Attack on Titan

• 1. Introduction

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  Attack on Titan begins in the year 845, when two enormous humanoids punch through the outermost of three great circular walls and leave a boy named Eren Yeager watching a grinning Titan devour his mother. That single image, a creature without reason or mercy, eating a human being while wearing what looks almost like a smile, ignited one of the most widely read manga series ever created. By November 2023, the series had over 140 million copies in circulation worldwide. How does a story born from an internet cafe confrontation and a rejected pitch become a cultural phenomenon that landed on the front page of newspapers in Hong Kong and triggered a congressional-style debate in the Chinese Ministry of Culture? The answers begin with a creator who drew his hometown mountains into a world of walls, borrowed his monsters' faces from mixed martial arts, and quietly planned the ending before the first chapter ever went to print.

• 2. The Man Who Built the Walls

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  Hajime Isayama created a 65-page one-shot version of Attack on Titan in 2006. His first stop was the Weekly Shonen Jump department at Shueisha, where an editor asked him to change details in the story and artwork. Isayama refused. He took the work instead to the Weekly Shonen Magazine department at Kodansha, where it finally found a home. The series launched in the very first issue of Kodansha's monthly Bessatsu Shonen Magazine, dated the 9th of September 2009. Before that first chapter ran, Isayama had already sketched out the major plot twists; the beats were in place, even if the details would be filled in as the story moved forward. He initially based the walled landscapes on his hometown of Hita, Oita, a place enclosed by mountains. The idea for the Titans themselves came from a more unsettling source. While working at an internet cafe, a drunken customer grabbed Isayama by the collar. He said that encounter showed him the fear of meeting a person he cannot communicate with, and that feeling is what he wanted the Titans to convey. When it came time to design their bodies, he looked at real athletes, using martial artist Yushin Okami as a model for Eren Yeager's Titan form and Brock Lesnar for the Armored Titan. Anime producer George Wada later traced another strand of the concept to Japanese culture itself, saying the series' "Wall of Fear" reflected the isolated and enclosed nature of Japanese society.

• 3. Inside the Walls

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  The civilization at the heart of Attack on Titan is built on a lie. Its residents, Eldians, believe they are the last humans alive, pushed behind three concentric walls more than a century ago by the emergence of man-eating giants. Within those walls, venturing outside is strongly discouraged. To fight the Titans that breach the barriers, the military deploys Vertical Maneuvering Equipment, a waist-mounted system of grappling hooks and gas-powered propulsion that lets soldiers move in three dimensions. Commander Hange Zoe later develops rocket launcher-type weapons called Thunder Spears. The Titans themselves form a hierarchy. Pure Titans are the most common, their predictable behavior making them easier to kill. Abnormal Titans behave unpredictably. At the top sit the Nine Titans, known as Titan Shifters: the Attack, Colossal, Armored, Female, Beast, Jaw, Cart, War Hammer, and Founding Titans. Each Shifter can move between human and Titan form and access their Titan's unique abilities. Pure Titans are created by injecting Eldians with Titan spinal fluid. If a Pure Titan eats a human who holds one of the Nine Titans, that Eldian reverts to human form and gains the Shifter's powers, but is then cursed to live only thirteen more years. Should the powers go uninherited at death, they pass to an Eldian baby born shortly afterward, regardless of distance or blood relation. All of this rests on a foundation that the story eventually shatters: the people inside the walls are not the last of humanity, and the world outside is not empty.

• 4. An Ending Earned

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  In September 2013, Isayama said publicly that he was aiming to wrap the story in 20 volumes. He had also planned, originally, to give it a tragic conclusion similar to the film adaptation of Stephen King's The Mist, in which every character dies. Fan response to the manga and anime made him reconsider what that ending might do to readers. The Japanese documentary program Jotnetsu Tairiku aired an episode in November 2018 devoted to Isayama's struggles to complete the series, confirming on air that Attack on Titan had entered its final arc. In December 2019 he said he planned to end it in 2020. In June 2020 he estimated only 5% of the story remained. By November 2020 he called it 1% to 2% from done. In January 2021, Kodansha announced the exact end point: the 139th chapter, published on the 9th of April 2021, after an eleven-year run. The final chapters carry a weight that the series had been building since page one. Mikasa kills Eren, which extinguishes the source of all Titan power and frees every Eldian from the curse. Eren's death reveals a plan he had hidden from his closest friends: he engineered events to spare twenty percent of humanity. An unspecified time after Mikasa's death from old age, a modernized Shiganshina is again reduced to rubble. The series closes on a boy and his dog approaching a massive tree that has come to resemble the one where the original Titan power was born.

