Saturday 10 October 2015

Why I dropped #1 - Shingeki no Kyojin (aka "Attack on Titan") manga

Shingeki no Kyojin by Hajime Isayama

The CHARACTER design

So here is an update on my AOT review after reading a part of the manga that exceeds the material covered in the anime´s Season 1. 

First of all, I liked the manga a bit better (which, of course, is the case with most manga to anime conversions I have experienced). The diversions from manga to anime are really minimal. The horrible chapter dealing with the basic training is shifted to a later point in the story (and should have not been published in the first place - it is atrocious as I described in my anime review). By the way, I realized there actually IS a leader presiding over all three branches of the military (though why we do not see more of him is anyone´s guess).

The big monkey on the back is of course the clusterfuck of a drawing style. Proportions are almost laughably bad. In the very first chapter the wall is described as being only 50 meters high, when compared with the height of a human it looks to be more like 150-200 meters! This is quite important of course, since a 200m Titan would be neigh unstoppable with humankind´s limited weaponry! The copy-and-paste buildings are of course another beam in the eye of the beholder´s brother. On the other hand, elements like the titans and humans (I can actually tell the most important characters apart on a glance!) are flawlessly designed, if not anything special.

But, since art style in manga and anime - just like graphics in video games - are really neglegible in importance to me, the reason why I dropped Shingeki no Kyojin eventually was the author´s betrayal of the original premise of the story.

To elaborate, AOT started out as the conflict of humanity and

EDIT: This post remained unfinished for some time. By now I have forgotten what I wanted to write, so here's the crucial point because of which I made the decision to stop: useless side-characters were getting long-winded backstories, and in a story where characters are so uniform and ultra-bland in the first place that just wasn't bearable as it didn't add the slightest thing to the main plot. So I gladly gave up on finishing this manga.


 

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