having the same problems. It basically wraps up every lingering thread or mystery by the end of season 3. With all that out the way, it does some world building/loredumping to set up all the players involved in the final conflict and their motivations, before setting it into motion. The transition into the final arc is a bit clumsy (Starting S1 EP4 was one of those "did I skip an episode?" moments) but it gets to the point eventually.
Its funny, cause i read the manga, and i would disagree. Without wanting to spoil anything, but i thought the ending was not really bad, it just didnt end up giving explanations to a lot of things, and it felt that certain themes never got a conclusion as well.
*AoT Spoiler* We're following Eren Jaeger, and the questions we want answered are the same ones he wants answered. That being said, in the story since then, a LOT has taken place and a lot of the questions have been answered pretty clearly. That's why they recently had a time-skip, to create more questions for us so that we might read part 2 in the hopes of learning... . . . WHY IS EREN KILLING CIVILIANS NOW?!?
What are you talking about the KoF manga is nowhere near being done. Is it? Last time I checked it wasn't. i went and read the gotdamn manga just cuz I needed to KNOW what was gonna happen next.
That's how the manga industry is. Manga-ka are expected to release a chapter a week most often than not with breaks here and there. Having a plot that is interesting and does great things under that schedule is insanely taxing on them. AoT manages to have patterns but it's much better than you might expect where the series is now in the manga. At least the characters are almost always like 5 steps ahead of the audience. Lost had problems but Attack on Titan isn't plagued by a million little plots happening throughout the story. It's one core plot with answers that the main characters / audience are looking for.
I think How I Met Your Mother actually also suffered the opposite problem. The ending was planned from season 1, and if it had happened that way there (I'm gonna say it) it wouldn't have been the worst. Instead of the show outgrowing any possible ending, it outgrew its own ending.
Pretty Little Liars has been good at seeming like it was gonna fall into this but eventually providing satisfactory answers. The problem is in the last two years more and more of these reveals have tainted the positive cred it once had with Feminist and LGBT fans.
It's also written by a guy who is all about imperialism and it shines pretty heavily through the story and characters to the point where it's... pretty uncomfortable. I couldn't figure out why I didn't like it when I started watching it so I tried reading it and it was worse, and then I learnt about the kind of view points the creator has and I was just like "OH. YEP"
He's not 'all about imperialism'. He just recognises that even people who do monstrous things can have admirable qualities. Two thirds of the way through the story it turns out that the titans are being created by an imperialist nation and shipped to the island so that said imperialists can kill the inhabitants and take its resources. Eren responds by starting his own fascist movement and instigating a global genocide. At no point during this is he presented as the good guy. The point of the story is to get you all fired up with nationalist fervour for the main character's 'team' only for him to become as bad or worse than his enemies. The author is thereby saying: this is where this leads. Don't do it. If you respond to oppression and imperialism with more of the same, you'll just perpetuate it for everyone. His praising of the leadership skills if individual imperialists is itself a part of his philosophy of otherwise 'good' people doing bad things.
@@joepeake8972 First of all, "3 years ago" kind of gives an indication that anything that happened recently in the story wasn't on my radar. It should also indicate that I probably don't care. I started clocking out a few episodes in because of the weird overtones and fully distanced myself from it when the mangka tried to make visual and thematic parallels to the titan-shifter people and Jewish people - only of the biggest antisemetic troupes out there is "Jews can turn into [x]" where x is usually monstrous, inhuman and/or terrifying so uh nope. Hard pass. (In addition to all the shitty stuff though - the pacing was shit, the characters did nothing for me, and whenever a show relying on Big Mysteries to get you coming back - which when the in-moment plot and characters weren't interesting, was all AoT had going for me - I know they'll never be worth the effort to find out so. Pthhh)
@@merchantarthurn I don't care whether you like or dislike the show (I wasn't a fan of the direction style or characters either to begin with). My point is that it's not fascist propaganda. A load of thinkpieces came out saying the Jewish ghetto comparison was somehow trying to make them out to be monstrous or evil when the entire second half of the show is dedicated to deconstructing/subverting that idea. I'm not telling you to watch it, I'm saying that you shouldn't be quick to trust the thinkpiece industry's sensationalist takes on works you haven't seen.
@@joepeake8972 Mate dismissing the criticism of antisemetic tropes as "sensationalist thinkpieces" makes me think you didn't actually care to think about the criticism or the antisemitism. The ones I read were from Jewish authors who actually dissected why "coded-Jewish-person turns into monster", even when the character is sympathetic, heavily relies on antisemitism. That's it. That's the way the cookie crumbles. Whether the tone was pro or anti fascist - it still relied on antisemitism in a really gross way that, understandably, made me of three years ago go "fucking gross". If you need to say "ah but wait, the gross antisemitism had a point in a few chapters time!!" then that's a shit piece of art lmao.
@@merchantarthurn I've also read stuff by Jewish authors saying the exact opposite, that this media got an audience that wouldn't have otherwise engaged with these ideas to do so. It's no different from superhero, sci-fi or fantasy stories using magical racism as an allegory for real historical events. No worries if you find such approaches distasteful.
Yeah... like chapter 122 specifically refers back to the title of the very first chapter, which proves that the author had at least some things planned in advance.
And proven that the author already had the background story in mind. Unlike Lost where the people who made season 1 had no idea what's the answer to the mysteries and let someone else dealt with them, AoT probably only made small changes here and there while the world building still remained the same. I also don't believe the "Eren was originally set to die" theory since that would've broken the foreshadowing of Eren's father giving him the key to the basement. AoT's problem seems to stem from pacing issues, where the series of events are being told in strict chronological order (until the current heavy flashbacks) that some dangling plot points remained buried until much later.
It seems like the author studied film for how he panel the manga together. i really like the paneling they do. the story is okay, but nothing that says he is a great writer. I think a lot of us like it more for the action then the plot.
This is an interesting little video! Yeah, I agree... I got into SNK back when the anime first aired a few years back, so at the time the Manga wasn't as far along and it seemed really good at the time. But as they finally started to reveal more things and make more mysteries.... I found it harder to care. They were clearly being made up as they went and it was just a mess.... and some of the stuff is very uncomfortable due to the underlying tones and just. Yikes. I had similar problems with the Tokyo Ghoul manga (well, its sequel tokyo ghoul:re mostly). Trying too hard with all these mysteries and twists and interlocking plans that it felt so... Bad and awful and boring and contridictory from what was originally set up.
In hindsight this video should probably be renamed "awkwardly jumping the gun while comparing an ongoing comic at an arbitrary point in time to a finished work of another format".
this is a random observation but the shade of that wall behind you is very soothing and compliments your skin tone amazingly
His gray skin tone is creepy , thanks for pointing that out....he can't get out much , which really really makes sense.
@@MrWatchowtnow someone's a Bitter Betty huh?
While he was on the left side of screen, I saw this comment, and Chef's Kiss. What a wonderful observation I missed.
Muted bi colours lol. But seriously me and my friends in photography/film are always joking about the perfect complimentary colours being as gay as us
I hope of all the comments on his vids Dan remembers, this is one of them
the thing is, uzumaki bi junji itou is surreal horror. And surreal horror atually benefits from being largely unexplained. And because the manga has this geniusly simple concepts (making scary stuff with anything resembling a spiral), ha was able to make an ending that is basically just an escalation of weirdness feel like a tight resolution.
Also, each chapter was mostly independant.
When talking about lost, I often run to thr phrase "artificial mystery". That is, it's a mystery that exists not even with the intention of ever being resolved. And yes, people will stick around until the very end, the difference is they'll regret having done so. A lot of Lost's famous atmosphere of mystery and confusion now comes off as hollow and cheap since we now know that the questions literally don't have answers. They were never designed to be answered.
