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CLICK HERE FOR THE ANIME THREAD It is the dusk of mankind.  Colossal titans or giants, preying on mankind, have driven it to the brink of extinction.  All that remains is a single city, surrounded by walls fifty meters tall. The colossal giants are invincible, they are ruthless. They cannot be reasoned with. They are like no other beast or creature. They seek only to consume humans.  Humanity's dusk is drawing short, for the giants are invading once more. ----------- Shingeki no Kyojin is a manga by Isayama Hajime, serialized in Kodansha's monthly "Bessatsu Shonen Magazine". Only starting publication a couple years ago, it won the Kodansha Award for Shounen manga in 2011, was nominated for a several others, and is reviewing/ranking extremely high. It is the #2-#3 best selling manga in Japan, which is pretty incredible given that it's only a little along now. It... is what I'd say is a shounen ("for boys") manga in name only. It has much more in common with Berserk or Gantz than anything. The fact that the author apparently tried getting it published in Weekly Shounen Jump is bloody hilarious. This poo poo is brutal, it's nihilistic, it's pretty bloody dark. It is also fairly gory so if that bothers you, might want to step out now while you have the chance!  On the left is Eren Jaeger. Eren is hotheaded and dreams of humanity being able to drive back the giants and finally live outside the walls, and see all the amazing things in the world that he has heard of only in whispers. He wants to join the Scouts, the city's only "aggressive" force that moves outside the walls. He gets in a lot of fights with other kids. On the right is Mikasa Ackerman. Mikasa is more withdrawn, and is much more concerned with keeping the people around her safe, Eren included. Mikasa is living with Eren and his parents (his father, Dr. Jaeger, being an extremely well renown doctor in the city). She also gets in a lot of fights, largely because she's covering Eren's rear end (she's a much better fighter than him). Personally, I find the manga very engrossing. It is pretty much "  : the manga". While it is very much the story of Eren and Mikasa, the giants themselves are probably the biggest draw point of the story, because they are creepy as gently caress. Very few manga can I say are able to show monsters that I'd honestly say are pretty creepy in execution and not just fantastic or silly. Kentaro Miura's Berserk is one, Junji Ito's works are another. This is definitely up there. The giants themselves are like combinations of the Colossi from Shadow of Colossus, the Bodies exhibit, and a lot of twists on human morphology. The direction the manga is taking is incredibly gently caress YES as well. There's complicated intrigue, very realistic character actions and motivations (you know the whole "character who is too stupid to figure out what's really obvious to the audience" thing? Never happens!). I'm really enjoying following it. The author really has chops despite it apparently being his first manga. You can purchase the existing volumes from Amazon, as well as get Kindle versions! Bon Appetit! 
Zorak fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Apr 7, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2011 01:51
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It's a monthly mag, what can you do? It's also not taken off yet over here, so most of the scans have been from the volumes.
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Jun 2, 2011 02:00
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As people pointed out: use the Mangareader version right now. The chapters are labeled shittily on Mangareader, but it actually has 3 more chapters than the Somemanga version (that's a lotta chapters) So uhhhhhhh what the gently caress IS going on with Erin anyways? Did his dad do research on the Giants, and if so, why the hell didn't he publish anything about it before or do anything about it before this point
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Jun 2, 2011 04:33
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Revdomezehis posted:Well judging by what was said in the Mangareader chapters about the myth of how the titans came about, I'd say Erin's father is somehow connected to a group of people who originally created the titans to try to bring people together against a common enemy. Would also explain why he didn't reveal any of this information before, kinda hard to say "I'll help you defeat these enemies, after all, I made them. Well thing is, they've been around for over a hundred years from the sound of it, and the stuck-behind-walls thing just contracted to where it was a hundred years ago, right? Or am I looking at it wrong? In any case, it'd be kind of hard for him to be a specific cause if he's way too young, and furthermore, I think him revealing that would be better than everyone dying. Unless, uh... he just expected humanity to live behind the Rose wall forever
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Jun 2, 2011 04:53
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tsob posted:The fact that Eren attacked and ignored the pleas of even Misaka when he went in weak and sickly makes this a good possibility really. Maybe there's some other faction of humans out there raising very weak humans and growing them in to Titans to keep control or something? Thing is The other Titans are still gunning to kill/ eat Eren, so that seems to show he's something unnatural.
