Attack on Titan

 At long last, I’ve finished watching the Attack on Titan anime. I’ve read Tezuka Osamu’s manga, played Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games, and now I’ve gone through Hajime Isayama’s masterpiece. I’m genuinely impressed by how these Japanese creators construct such vast, coherent worlds.

Attack on Titan is one of the highest-rated anime on IMDb (9.1; by comparison, Spirited Away sits at 8.6). I had previously watched a few scattered episodes and didn’t really “get it.” This time I watched it from start to finish—intense, exhilarating, and astonishingly brilliant. As the saying goes, a thousand people have a thousand Hamlets, and the online debate around this series is huge.

In my view, the Attack on Titan anime, the Dune novel series, and the game Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree are all wrestling with the same core question: the price of freedom.

I think Attack on Titan is very likely inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune series. The conceptual parallels are striking, though Dune is actually less “brain-melting” than Attack on Titan. In Attack on Titan, the core “superpower” is that the future can influence the past. In Dune, the power lies in strong prescience—seeing future possibilities and then making choices in the present to steer humanity along a chosen path. The “Paths” in Attack on Titan correspond to the Golden Path in Dune:

• in the former, it’s a kind of two-dimensional plane or network;

• in the latter, it’s a long, linear route laid out in time.

In Attack on Titan, the price of freedom is the extinction of 80% of humanity.

In Dune, it’s the Butlerian Jihad and later holy wars that kill some 61 billion people, and under Leto II’s 4,000 years of brutal rule and extreme extraction, the casualties from the Great Scattering are beyond counting.

Watching both works, I often felt a chill down my spine. It’s hard to understand why the authors chose to make the “optimal route” selected by their superpowered protagonists so incredibly catastrophic. If they had simply reduced the death toll a little, the stories would be much less controversial.

Looking back, though, I think that extremity is the point: they want to push the cost of freedom to the absolute limit so no one can look away.

I suspect that, for many Chinese viewers including myself, this is hard to intuitively accept. Yet in reality, Chinese history has seen tragedies on a scale and intensity that often exceed those elsewhere in the world.

To borrow a line from Laozi’s Tao Te Ching:

“Heaven and Earth are not benevolent; they treat all things as straw dogs.

The sage is not benevolent; he treats the people as straw dogs.”

In Elden Ring’s DLC Shadow of the Erdtree, the demigod Miquella, moved by immense compassion, is willing to sacrifice everything. By using his power of enchantment, he seeks to bind the hearts of all people and create a “gentle world.”

But this utopian “land of tenderness” is not something Hidetaka Miyazaki or George R. R. Martin ultimately endorse. The player character tracks Miquella along his path to godhood and finally kills him, leaving behind a world that is chaotic and desolate rather than warm and gentle.

In the eyes of these authors, the course of human history is always at risk of sliding into a comfortable, stagnant local optimum—a cozy trap from which we cannot escape. Breaking that cage inevitably brings chaos and demands a terrible price.

The age of artificial intelligence is approaching quickly, and an age of abundance for humanity will likely follow. This great abundance will be a powerful attractor, locking us into a beautiful new world of comfort.

The odds that AI will directly chop down the tree of human civilization may be far lower than the odds that we, sunk deep in our comfort zone, simply let that tree wither and die of old age.