Finishing *Attack on Titan* with My Wife

Yesterday, my wife and I finished watching *Attack on Titan*.

We had been watching it little by little on Netflix, and finally reached the end of the story.

After it was over, I found myself thinking about it for quite some time.

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We are told that killing another person is wrong.

Yet in war, the more people someone kills, the more it is described as an achievement.

They may even be praised for it.

When you think about it, this is very strange.

We accept it as normal, but perhaps we live in a deeply unreasonable world.

*Attack on Titan* was a story that refused to look away from that contradiction.

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The story is not about a simple division between good and evil.

Nor is it about justice defeating wickedness.

It is neither a beautiful celebration of self-sacrifice nor an endorsement of mass killing in the name of war.

Every side has its own history.

Its own fear.

Its own anger.

Its own people to protect.

One side believes it must destroy the other in order to survive.

The other side believes exactly the same thing.

So many values, motives, and histories are intertwined that the story cannot end by simply naming one person as the villain.

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I have always loved Russian literature and have read a great deal of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

*War and Peace*.

*Crime and Punishment*.

What those novels portray is not merely a series of events.

Why do people kill?

What is justice?

Who decides what constitutes a crime?

To what extent can a person accept responsibility for what they have done?

*Attack on Titan* explores through animation the same kinds of questions that literature has examined for generations.

That surprised me.

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At times, some episodes felt less like parts of a conventional story and more like works of avant-garde visual art.

Time became entangled.

The boundary between memory and reality grew uncertain.

Events in the past affected the future, while events in the future altered choices made in the past.

It was not an easy story to understand.

Yet even when I could not fully understand it, something remained.

Perhaps that, too, is one form of art.

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I had expected the story to leave a much more bitter aftertaste.

But somehow, it managed to arrive at an ending.

I do not know whether it can be called salvation.

Nor did it offer an answer with which I could completely agree.

Even so, the long story reached a proper conclusion.

Looking back, countless details had been placed there from the very beginning, only to be brought together one after another in the second half.

The creators carried an extraordinarily complicated story through to the end without allowing it to collapse.

As storytelling, it was remarkable.

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What kind of adults will children who grow up watching a story like this become?

The world cannot be divided neatly into the side of justice and the side of evil.

The enemy has a family, too.

What feels like justice to one person may become terror to someone else.

I wonder what kind of sensibility develops when a child encounters such a story from an early age.

Of course, one work alone does not determine who a person becomes.

But it can leave a question somewhere inside them.

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There is no doubt that forms of expression continue to evolve.

Themes that might once have been explored only through novels can now be conveyed through manga and animation.

This story, created in Japan, is being watched in many different parts of the world.

How is it received by people whose countries, languages, and histories are different from ours?

I would like to hear their thoughts.

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Today, while driving from Chiba to Tokyo, my wife and I talked about *Attack on Titan*.

Even after watching the final episode, many things still did not quite make sense to us.

One thing my wife said stayed with me.

“Perhaps people who love most deeply are also the ones most likely to seek revenge.”

There may be some truth in that.

But then another question remains.

What do we mean by love?

Is protecting someone precious to us an act of love?

If that person is taken from us, can revenge also be born from love?

How much can we place inside that single word?

It seemed to require more thought.

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Again and again, *Attack on Titan* portrays the feelings of people whose families and friends have been killed.

The person who killed your family.

The person who took away your friend.

Could you join forces with them and face a threat to the world together?

“Could you still fight beside them?”

That was one of the questions the story kept asking.

Could you answer yes?

Would you answer no?

There is no easy response.

Even the same person might answer differently depending on the circumstances and the state of their heart at that moment.

My wife and I continued sharing our thoughts.

But in the end, neither of us found an answer.

Still exchanging impressions that led to no conclusion, we continued driving toward Tokyo.