What I liked:

  • The titan designs, which manage to be consistently bizarre and terrifying in a way that I really appreciate (and also abhor)
  • A sense of legitimate narrative propulsion and danger; nobody (besides the protagonists) is safe, nobody (besides the protagonists) can really be trusted. I don't have a good sense of where the plot is going besides "the Titans are more than they seem and probably created by the humans in a Xenoblade Chronicles-esque sense".

What I don't like:

  • A lot of people make obviously poor decisions for no reason other than "it serves the plot"
  • I don't really have a good sense of what the power levels are at play here; Titans very quickly go from being a world-beater threat to being something of which multiple humans have multi-hundred body counts; any given conflict, like the above bullet point, seems to be decided more by what serves the plot than what realistically would happen in a combat scenario
  • There is a lot of filler and monologuing in the stereotypical shonen sense

I'm enjoying the story enough to want to continue; I wish the story was delivered with more speed and grace.

★★★

Highlights

I had such a boring life.

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About Attack on Titan (Season 1)

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About the author

I'm Justin Duke — a software engineer, writer, and founder. I currently work as the CEO of Buttondown, the best way to start and grow your newsletter, and as a partner at Third South Capital.

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