The creators of Lost call it "The Mystery Box" plot.
the thing is, there are answers, apparently one guy even got the writers to tell him directly what they are but regrets doing it because he felt it robbed him of the ability to think those answers through himself and now refuses to tell anyone else
@@NightShroud092 well, ONE of the creators of lost calls it the mystery box, the other two guys who actually made the whole thing after the first guy left after the pilot hate the concept
I'm arriving 7 years late to this video because at this point in my life I've seen Lost, read all of Attack on Titan, and feel really really strongly about at least one of them and mostly want to use this comment as an avenue to vent about something I hate; not to give the game away, or anything. I figure there's a lot I theoretically could talk about that I personally take issue with, but I wanna stay focused and stick to one or two things cause most stuff I think has enough room for disagreement and there's just some stuff that I care about more than others.
Spoilers for Attack on Titan.
For me, Lost exists in a tricky personal headspace, cause on the one hand I can't imagine sitting down to watch all of it at time of writing (especially since I am capable of recognizing its faults and am generally quick to bemoan the show it could have been and we never got), but I do find something mesmerizing in its failings. It's a show worthy of criticism, but as I get older the more interesting Lost becomes, almost entirely for its production since at this point in my life I've undergone almost a complete break from the literalism of the plot and narrative necessary to compose storytelling. For me, Lost is more interesting because of what it failed to do, while its accomplishments have remained undigested by my memory. I don't know if I'd still remember it, or even care, if it had its shit together back when it held greater cultural relevance.
Anyway, I wanted to start off with that because, now that AoT's mysteries have been answered, I think a lot of Attack on Titan's theming and narrative (probably by accident) reads as a justification of segregation, labor camps, and genocide, while the rest reads as fascist apologia. It has the sort of ending that makes me retroactively embarrassed that this was the anime that got me into anime back in high school, as well as the sort of plot twists that apparently irreversibly has killed my ability to take seriously any story that insists on keeping major story beats hidden while openly advertising that it is in fact hiding something, because it meant for years while the series remained unfinished you as a fan could dodge any and all criticisms of AoT by hiding behind the thin veil of "trust me, it gets good, we just don't have all the answers yet" as the blind lead the blind. In practice, most of AoT is an unserious giant robot show with a melodramatic skew of a totalitarian military complex that pointlessly sacrifices hundreds (thousands?) of lives in the name of freedom, when apparently any old giant guillotine attached to a wall would've done the job.
Before I even talk about the ending, I can't help but point out that the Marleyans, AoT's functional stand-in for the Nazis (if the ghettos and arm bands was any indication of AoT's subtlety) basically have a point. Like, they just do: in the context of the series, Eldians can turn into giant zombie fellas when you give em spine juice; they literally turn into killing machines with no control over themselves because of a fake in-universe elixir which is dumb and fake. The audience has spent most of the show watching loads of Titans kill and be killed, and for the most part the killing of a Titan is given no real moral dimension beyond finding out they used to be people, at which point the characters keep killing them because, I mean, what else are you gonna do? Do I even need to explain how nonexistent the question of killing a Titan is, in a culture oversaturated with zombie media? Like, no, it's kill or be killed, there's not much of a conflict to be had; all it takes is a spiked water supply then bam, that's the end of your civ run (heck, a poisoned wine supply was an actual plot point near the end of the series). The Marleyans have a point, and they can back that point up with good reasons for their discrimination and genocide, which, um, sucks I think. Meanwhile, in the real world, there is no good reason for discrimination and genocide; even contemplating it is kinda laughable. I don't think it's the sort of topic that's made better or interesting by being reframed as "well, what if Jewish people and LGTQ+ folk could turn into giant zombies."
Then there's the ending, a conclusion where the main character assumes control of the military and the nuclear might to wipe out everyone he reckons he doesn't like because his friends are "us" and everyone else is "them," and while his pals pontificate on how wrong genocide is, Eren gets to wipe out 90% of the world population before being beheaded by Mikasa. Eren commits nuclear holocaust, gets killed by his friends so they look like the good guys, and then they get to live in a world where all their enemies are dead. What a load of shit. AoT gets to soap box about how bad and complicated it is to fall into the cycle of violence, then told a story about how the best way to end the cycle of violence is to commit the most violence, a decision that ultimately super paid off for the story's primary cast: it was effective at accomplishing what it set out to do, the oppressed get liberated (excluding all the oppressed that got melted and stomped, whoops), and the main characters get a happy ending. Wow, that like, sucks, I think.
These are the sort of plot choices that are begging to be read as metaphor, because they're total nonsense if you read them literally. But if there is an authorial intent for the text to be read as allegory, it's lost in the very clear parallels to real-life world history. The Holocaust isn't an metaphor, and all that. Knowing what I know now, I honestly think it would've been-- if not better-- at least more interesting if AoT's mysteries remained unsolved; ironically, if it had more in common with Lost. There were a lot of questions in AoT that, quite frankly, I'm not convinced the audience ever needed the answers for. The origins of the Titans in particular was the sort of thing that could've been a mystery forever, because I'm not convinced that any one explanation would've been more impactful than what the Titans meant for the characters, i.e. what they represent. In practice, for me, having the answers to my greatest high school questions shines a spotlight on AoT's ability to convey information as well as its overall quality, it's the point where I am forced to engage with the version of myself that once was so excited to learn what was in Eren's basement, where I have no choice to conclude, "this anime sucks, I'm a fucking moron."
Nailed it. Lol when I saw the final chapter I thought it was a joke. I thought that we had finally been duped and that Isayama had a fake chapter lined up so the actual manga wouldn't be leaked. Nope. He had always said in interviews romance was on the backburner, but that turned out to be a total lie. "Thanks for committing genocide for our sakes!" and Mikasa kissing Eren's decapitated head. Utterly fucked. AOT is a shonen, most of its readers are young and impressionable. There's plenty of people who read it and interpreted genocide as being the right choice unironically, who are also going to see this shining example of a totally healthy relationship and have that as their takeaway from AOT's ending. Beat your girlfriend, she loves you like a lost puppy and will never move on!
Wow, now I’m glad I didn’t stick with the show.
I’ve been recently digesting the idea that the author has complete control over their work, and any in-universe lore justification for horrible stuff is irrelevant. (From several other Folding Ideas videos.) So, this is kind of the perfect example of that. There’s genocide in Attack on Titan because the author wanted to. Which is messed up.
Hilarious reading the recent comments on this video now AoT (manga) has ended. People who generally disliked the ending are saying that you called it, and people who generally liked the ending are saying that you got it wrong.
I read a summary of the ending on a wiki, and consuming all the information in a torrent of text makes it feel like this nest of conspiracies is what happened, but it could be that it was fairly understandable when presented in pieces, chapter by chapter. I'm not going to read to find out, so I just won't pass judgement. I wonder if Dan will come back to the show at all?
Isayama: *And I took that ´personally*
7 years ago I had many of the same concerns about Attack on Titan, but however one feels about where it went, at least the mysteries were solved.
Watching this amidst the final season of Attack on Titan is a trip. I have not read the manga as it feels like far too much to take on before the series finale at this point, but I spent much of the time before Eren and friends came back wondering what the hell happened. So while technically wrapping things up, the emotional core of this point resonates.
FWIW - this video was released before the manga had even reached the basement.
He's definitely wrong about AoT here, but this video released around the same time as the chapters about Eren with Historia and Reiss in the crystal cave so he just didn't know. With hindsight, we know how the structure of the world in AoT was built before even starting illustration of the first chapter.
It would be neat to see Dan return to Attack on Titan now that it's over, but this is a video from several years ago that less than 10% of his current subscribers have seen, so I'm not sure there'd actually be a point unless he could build a separate video essay around how AoT ended and just kinda mention the Lost parallel in passing.
Perhaps you should return to Titan, it's undergone a real tonal shift and those mysteries (barring the very opening 40 seconds) have actually both arisen and been resolved in a natural and satisfying way. It seems like for a majority of the initial questions, if you'd asked Isayama about them when he was still writing what would become season 1, he would actually have a decent answer. I feel like I might be mindlessly defending it, but I would like to assert that, now that the manga is in the endgame, it has yet to feel like Lost
I dunno, I've been keeping up with the evolving plot, and the answers are hilariously convoluted.