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Jun 2, 2011 06:19
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I thought it was just because she was kind of badass? Not everything has to have a crazy explanation guys. Sometimes a girl is just a badass 
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Jun 2, 2011 08:24
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Elysiume posted:Yeah, I thought she was just awesome. So...why exactly was the doctor visiting the family? I forgot. Let's just keep it up until a few pages in since some people are just starting and trying to gauge impressions, I'm sure. I figured he was just, you know... being a doctor. They already established in chapter 1 that his father is a famous doctor who does medical work for a lot of families and helps them. He was "taking the boat" since his medical treatment was actually used further into the city (aka the more ritzier parts I take it). Also, I must say, the revelation from the commander about the truth of the attempt to "counterattack" the giants and the 50% loss was perhaps the most of all, even if it was realistic as hell.
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Jun 2, 2011 08:30
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quote:Also, why keep the doors at all, especially knowing that the huge Titan's preferred strategy is to kick them down? I get the argument that they are partially symbolic, and permanently blocking them signifies giving up any hope of return to the outside world, but they aren't really that important strategically. It's not like they hide underground with doors being the only way in or out - they simply need some lifts and cranes and ladders to pass the walls any time they want. You need doors in order to move large amounts of gear through. Hell, we saw the issue with small doors just previously; there's a limit to what you can do with "just man sized doors" given the nature of civilization. Moving supplies to the outside via crane is something you could conceivably do, but we haven't exactly seen what the level of their mechanical design is short of their maneuvering gear. A sufficient supply flow requires a large opening and, as we saw with the scouting expeditions they showed, they often included rather sizable supply chains to support them. Supporting any sort of armed force requires a lot of man-power infrastructure. For every soldier you need like 5-ish non-soldiers just to take care of their crap and feed them and do all the other stuff. Further, it's kind of hard to do a mass-exodus and army-action when you have to move literally everything by ladder. quote:Also, having the human troops swing around in their gear is a nice concept, but it suffers from the "Spiderman paradox" - where do they swing from most of the time? Wouldn't it make sense to have some towers and high buildings within the cities with the express purpose of increasing their defenders mobility and creating safe spots (instead of just having uniform rows of relatively flat houses)? The Titans didn't seem to be too eager to climb, or use tools, or purposefully demolish human structures so far. Most of the time we've seen them doing stuff it's been on a low-building level, where they pull themselves from rooftop to rooftop before they fall low enough for gravity to get them. It's not quite the same issue as the Spider Man thing. quote:Also, why not use the size difference more to your advantage? Wouldn't having large arching windows that Titans can use to see/climb/reach in be a pretty stupid idea for building your HQ/armory/stronghold? Why use huge, broad empty streets in favor of narrow alleyways? Why use long flat houses in favor of a more contorted architecture that offers more cover to humans and restricts the Titan's mobility? Tunnels and bridges and cable railways well out of reach all seem like good things to have, too. Or why not build the city (or at least parts of it) onto the top of the wall in the first place, since (at least prior to the giant Titan's appearance) this seems like the safest place of them all. I guess all I'm saying is that for a people whose biggest fear over multiple generations was being eaten alive by big dumb predators, they don't really seem too eager to structure their environment accordingly. I think a lot of the implication is that no one actually expected the Titans to ever get into the city, hence they never really designed them in such a way internally that it'd be naturally more defensive. They took some precautions, but as anyone familiar with city planning might tell you, there are few cities that are rationally lain out. They've already established that private industry has a lot of pull within the city, and if they want to do stuff in a way that makes them more money vs efficiency, they'd probably do it. Also, I think the broad streets is again a matter of them focusing more on accomodating industry. The big streets are equivalent of modern throughways in a standard city: industry and trade flows through it. Bear in mind that there are actually some empty spaces within the rings as they've shown us, where there's farming and even still some forests remaining. There's supplies moving everywhere, and you have to bear that in mind. I do think the author made some assumptions re: the level of technology and city planning understanding for the sheer purpose of making battles more interesting and the entire setting more frightening, but I think they're within the level of plausible suspension of disbelief in that regard.
