Attack on Titan — A Memorandum on Growing Up

I don't want to write a conventional review of Attack on Titan.

I don't want to rate the animation, music, characters, pacing, or plot. Those things matter, but they are not what stayed with me. Still if I have to say something about them, the music is magical.

What stayed with me was the strange feeling that, somewhere along the way, I stopped watching a story about Titans and started watching something that felt like growing up.

This is my attempt to record that feeling while it is still fresh.

Not what the story objectively means.

What it meant to me.

And perhaps more importantly, what it made me realize about life—for now.

At the beginning, the world seemed simple.

There were humans.

There were Titans.

There were walls.

There was an enemy outside.

There were people trying to protect humanity.

It was easy to understand who was worth fearing and who was worth trusting.

And perhaps that was the first thing the story had in common with childhood.

When we are young, the world seems to come pre-labelled.

Good people are good.

Bad people are bad.

Adults know what they are doing.

Institutions exist for reasons we can understand.

History is something that happened.

Religion is something people believe.

Government is something that governs.

Power belongs to those who are powerful.

The unknown is simply the thing we haven't learned yet.

Then we grow older.

And the walls begin to crack.

The walls became more than physical structures to me.

They became the boundaries of human knowledge.

At first, I thought the walls protected humanity from the outside.

Eventually, I began to see another possibility:

Perhaps the walls also protected humanity from the truth.

There were things people didn't know.

Things people weren't allowed to know.

Things people had forgotten.

Things people had deliberately hidden.

And there were even things nobody knew they didn't know.

That last category may be the most frightening one.

It is easy to search for something when you know it exists.

It is much harder to search for something when you don't even know that there is something missing.

Growing up feels like that.

Every few years, I discover something that makes me realize that an earlier version of myself wasn't exactly wrong.

I simply didn't have enough information.

One of the strangest things about Attack on Titan is how often new knowledge doesn't simply answer a question.

It changes the question.

I thought I was learning facts.

Instead, I was repeatedly being forced to reinterpret the facts I already had.

Something I saw earlier would acquire a completely different meaning later.

A person I judged would become more understandable.

Something I thought was obvious would become complicated.

Something I thought was complicated would suddenly become obvious.

That feels remarkably close to growing up.

You don't merely accumulate knowledge.

You reinterpret your memories with the knowledge you have now.

The past doesn't change.

Your understanding of the past does.

This may have been one of the hardest lessons.

It is easy to look at someone's actions and decide what kind of person they are.

Someone did something terrible.

Therefore, they are terrible.

Someone sacrificed themselves.

Therefore, they are good.

But people have motives.

People have fears.

People have histories.

People belong to families, nations, religions, ideologies, institutions.

People can love someone and hurt someone else.

They can do something horrible while believing they are doing the right thing.

They can do something good for selfish reasons.

They can change.

They can contradict themselves.

They can be victims and perpetrators at the same time.

The older I get, the less satisfying the question "Who is good?" becomes.

The more interesting question becomes:

"What happened to this person that made their actions make sense to them?"

Understanding someone does not mean forgiving them.

But understanding is different from hatred.

When I was younger, the monsters were outside.

They were under the bed.

In the dark.

Behind the door.

Somewhere beyond the walls.

Attack on Titan slowly made the monster harder to locate.

It wasn't simply outside.

It could be inside a person.

Inside a society.

Inside an ideology.

Inside a government.

Inside a religion.

Inside a nation.

Inside me.

Perhaps the real horror isn't that humans can become monsters.

Perhaps it is that the distance between "human" and "monster" is much smaller than we want to believe.

The devil is not necessarily under the bed.

Sometimes the devil is inside us.

And that doesn't mean that humanity is evil.

It means that being human requires constant choices.

The same thing happened with the idea of God.

The story made me think less about a God physically existing somewhere above us and more about what humans place inside the idea of God.

Meaning.

Hope.

Fear.

Authority.

Morality.

Purpose.

Comfort.

Control.

Sometimes people create walls and then worship them.

Sometimes people give institutions divine authority.

Sometimes people use religion to protect truth.