On the other hand, there are a lot of details which are tied together by the story as it stands in about the past year. For example, in the beginning we see people with names deriving from all over Europe (obvious german ones, Ackerman is Jewish as is Levi, Eren is Turkish, Rico's surname is Polish etc.). At first this serves to reinforce the atmosphere of being "the last bastion of humanity". However, with the reveals from about chapter 88 onwards, we see the diversity in names is in fact due to the Eldian Empire occupying a swath of territory of roughly equivalent size, so when the retreat to the island was made the population would include representative examples of this geographic spread. Another example is the number of kings between Ymir Fritz' deal and the king that built the Walls, the 145th king retreated to Paradis 1750 years after the deal, which comes out at about 12 years per king, which matches up with the curse. The dates have been known since chapter 50 something and the king number has been known since somewhere in the 60s. Obviously this falls outside of the purview of your video, and it's entirely possible that that was made up in order to foreshadow the introduction of the curse as a plot device in the late 80s, but I find it quite nicely set up and it's enough to colour my impression of even earlier chapters ;)
There are, of course, other details which have yet to be described and I'm not sure how they could be. The very first panel/shot of anime and the title of that chapter "To you, 2000 years from now" seems to be a mystery where the story isn't moving in a direction to solve it, and there's plenty going on with Zeke/ royal blood/ titanising that lies somewhere between unexplained and utter bull. However, I'm fairly convinced that the number of early mysteries (I'm just going to put all of the obvious unanswered questions raised up until chapter 88 in this group) that are tied up but replaced by new ones as the plot has moved on is larger than the number of early mysteries that remain by a sufficiently satisfying margin. Still some handwavey rubbish with the Eldian paths, although they are quite convenient for the author. We're both just responding to similar things in different ways, it seems. Love your videos generally, by the way. I enjoy your perspective on a lot of your subject choices a lot, and particularly videos like the Shadow of the Colossus one are real experiences to watch!
@@FoldingIdeashope you are still watching and do a follow up on AoT
Now that Attack on Titan has ended in 2021, I think this video turned out to be incorrect. Even with the ending being very divisive, the reason why it's so divisive isn't because it fell to the traps described here. It wasn't like Lost where *everything* was left to be explained at the end. With AoT, its biggest mysteries had already been answered long before the ending section came about, and most fans consider these answers satifying. The thing that was so polarizing about the ending was the way the final conflict was resolved.
I haven't read the manga but I am up to date with the anime and I do think Shingeki did a pretty good job (if not perfect) of unveiling its mysteries
Junji Ito's great outcome with Uzumaki is largely an outcome of genre and theme. He was making surreal horror as usual and played very abstract at first, but when he delved further into the town and characters as he had to for the manga to continue, he didn't choose plot as an advancing work, he chose to stick to theme as the connecting strand. It's a gamble; it works well in his usual urban legend touch-of-the-surreal horror style at first, and as things escalate the common characters and town give us a frame of reference to anchor the increasing absurdity and the strong theme gives us the ability to read into, predict, and play along with the 'plot' - we never know what the next chapter will do, but when we see the first few pages, we KNOW the theme well enough to be a page ahead of the characters. And it worked very well in allowing the theme to BE the plot in turning the whole thing into 'spirals all the way down'; making the disconnected and surreal nature of everything not a weakness but its great strength. But it's a gamble, because if he'd got to chapter 8 and ran out of great on-theme developments, the whole thing would have collapsed.
Stories usually go with plot as the string between pieces because it feels more concrete and safer - you can't 'fail' to add something to a plot, just do better or worse. But because it's so safe, it gets really obvious when you screw it up. Or stacking mystery boxes; you get a LOT of extra momentum at the start and can string audiences along right up until the last box is opened, but it is a stringing along and it will fail. If the audience watches you open the last of the nested mystery boxes and finds nothing, they don't see an empty box, they see the hand of the writer flipping them off for ever caring.
I think Lost is the most famous example of this, but it's by far not the worst example. Lost actually had a lot of its mythology in place from the very beginning. Check out a fantastic article, okbjgm.weebly.com/lost by former Lost writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach where, yeah, a lot of the broad strokes were always there and didn't just come out of nowhere. Not to say that it wasn't victim to the things you're describing, but you might be surprised how much of the groundwork was developed by the time of the pilot and it wasn't just twists for the sake of twists. The second and third seasons did suffer because ABC wanted to keep their biggest hit on the air as long as possible which meant throttling the plot, but once they were convinced that "Hey this show needs an ending" the last half of the series mostly kept on track of delivering a solid narrative. The show was always about the balance between science and faith, rational and irrational, so things like the numbers or why the island heals people, etc etc, I don't mind them not *really* explaining. Really the show kept to its own internal mythology for the most part, as infuriating as that might be.
Now if you really want a poster child for this kind of phenomenon, check out Heroes. A show clearly making up things as they go along, as characters that should have died or been written out are forced again and again back into the spotlight because they're considered fan favorites, as mysteries are set up but are never paid off, as the status quo is constantly being reset so that the audience isn't scared away by any attempts to advance the plot. It's Lost paint by numbers by someone who doesn't know how to count.
Fantastic explanation for this wibbly wobbly mythology phenomena. We take it for granted that episodic TV has, aside from daytime soaps, been a more recent phenomena but we've been reading books for centuries so the concept of a beginning, middle, and end should not be so hard to understand. The main problem with TV vs books is that an author will get their ending published if the beginning is as well. TV doesn't have that guarantee so shows being written as a serial need a show bible but the showrunner and staff have to be prepared for a sudden ending if they're cancelled. That causes these same problems however. I think tho that Lost was forced to be stretched out due to network demand while Heroes has been allowed to run wild because the network allowed it and staff was constantly fired because Tim Kring ultimately didn't want to actually be tied down to an ordered set of rules. Both shows suffered the effects of network bloat but for the opposite reasons. And please god don't let them unleash a second season of Heroes Rewhatevered onto the world. The first season just proved that no one learned from or cared about flaws that decayed the original series.
Big disagreement on Heroes here. I saw it as Marvel/DC comics put on TV, where story arcs and characters are ment to be drastically evolving, almost rebooting in the way it takes new turns, good guys becomes badguys, different timelines explored etc. And it did that near perfectly - including it imploding on power inflation and later getting actually rebooted.
i would love you to read what came out over the last 3 years and letting us know if your opinion changed
Asked one year ago but in short - nah. Just now on twitter mentioned it again. Maybe not the mystery part... although it fits tbh, but it still sucks.
In the middle of rereading Attack on Titan now and this video popped up on my home feed. I sort of wish this was a longer minisode so that he could have brought up more specific examples, 'cause going back and reading through the manga again has made me go "oh yeah this was all pretty obviously planned out WAY in advance". Curious about what the disconnect there is.
So for example there are some heavy imperialist and fascist reading's. Now people take it a little far by claiming ishiyama is Nazi but if the "beyond the wall" plot was thought out ahead of time he wouldn't have needed to use shorthand.
Eren also being the will of the Attack Titan was a concept but clearly not one that he had completely solidify. There's a technique in writing were an element of the story is kept vague enough to leave room for additions.
Also Anna and Historia were threads given a decent amount of focus but clearly he never had plans for them. Its also already well known that Sasha was supposed to die early but fan backlash kept her alive.
Honestly I like the ending though but it also shows how swayed Ishiyama can be because even if people hated it the ending was his choice and his vision no one else's
HOLY SHIT, this did not age well. Folding Ideas I would love for you to make a sequel to this vid, it's needed
lol i just watched this video and felt exactly the same
I just looked it up, in August 2015 the manga was around the Uprising arc, I can totally see why he's come to that conclusion because there were a lot of loose ends and mysteries at that point in the story.
It was bound to never age well because he tried to use an American tv show to predict how a fucking Anime of all things would go.
It did. It aged pretty fucking well.