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Jun 3, 2011 21:19
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Grenadier posted:This was pretty much exactly what I was assuming as well. I really hope that they find out more and more about the Titans just by examining their anatomy and (de)composition after battles, and maybe a tidbit here or there from old records on the outside hinting on their origins/function, but never quite figure out exactly how or why they came into being. That always ends up with some lame infodump character, usually a bad guy that isn't terribly compelling. Their bodies almost immediately deteriorate after battle/ melt away. This is a lot of why they don't understand anything about them.
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Jun 4, 2011 22:50
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Rakugoon posted:Well, they also can't breed more cannonballs. Population control is grand when you've got giants to try to get them to kill.
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Jun 8, 2011 18:51
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temple posted:The 3D system makes sense for no other reason than it allows the defenders to scale their own walls. If you imagine the giants as walls, it allows them to melee attack something taller than themselves. The real thing that doesn't add up to me is why they have to cut the neck. If they blow the head off, it regenerates. Well aim lower. Seems obvious. Hopefully, the writer has more to explain. Because the area is in the center of the lower neck, ie, from a lot angles that'd mean going through the chest cavity. Which is apparently fairly armored. I don't think they get many chances to hit them from behind. Also believe it or not, aiming a cannon is hard. Arms like that ultimately come down to luck whether it hits the target. I assume they do get lucky with them now and then, but perhaps not enough!
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Jun 11, 2011 07:34
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Bisse posted:Since that is their weak point for an unknown reason which is a mystery! Which is part of what makes this manga so great, the unknown, mysteries! Not necessarily the case. Correlation != causation, yo It may just be that that's the neural center of the Giants and functionally their brain, and Eren is just sitting in a giant's brain due to shenanigans
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Jun 11, 2011 07:42
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Not to mention, as Rakugoon put it:Rakugoon posted:Yeah, and Britain would have won the Crimean War so easily if they had just built B-52s.
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Jun 11, 2011 17:16
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They specifically said that there are both male and female-esque giants, even if they're sex-less, though female-like ones are much rarer. Also I think it's kind of silly to assume literally every giant has a human in them, if only because we have literally no evidence beyond one case at this point, possibly two if the larger one is the same (given its ability to appear and vanish rapidly)
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Jun 16, 2011 05:10
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Nilbop posted:Colossal Titan: Probably has a human in it. These are the same thing?
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Jun 17, 2011 21:22
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Ytlaya posted:While it's of course silly to be sure it's true, there's a hell of a lot that indicates it. It's far more likely that it's true than it isn't, because it fully explains a couple mysteries without any contradictions. And they've also made *wink wink* suggestions that humans fighting each other is as bad as titans fighting humans, indicating the titans have some human "base." Except we've seen them carved open at that point without any human inside. Like the only way that could be the case is if you argue that there used to be humans in them all and they atrophied, at which point the whole piloted thing is pointless since it's more of a human-as-seed than human-as-pilot like we see in the other case. It also diminishes the importance/ notability of the special cases.
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Jun 18, 2011 01:47
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GreenBuckanneer posted:So, who knows a guy who knows a guy who does work on this scanlating it? Maybe if I threw a fiver someone would scanlate it? He's already working on the next volume. Patience.
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Jun 18, 2011 04:03
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GreenBuckanneer posted:Unless someone fibbed, there are raws out, but not scanlated completely. That's more or less what I was kvetchin about. There is a volume raw out for Volume 4 and the group is working on it, as I understand it. So again, patience.