• 5. A Franchise Beyond the Page

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  Wit Studio produced the first three seasons of the anime, with Tetsuro Araki directing the debut run, which aired from the 7th of April 2013 to the 29th of September 2013 on Mainichi Broadcasting System. Producer Toshihiro Maeda disclosed that Wit Studio declined to produce the fourth and final season due to scheduling issues, and the studio MAPPA took over. The fourth season premiered on the 7th of December 2020 and concluded in two television specials; the second aired on the 5th of November 2023. Away from screens, the franchise spread across novels, stage productions, and theme parks. Universal Studios Japan hosted Attack on Titan attractions from January to May 2015, featuring a life-size 15-meter Eren titan facing a 14-meter female titan. A stage musical debuted at the Orix Theater in Osaka from the 7th to the 9th of January 2023, then moved to the Seinenkan Hall in Tokyo before crossing the Pacific to the New York City Center from the 11th to the 13th of October 2024. Video games multiplied across nearly every platform, from Nintendo 3DS titles developed by Spike Chunsoft and Nitroplus to PlayStation releases published by Koei Tecmo, while crossover events brought Attack on Titan characters and weapons into Fortnite and Call of Duty. On the 3rd of November 2014, American writer C. B. Cebulski announced a crossover with Marvel Comics scripted from a scenario written by Isayama himself, in which Spider-Man, the Avengers, and the Guardians of the Galaxy faced Titans on the streets of New York City.

• 6. Sales and Controversy

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  Kodansha credited Attack on Titan with delivering the company's first revenue increase in eighteen years. Mainichi Shimbun called it a "once-in-a-decade hit". Oricon reported 30 million volumes sold by April 2014; the figure climbed to 45 million by November of that year and passed 100 million by December 2019. The series' twelfth collected volume received a first printing of 2.2 million copies, placing Attack on Titan in a group of only three manga series ever to exceed an initial print run of 2 million, alongside One Piece and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. In the first half of 2014, it outsold One Piece for the first time in five years, and Isayama publicly thanked his readers and expressed surprise at the achievement. In 2013, coverage of the anime appeared on the front page of Hong Kong's am730 newspaper, reflecting the series' reach across Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan. That reach was not without friction. The South Korean Electronic Times accused the series of carrying a militaristic message tied to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's political leanings. In 2013, media attention landed on a 2010 blog post in which Isayama indicated he had based the character Dot Pixis on Imperial Japanese General Akiyama Yoshifuru, whose war record included atrocities during Japan's occupation of Korea and China. The resulting online debate included death threats to Isayama. By 2015, the Chinese Ministry of Culture listed Attack on Titan among 38 anime and manga titles banned in China. Critical interpretations also drew parallels between the Eldian people and Jewish historical persecution, generating accusations and counterarguments that the series had continued to attract into the 2020s.

• 7. Awards and Legacy

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  Attack on Titan won the 35th Kodansha Manga Award for Best Shonen Manga in 2011. The same year, the industry survey Kono Manga ga Sugoi named it the best manga for male readers. At the 27th Harvey Award in 2014, it took Best American Edition of Foreign Material. The 17th Attilio Micheluzzi Award named it Best Foreign Series in 2014 as well. In 2021, the oversized Attack on Titan for Giants volume broke the Guinness World Record for the largest comic book ever published, a title previously held by Turma da Monica. On TV Asahi's Manga Sosenkyo 2021 poll, in which 150,000 people voted, Attack on Titan ranked sixth overall. A December 2023 survey by Nikkei Entertainment found that within Japan the fanbase has an average age of 33, with a male-to-female ratio of 40:60, a split that defies the shonen label the series carried throughout its run. Manga artist Makoto Yukimura, creator of Vinland Saga, said in an interview that he admired Isayama's ability to manage the entire plot through to the end, pointing specifically to the 20th volume as a turning point, and named Attack on Titan one of his favorite manga while it was still being serialized. The art book Fly, released on the 2nd of May 2024 alongside Volume 35, bundled a new one-shot manga titled "Bad Boy" focusing on Levi's childhood, suggesting that the world of walls, Titans, and Eldians has not yet said everything it has to say.