Considering where Attack on Titan is now, this video did not age well. I also don't know that the manga or show ever really introduced mysteries beyond "what are titans?" And "what does the world actually look like beyond the walls?" Both of which would (and did) explain any mystery that is brought up in the course of the story.
the story is all plot driven. i don't think we can expect any major resolve at the end. maybe a paradox plot twist
Gilli Weed literally all of those are answered by the first two questions.
I think they will come to a good final conlcution, even if it is just final for the characters.
@Gilli Weed "Just think of how flat and uninteresting the beach scene was, even though it should have been the most emotional moment of the series"
But... it was?
"So if we kill everyone outside... can we be finally in peace?" I'm still shivering over that scene, especially if you see where did Eren's character develop later.
"Even recently, we had mysteries set up between the two boring ass ethnicities that existed outside the wall"
But it fits into the thematic of the manga completely? So obviously SPOILERS, the twist that Elderians locked away in the walls because they ARE the Titans, they are the ones who can transform into them, and the world FEARS them just like they feared the Titans in the whole manga, fits into the "we vs outside forces" theme pretty well, its has a lot of real world metaphors and it gives a obvious message about the dangers of nationalism, but also collective guilt over mistakes which were done by your ancestors, and about racism in general. Also you can see that this was set up intentionally from the first issue of the manga. I don't know... I just can't hate on it, it became something a lot more than just a roller coaster ride about people fighting giant zombies and dying.
I think another interesting point that changes the tonal and introductory plots of the show is that the mangaka (sorry I can't remember your name right now, sir, and I'm too lazy to open a new tab) initially planned at the outset of writing to kill the entire main cast, but upon seeing popular response to his characters and especially after seeing the show, felt he didn't know if he could follow through with that intent anymore. So that creates a huge shift in intent that just doesn't line up with the groundwork already laid. Maybe he'll still kill everyone off. Maybe he won't. But author intent is a usually invisible force that drives a narrative, until the author suddenly changes trajectory, and then it leaves the viewer feeling like... something is off.
...But I gotta say, I'm pretty much just in it for Armin and the 3DMG. >_> Whereas most fans are crying fan-tears for Levi, I just adore that nerdy blond dweeb to bits.
There is one point in the manga that really stands out to me in regards to how clearly the mangaka never really planned the series out beyond the start.
*Spoilers follow, you have been warned*
The scene in which we finally get the huge revelation that the colossal titan, and the armored titan are actually humans, and not just humans, but actually humans that in the military, and not only that, they're in the very same squad as the protagonist.
It should be a huge dramatic reveal. And everything about the scene was just lazy. It came out of literally nowhere. It was as if the mangaka all of a sudden realized that he had no idea how to lead the characters to the reveal, so he just made the characters give up.
The following resolution shows that these actions go against any sort of plan that might have been in place for them, and it literally made no sense for them to not at least wait for a moment of privacy with Eren to reveal this information. They just kinda blurted it out while another completely unrelated conversation was going on.
In some way it feels like it may have been supposed to be a subversion on the whole "wait 500+ chapters for the dramatic reveal", but it utterly kills the flow of the story, and ruins any and all immersion there was in place.
I watched it when it was originally airing, and at some point I just couldn't wait any longer and ended up reading the manga. After catching up to the manga at that point in time, I gave up on the whole series. It became abundantly clear that there was no actual intention of really resolving the story, but rather just, as Folding Ideas said, go the lost route of constantly introducing more and more trite mysteries that will also never go on to actually get resolved.
i don't think the reveal for point one was good. yes it didn't allow tension, but i had never seen anyone do a reveal that big in the background of a panel. not even the fore ground of the panel. mind blown, this technique has potential. but yeah it didn't really give a lot of tension afterwards.
Take in consideration the series has some huge twists befor like eren becoming a titan , The author knew fans would second guess everything and he made the reiners reveal anticlimatic out of a sudden to surprise readers to change parts of the mystery formula.
@@Svefngengill Something that was heavily foreshadowed (in show more obviously) came literally out of nowhere. Character who obviously has mental problem reveals secret while his partner panically protests, that just doesn't make sense. Now there is last arc, pretty much every chapter includes major revelation which people were able to predict months or even years in advance, but yeah, it is abundantly clear that there was no actual intention of really resolving the story...
With the hindsight of 5 years I can definitely say that Attack on Titan was planned. Not every detail was planned, but enough that every mystery introduced in the series has a resolution later down the line. Sometimes a lot later (Annie), but it's coming.
yeah unfortunately that planning was just racism and fascism
Although, what you describe could be said about "Lost" as well.
It's well known, that the final episode of Lost, the conclusion, has been planned from the get go. Just not the "details" how they got there.
But while in AoT, the details are still generally part of the over-all plot, in shows like "Lost" the details got carelessly and randomly attached to the main plot and completely overgrew the main story, to a degree that the ending couldn't be satisying anymore.
@@garrettgrisso8180 I don't quite agree. Yes fascism and racism are elements of the story, but neither are endorsed, at least not from a western view point. The series makes it clear that the racism against the Eldians (who are simultaneously a stand in for Jewish people during the holocaust and Japanese people who suffered under Japanese Imperialism, so yeah the metaphors do get mixed) is entirely wrong. Yes I've heard people say that some Titans having huge noses is anti semetic, but I don't agree because all generic Titan faces are super exaggerated in similar ways.
As for fascism while it has been in the series from day one, every fascist organization in the narrative is very clearly shown to be bad or even outright evil. Eren embracing fascist genocidal ideology also isn't the narrative supporting that, since theres no way to read the narrative in a way that portrays him as a "good guy" anymore after that and the story shifts to everyone's attempts to stop him. First by attempting to appeal to his humanity and kindness and when that doesn't work outright trying to kill him.
@@Evnyofdeath If you see any depictions of westerners in Japanese media, they are generally depicted with exagguratedly large noses. I do not think this has anything to do with antisemitic sterotypes, this does not have the same history in Japan. The iconografy of the Eldians are definitly based on the holocaust, but I think it is only used as a paralell to mirror Japanese historical event.s
The period in Japanese history with most parralels is not WW2, but late Edo and the meiji period(mid 1800s to early 1900s) and Japan meeting the world outside, especially the wetern imperialists who many at first saw as unrefined barbarians, but came to see as a superior foe when the Americans forced Japan to open the borders. There's a lot of valid critizism done against the series, but I think a lot of it is done from a wester-centric worldview.
@@Evnyofdeath All of what you said fails to holds weight when the autor said in an interview that "there are good thinks that have come out of war". Really Isayama is one of those people that read Mein Kampf and think Hitler had "some" good reasons. Your average enlightened centrist.
Hey Dan! Now that the series has an ending, do you plan on finishing it?
OMG I'm not the only one who compared Yeager's basement to J.J. Abrams mystery boxes XDD
"Problem with serial production" *Charles Dickens has entered the conversation*
This guy was roasting attack on titan BEFORE it was cool
I feel bad, because I also got it wrong here exactly as Dan did. I came back to AoT only after season 3 came out and it turned out the answers and resolutions have been planned way in advance
Lost had a slightly different problem than what you describe here. my understanding is that there was a concertina-ing of seasons as in, when season one came out there was a plan for a coherent 3 season story with a proper ending etc. then it became a massive success and they were told we want 11 seasons, green lit right now. as it changed in popularity that number of seasons kept being changed between "one more" to "nine more" bouncing back and forth like a yoyo. imagine trying to write something sensible under those conditions!
This video is a cautionary tale on updating your priors given new information. As the manga progressed, we became increasingly aware that Isayama was doing everything but writing by the seat of his pants. In fact, he most likely had major portions of the story planned in advance. It would be cool of you to make a video acknowledging this.
I doubt he will. He already replied to another comment (the one literally made just before yours in the 'comment timeline') that basically told him the same thing and said "I was, in fact, extremely correct about AoT". So he clearly isn't willing to change his mind after all this time despite all of the overwhelming evidence that has piled up as the series progressed proving him wrong. He's also probably jumped on the stupid bandwagon of "AoT is for Nazis as it demonstrates Fascistic themes and ideas" even though it specifically goes out of its way to show those ideas/ideologies in a negative light, deconstruct them and show exactly why they are bad in the first place.