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Jun 18, 2011 05:29
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Actually, you may recall that it's a marking on Mikasa's hand. Why it has a number, and why the number changes, we have no idea.
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Aug 5, 2011 20:36
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GreenBuckanneer posted:This loving manga should be god drat sticked. DO IT ZORAK It was stickied already before for like two weeks, shut up.
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Aug 14, 2011 09:29
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I'm really liking these fluid back and forth flashes. It works really nice for filling in background details while keeping the pace of the ongoing stuff at the same time.
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Sep 12, 2011 05:24
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Pigasus posted:Yeah, I'm honestly confused about the proportions in the shot where Eren suddenly turns into a giant at the end of the chapter. Initially, it seems like his human form grew along with the giant's skeletal frame, but in the next shot, he's the same size as Rivalle. There's a slightly large human torso hanging out of his arm. Not a particularly gargantuan one like usual. Just an unnaturally big one.
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Sep 12, 2011 20:17
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Kusaru posted:Chapter 26 is out: http://www.mangafox.com/manga/shingeki_no_kyojin/v06/c026/1.html Looks like the scout force agrees with us that the hyper-intelligent / strange Titans are likely "piloted" one way or another, if not Titans in general.
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Oct 11, 2011 01:22
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You don't need to tag stuff from many chapters ago, or speculation.
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Oct 25, 2011 02:07
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Gotta love a manga where characters are actually intelligent in their conclusions yessss
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Nov 10, 2011 22:57
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Frome posted:Haha drat Simple: she disengaged from it while they started to try to devour her, then 3D maneuvered out as the body deteriorated. The deterioration obscured her enough to hide from both Rivalle and the giants. And I have to say, I love that for once, BELIEVE BLINDLY IN YOUR FRIENDS has failed.
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Dec 12, 2011 01:06
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SHAOLIN FUCKFIEND posted:I feel like it would have the potential to be vastly popular if the author was better at that sort of thing. It's the second best selling manga in Japan right now, just below One Piece. So uh... it is vastly popular.
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Feb 13, 2012 22:11
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It's an interesting two pronged plan. If they had got her underground, they could have subdued her easily where she can't transform due to the lack of the sun and room. On the other hand, if the entirety of the scouting legion and the MPs jump her here, they have a chance to take her down and make a MASSIVE strike against information control. The human-giants beyond Eren seem to largely be aiming to force people to turtle in and control numbers. They don't actually desire humanity's extinction, they desire control. They want the status quo to be maintained since that means those in charge keep their power without threats. Having humanity have to back in as much as possible and reducing the population to manageable levels is part of this. They've said before that the major losses to population was actually viewed positively by those in charge. In essence, the human-giants are a means to manipulate the other giants and remove trouble elements if necessary, as was just tried against Eren in the recent mission. But what will happen if a giant appears right in the middle of the city, the safest zone, the ultimate bastion? Behind the final wall? It doesn't matter that those in charge will figure out that it's one of their "own giants" that did it; the populace will turn from "why bother, we're safe behind the walls!" to sheer "OH poo poo. OH poo poo". The essence of protection will fail, which will send ripples through the system and also give those that want to take offensive solutions more pull.
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Mar 12, 2012 09:11
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Zorak posted:It's an interesting two pronged plan. Yesss they basically outlined in this chapter that my theory on their motivation was fundamentally accurate, high loving five. This manga is the best.
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Apr 12, 2012 06:59
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What the hell... bad things are happening, aren't they 
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May 11, 2012 22:20
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It's entirely possible that all the Titans are originally man made, and the experiment just went Horribly Bad somehow. Or they were man made as part of a giant eugenics "KILL THE POOR" type thing by the ruling class. They were happy when they lost that wall at the start of the series, after all, what with it reducing the "mouths to feed".
