Please let me watch the real Attack on Titan. Why am I crying?

The following spoiler contains context to how, why and when I watched the anime, along with the classic overdramatic whining most reviews start out with, which nobody cares about. Tl;dr, I binged it all blind in the span of a few days.

~!AoT was supposed to be something I saved for later, for when I got tired of anime, to revive my interest in it. However, anilist's random-anime-picking feature decided differently, so I dedicated myself to binging it like usual. Circumstantially, it's just ended this month.

When I started watching it, I'd expected the story in my brain to come to life. A war drama filled with death, characters worth crying over, a slow, gritty and realistic plot that made it a saga to behold. It was definitely divisive, but what masterpiece isn't? I was wrong. There is no reason for anyone ever to call Attack on Titan, as a whole, good.!~

This review has spoilers for everything, naturally.

CHARACTERS

Calling them cardboard cutouts would be a compliment. Watching them 'develop' has broken my brain and I don't even know what to say at this point. Time-skips in anime usually suck, because they tend to be excuses to change characters' personalities without having to prove to the viewer that their developments make sense. This anime couldn't even do that right, and instead had us witness some of the worst character writing I've seen.

Mikasa is not one of the worst written female characters, she is one of the worst written characters, period. Alongside any of the cast that got any major 'development'. Whenever a character survived a battle, it was only so they could have the same flashbacks, the same monologues, serve the same useless time-filling role and either die being themselves or live long enough to become caricatures. When Sasha died, I felt heartbroken, because I'd have to stand more screen time for the rest of them and new people would be thrown into the mix, even more pointless to the story than the previous additions.

I genuinely struggle to come up with words for this section. I try to think of the names of characters and match them to descriptions, but there are so many versions for each of them I can't even connect them probably. My brain can't handle this level of cognitive dissonance.

Some stories have bad characters because they never develop. The sort of lows AoT sank to could only be achieved by having a specific kind of horrible development. I don't think it's possible for most shows to accidentally reach the same level as the cast of this anime. That being said, there were some highlights. Erwin, even Eren's dad, Reiner and Marco were fine.

Mikasa, Armin and Eren were fine too, at least in the first season. They were flat and cliche and basic, but that's fine by me. The journeys are what make characters unique, not quirks or personalities. They are supposed to be dynamic, and that movement gives them life. The true colors of these characters were only revealed the longer the show went on.

Every action Mikasa takes makes no sense to her own character or to the circumstances. It feels purposefully bad. There is not one sympathetic thing she does the whole time. The final season, which attempts to 'develop' as many characters as possible, never shows her in a good light. In the end, she isn't even able to throw away the red scarf as she sits beside Eren's grave, which he explicitly instructed her to do as his last wish. The way humans work aside, there is no narrative reason for her to do the things she does. It's all WHY? Why? There is no answer. Nothing she does obeys reason. She is insane-ly bland. I'd rather watch that blond, psychopathic tomboy chick commit crimes or the annoying plot device Sasha-2 than have to look at Mikasa's stupid face again. Not even her child self was nearly as bad as what she becomes later. The story lobotomized her beyond recognition.

Another thing is the way the story does 'development'. When it's not metaphorically tearing the characters from limb to limb, it 'develops' the viewer's view instead. It throws hordes of flashbacks at you. Most characters never really change, but they are 'developed' through monologues and divulging information to the viewer. This is pure bad writing.

Aside from that, Armin and Eren are both just flat tropes done badly. It's been pointed out enough by other people how much Eren's plan doesn't make sense. There is something salvageable in the concept of it, but the way it was executed leaves nothing left to save. Jaeger was alright as a protagonist at first, but the more the story progressed, the worse he got. I do not care about him being annoying. He just ceases to act like a real person, or even a fictional person. I feel bad for him, mostly. He deserved a better story.

Armin is Armin. I've never wanted to care about a character more and cared less.

Either way, the story is much worse than the characters later on. At first, they drag it down with the constant repetitive, unsubtle monologues, overstuffed cast, plot armor and every other bad thing you can think of. Then it proceeds to say "bet" and take them to hell.

COMEDY

Putting that aside, Attack on Titan is one of the funniest anime I've ever watched. The horrible directing, long pauses, weird animation in the later seasons and absurd tonal shifts all elevated both intended and unintended comedy to unprecedented levels.

First of all, Levi. He isn't mentioned in the characters section because I'm saving him for this one. Levi has got to be one of the most effective comic relief characters I've ever seen. I can't even call him anything else - he gets no development and replacing him with any other 2-dimensional character would make no difference to the plot or relationships.

However, I have never related to a reader-insert character as much. It truly felt like he represented the viewer, trying his best to keep the plot together, stop characters from going too far off the rails and make the anime feel serious. He failed miserably, obviously, and everytime a character said or did something inane and he had this deadpan look in his eyes, just staring at them, I felt that pain in my soul.