@@mikloshujber1452 Thanks for the reply. I had little hope he would acknowledge being wrong given the opinions he has made publicly available in the past, but thought I'd try anyway. At least, everyone who follows the manga and doesn't think the Earth is filled with Nazis knows he was wrong. Cheers
Guy's the moment he had to use arm bands as short hand you can tell that half the ideas weren't nearly as fleshed out.
The Nazi issue doesn't come up if you don't predicate the unbalance of power with clumsy handled imagery.
He even had to make changes to the anime because he was afraid the manga content dragged on in places (which I liked but ) because the story wasn't didn't have a clean trajectory
The only plan was Eren and sadly that's all anyone fixates on how his twist was planned ahead but not really anything else once you look at the whole series
Now we looking forward to an update to this comment after that ending.
If Isayama had a plan it was "what if house Atreides from Dune was jewish and also the protocols are true".
I honestly really love the way Attack On Titan handled mystery. Even waiting years between watching the first season and the follow-up season, I was very satisfied with the payoff. My best guesses as to what the fuck was going on behind the scene were just flat wrong and I really enjoy a work of fiction that eludes predictability. Also, it did feel like the writers had purposefully intended these revelations all along--i.e. it didn't feel like they just pulled it out of their ass.
Interesting comparison but I recommend checking out the latest chapters (at least like, the last 5 or so). Also, if you're basing your opinions on summaries and fragments of the source material instead of actually reading the whole source material (not to mention unfinished source material), we'd have to take them with a bigger grain of salt. I can't really see how AoT gets on Lost's level of convolution right now (don't remember what part the story was at at the time of this video).
Also, another video on AoT could be relevant since season 2 is officially coming out this year.
This problem is inherent to all serialized stories. Some shonen manga avoid it like Jojo's by telling stand alone stories (pun intended) with some connective tissue, or One Piece where the end goal is nebulous to meaningless and the island arcs are their own adventures. It's basically the old Star Trek formula "Enterprise lands, problems ensue, problem gets solved, Enterprise leaves", just more elegant. Other shonen manga are Naruto, made up as they go and frustratingly inconsistent in worldbuilding, themes and plot. The things that work about Naruto were either accidental or abbandoned early on.
I honestly feel like this video has aged quite a bit in terms of even equating Attack on Titan with Lost. For as much as Attack on Titan's ending has spurrred controversy, you cannot make the claim it wasn't the ending that was planned out and executed by the author's intent long before it actually got to the point of the ending itself. Unlike Lost, which was written entirely by the seat of the pants', AoT had a serialized plot and the mysteries were all ones the author had the answers to before he started writing and delivered on them accordingly.
That makes it even worse because that means the show was never good to begin with.
Well you weren't quite right that the questions weren't answered, as they all were, yet the ending certainly left many wanting.
Holy shit, this guy's a fucking prophet.
For those of us who are of a little more risk of dying by covid, I learned my lesson with X files - so when Lost came I said "they don´t know where they are going with this shit".
I have always felt that a good mystery... thing (tv show, novel series, comic, anything really that does not have a predetermined run time) has to have a relatively thoroughly planned conclusion for each mystery. If it doesn't have a planned conclusion for each mystery it will be extremely unsatisfactory. For instance, in the original Sherlock Holmes books, they could go on for as long as the writer wished so long as each book was well written and, in the sherlock tv show while each episode was generally considered good (from what I understand) the overall plot was a mess because there was no plan for how to end the tv show as a whole just a plan for each episode. Just my own thoughts.
You need to reread and rewatch AoT. All the mysteries are tied up in a neat little bow by the end of the story. Every storyline is both foreshadowed in previous episodes and resolved by the end of the series.
I’m not sure if I agree with this. I’m not sure how much was out at the time this video was made but attack on titan has, in my opinion, wrapped up almost all its loose ends.
This video did age well
We are now in the last season and fortunatelly, it looks like Dan was fairly wrong about his assesment of the show. Even though we still have a few episodes to go, at the moment it looks like this show knew where it was going right from the get go. Everything looks like it comes together nicely. Most mysteries have alreay been solved, in a way that makes it look very much planned that way.
Although, I really can't blame Dan here for his skepticism. After all, AoT really is more the exception than the rule in this regard. Just recently, we had the finale of "Game of Thrones", which, just like "Lost" and just like "AoT" was built on a lot of mysteries, and was presented as if it was building up to something big. Only to then end on a finish which didn't tie up anything in a satisfying way.
So, Dan was justified to be skeptical. Fortunatelly, he seemed to have been wrong.
Do you still have the same opinion?
@@demonking-zm3rs At this point, yes. But I need to point out: Don't know how the story ends. I don't read the manga, I only watch the anime. And there, we are still half a season away from seeing the end.
Dan wasn't wrong. In fact, he was extremely spot on.
I wonder if Titan has a distinction from Lost in that the conflict is clearer and the "mystery" is based implicitly in the solution of the conflict. In Lost, no matter whether or not the inhabitants of the island find out what's up with this cukoo island, it isn't immediately apparent to the viewer how The Island will help those on it leave.
Titan though is ostensibly building to something - when all is shown about The Titan's Origin the hope of the characters (and audience) is that knowledge will help end the conflict.
+Timothy Morrise but the probable thing is that when the manga reaches climax people will be disappointed. i totally imagined an anti climatic climax.
But the titans make sense in the world of attack on titan, And the wall, and the things that look off, but make sense later.
And here I thought one of the strengths of anime was that they didn't generally aim for forever.
+Robert Richter clearly you arent familiar with the likes of One Piece, Bleach, Naruto and Detective Conan
Clearly.
Robert Richter most definitely, even.
+Robert Richter I generally think that depends on where the anime comes from. Some studios come up with an idea and set out to make that. They have a clear story and they tell it and end. Others are adapting manga, the one I'm most aware of being adaptations of shonen jump, these titles are run essentially by a survey in each weekly volume (essentially people say which ones they picked up the issue for and which they didn't even bother to read) the ones that no one reads get given a month or two to wrap up and the ones that everyone is obsessed with the creator is basically told "You are going to write this for six more months". This means that a lot of manga is designed specifically to last forever with a few chapters pre-planned by the author that they can drop in as an ending at any point (as far as I understand it) which means that lots of manga (especially popular ones like Naruto, Bleach and Attack on Titan) is designed specifically to last forever which leads to anime adaptations that suffer from the same problems.
And this is made even worse since a lot of these long runners begin adapting to anime before the series is even finished, and since weekly manga plots can move really slowly filler has to be made to slow the anime down so it doesn't overtake the manga and run out of ideas.
Set lengths do exist in anime (Cowboy Bebop, Elfen Lied, etc.) but a lot of the most popular animes have always been set to go on potentially forever. This ranges from the days of Astro Boy and Speedracer to modern day. Just look at Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon. Both franchises are capable of going on forever and both franchises are big parts of the reason anime is so popular in the US.
I would have agreed with this but then I read chapter 86. Now I could not disagree more. I would describe Isayama as the anti-Lindelof.
this made me think about how far eren is as of right now (in the manga)
It's funny that Attack on Titan as of 4 years ago was amazingly simple and straight-forward compared to where the manga is circa 2020. A lot of issues have actually been pretty well resolved at this point. though the narrative structure has really suffered to get us to this point (exacerbated by the fact that so many characters and so many locations look so similar due to the art style). LOST fell apart not just because they were asking all sorts of questions and creating so many mysteries, but doing so with no goal in mind and no intended payoff. They hoped that they would just find a resolution as they went, but then they cut short at 6 seasons and ran out of time. It's exactly like what's happening right now with the Disney Star Wars movies: lots of setups, twists and inverted expectations, but all done without an end goal in mind and no real plan for how everything would pay off in the end.
