It’s truly a one-in-a-lifetime series.
Summary:
- Attack on Titan is a one of a kind shounen.
- It set the trend for more mature and graphic series.
- It influenced the anime world a lot.
Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin) is a phenomenal series indeed. It earned extreme fame in and outside of the anime community. There is hardly any fandom person who doesn’t know about this anime, and it has influenced a number of other series.
There Was No Other Series Like It
Straight from the first episode of the series, released back in 2013, viewers understood that Attack on Titan would be something they’d never seen before. The world the anime portrays surprises with its horrors right away.
People are stripped of their freedom, forced to live behind high walls like some sort of cattle, giant titans are lurking outside these walls, making humans feel caged and powerless. This was fresh, frightening and surprising.
It’s easy to find a shounen protagonist whose parents die somewhere in the story or are already dead at the beginning (Naruto, Bleach, Jujutsu Kaisen), but hardly any series features such a graphic and brutal murder as Episode 1 of Attack on Titan. The series was truly surprising and inflicted absolute horror on viewers.
But Episode 1 was only the beginning of the cruelty the anime was about to show. The series is packed with trauma, drama and gore. It was always a shounen, but the way it approached violence was so gruesome that you might think it’s targeted at an older audience.
Attack on Titan’s Influence
Before Attack on Titan, there weren’t as many graphic shounens. Yes, terrible things happen in some other iconic series such as Naruto and One Piece, but they weren’t shown as explicitly.
Attack on Titan made the phrase “not afraid of killing important characters” a thing, since it was the first anime to treat its characters with such cruelty. It became the Game of Thrones of anime, like some fans loved to call it.
Although it might not have been the direct influence for modern shounens, it did have a lot of influence on what fans are looking for in a series. Viewers are now more interested in more mature anime that aren’t scared of exploring controversial topics and being explicit.
Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man are wonderful examples of this. Both series are shounens, too, but they can get so graphic and insane sometimes that you can’t even imagine them coming out before Attack on Titan.
Moreover, Attack on Titan got so big and famous that multiple other series featured various references to it. Such series as Kiss Him, Not Me or Koyomimonogatari and Outbreak Company have small Easter eggs with Survey Corps uniforms or Titans.
Attack on Titan is not just an extremely popular anime series, it’s a real phenomenon that changed the industry and fans’ perception of what a good story and a good shounen should be. And we’ll always be grateful to this series for that.