Why "Attack on Titan" Is the Alt-Right’s Favorite Manga – The New Republic

Here, Isayamas convoluted racial coding comes to the foreground, because Isayama does construct many symbolic parallels between the Eldians and an ideal Nazi state. Eldian society is ethnically homogeneous, with the exception of a single Asian woman, and all the named Eldians have European names. (It is not clear if they are intended to be white. The pale mukokuseki or stateless default character design template used in most Japanese anime is often interpreted as Japanese in Japan and white in the U.S.) The coup against the state could be read as an anticolonial revolution, but the alt-right interprets it as a nationalist putsch against a pacifist state. The opening theme music of the show is even sung in German.

There are also parallels to Imperial Japan. Isayama explicitly based one heroic general on Imperial Japanese Army General Akiyama Yoshifuru, while fans on both the left and the right see close parallels between another character and Nazi General Erwin Rommel. Another character, Mikasa, shares her name with an Imperial Japanese battleship. Given these aesthetic decisions, perhaps it is unsurprising that one poster opened their thread, When did you realize this was fascist propaganda and that its commentary on how the good guys lost WW2?

Theres fodder for many other, sometimes contradictory, racist interpretations of the show. The Marleyan state is controlled secretly by an Eldian family, reminiscent of right-wing conspiracy theories around Jewish cabals and financiers. On the chan boards, alt-right Attack on Titan fans who detest the Eldians tend to think of the walled city as Israel and consider their expulsion and ghettoization well-deserved punishments.

A contingent of liberal commentators also identified the series as careless at best, and intentional at worst, in its invocation of antisemitic tropes. As one user tweeted, This boneheaded metaphor has the people analogous to holocaust victims literally turning into giant horrid man-eating monsters. As another observed, Attack on Titans whole Jews used to rule and brutally oppress the world and fled after losing a war and are the only people who can turn into Titans and literally eat people thing is, yknow, pretty gross and maybe a reason not to buy/read/watch it, just FYI.

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Why "Attack on Titan" Is the Alt-Right's Favorite Manga - The New Republic