GOT showed how even an end goal doesn't help completely elevate the problem.
I haven't read the manga, but I didn't see this on the anime. I hated Lost from early on because as you say I saw that the draw was the mistery and that they weren't going to be able to deliver. But even if Attack on Titan does have a mistery, and I don't think that's the draw. What makes it work is the feeling of certain doom. Victories are pyrric, and you can't see a way out.
I can guess they'll eventually reach some kind of resolution, but what intrigues me the most is not who or what the Titans or what's the deal with Eren's father but what will be the price of their final resolution? Will it be worthy? Will they have a choice?
I watched the anime and then went to read the manga. I would say unlike in the anime, the action is not part of the draw in the manga. There is only one action scene in the manga that I think was interesting and it was because it was one of those battles of wits. Action scenes themselves (in my opinion of course) are not very well drawn. So the mystery is a lot more important in the manga. However, I also think that the mystery is not bad. Some twists are absurd (in the sense that if you pay too much attention to detail they don't make sense) or sometimes big revelations are down played, but it doesn't seem like it is going to leave loose ends.
Attack on titan has a constant worlsbuilding, begins with knowing little vto reveal more revelation for revelation. And the author never contradicts himself or the world he build. And doesnt makes them up for shockvalue, he plans them from full panned out storyline.
The unresolved mysteries of Lost never really bothered me.I just loved the characters so much that I was happy with the resolutions to their individual stories.
retrospectively, (having not seen the newest season) it seems that AoT managed to avoid the Lost puzzle-box curse
the question of whether AoT can end on a satisfying note given how polarized the fanbase has become over the main character is up for debate, but I think this video is wholly wrong about the mysteries in attack on titan being written without answers in mind. It is head and shoulders above Lost in terms of introducing and then resolving mystery boxes.
Wasn't his point that he didn't think the resolutions would be satifying.
@@fightingmedialounge519 Which resolution did you not find satisfying? I liked the explanations for some of the former mysteries. I liked how most of them were kind of realistic.
Gonna go into spoilers now so be aware of that.
The revelation that the "home town" of Reiner, Berthold, and Annie turned out to be a relatively normal country seemed weird to me at first. I expected a magical titan-town or something. It makes sense that a country would use titans as a military weapon though and the way in which the people who could have this power are suppressed is kind of a neat twist on the relationship between the characters and their home.
The whole thing regarding memory-manipulation was kind of weird and a strange device for telling the story, as far as I can remember. I can't remember enjoying that part.
Regarding a more recent reveal, I enjoyed the way in which the myth about that first titan ever was revealed to be nothing like a fairytale and more about a monarch abusing his power.
I also enjoyed the direction they went with regarding the main character in the current chapters. Sure, it's super edgy, but it kinda makes sense for someone growing up under circumstances like this to basically become a genocidal maniac out of desperation.
Of course, not all reveals were super satisfying, but Attack on Titan is probably a fair bit above the average manga of that type when it comes to how well the story is crafted. They often served to develop the plot and characters, expanded our view of this world, helped to make a story about naked giants fighting more realistic, and didn't have any internal contradictions I spotted as a person not too invested in every detail of the story. What would you have wanted from reveals like these to be more satisfying? If you agree with me on the examples I've mentioned, do you mind providing your thoughts on a reveal you found lacking?
This was a huge underestimation of how anime plots tend to work. They don't do "Lost" style shows in Japan very often.
Sounds like generic shonen anime to me and all the lazy tropes that come with it.
@@casono Attack On Titan is not a shounen manga, so that's the first problem with this comment.
@@theMoporter it's been 3 years, but it literally is a shounen manga. It was published in Kodansha's Bessatsu Shounen Manga magazine.
I think Uzumaki wandered a bit through the middle. There was a repeating formula for chapters/ issues. Which I think is a trap of episodic content, star trek being a great example, where in you end up with 3 or 4 reoccurring types of episodes with a 1 off now and again to keep things fresh.
I think your biggest mistake here is not takin into account differences between manga and TV-show productions.
When you making a TV-Show your stakes are really hight. Making TV-show is expensive. This is why long-runners are so vital to networks - they already have strong following, so you don't have to worry about raiting so much. It's more profitable to continue existing show than making new one. Add this to having a lot of people working on both script and direction and hight dependence on network... Yeah.
Manga on the other hand is way, waaay cheaper. And author have almost unlimited creative control over it. He dosen't have to artificialy stretch up his work, he can tell every story he want. And Isayama clearly have a story to tell.
"[The] author have almost unlimited created control over it."
Oh, that is... cute.
just a few more episodes left, hope it ends in a satisfactory way
Wow you called it
Idk I've been very satisfied with the mysteries and payoffs in AoT. Feels pretty well planned to me
One thing to remember with lifespans of shows is that what a network wants is a. The show makes it to the third season b. They hit 100 episodes so the show becomes valuable for syndication fees then c. See how far it can go while carrying high viewership numbers. It's very rare that shows on network and cable TV are kept around as a 'passion project' that an exec loves (such as Hannibal) but the success of the commercialless format that streaming services can use is forcing networks to look more towards serial shows to compete. I know this is purely technical business babble but it's also very real concerns that (at least American) show creators need to keep in mind when creating their show and deciding how to write and pace their story. If your viewing numbers are bad you're probably done but if they're good you run the risk of the network stepping in and fooling with any non-malleable timeframes you may have initially planned for. It's a very narrow fence to walk on making a show. Vince Gilligan was not sure Breaking Bad would come back another season for most of the show's run but the studio acquiesced to his request to end at 5 seasons. They all made history and at least now it's a bit easier for showrunners to be given more of a chance. Networks still want their 100 episodes though so that is often a showrunner's main goal.
Agreed on lost. Not agreed on AOT. I don't know where the manga was when he did the research, but the general plot seems to have been laid out beforehand. Most of the mysteries have been answered for a while now, meaning that the show has lost a major hook and has taken a not-too-welcome turn.
Now we've hit the critical level and the plot is about... both sides but with Nazis and the Jews????
good job AoT, you beat the odds.
It really didn't beat any odds. It just performed how Anime generally performs in this context. Loose end mysteries aren't really a thing Anime often does.
You should definitely read the most recent summaries/chapters. Everything is explained and is revealed to have been connected from the beginning.
Pretty sure he has and still wouldn't like it.
Kye Dysarthria Damn I don’t even remember leaving this comment on this video lmao
Watching this in 2021 and knowing the ending of the manga... this video feels even more relevant and accurate.
I hated Lost. But in its defense it brought the idea that a show that could maybe tell a story with a beginning middle & end into television. If it came out now it would be 12 episode seasons or maybe a single season event show. I’m glad for the shows it’s inspired.
I wonder how many people are going to send you emails about how supposedly the writer for Titan has said that he had the story mapped out from the beginning. (I only know of this because I hear it a lot.)
I wasn't a big fan of Attack on Titan because the mysteries that it promised answers too just weren't interesting enough to make up for what felt like a needlessly too bleak story. After episode 5 I just grew numb to any emotional moment the show put in front of me.
I don't think I believe AoT's creator has the story mapped out. He can't even keep track of character traits and motivations between scenes.
yeah we like the action scenes, more then the plot!
@@The5lacker any examples of that?
I think you should look into this series again.
i think you should look at the series again too, this time with a critical eye watching for nazi dogwhistles and fascist ideals
@@alaraplatt8104 I dropped the series when I heard a rumor about the creator ran a Japanese nationalist Twitter account. Believe me, I've looked into the series and found the exact opposite of what you're claiming. The series is overtly anti-fascist.
@@alaraplatt8104 what are you even talking about
There _is_ one example of a mystery which keeps unfolding, every answer revealing new questions and inadequacies in our understanding of the material. It's called science, and it's fascinating after centuries-if not millennia-of new episodes. I'd love to see a supernatural mystery thing where the mysteries kept unfolding like they do in science, but the overlap between mystery authors and people who love and understand science is probably minimal.
Oh, so like The Magicians?
