“Normal efforts toward self-care fall so short and feel so ludicrous when it feels as though the world is hurting everywhere.”
“Caring for the “rag and bone shop of the heart” — in the words of Yeats — through such palliative measures as rest, meditation, exercise, and even TV seems tinged with a halo of selfishness.”
“Rebecca Solnit’s trenchant essay, “Hope in the Dark,” rightly points out that, “to hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear.” To hope means one is intent on future survival, but, all the same, attempting to hang on while ignoring clear and urgent cause for despair can lead to emotional exhaustion.”
“The grimness of apocalyptic dystopia, however, has provided an odd kind of solace. Leaning into surreal levels of gore and violence may not be therapeutic for everyone, but the Japanese anime series Shingeki no Kyojin (translated into English for Cartoon Network as Attack on Titan), one of the most popular anime and manga series currently in Japan, has become one kind of answer to my benumbed emotional paralysis.”
“Hajime Isayama claims he created the cannibal-horror manga upon which the series is based after he was accosted by a drunk man because it made him realize: “The most familiar and scary animals in the world are humans.””
“The kaiju-derived — kaiju means “strange beast” in Japanese — monsters are thus aptly humanoid even as they are Goliath-sized.”
“And the entire genre of kaiju is descended from the famed Godzilla, whose creation arose from the atomic bombardment in Japan.”
“Attack on Titan, like Godzilla, is the result of one of the most heinous acts in the known history of the world, committed by Americans, by mankind itself.”
“The hyperbolic remove of this apocalyptic action series enables me to understand how to cope in the face of catastrophe — in whichever form it arrives. The protagonists’ suffering only mutates, but never abates.”
“There’s a strange, resounding comfort that comes from Attack on Titan’s over-the-top speeches delivered with quivering irises and operatic heights of emotion — these teens living in a post-apocalyptic landscape besieged by kaiju can find a path to hope, therefore so can we.”
“By dipping into Isayama’s scarlet-saturated dreamscapes and its visceral mangling of anything decent in its path, my mind finds a way into wordless emotional logic.”
“It’s no wonder that a series whose most competent figure is a teenage girl, whose fighting prowess dominates at a level that strains credulity, holds appeal for someone like myself who experiences her rights as a woman being stripped away at breathtaking speed.”
“During my own time living in Tokyo, my 18-year-old students would cheerfully tilt their heads and say ganbatte, meaning, “I will fight!” in response to tackling even their quotidian English language studies. Indeed, I was a bit perplexed at the warlike expression being so regularly invoked in the classroom. Ganbatte, derived from ganbaru, literally means “to stubbornly persevere.””
“This selfsame cheerful resolve threaded throughout Attack on Titan ends up being part of a collective responsibility laid equally on the shoulders of all willing soldiers. At one point, the leader calms his terrified troops saying, “It is for us to fight this cruel world.” The show is, to some extent, about the realization that you are responsible, even in some small way, for the future.”
“In the end, it is Attack on Titan as a death opera that makes those brief 20 minutes of vicariously experiencing life in oversaturated emotions and hues restorative.”
“While Attack on Titan reminds us realistically that death comes to us all, how we live our lives still matters independent of how dire the circumstances are around us.”
“The world, no matter how terrible, becomes a better place the moment you decide to make it so. With one sword pointing toward the direction of the melee he cries, “Devote your hearts! Create your ri”