Why I Do Not Watch *Attack on Titan*: SUMMARY.

"*Life is fragile, men are vulnerable and it is of the essence of the human situation that they are such. For in heroic societies life is the standard of value. If someone kills you, my friend or brother, I owe you their death and when I have paid my debt to you their friend or brother owes them my death. The more extended my system of kinsmen and friends, the more liabilities I shall incur of a kind that may end in my death*."

Alasdair MacIntyre, *After Virtue*.

I ask anyone who ever tries to humanize the Titans: watch the final scene of that first episode, over and over, watch that tearful boy as he is carried off, torn from his mother by a coward strong enough to separate them but not save them, crying with those big, green eyes, as opalescent as Spring dew on blades of grass, as she, his loving *kaasan*, right before those boyish eyes, is cut in twain betwixt the teeth of a monstrosity, a grinning menace, smiling as no man could smile in witnessing such cruelty, and tell me that a single swing of his avenging blade would not be justified, that there was any Greater Good in such a Hell aside from his vendetta, that a man would ever come of age without ensuring that the debt of blood was paid, that any Hero could have lived who would not lift a sword in opposition, that this fallen world would ever know a shade of grey when such a thick red line was drawn in blood between a moral black and white, that such a program could amount to more than military propaganda, that a peace was ever possible when this was how the mother’s soul was sent to “rest”, and tell me that you have the higher ground in claiming *this* to be the fate of our species, that you would not see this as the very evidence that not all sins and crimes are human, that not every will and intellect is of a human nature, that the monster is in any one of us when everyone of us, within that moment, only felt the agony of the oppressed.

If you believe the monsters had been justified, then I refer you to that scene. If you believe the heroes were not justified, then I refer you to that scene. If you believe the heroes were the monsters, I refer you to that scene. No other scene is necessary, and, if you attempt to find some scene which can undo the damage of that scene, as if to reason that this travesty was justified in any way, or that it did not warrant retribution, I refer you to a mental hospital.
If, by the end of this poetic run-on sentence, you don’t feel a tinge of pity for that boy, enough to know that he can never be the villain of the story, then take leave of our species now by any means that you see fit, but spare the rest of us, I beg you, for the rest of us deserve to live in peace and harmony, and we shall fight the threat which seeks to take that from us.


This is why I do not watch this show. I only watched beyond this scene to see the hero get his vengeance. When I smelled even a hint of propaganda that suggested sympathy for the oppressor, that was when I stopped.


If anything comes close in sickness to atrocity itself, it’s claiming that atrocity is human. If the only thing dividing us from avalanches is a human face, then none of us have any right to life. Yet if we do deserve to walk upon this Earth, then we are more than mindless malice, and a malice which opposes mindless malice, singlemindedly, is not a mindless one itself.


In that case, which is surely so, that being who’s distinguished from an avalanche by human face alone must certainly, for that same reason, not be human, and it has appropriated our likeness to make mockery of our species. 


We won’t let it win, and, if this program seeks to let it win, then I am sorry that I wasted time in watching it.
**[({R.G.)}]**

An Addendum: Why I Do Not Watch *Attack on Titan*.
**This Page has been Optimized for Discord.**

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