The Ethos of Fascism

Attack on Titan Season 4 promotional poster. Credit: SlashFilm.

Warning: Spoilers for Season 4 of Attack on Titan.

With the cultural shift toward right wing ideas and aesthetics since the beginning of the 2020s, many have been examining the “alt-right pipeline” and what has led young developing teens and adults to adopt far-right rhetoric. A primary subject of this discussion has been anime, or animated Japanese media, which gained mainstream popularity in the United States by the late 2010s and has since become a cultural staple. One of the most popular, notorious, and dissected series at the center of this discussion is Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan. 

Attack on Titan is a seemingly post-apocalyptic story that follows a population of people trapped on an island called Paradis within 3 concentric walls, where humanity beyond the walls has been wiped out by giant, man-eating Titans—or at least, that is what these characters are made to believe. After three seasons of being terrorized and wiped out by the Titans, our main characters learn the truth about their world: humanity outside the walls has not perished. 

In fact, humanity outside of the walls is responsible for the Titan attacks on Paradis. Marley, an imperialist military state, has launched a genocidal campaign against the people of Paradis using the power of the Titans. This campaign is almost unilaterally supported by the rest of the world because the people of the island descend from the Eldians, an ethnic group who, centuries prior, brutally conquered and ruled the earth before retreating to Paradis upon their defeat. 

Season 4 of Attack on Titan features an all-out geopolitical conflict that ends in the show’s main character, Eren Jaeger, harnessing the power of the Titans to wipe out humanity beyond Paradis’ walls and eliminating the genocidal threat against his people, in an atrocity called the Rumbling. The other main characters try in vain to stop him, and only manage to kill him when the damage is already done. 

Eren’s massive Titans storm the shores of the continent of Marley.

An important dimension of Eren’s mass murder is that not all of his peers disagree with him. In fact, he garnered support from a massive rogue group on Paradis called the “Jaegerists,” who aided him in his takeover of Paradis’ government. This group believed earnestly in their race’s supremacy, and aspired to the days of the Eldian Empire—a dogmatic response to the trauma of enduring genocidal violence. 

To me, Attack on Titan was a show about violent resistance to genocidal forces. Eren’s actions were as much a product of Marley’s genocidal campaign against the Eldians as they were a product of Eren’s own choices. Even before the threat of the Rumbling, our main characters were constantly grappling with the fact that fighting back against their oppressors meant that they would have to overlook, or even commit, actions that went against their own morals. I assumed the show was meant to serve as a cautionary tale about how fascism and imperialism drive a cycle of violence by necessitating that victims defend themselves against genocidal oppression with more violence.

The main characters flatten a port of Marleyan naval ships, taking many civilians as well.

Though the author’s right wing ideals were identified as early as the 2010s, Attack on Titan has been accused more overtly of having roots in fascism since the geopolitical plot was introduced. These accusations gained traction because of a growing subsection of the fandom who firmly align themselves with the Jaegerists in the show, deeming Eren’s counter-genocide as completely justified. Many argue that for people to come to this conclusion, the show must not have done a good job denouncing Eren’s actions.

When I first watched the show, the fascist propaganda accusations were beyond me. The show seemed to clearly condemn Eren and the Jaegerists. One of the main characters, Hange Zoë, even lays it out explicitly: “Genocide is wrong! I’ll be damned if we try to justify it.”

Though the ending was more morally ambiguous than the rest of the show (and poorly written, in my opinion), it still maintained that Eren’s actions were horrific. The most it ever did was lend pity to him and the Jaegerists for the trauma they endured prior to their decisions to adopt supremacist rhetoric. Surely, my reading was more substantiated by the show than this one. Surely, if another left-leaning person such as myself watched it, they’d see a very similar story to me, right?

Well, I finally watched a left-leaning interpretation of Attack on Titan by YouTube creator A Man of Many Cats, and my worldview was, regrettably, shattered.

The video first outlined some of the most explicit references to fascist regimes. For example, the revered character Erwin Smith was modeled off a Nazi general named Erwin Rommel, who opposed Hitler in the last few years of World War II (not necessarily, of course, due to any desire to protect Jewish people or any other groups massacred in the Holocaust). Yikes. This established pretty explicitly that Isayama was sympathetic—on some level—to members of the Nazi party. 

However, it went deeper than iconography. I mentioned that the Eldian people historically had brutally invaded and conquered other countries, forming a massive empire that spanned thousands of years. The result was both an island where most Eldians had retreated to after their eventual defeat and a diaspora of Eldians across the globe who faced the wrath of the people they had previously conquered. The king of Eldia had taken a vow renouncing war, refusing to use the Titan powers to protect his people against Marley’s attacks anymore. This element of the Eldian lore always struck me as odd: What group of people is this supposed to be an allegory for? What group of people experiencing genocidal oppression in the real world has ever previously conquered it?

As it turns out, we needn’t look far for clarification. Attack on Titan takes themes, imagery, and even battle strategies from a novel-turned-TV show called Saka no Ue no Kumo, which is revisionist depiction of imperial Japanese history. 

