Eldians in Attack on Titan
This is a companion piece to my first essay on Attack on Titan “Is Attack on Titan Pro-Miliatry? Kind of, it’s messy”. This time I will try to analyze the Eldians in Attack on Titan. Similar to the first essay, complete spoilers for the whole series and manga from this point on. You have been warned.
Plus disclaimer, this is simply my opinion. I am trying to open up a discussion on Attack on Titan on what we can learn from how the show tackles some of its themes and ideas.
Prior to the major Season 3 reveal the titans were a fairly neutral force, anyone watching the show would agree that it was fine to murder them, that it was fine for Eren to have such a hatred of them and want to exterminate them. This radical behavior, and the military backing of said behavior, and the immense violence that comes with such a behavior, meant that one could argue that it was all justified, because titans are monsters. One doesn’t need to spend much time convincing anyone that Titans are monsters with no redeemable aspects. They’re viewed as predators to humans, almost like animals lacking any consciousness or humanity, it’s easy to murder them because it’s either us or them. But what if they were human?
The most damaging aspect of AoT is that titans are humans, and that the only race of humanity that can become titans are the Eldians. However, this truth is not revealed until the end of Season 3, so therefore prior to this reveal the titans were monsters. Now the fact that titans are humans turned into monsters doesn’t seem like such a big deal right? As mentioned countless times, titans are likened to zombies, mindless monsters that the story can just use to explore other themes and ideas, but the titans are more than that. The show is all about the titans, it is in the literal name, so it would only be logical that for something to be in the name it should also be tied in some way to the central themes of the show? The reality is rather that the titans are vessels that the show utilizes for the communication of its themes on freedom and self-determination, which one can argue on relentlessly but we are not here to do.
The ability of the Eldian race in AoT to turn into some sort of different creature, and this ability being tied specifically to their race is not new to AoT, the manga did not invent this concept, this concept has existed for many years, both in the anime spheres and even outside of it. This extends beyond the obvious ‘a race being able to turn into a monster’ but deeper, into the idea that race itself as a concept is something tangible. A lot of these narratives naturally assume that races are inherently tangible, and that one can divide humanity into such races, that there are intrinsic qualities that render one of one race and one of the other… And well… This is all… pseudoscience bullshit, excuse my language, but that is the truth. There is no basis in reality for such a premise, and such a premise has historical roots in some troubling moments across history. Racism is a social construct that was constructed to justify the exploitation of African slaves during the slave trade, I am not well versed enough to explain this concept fully, so I advise you research it yourself, learn about the fabrication of race to facilitate exploitation. All of this is irrelevant though to our discussion of AoT and other media that use race as a force in their narratives, what renders this malicious is the fact that this is accepted as truth by the media itself and those watching it, when we are told that the Eldians (and only the Eldians) can turn into titans, we shouldn’t be like: “ohhh that’s cool” we should be like: “ohhh noo that’s bad”. This is not a call for art or media to limit the stories it tells, the point I am trying to make is that this perpetuates the idea that race is a thing, that it is something real and tangible, when in reality there is no way to distinguish between us as humans, and to perpetuate this pseudoscience is very dangerous and only assists racists and reactionary White Supremacist antisemites to feel justified in their beliefs and ideas.
We now get to probably the most contentious and heavily debated part of the entire AoT series, both on and offline, it was this original reading of the text that lead to such division, and lead to many AoT fans to label anyone who was critically analyzing the text as just being uncharitable and accusing them of not reading the manga, or misinterpreting what was actually being said. That reading being that Attack on Titan is Fascist, the proof? That Isayama had likened the Eldians to the Jews. To all of this I just want to make clear, art is complex, vast, and infinite. There are different ways to approach art and how we talk about it, one of the many multifaceted ways upon which we can talk about art is the historical and social context that art decides to interject into itself, sometimes willingly, other times unwillingly, but both of these are there, they are both present, and any choice in art brings with it meaning and baggage beyond what the author might originally intend, or even what the text itself might intend. It is true that one particular choice in a piece of art could be read at its most charitable, and when it comes to the choice of tying the Eldian plight to that of the Jewish people, there are many ways to read this. Defenders of the show will point out that this was not hateful at all, and I would agree, I do not think that Isayama was being explicitly hateful or evil with his choice to connect the two. It is clear that the author throughout the anime and manga is trying to comment on the nature of fascism, war, and authoritarianism. But at the same time, the author is not the sole voice of a piece of work, the work itself has a voice too, and also everything else around the work has a voice, to pick one particular moment in history and tie your manga/anime to that moment brings with it baggage, so the question we need to ask ourselves is, what is the baggage that Isayama unintentionally placed onto his show with the choice to connect the Eldians to the Jews? I can’t answer that, because this is beyond my ability to answer it, but I think it is important that we ask this question.
What we can talk about though is the way AoT uses the “Jewish Question”, this is already another contentious topic, and I can already see many disagreeing with this point. What is the “Jewish Question”? It is a Nazi conspiracy theory, the way it goes is that the most important question you can ask is the “Jewish Question”, it is a question about who is actually in control in society, who is actually pulling the strings and manipulating world events, and well I think you can guess who these Nazis think is already behind it all. The first hint we get of the “Jewish Question” is with Erwin asking Eren “Who is really behind all of this?” or something along those lines, this moment became a meme in the AoT fandom, on its own it was fine, but recontextualized with the information we gain about the Eldians and their connection to Jewish iconography later in the seasons it can lead us to interpret this moment as a “Jewish Question” moment. But I think the most conclusive proof of Isayama utilizing the “Jewish Question” comes in the Season 4 reveal that Marley was actually secretly being controlled by an old Eldian family all along, it was the family that had freed the rest of the world from the Eldian empire of oppression. This feeds into really insidious ideas that a lot of reactionaries have, they blame the Jews for their own oppression, since for them Jews are both in control of society and insidious parasites that are the lowest people in society. It is logical to ask, if an Eldian was running the society all along why then did they allow their fellow Eldian people to be oppressed? This discussion is complex but it highlights the problems with the show, the writer did not need to evoke Nazi imagery to talk about Fascism, and yet he did, so what is his point? Are we meant to sympathize with the Eldians? Or are we meant to hate them? This “nuance” simply muddies the waters and makes it harder to understand what the true end goal of AoT is.
Once again I urge you to think, what is the show trying to say, what are we as an audience supposed to take from this? Because we cannot just engage in art uncritically, we need to be critical of it, we need to break it down and understand it. All art has something at its core that it is trying to communicate, a message to say. So what is the message of AoT?
