Shingeki no Kyojin(Attack on Titan) – 34 – 35[Opening/Children]

Forgive me for the extremely late posts but I was on holiday in Portugal so didn’t really have the energy or tools to write up posts. If it’s any consolation the holiday was pretty terrible. I am out a grand and all I got in return was a mild tan, a half deaf ear, a cold and severe amounts of boredom. Gah, the pains of showing your family you give a damn. Anyway I watched these episodes back to back with hope that with a double dose of Attack on titan this would medicate my previous issue with the current plot being overly drawn out. Sadly this isn’t the case as I really am struggling to see the reason why these episodes are so ridiculously drawn out. In my adult years I have grown sensitive to when a show is wasting my time and in this case I feel these two episodes could be crunched into one and the pacing would be all the better for it. Part of the reason for this slow pace could be an artifact from it’s source, where events are repeated by the characters to refresh the audience on just what is going on. Now in a monthly series such as Attack on titan this is perfectly logical.

After all it’s hard to expect a reader to remember the events that could have happened a couple of months past. For an example the first episode here starts with Ymir reiterating that they were taken to a forest to wait for nightfall. Thing is that Hange pointed out this very thing in the last episode and having Ymir explain it here only illustrates to the audience why Eren can’t go titan and escape. Even then there is no point in going to such laborious detail. But a real big offender is the scouts checking out Connies village and once again repeating that titans ravaged it, but there’s no bodies and they didn’t take the horses…yes, yes, we went over this already. There’s no point in giving the audience a reminder on something that happened only a few episodes ago. This is sort of the reason as to why you can’t simply adapt word from word from a source and expect it to work as well. One has to take into account that anime has new benefits and lacks the limitations of manga while bringing it’s own limitations.

Animation has truly degraded these past episodes and I am not surprised. They had a pretty good run of demanding animation sequences so it’s no wonder if the team is burned out. But the second episode here has a few seconds of footage with animation so utterly terrible I had to repeat it just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. This is one point when in Reiner and Bertholdt were escaping on 3D dimensional gear and I swear to god the animation was just a still image moving diagonally. A literal animation tween of the most basic form and I am honestly surprised to see no mention of it in discussion threads. Other than that the number of still frames has gone up so either the team is saving themselves for something or are on their last legs. So in other events Riener is claimed to have disassociated cognition where in he has played the solder so long that he has trouble discerning which of his personas is real. I am sorry but, I really don’t buy this. Throughout the series Reiner has been a relatively solid character and showed no real sign of mental instability. They throw in a flashback to try and recon this in but it really does feel like a on the moment decision to justify his offhand confession to Eren. Also his condition is not explained by his comrade but instead perfectly deduced by Ymir at that very moment. It just bothers me that these characters are ridiculously perceptive when it comes to interpersonal relations but still frustratingly oblivious to obvious concepts like Titan’s being transformed humans.

I must reiterate that nothing in these episodes I would consider bad. In fact I found Ymir’s flashback to be the best part of these episodes though that may be anime original content or part of a later development moved to this point. But I do think that if I didn’t have to blog it that I wouldn’t be still watching it. It’s not a matter of disliking it but I just have a complete lack of interest. This could be attributed to the fact that I have read on in the manga and therefore know the revelations that this show is still trying to keep out of reach. But there are animes airing during a season in which I just can’t bring up the motivation to start watching it. Boku no Hero season 2 would be a prime example of this. I had the full intent of watching it and yet it’s over halfway through the season and I can’t be bothered to start episode one. I confess that I haven’t even finished the second season of Gate despite not finding it a bad show. I just…stop. No real feelings behind it besides apathy and my hesitation to continue watching which is greater as the episodes build up each week. In truth I never had much interest in covering this to begin with and still stand by my opinion in the preview that this is where Attack on Titan started to lose me. History repeats itself I suppose.