Sometimes they use it to hide truth.

Maybe God isn't simply a being somewhere above the world.

Maybe what we call God is also something humans carry inside themselves.

Something they use to decide what is right, what is sacred, what is worth dying for.

I don't know if that makes God more real or less real.

It makes the question more complicated.

I began the story thinking of power rather simply.

Who has the strongest weapon?

Who can defeat whom?

Who commands the army?

But power turned out to be much more than physical strength.

Power can be:

The person holding the sword isn't necessarily the person holding the power.

Sometimes the person who controls the story has more power than the person holding the weapon.

That is something I suspect extends far beyond fiction.

The story also made me think about something more mundane but equally important:

People respond to incentives.

Individuals and institutions don't always behave according to what is morally best.

They respond to:

That doesn't make morality meaningless.

It makes morality difficult.

A system can produce terrible outcomes without every individual inside the system being evil.

And a person can have good intentions while participating in something harmful.

Understanding incentives is another part of growing up.

Even the Titans themselves became a metaphor for knowledge.

At first they were simply monsters.

Then they became biological mysteries.

Then they became evidence of something larger.

The more humanity learned about them, the less satisfying the original explanation became.

That reminded me of science.

Science doesn't mean that we know everything.

It means we have a method for discovering that what we thought we knew was incomplete.

Every answer can open ten more questions.

And sometimes the most important scientific realization is:

"Our model was wrong."

That isn't failure.

That's progress.

Perhaps this is the biggest thing I took from the story.

There is so much we don't know.

And even more frightening:

there are things we don't know that we don't know.

The world is larger than our map of it.

Reality is larger than our understanding of reality.

The version of myself writing this memorandum knows things that my younger self didn't.

But there is another version of me in the future who will probably look at this and think:

"You had no idea."

And that thought doesn't frighten me as much anymore.

It makes me curious.

My favourite characters weren't necessarily the strongest.

I was drawn to people who tried to understand.

Armin.

The strategist.

The people who looked at a seemingly impossible situation and asked:

"What are we missing?"

That may say something about what I value.

I admire intelligence, but not intelligence as a collection of facts.

I admire the ability to remain curious when certainty would be easier.

To change your mind when evidence demands it.

To make decisions when you don't have enough information.

To keep thinking when everyone else has already decided what the truth must be.

Maybe growing up is discovering that the world is not getting simpler.

It is becoming more complicated because I am becoming capable of seeing the complications.

As a child, I saw events.

As I grow older, I see causes.

Then consequences.

Then competing causes.

Then unintended consequences.

Then the people behind the people.

Then the systems behind the people.

And eventually I realize that I still don't understand the whole thing.

That isn't failure.

That's maturity.

Perhaps maturity isn't knowing the answers.

Perhaps it is becoming comfortable enough with uncertainty to keep asking better questions.

There is something fitting about the basement.

For so long, everyone lives with the knowledge that there is a locked room containing the truth.

The key exists.

The room exists.

But knowing that there is a truth somewhere doesn't mean you're ready for what the truth will do to you.

I think life has basements too.

Things we haven't understood yet.

Things we haven't experienced.

Things we haven't questioned.

Things we aren't emotionally ready to know.

And when we finally open them, the world doesn't necessarily become happier.

It becomes larger.

Attack on Titan began for me as a story about humanity trapped behind walls.

It ended as something much more personal.

It became a story about how humans construct walls around themselves:

with ignorance,

with fear,

with ideology,

with identity,

with religion,

with politics,

with pride,

with certainty.

And growing up is, perhaps, the gradual process of discovering where those walls are.

Some need to be broken.

Some need to be understood.

Some protect us.

Some imprison us.

And some exist only because we have never thought to ask what lies beyond them.

I don't think I have reached the end of that process.

I don't think anyone does.

There will always be another wall.

Another basement.

Another truth.

Another perspective.

Another version of myself waiting somewhere in the future who knows something that I don't know today.

So this is not a conclusion.

It is a snapshot.

This is how I saw the world after Attack on Titan.

How I see it for now.

Date- 03.08.2026