UA-cam forgetting I watched this back in the day and recommending it now that everything in AOT has come together amazingly well is sure some bad timing.
Aaannnnnd he just doubled down on twitter. I respect you Dan, but that's a pretty unsightly reaction to being proved wrong.
This is the reason the good place is imo one of the best TV shows ever made
happened to homestuck too. 'swhy the ending dissatisfied so many ppl, i think :/
Maybe but... was anyone actually reading Homestuck for the *lore*? Really? *Really?*
Like, I guess... but I feel like Homestuck's problems were really more with the overarching plot structure rather than a desire to keep the nonexistent mystery going.
I think a really good example of how to avoid this was the show The 4400 on USA. It was also a mystery show from the mid 2000s like Lost but unlike Lost new mythology elements weren't just put in willy nilly. We started with one central mystery and as we got answers, those answers very naturally led to more questions. There was some branching in all of this, of course, so that there were several plot threads left hanging when the show was cancelled due to the writer's strike (damn it) but there was always a sense that there was a bottom of the mystery that we were always getting closer to. Of course the show doesn't have a proper ending due to the cancellation so there's no way to know if it would have been satisfying or not, and I suspect the writers were still making it up as they went along judging by a couple of minor plotholes, but they had the sense to use restraint and build, slowly but surely, on this system of questions naturally leading out from answers.
The 4400 are great. The developement of the characters They knew how to tackle the conflict of several fractions with good and bad sides during one show. They even wrote a realistic cult. And the makers of the show had to write novels to continue from the next season like ending in the latest episode.
Definitely Attack on Titan's author wasn't making it up on the go. Of course the first time I comment on a Folding Ideas video it's the one time I don't agree, so whenever you read this Dan, consider this also as a positive comment on almost every other of your videos XD But whatever people may think of the ending, there's no way that there wasn't a lot of planning going on under the surface, from the very beginning of the story. It's blatantly apparent.
Hold on, Dan, you never really got back to Attack On Titan.
Was that intentional? It could be taking the video's content into account.
It's funny you compare AoT to Lost as I used to be a huge fan of Lost and have made that exact comparison, only the difference is that AoT was what Lost could've been and is a mystery that does right everything Lost did wrong. Lost got progressively more ridiculous and threads were constantly invented and dropped, rewatching from Season 1 gives you absolutely no clues that you missed before since after watching it to the end you know they don't mean anything. It's all just fate, or magic, or that people were idiots. Yes, the explanation was literally just "magic" in the end. Or "ghosts". If they had revealed that the whispers were "ghosts" and the smoke monster was pretty much magic I'm sure a huge chunk of people would've stopped watching. What's most painful is that the fans of Lost have come up with so many geeky theories that MADE SENSE and were way more fascinating than what we ended up with, which was religious mumbo jumbo. All the Producers had to do, was go on line and pick a fan theory, and we literally would've gotten a way better ending to the show. But no, they decided to go with magic. Ok then.
AoT however, managed to weave all these elements together and the mysteries have gotten only more interesting as we find out more. The difference is, THEY ALL MAKE SENSE. Rereading from chapter one, you find out so many throw away lines of dialogue, so many innocent shots or comments or gestures that foreshadow future events. Fans have come up with tons of engaging possibilities for the answers to the mysteries and they're all fascinating. Compared to Lost, where you can't even come up with one that makes any sense at all. Isayama the author of AoT has proven time and time again that he had at least 80% of the outline of his story in his head before he started drawing chapter one. It's extremely rare for an author to create such a well thought out mystery action series and is largely part of the reason why it has been the success that it is.
It's unfortunate that you decided to spoil yourself and not read the manga or even watch the show properly, but especially in light of the past 5 chapters or so that pretty much revealed 70% of the mysteries (and yes they all fall into place) the comparison to the incoherent mess that Lost became is rather insulting.
I like attack on titan for its action scenes, the battle plans that get carried out , and we get diagrams to show us the battle field. i think these are really well done. but the story itself seems to lack something. which might actually be a story, since it is pretty much just plot.
Gilli Weed the story is literally focused on one single conflict with no mystery whatsoever at this point.
It drags at times, but in the manga they seem to head toward a resolution to a major conflict that will pay off. It also works as a Anti war drama. The author definitly has a laid out plan and doesnt make bs up every season like lost. They didnt even developed the mystery what about the lighsource in the island is so important. And the los finale sucks with a few good moments of ben and hurley.
Supernatural is the epitome of Lost Syndrome.
Actually, Supernatural is the epitome of The Simpsons syndrome: things just drag on far longer than they need to be and everything new feels like a rehash of previous seasons.
wles mana I was more referring to the need to constantly build things up.
Brian MacLeod that's more of like the "Dragon Ball Z" syndrome and a narrative version of power creep. "This guy is the strongest guy we've ever faced! He can blow up mountains!!" Cut to the next story arch-> "This guy is the strongest guy we've ever faced, he can blow up PLANETS!"
+LegendLeaguer
BTVS is another great example of this. "This is the most powerful vampire in the world, we're all going to die!" [kills boss vampire, cut to even tougher baddie that is about to unleash its plans to blow up the planet, end of season cliffhanger]
soupalex Noooòoooooooo.
I think attack on titan season 1 (and possibly the equivalent manga chapters) had some failings that pushed some people away. But as with other commenters, I agree that Attack on Titan is not Lost (yet; we still have final season pt 2 to see). You never want to hear someone say "wait until season blah, that's when it picks up," but at the same time that's exactly how I feel about it. The groundwork of season 1, as plodding or confusing as it was at points, did set up future seasons to have some really great stories. I think to that extent, lining up a completed, long-running American tv show to a Japanese manga adapted to anime should allow for a bit more nuance than yellow flags.
I don't know if AoT does this mass production of mysteries, it seems like most get resolved, but I am glad that I'm not alone in feeling this way about it.
More, I feel it piles all of its mysteries on over the first 3 seasons, with almost no clues or tasty crumbs to keep the audience wanting more.
As the audience, you're supposed to be able to follow along with the story, and you can't if you have no idea at all what's happening, and cant get emotionally invested.
You feel like an alien, not an active viewer.
God-damn it. You called it, Yams bit more than he could handle, and then some more. Even in literally the last fucking chapter, after not tying all the knots, he was bringing up new mysteries. It was frustrating.
And the fact that people overlook this and praise him and AoT's ending as being "superbly great" makes me mad.
I do look forward to you taking a new look into it after the series' ending, though!
Wait, what?
I wonder if you dive into how attack on titan dealt with tjis problem now that its over
Hey, I was just wondering if you have any particularly major examples of mysteries in Lost that you feel weren't resolved satisfactorily. I ask because while I hear that charge leveled against the show constantly, nearly every example I've seen given of a supposedly unresolved mystery or dangling thread really does have a solution or resolution somewhere.
Like, for instance, people seem really hung up on the polar bear - I have read and watched and listened to rant after rant after rant lamenting that the finale "never explained the polar bear," which is just bizarre to me given that the polar bear's presence had been justified since at least the beginning of season 3. To be sure, that's just one example, and some of the other mysteries really are less explicitly resolved than that one, but I've honestly yet to hear any truly pressing questions that I haven't been able to answer, and I have definitely looked.
That being said, not once in this video did you claim that they were all just dead the whole time, thereby clearing the tragically low bar for legitimate Lost criticism, and for this I thank you.
Good thing all of this didn't happened in Attack on Titan
Yeah, good thing Dan was super super super super super wrong about this one.
This guy had no idea back then...
This aged pretty poorly ngl. Not to shit on you I think it for sure seemed that way at the time
I didn't notice all that many mysteries piling up as I read Attack on Titan, but I did end up dropping it like... 80 chapters in or something like that? Not because I got bored with the story, but because I caught up to where it was being written, left it for a few months to let more chapters happen, and then when I came back I couldn't tell who anybody was because the art isn't good enough to distinguish between generic randos and half the main and supporting cast if you're not on top of things enough to know *exactly* what everyone looks like and where they are. I also couldn't remember a lot of the supporting cast because there were a bunch of them.
you just watched like 15 episodes of it and you are already saying that?