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Jun 12, 2012 19:53
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Eiba posted:Wait, that's not quite how I remember it. It's been months since I read it, but I thought the issue was that, with all the refugees from the outer wall area in the middle wall, there were too many mouths to feed, so the ruling classes were happy to send them to their deaths with a hopeless attempt to drive back the titans. They did say that about the venturing party, but they also said they were fine with losing major swaths of the population since it was getting too difficult to govern and support the ever growing population within the walls anyway. And no, it's not really silly comic book villain motivation. Why do you think holocausts, mass-exterminations, and IMMIGRANTS GET OUT OF OUR COUNTRY stuff happens? Or any major political shift? It's less about "WE WANT MORE PEOPLE UNDER OUR CONTROL", and more "WE WANT CONTROL". And if a large swath of the population poses a potential risk to that control simply by being so expansive and over-populated that a reduction would simplify the rule without affecting the ruling class' quality of life, why wouldn't they take it assuming their focus is just on their control? It's rear end in a top hat-y as gently caress, agreed, but it's happened quite a lot of times in history. Further, the existence of Giants gives the ruling class a target to focus unrest and displeasure towards rather than the government. Those who oppose the ruling class or start trouble aren't just revolutionaries or malcontents or even protestors in this context: they're criminals against humanity itself, as the government (and the institution that it consists of) is made synonymous with humanity itself. So to speak out against the government is to be out to drat humanity to death. And if things go wrong, well, that's the giant's fault, isn't it? drat those monsters! It's entirely possible, with our lack of understanding of the world's chronology, that this system could have existed actually for hundreds and hundreds of years beyond what is said. It could be that they deliberately let the Giants in every few centuries to cull the population within the walls, before eventually using man-made giants to push them back to the outer walls and then letting humanity slowly fill its way out again. It's a sustainable system, assuming their economy stays at the low-level it currently inhabits. The ruling class don't have to worry about shake-ups, overpopulation issues, or even a lack of resources, and can rule in luxury, and given the Giant's tendency to ignore everything but humans, it allows the natural world to thrive without their touch, too. It's a horrible solution, yes, but it's no more horrible than anything that has happened in our own history, as far as I can tell. The major bump in any scheme like that would be of course, people finding out and loving up the system. Which Eren's abilities has clearly started in doing. His father probably figured out that titans were human-generated on the logic of their irregular and impossible biology, and worked towards understanding their own genesis. This means there's someone with the power of the ruling class' select who may be able to completely upset the system. Annie was their attempt to stop him from messing up the order of things, but she basically hosed up and now the populace know more than ever before. That the Titans may not be just other. Which means their aggression and fear is possibly going to be turned in-ward. Largely speculation, but I think you get my idea. Zorak fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Jun 12, 2012 |
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Jun 12, 2012 21:45
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Eiba posted:Xenophobia, nativism, ethnic cleansing, and holocausts all have to do with a group of "others" upsetting the balance/purity/rightful order of our society (to which they don't belong). Usually that's an excuse, yes. Justification does not equate to causa bella though. A lot of it has to do with redistribution of power and health, and reaffirmation of the power base by restricting the support to a select grouping. As to why they'd do it here, consider the fact that it takes a lot of agriculture to support a single person. If the population is expanding faster than the agriculture could control in the long term, and even further could result in over-exploitation of the land resulting in over consumption, losing walls temporarily to lower the population and let an agriculture "bounce back" before re-expanding in a few decades could be a very calculated loss for purposes of long-term stability. quote:When you get right down to it, yes, I'm sure the origin of the Titans has something to do with some ideology of control- I'd bet a more idealistic origin rather than simply a pragmatic "control" motive- but as for what's been happening in the manga, that's in no way in the ruling class's interests. At all. I mean, even if the outer wall was a horrific population valve, the titans are now through the second wall. This fucks over the ruling class as much as anyone. I totally disagree. I can see the wall falling as a calculated move. It may be that the Giants actually pose no threat whatsoever to the ruling class by comparison to how much of a threat they are to the general populace. It's entirely possible they have whole retinues, a near army, of Eccentrics capable of becoming very powerful Titans. They could conceivably pied piper out every Titan in the inhabited area all on their own with minimal threat: it's already been shown that they can call masses of Titans to their person. If that's controlled, they could possibly just use it to shepherd out everyone when the job is done. This conspiracy is way too big and important to the entire system of the walls for it not to be coming straight from the top to me. The highest officials have to be in on it.
