Attack on Titan - Give it the FIVE episode try
Attack on Titan is a 26-ep anime that started airing in April. It's halfway through now. Dave watched three episodes and didn't like it at all. He called it PTSD the Anime, and he found it too bleak and unpleasant. I found the pacing to be uneven - there is too much internal angsting that slows down the action. Suspense is not maximized. Animation is highly variable - sometimes it is as bad as still panning. The budget went to aerial wire-fu combat sequences.
Spoiler-free premise: Imagine the walking dead, except the walkers are kaiju-sized naked, flabby, bloated, genitalia-less humanoids. They shamble along, with large, toothy grins, plucking up humans and chomping down. And humanity has been pushed back to concentric walled sanctuaries. To combat the giants, they wield batman-spiderman-esque grappling hooks and dual blades.
So far, the show is 100% fanservice and romance-free. The women are strong and treated exactly the same as the men.
Episode 5 has one hell of a cliffhanger.
Eren Jaeger is one unpleasant ball of screaming rage. I can't stand him. His ranting about human being reduced to fenced-in cattle is interesting - it implies the Titans are intentionally herding them, and so far there is no evidence of that. As a whole, the Titans don't seem intelligent enough. However, Dave and I both noticed the skinless colossal Titans venting steam, suggesting those are mechanized. Are the Titans under someone else's control?
Something HAS to be up with the skinless Titans. They literally appear out of nowhere. When one of them showed up again in Ep 4, it was so sudden I thought Eren was reminiscing about Ep 1. Is the lightning strike used for dramatic effect, or do these Titans ride the lightning somehow? The one Eren fought seems capable of teleportation.
By Ep 4, I hypothesized that the Titans were biomechanical constructs and were directed, if not outright piloted, by someone. Considering how the sole weak point is the base of the neck, perhaps that is the location of a cockpit. However, if they are in fact mechs, why the hell are they naked, fugly, grinning, man-heating humanoids?! The only reason I can come up with is that the Titans look pants-wettingly distressing. Psychological warfare perhaps?
EP 5 - I was not expecting Eren to be maimed, much less killed, so soon. Considering how hateful the character is, I wouldn't mind at all if he turned out to be a Decoy Protagonist. I'd rather watch the rest of the Survey Team. Perhaps Daddy's apparent modification was a red herring.
Aaaand then comes Ep 8. My best guess is that Eren was modified to regenerate. Lucky for him. Aaaand he somehow figured out that a cockpit at the top of the vertebral column, hacked his way there, and utilized the Titan as his meat puppet. But there are gaping issues with this proposal. First, how the hell would Eren be ABLE to do that? There was no evidence of machinery when he emerged from the Titan. Second, how did he escape the Titan that swallowed him to hijack this one? This young, buff, vaguely Elven Titan that looks suspiciously like Eren? Maybe he didn't escape. Perhaps when he took over the old, flabby Titan, he transformed it. But .... HOW?!
Spoiler-free premise: Imagine the walking dead, except the walkers are kaiju-sized naked, flabby, bloated, genitalia-less humanoids. They shamble along, with large, toothy grins, plucking up humans and chomping down. And humanity has been pushed back to concentric walled sanctuaries. To combat the giants, they wield batman-spiderman-esque grappling hooks and dual blades.
So far, the show is 100% fanservice and romance-free. The women are strong and treated exactly the same as the men.
Episode 5 has one hell of a cliffhanger.
Eren Jaeger is one unpleasant ball of screaming rage. I can't stand him. His ranting about human being reduced to fenced-in cattle is interesting - it implies the Titans are intentionally herding them, and so far there is no evidence of that. As a whole, the Titans don't seem intelligent enough. However, Dave and I both noticed the skinless colossal Titans venting steam, suggesting those are mechanized. Are the Titans under someone else's control?
Something HAS to be up with the skinless Titans. They literally appear out of nowhere. When one of them showed up again in Ep 4, it was so sudden I thought Eren was reminiscing about Ep 1. Is the lightning strike used for dramatic effect, or do these Titans ride the lightning somehow? The one Eren fought seems capable of teleportation.
By Ep 4, I hypothesized that the Titans were biomechanical constructs and were directed, if not outright piloted, by someone. Considering how the sole weak point is the base of the neck, perhaps that is the location of a cockpit. However, if they are in fact mechs, why the hell are they naked, fugly, grinning, man-heating humanoids?! The only reason I can come up with is that the Titans look pants-wettingly distressing. Psychological warfare perhaps?
EP 5 - I was not expecting Eren to be maimed, much less killed, so soon. Considering how hateful the character is, I wouldn't mind at all if he turned out to be a Decoy Protagonist. I'd rather watch the rest of the Survey Team. Perhaps Daddy's apparent modification was a red herring.
Aaaand then comes Ep 8. My best guess is that Eren was modified to regenerate. Lucky for him. Aaaand he somehow figured out that a cockpit at the top of the vertebral column, hacked his way there, and utilized the Titan as his meat puppet. But there are gaping issues with this proposal. First, how the hell would Eren be ABLE to do that? There was no evidence of machinery when he emerged from the Titan. Second, how did he escape the Titan that swallowed him to hijack this one? This young, buff, vaguely Elven Titan that looks suspiciously like Eren? Maybe he didn't escape. Perhaps when he took over the old, flabby Titan, he transformed it. But .... HOW?!