I have been making my way through the final season of Attack on Titan, the Japanese anime series that’s become something of a global phenomenon. I have a lot of affection for Attack on Titan; it was the series that got me into anime and manga in the first place, after decades of not really getting the appeal of the form. The show has served as a gateway drug for millions of other viewers too, telling a complex, multifaceted story that also hits all the anime beats of awesome action sequences. But as the show lumbers toward its conclusion, it’s dealing with a narrative problem that a lot of stories are encountering, even embracing. Call it, as the title of this newsletter puts it, Chosen Ones Gone Wrong. Attack on Titan has become a show about what happens when heroes, in pursuit of their heroic aims, become villains.
A quick rundown of Attack on Titan, if you’re not familiar with the show. The story takes places in a series of cities surrounded on all sides by enormous walls. The walls are there to protect citizens from Titans, giants who eat humans indiscriminately. Eren Yeager is our hero. He joins an expeditionary squad that travels beyond the walls in an attempt to take back the world from the Titans’ grip. We soon learn that Eren, as befitting a chosen one, possesses an extraordinary power: he can transform into a Titan himself, becoming an enormous giant who can battle the other Titans, thus turning the tide in the humans’ ongoing war.
Long story short, Eren learns that he and the Titans have much in common. The humas in the walled cities and the Titans all reside upon a prison island known as Paradis, meant to house a race known as the Eldians. Eldians possess the ability to transform into Titans. Millennia ago, Eldians ruled the world, until a country called Marley staged an uprising, successfully managing to overthrow the Eldian powers, sending the remaining Eldians into exile on Paradis. Once Eren discovers this state of affairs, his goal changes radically. As the final season portrays, Eren uses Titan power in an attempt to destroy every last trace of Marley and install Eldians as the ruler of the world once more. In short, genocide.
Unlike, say, Succession or Yellowjackets or whatever the Prestige TV show du jour happens to be, Attack on Titan hasn’t really caught the attention of what one may as well call the Discourse. The most prominent example I’ve encountered is this piece from the New Republic, which focuses on an unsavory subset of Attack on Titan fans, namely, alt-righters who see in the show a parable for their own inchoate yearnings for fascistic dominance, with Eren as the red-pilled weeb sticking it to the wokeocrats. I don’t think Attack on Titan is an inherently fascist show, personally. The story could just as easily lend itself to a liberation framework, with Eren as the freedom fighter leading his people to righteous victory. But even those readings ignore the complexity that Attack on Titan brings it to the story, and its suggestion that struggle, however righteous, is likely to overstep its original cause in the commission of atrocities.
And Eren is far from alone in this particular journey. A staple of popular stories over the last decade, and likely in the coming years, details just this journey from zealous heroism to ruthless villainy. Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones is perhaps the most controversial example, as her late-series heel turn outraged many fans who saw her as embodiment of the righteous (white) savior, leading oppressed people to autonomy. Dune looks to be telling a similar story. Denis Villeneuve, an obsessive fan of Frank Herbert’s novels, describes the overall arc of Paul Atreides, which he hopes to tell in the future movies, as a kind of Space Opera Michael Corleone, the innocent seduced to the point of total corruption. Indeed, the subsequent volumes of the Dune saga see Paul carry out a campaign of violence and genocide not unlike the one Eren Yeager attempts to wage. Chosen ones choose violence.
This whole arc, as it plays out in different narratives across different media, suggests that heroes, or perhaps heroism, has rather a short shelf life in this volatile age. I’ve thought of this fearfully while following the news out of Ukraine. Part of the reason for the global support of Ukraine, and Zelensky, comes from a need on the part of the US and other western nations for clear-cut heroes with righteous goals. The global stage has offered very few such figures in the last 30 years or so, with heroes and enemies simply becoming powers asserting their interests in far-flung corners of the world. But this tendency suggests that Zelensky, in the course of defending Ukraine, may make some choices that could be seen as betrayals of the very heroic ideals the US media has invested him with. And if that happens, will people keep watching The Ukraine Show? When reality fails to deliver the needed shot of heroic uplift, will we just skip to the next show in our queue?