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Jun 13, 2012 01:34
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Schwarzwald posted:It was the worst day for humanity, again. Yeah, holy poo poo. I wonder what this means towards the origin of the Giants, and their organization. I mean, are these Sasquatch at all related or even connected to the human-piloted giants? Are these two different factions? What's going on??? God this manga owns. This twist made everything incredibly more 
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Jul 8, 2012 20:31
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Nilbop posted:No they're not. Sasquatch talks about the thing in the back of "our necks." He's a human titan. Also bear in mind that 99% of the giant forces are mindless fart-around-and-eat-people giants that don't seem to have any minds, whereas the titans themselves are all geared toward specific purposes, be it breaking the wall or crashing through reinforced gates. They're bred or built or trained for certain things, and stuff like "why can the humans jump and move so well" isn't an issue for them most of the time. They're winning anyway, there's no impetus. No? Human-titans are very clearly human piloted, that is to say, there's no "thing" in their giant-necks, they ARE the thing in their giant necks. As far we know, wild giants "lack" this human. At the very least, no cut open giant neck has revealed one yet, and Eren has proven capable of doing just that on the clearly more intelligent human-piloted giants. The Sasquatch clearly treats the thing in the back of his neck as something else, probably the equivalent that "standard" giants have. Further, he's clearly not human just because he has really no reason to lie otherwise. He states clearly that he is not human, that he has only a vague idea of humanity, and is totally unfamiliar with their 3D Gear, something that as far as we can tell has been part of human repertoire for decades now. He's also clearly different from the other human-piloted Titans in appearance alone. He's not human-featured, but he's not as twisted as the other non-human giants, he seems much more... biological.
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Jul 10, 2012 05:00
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Gyges posted:I assume that all "deviate" titans are actually human titans. However since we know that human titans live amongst the populace and serve in the military his not knowing about the 3D gear and comments about speaking the same language indicate he is separate from the known "faction" of human titans. So you've got Eren and perhaps other as yet unknown "pro-human" titans, Annie and her infiltrating "anti-wall" titans, Sasquatch who seems both anti-human as well as ignorant of at least the local humans and their tech, and the "mindless" titans who seem to make up the majority of the titans. Presumably all of the deviates fit into one of the three non-mindless groups, and since Eren types are essentially titan humans instead of human titans you're left with what looks like two groups or factions of human titans. We have no evidence that Annie is "Anti-Wall". The only thing she's done is tried to capture Eren, for whatever reason. We know not the motivation of her masters.
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Jul 10, 2012 05:07
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dis astranagant posted:Not really but it's also been shifting away from the grimdark stuff since the Black Swordsman arc ended. Um... the trolls? No Wave posted:Has Berserk killed off anyone significant in the present? A few, but most of the deaths in Berserk serve a narrative point. At this point of the narrative, it's not really necessary for them to kill tons of the cast off, since the point is that Guts is finding firmer ground at the moment.
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Aug 12, 2012 19:13
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http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3542537 Made an anime thread for Attack on Titan!
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Apr 6, 2013 20:39
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Thoren posted:Doesn't every titan presumably have a "pilot?" Doesn't seem to be the case. They've dissected normal Titans alive and found nothing particularly indicative of a pilot, as far as we're aware. Of course, it's possible a Titan could "grow" a pilot, but who knows?
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Apr 10, 2013 07:08
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Eiba posted:The reactions are going to be fun, all the "just you wait Report people who do that so I can hit them. That is a punishable offense.
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Apr 14, 2013 07:47
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" from the folks who've read the manga is going to be insufferable for me though... I'm going to have to make a point of just not posting, or I'll almost certainly make an rear end of myself bitching about oblique spoilers.