The winter 2023 anime season is winding down, and the shows I was watching all ended on very intense notes.
Attack on Titan slipped in almost unannounced with the first half of its final final final we really mean it this time cour. The series will conclude with two one-hour episodes, the first of which aired this month.
And it was a marvelous, beautifully-crafted episode, perfectly balanced between action scenes and relationship moments. It may be taking literal years to finish this anime series, but if the concluding episode is as great as this one it’ll be worth the wait.
Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin) is usually categorized as a shonen manga and anime. But I think the most applicable category for the series is horror.
When the story begins, we’re introduced to the Eldians who live in three walled cities and their adjacent farmlands. The civilization is medieval with most people either farming or working simple trades.
Outside the walls lurks incredible danger. The Titans are gigantic monsters that nearly wiped out humanity, and only the walls can keep them out. They resemble huge skinless human beings but with strangely floppy limbs and terrifyingly blank facial expressions. They eat humans.
The hero of the story is Eren Jaeger. His mother was eaten by a Titan and then his father, a doctor named Grisha Jaeger, disappeared. Along with his friends Mikasa and Armin, Eren joins the Survey Corps, a military unit that uses rappelling and jet pack-like propulsion equipment on their missions to survey the Titan population outside the walls.
The story is complex, involving politics and secret missions and betrayals within the unit and in the greater society at large. There are many twists and turns. Each turn of the story leads the viewer to ever darker truths.
The scenes where humans are eaten are shown in graphic detail. The horror is visceral and seizes your guts as you watch. Attack on Titan’s creator Hajime Isayama doesn’t mask the characters’ terror in any way; nor does he pull a “fade to black” before they’re eaten. You see it all.
As if that wasn’t enough, we see other gruesome and violent scenes including a child being torn to pieces by a pack of dogs (simply because she’s an Eldian), torture, maiming. The civilization is primitive and human suspicion of “the other” is on full display.
The characters go through a lot and by the end of the story - where we are now - they are spent and bitter. The layers of betrayal and all the awful revelations about who the Titans really are have worn them down. And in doing what they believed to be right, they’ve become killers and worse.
This first of two “special episodes” that will conclude the series includes a quiet scene in which the corps - friends who became enemies who now come together one last time for the final battle - discuss their plans to stop one of their own from destroying civilization.
In the course of the discussion all of their regrets come out. Apologies are made and accepted. They’re aware that it’s unlikely that all of them - or perhaps any of them - will survive the coming fight.
The weight of the past is heavy.
In this episode, one of the main characters sacrifices herself to buy time for the corps to escape the Titans and reach the battlefield.
There is one hour remaining in the Attack on Titan anime series. The second special episode is set to air sometime this fall.
Some surprising news about Boruto - it’s going on a long hiatus.
Boruto’s last two episodes were very intense. Although everyone narrowly survived an encounter with the villains Code and Momoshiki, the series’ first part ended before the much-anticipated timeskip.
The anime has caught up with the manga (more or less... apparently they could have animated a few more scenes from the manga and not stopped where they did, but whatever), so they’re now calling the first 293 episodes “Part 1” of the series. No announcement as to when Part 2 will begin airing.
So my mainstay anime is gone for now. I’ll be honest - there’ve been times when Boruto bored me. It was in fillers the entire year of 2022 and generally the storylines haven’t been as compelling as they were in the parent series Naruto.
But they are definitely leaving it on a high note, having set up the future conflict between Boruto and his adopted brother Kawaki. So I’ll look forward to it whenever it returns.
Finally, My Hero Academia’s sixth season came to a close with Saturday’s episode. This arc was called the “depression arc” by the manga fans and now I see why. After a massive failure by the heroes to defeat or even contain Shigaraki and his legion of villains, the public turned against the heroes.
It was a depressing arc, but public opinion began to turn back in the heroes’ favor by the end. The series returns for its seventh season in October.
Bleach returns in July with the second part of the Thousand-Year Blood War arc. Until then, there’s not much that’s new that I want to watch. I’ve gone through Crunchyroll’s Spring 2023 guide and didn’t see anything that stood out.
So I’m going to finish the other series on my watchlist (Spy x Family, Heaven Official’s Blessing, Bureau of Paranormal Investigation) and then maybe watch some old favorites and then... we’ll see. There are a number of classic anime series I haven’t watched yet. Maybe it’s time to add them to the list. ;-)