It was like an actual soldier character with some endearing quirks got stuck in a sit-com filled with unlikeable puppets whose personalities could change at the drop of a hat. Pretty much the mirror image of the comedy of Irresponsible Captain Tylor. He got to be the straight man to the constant nonsense the writer was throwing around, and whenever he came on screen, I felt actual relief. Like I could take a break from the madness and let him react instead.

He became boring in the finale, like everything else, but he's pretty much the only reason I was able to trudge through most of it without falling asleep.

Second of all, the other characters. I didn't care much for the actual comic reliefs, but the funniest moments were the ones where everything went completely quiet and they started acting so braindead tears came to my eyes. The constant barrage of bad animation and directing in the later seasons made the contrast even better.

When Connie and Sasha started saying "haa?" repeatedly in a drawn-out bit while the cart was traveling over a dirt.png PS-2 background, I could not breathe. When Hange came to Eren's cell and started repeating "fight, fight", like a robot while he just stood there until he finally screamed at her, I genuinely felt bad for him. It was like the author trapped these people in an unending nightmare, some sort of purgatory where they'd be tortured by eldritch nonsense. I think AoT has ruined my sense of humor for good because nothing can top this.

Another good thing about the anime I might as well put in this section is Reiner. His going insane and being delusional was the best thing in the whole anime for me. The way the camera isn't even focused on him, the volume turns low like he's just a background character casually chatting away as he says "by the way, we're the Collosal and Armored titan" and Bertolt and Eren just stand there, is one of my favorite sequences in anime. When he started talking about a promotion in the treetops, I was extremely happy something interesting was finally happening. I wish they'd kept that up for longer and used it more.

ANIMATION & ART

The music is good. I wouldn't care if they just slapped manga panels on the screen and called it an anime, honestly, if the story was good. It'd still be better than this. That said, the later 'animation' looks really bad. It is not just the story's pacing that sucks. The directing is awful and the way the scenes are drawn and drawn-out only makes them worse.

STORY

The story is boring and repetitive.

After the first season, it's all the same. The same plot points repeat with varying intensity. Nothing is ever subtle. If it's not said in dialogue, it is said in monologue. If not in monologue, in a flashback. The viewer can't figure anything out themselves, except they can, and it's exactly the things they're not supposed to. The characters are so predictable it's laughable. You can tell what they're going to say, do, decide. You may not know the secrets of the future seasons, but the next scene? Episode? Anyone can tell. It is only when the characters completely lose all consistency that 'new' things happen, and even then, they're all constantly transforming into one another in an endless barrage of tropes and stereotypes.

I could talk for hours about everything wrong with every single episode and it still wouldn't encapsulate how horrible the writing is.

But that said, it started off good. I think most people can agree the first 8 episodes of the show, or even the first season, were at least decent and promising. However, the intriguing premise of humanity having natural predators and how society would deal with that is thrown out for regular human vs. human conflict done in the most overdone, uninteresting way possible. Yes, when discovering human civilization was doing well outside the walls, I was disappointed, too. That is one part of Eren's feelings I understand. The future, the secrets, humanity's triumph or demise I was watching the show for were thrown out the window. I don't care about political intrigue when it's done this horribly. I just wanted to see the things the show had going for it done well. My disappointment was and still is immeasurable.

Add the rushed pacing, bad characters, and it's impossible to take anything seriously or keep up the suspension of disbelief. I have never been less immersed than I was in the later seasons. I kept skipping through because I knew from episode one of the first season that some timey-wimey stuff was going on, and I wanted to know what it was. For those of you who have read the ending of the Tokyo Revengers manga, I believe THAT would've been better than what we got here.

For me, the potential of AoT was to be a gripping survival, military, emotional drama. I wanted to see the world with Eren and Armin. I wanted to find out what scientific shenanigans made Eren half-titan, and if there was a colony of half-titans who wanted to conquer the world as titans, or anything basic like that. I wanted to see Levi and Eren's excursions as scouts and how they'd utilise his power in practice, I wanted the same sense of awe and danger that Made In Abyss made me feel. I wanted to immerse myself in a world where humanity struggled to breathe. I wanted tension and suspense rather than constant 'hype' which desensitised me to it. All of that was dashed for the sake of idiotic plot-twists. The moment AoT stopped being about man vs. nature, it lost its hook for me.

Can't really blame all that on that, though. The author obviously wasn't capable of making a good shounen, a good seinen or anything in-between. The story was doomed from the beginning and determined to do everything wrong rather than but a single thing well. The sparse fanart and hype around it I saw made me daydream of that ideal anime, something worth remembering. It never existed, yet I'm mad at AoT for taking it away from me.

I think that's the reason why my rating is so low, and not something more reasonable like 6/10.