In the context of fascism and imperialism, most people focus on Germany, and subsequently tend to overlook a close ally of Germany during World War II, Japan. Japan was a violent imperial power responsible for countless atrocities against countries across Asia, from Korea, to China, to the Philippines. Saka no Ue no Kumo served as a show that reinvented Japanese imperialism as a unification project to industrialize and defend Asia against “the West” under the Japanese Empire. Japanese soldiers and settlers across Asia are portrayed as attempting to “civilize” the people in other Asian countries like China. The story culminates in the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of the 20th century, portraying Russia as a greater Western enemy to reframe the Japanese as victims… much like Marley and Eldia, respectively, are portrayed in Attack on Titan. 

Furthermore, despite many Japanese settlers being repatriated after World War II, there was a sizable diaspora of settlers across Asia who did indeed face resentment from civilians about the violence Japan unleashed on their countries and communities. Japan had also renounced war after World War II, a decision that was heavily criticized by the Japanese people in the wake of massive geopolitical shifts in Asia toward the end of the 20th century that were viewed as threats to Japan’s safety. Compared to the common claim that Eldians are an allegory for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the actual historical context of the Eldians aligns far more with that of the Japanese diaspora, right down to how the island of Paradis looks on the map.

Paradis, as shown in Attack on Titan.

So, Hajime Isayama wrote Attack on Titan from a perspective informed by the fascist regimes of Germany and Japan, to the point of outright basing the story on Japanese revisionist propaganda, and using Holocaust imagery to liken the violence of the Holocaust to the plight of the Japanese diaspora. At this point, I felt pretty stupid. This story that I genuinely vouched for was so blatantly informed by fascism that I couldn’t help but feel somewhat historically and politically blind. Attack on Titan was undoubtedly fascist propaganda.

But… was it?

I mean, it’s written by someone clearly entrenched in a fascist worldview. But does it actually function successfully as propaganda?

Most viewers, evidently, are not well-versed in the history of Japanese imperialism. Marley and Eldia are overwhelmingly viewed as a Holocaust allegory by the show’s ever-growing Western fanbase. Knowing that, how well does it actually function as propaganda, such that it may reflect the rise of right-wing ideology in the United States?

A lot of right-wing fans took Attack on Titan as validation of a fascist worldview. There were even fans who believed that the Eldians were allegorical white Europeans due to the Eldian lore of “atrocities from the past.” However, there is also an entire subset of the fandom who believes Attack on Titan is explicitly anti-fascist and anti-war, as well as a substantial number of people who even took on my view that it was a story about resistance against fascism. 

The political messaging in Attack on Titan is so vague that people all over the political spectrum watched it and saw their own views validated. So, regardless of whether it was intended as propaganda, does it succeed? Is there any overarching fascist message that was conveyed to viewers, regardless of their political beliefs before watching?

The post-credits scenes of the finale, set after our main characters started negotiations with the other Rumbling survivors, shows a bleak future for the Eldian people. They usher in a bit of industrialization and growing infrastructure, but it is not long before they are hit with a barrage of bombings and other violence. The show ends with a clip of a child coming upon Eren’s burial spot, mirroring the first episode of the show. The implication is clear: the violence never stopped, and the cycle continued.

The video I watched had an important section about the actual themes in Attack on Titan, evaluating whether they aligned with fascist rhetoric or philosophy. Despite the discrepant messaging in Attack on Titan, the creator identified one ethos that seems to pervade throughout the show’s many arcs: the strong will always oppress the weak, so you must always fight for your place on this earth. 

This ideology reflects deterministic nihilism, specifically the idea that nothing you do will fundamentally change systems of violence in the world. That large-scale violence between humans is an inevitability, a natural phenomenon. This idea is a precursor to fascism. 

If violence is the inevitable truth of our world, then fascistic violence is no longer the product of people’s conscious decisions, it is the product of nature. Fascistic violence is merely an inevitable fight for one’s own place in the world. 

Eyecatcher from Attack on Titan. Translation (credit to Funimation): “Enemies and Allies: When Titans were the greatest threat, Titans were the enemy. When countries were the greatest threat, countries were the enemy. For as long as people hold firm to different beliefs, there will always be an enemy.”

This is the message that was overwhelmingly picked up by the audience of Attack on Titan, across the political spectrum. This is a message that actively encourages people to be complacent about fascism, something that is quite relevant to our current society. 

As we see right-wing politics and aesthetics gain cultural prevalence, it is important to keenly observe not just overt allegorical representations of right-wing narratives, but themes that prime viewers to accept those narratives down the line. Attack on Titan is not the only portrayal of humans having a predisposition to antagonism and violence—this is an extremely common notion about human nature, particularly in the United States.

The aftermath of the Rumbling.

Who escapes accountability when we attribute bigotry to human nature? What are we really saying when we claim the cycle of violence is inevitable? These deceptively palatable ideas affect how willing we are to intervene in our own circumstances. The danger of Attack on Titan, and other media that fly under the political radar, is not an endorsement fascism and genocide, but the act of treating both as fated and untouchable. It’s the act of, like Eren himself, flattening the nuances of geopolitical conflict, until all that is left are the remnants of horrific atrocities that we convinced ourselves could not be prevented.