Titans
Recently, the TV series Attack On Titan concluded its 10 year run. While this post will discuss war, violence, and how we understand such acts and concepts, it will contain spoilers for the story that help illuminate the aforementioned subjects…so consider this your warning!
Attack On Titan was originally a comic in Japan, a Manga. The Manga concluded the story several years ago but as all TV adaptations* go, the motion picture version lagged behind in production and only recently concluded. A brief synopsis of the story is to follow.
Humanity is at its final stand. Behind three large walls, all of humanity remains. Beyond those walls, the Titans, large humanoid beings, roam free and eat all the humans they see. It is dangerous and ill advised to step foot outside the walls. Pulled by a sense of curiosity about the outside world and pushed by the feeling that the walls around them are meant to confine and not protect them, our main characters push forward into the unknown.
What starts out as a story about curiosity and mystery, turns into that of tribalism and adventure, which in turn leads to a tale of war and genocide, and finally an inquiry on human nature and our penchants for violence.
Initially, we the audience are put in the perspective of the main characters - we fear the Titans because it’s logical. Our protagonists are humans and the Titans are monsters. While we don’t know a lot about their world, there is some common ground for us to stand on together.
It is then revealed that there are other humans out there, beyond the walls, and that they have been using the Titans to confine our protagonists. Our sense of tribalism grows with our main characters just as their conviction does that their initial hunch was right, the walls were meant to keep them in, not protect them.
The story then turns when we are put in the shoes of the “others”. We learn that the other humans, who have been the antagonists throughout the story, are facing the same dilemma as our protagonists. They were brought up to believe that they were the victims and that our protagonists were the enemy.
Our protagonists, on both sides of the conflict, begin to go through the same cognitive dissonance we undertake as the audience, from the vantage point of each side. It’s rare that a story makes you vilify your hero in a way that also makes you want to preserve their sanctity, while doing the opposite to those who you once thought were villains. But that’s reality. That’s what makes the story so compelling.
“One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist”
This is a crude statement that leaves a a lot to be desired but the main message remains true.
Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, violence can be justified and crucified in the same subjective manner.
And given that such logic is subjective, it therefore can easily be made cyclical. I hit you because you hit me and you hit me because I hit you is the way to view it going backwards. I will hit you because you will hit me and you will hit me because I will hit you is the way to view it going forwards. In isolation, each action can be justified by looking backwards or forwards to a certain point. But in totality, there is no logic. Just a cycle that repeats itself because of itself.
“Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic”
We avoid culpability by rationalizing that the situation is cyclical, and that our actions are therefore predetermined by the pain of the past and the fear of the future. Once you relinquish such ignorance, you are forced to deal with the burden of responsibility for your actions, which in turn leads to the realization that you have agency to act, unbound from any such cycle.
A secondary theme of the story is that of how our mechanisms of inflicting violence have outpaced our understanding of war. The story of Attack on Titan takes forth over several years with technology advancing at a rapid clip akin to that of the early 20th century. Conflicts that begin by the blade, turn to bullets, which then morph in to explosives, and so on. The scale and ease at which we are able to cause such destruction no longer fits within the confines of what we as a collective have defined as right or wrong in war.
War had previously been viewed as an honorable venture. From religious crusades to colonial expeditions, war and its accompanying violence were met with equally significant and tidy logic to justify its horrors. And while I am taking historical liberties in describing these examples at a high level, the same themes remain true in our history as it does in the story of Attack on Titan. War becomes palatable when it is viewed through the lens of a person fighting another person over something they have deemed worthy of staking their lives against. Something that each party have consented to. It feels like a sport. A sport in which the consequences are borne only on the shoulders of the contestants.
A duel. A joust. Just you and me, in the ring.
This primitive view of war is how we ultimately conceptualize our current view of “the world order” and how wars “ought to be fought” and how and when violence can and cannot be justified. The rules “made sense” when the playing field was conceptually equal, but the proliferation of modern weaponry has made it challenging, if not impossible, to enforce such rules with clean logic.
Our preconceptions of war are not able to handle the scale and pace in which violence can be executed in our modern era, which leads us back to the original conundrum.
If there are no rules that can be consistently followed and enforced then the rationale one falls upon is to utilize the logic of the aforementioned cycle of violence. Choose a point in the wheel and use that as the basis for your future actions and justifications for the past. This therefore makes such conflicts appear intractable.
At this point, I won’t pretend to offer a solution because while one is not readily apparent to me, it would also be a pure academic exercise on my part, if I did have a proposal. I write this from the comfort of my apartment in Brooklyn, New York, where the biggest points of contention in my life right now are choosing what to eat for my next meal and waiting for my colleagues to review my PowerPoint presentation. But that doesn’t mean I will sit still. The least any of us can do is to keep learning, listen, and challenge our ideas because there is one constant that is inescapable in all conflict.
People.
We start violence. We perpetuate it. We can also end it.
Returning back to Attack On Titan, the story concludes that the power of the Titans is eventually eradicated from the world and that should create a time for peace. In the end credits, it is shown that peace does exists for some time but that just because the Titans have disappeared from the world, violence returns and persists and that the real monsters were never the Titans, but the people who wielded their power against one another. I was initially disappointed with this ending but sat with it for a few days and began to feel more hopeful, and decided to write this piece because of it.
We can be monsters. But we can just as easily, not be.
*Video adaptations of Manga are called Anime.