Currently keeping up with the anime as it comes out, I would say that Attack on Titan managed to avoid having the same problems. It basically wraps up every lingering thread or mystery by the end of season 3. With all that out the way, it does some world building/loredumping to set up all the players involved in the final conflict and their motivations, before setting it into motion. The transition into the final arc is a bit clumsy (Starting S1 EP4 was one of those "did I skip an episode?" moments) but it gets to the point eventually.
Its funny, cause i read the manga, and i would disagree. Without wanting to spoil anything, but i thought the ending was not really bad, it just didnt end up giving explanations to a lot of things, and it felt that certain themes never got a conclusion as well.
This video didn't age well...
... but Attack on Titan only has 1 season. And isn't the manga only like 2 season's worth of content ahead of the show?
*AoT Spoiler*
We're following Eren Jaeger, and the questions we want answered are the same ones he wants answered. That being said, in the story since then, a LOT has taken place and a lot of the questions have been answered pretty clearly. That's why they recently had a time-skip, to create more questions for us so that we might read part 2 in the hopes of learning...
.
.
.
WHY IS EREN KILLING CIVILIANS NOW?!?
What are you talking about the KoF manga is nowhere near being done. Is it? Last time I checked it wasn't. i went and read the gotdamn manga just cuz I needed to KNOW what was gonna happen next.
That's how the manga industry is. Manga-ka are expected to release a chapter a week most often than not with breaks here and there. Having a plot that is interesting and does great things under that schedule is insanely taxing on them. AoT manages to have patterns but it's much better than you might expect where the series is now in the manga. At least the characters are almost always like 5 steps ahead of the audience. Lost had problems but Attack on Titan isn't plagued by a million little plots happening throughout the story. It's one core plot with answers that the main characters / audience are looking for.
you mean How I Met Your Mother?
Another perfect example of the same problem
I think How I Met Your Mother actually also suffered the opposite problem. The ending was planned from season 1, and if it had happened that way there (I'm gonna say it) it wouldn't have been the worst. Instead of the show outgrowing any possible ending, it outgrew its own ending.
Boy did this video age badly...
It didnt lol
Pretty Little Liars has been good at seeming like it was gonna fall into this but eventually providing satisfactory answers.
The problem is in the last two years more and more of these reveals have tainted the positive cred it once had with Feminist and LGBT fans.
what was that comic you recomended there? something by Ito? was that as in junji Ito?
Yeah, Uzumaki by Junji Ito.
ta
It's also written by a guy who is all about imperialism and it shines pretty heavily through the story and characters to the point where it's... pretty uncomfortable. I couldn't figure out why I didn't like it when I started watching it so I tried reading it and it was worse, and then I learnt about the kind of view points the creator has and I was just like "OH. YEP"
He's not 'all about imperialism'. He just recognises that even people who do monstrous things can have admirable qualities. Two thirds of the way through the story it turns out that the titans are being created by an imperialist nation and shipped to the island so that said imperialists can kill the inhabitants and take its resources. Eren responds by starting his own fascist movement and instigating a global genocide. At no point during this is he presented as the good guy. The point of the story is to get you all fired up with nationalist fervour for the main character's 'team' only for him to become as bad or worse than his enemies. The author is thereby saying: this is where this leads. Don't do it. If you respond to oppression and imperialism with more of the same, you'll just perpetuate it for everyone. His praising of the leadership skills if individual imperialists is itself a part of his philosophy of otherwise 'good' people doing bad things.
@@joepeake8972 First of all, "3 years ago" kind of gives an indication that anything that happened recently in the story wasn't on my radar. It should also indicate that I probably don't care. I started clocking out a few episodes in because of the weird overtones and fully distanced myself from it when the mangka tried to make visual and thematic parallels to the titan-shifter people and Jewish people - only of the biggest antisemetic troupes out there is "Jews can turn into [x]" where x is usually monstrous, inhuman and/or terrifying so uh nope. Hard pass.
(In addition to all the shitty stuff though - the pacing was shit, the characters did nothing for me, and whenever a show relying on Big Mysteries to get you coming back - which when the in-moment plot and characters weren't interesting, was all AoT had going for me - I know they'll never be worth the effort to find out so. Pthhh)
@@merchantarthurn I don't care whether you like or dislike the show (I wasn't a fan of the direction style or characters either to begin with). My point is that it's not fascist propaganda. A load of thinkpieces came out saying the Jewish ghetto comparison was somehow trying to make them out to be monstrous or evil when the entire second half of the show is dedicated to deconstructing/subverting that idea. I'm not telling you to watch it, I'm saying that you shouldn't be quick to trust the thinkpiece industry's sensationalist takes on works you haven't seen.
@@joepeake8972 Mate dismissing the criticism of antisemetic tropes as "sensationalist thinkpieces" makes me think you didn't actually care to think about the criticism or the antisemitism. The ones I read were from Jewish authors who actually dissected why "coded-Jewish-person turns into monster", even when the character is sympathetic, heavily relies on antisemitism. That's it. That's the way the cookie crumbles. Whether the tone was pro or anti fascist - it still relied on antisemitism in a really gross way that, understandably, made me of three years ago go "fucking gross".
If you need to say "ah but wait, the gross antisemitism had a point in a few chapters time!!" then that's a shit piece of art lmao.
@@merchantarthurn I've also read stuff by Jewish authors saying the exact opposite, that this media got an audience that wouldn't have otherwise engaged with these ideas to do so. It's no different from superhero, sci-fi or fantasy stories using magical racism as an allegory for real historical events. No worries if you find such approaches distasteful.
2022 is laughing, haha.
this video didn't age well at all lmao. The creator definitely had an ending in mind when he first started writing the story
Yeah... like chapter 122 specifically refers back to the title of the very first chapter, which proves that the author had at least some things planned in advance.
When it comes to his opinion it aged perfectly fine.
Attack on titan didn't age well lmao
@@jy8087 says someone who probably read the manga and fell off when season 2 aired
@@nikkothegoblin listen buddy AoT is Bad lmao
chapter 86
yeah the last few chapters just explained everything... like literally eveything
And proven that the author already had the background story in mind. Unlike Lost where the people who made season 1 had no idea what's the answer to the mysteries and let someone else dealt with them, AoT probably only made small changes here and there while the world building still remained the same. I also don't believe the "Eren was originally set to die" theory since that would've broken the foreshadowing of Eren's father giving him the key to the basement. AoT's problem seems to stem from pacing issues, where the series of events are being told in strict chronological order (until the current heavy flashbacks) that some dangling plot points remained buried until much later.
wles mana i don't think it's pacing issues alot of little things were explain though out but now the big things are being revealed
It seems like the author studied film for how he panel the manga together. i really like the paneling they do. the story is okay, but nothing that says he is a great writer. I think a lot of us like it more for the action then the plot.
This is an interesting little video! Yeah, I agree... I got into SNK back when the anime first aired a few years back, so at the time the Manga wasn't as far along and it seemed really good at the time. But as they finally started to reveal more things and make more mysteries.... I found it harder to care. They were clearly being made up as they went and it was just a mess.... and some of the stuff is very uncomfortable due to the underlying tones and just. Yikes.
I had similar problems with the Tokyo Ghoul manga (well, its sequel tokyo ghoul:re mostly). Trying too hard with all these mysteries and twists and interlocking plans that it felt so... Bad and awful and boring and contridictory from what was originally set up.
Best part they set a deadline 2 years to end it-because of the xfiles
In hindsight this video should probably be renamed "awkwardly jumping the gun while comparing an ongoing comic at an arbitrary point in time to a finished work of another format".
Nah, AoT is still bad and aimless.
@@FoldingIdeas That is like your opinion. Not to mention you are still in minority, who thinks like that.
#SixSeasonsAndAMovie but, you know, with Dan Harmon as show runner?