1:
I don’t have a ton of “where do they come up with this shit?” moments in my reading life, but this one hits the mark.
Giant naked men with no penises have consumed most of the human race the way I, a normal-sized man with a penis (nothing to brag about, but it DOES exist) consumes tortilla chips at a Mexican restaurant.
There is no point at any Mexican meal where I would say no thanks to another basket of chips. No circumstances, either. They could blend the chips and salsa into a slurry, and I’d still give it a swig.
When I had adult braces, the food limitations were mostly easy.
No gum? No problem.
No hard candy? No problem.
No chips? “Listen, doc, either I put some chips in my mouth sometime over the next 3 years or I put a revolver in my mouth right now. I’ll go by your recommendation as an oral health professional on this one.”
I guess what I’m saying is that I identify with dickless giants who swallow people whole more than I do the brave souls fighting to save humanity.
2:
What is with criminals in fiction that they are also all rapists? Isn’t there like one bank robber who is like, Listen, I want this money badly, but I have no interest in getting all assault-y on this bank teller we’ve got tied up?
And why do they always try to get it on with a lady who’s like a ruthless super spy? I don’t think I could handle a consenting, happy-to-be-there minor league softball player let alone a trained-from-birth killer. How does the criminal THINK that’s going to go? “Oh, here’s Harley Quinn, basically female joker. Somehow she occasionally beats Batman and The Flash and shit, but I think I can make dis woik.”
Or they easily fall for the whole “helpless damsel” act after the lady has been captured for like 3 minutes. If it was me, and the lady was like, “Maybe we could loosen these ropes, they’re hurting my widdle wists,” I’d be like, “if you’re serious, you’re so weak and setting back women by decades. If you’re trying to fool me, also not cool from a feminist perspective. Aphra Behn is rolling over in her grave. That’s right, I known who Aphra Behn is. You’d think with this kind of knowledge I could find a job, but knowing a lot about dramatists is actually the perfect kind of knowledge to never get a job. Hence robbing the bank here.”
3:
I think I’ve finally, after a lot of searching, found a manga I enjoy. It hasn’t been easy. It’s just not my thing. The storytelling is often very decompressed, stretching one volume of content into three or four. And oftentimes you’ll find things repeated.
It reminds me of what drove me nuts about Harry Potter, the repeating. Once you discover a rock that can make people immortal WHO CARES ABOUT QUIDDITCH? I still can’t figure out why Harry Potter didn’t say, “Hey guys, do you realize we can do magic? Like, all kinds of magic? But instead of learning how to liquefy people we’re going to play broomstick basketball.” Despite all that (and SEVERAL letters to JK Rowling which I was very fortunate to not have end in legal action) I felt like whenever I picked up a Harry Potter book, before I knew it I was reading sports writing. YOU CAN’T TRICK ME INTO READING ABOUT SPORTS! Especially made-up sports. Because we all know there’s only one made-up sport of value, and that’s any sport where the point is to hunt other human beings. Running Man, Hard Target, Battle Royale, Hunger Games, and to some extent, I guess, 1994’s Ice-T vehicle Surviving the Game.
4:
Okay, you ready for a little fact-ing that fans of this series probably already know?
I was thinking the title of this is kind of strange. I was wondering if we’d eventually get a character saying, “It’s time for our attack on the Titans!” Sort of the Walking Dead moment when Rick is like, “WE are the walking dead!” Which, bro, I get the symbolism here, but I still have to give that one to the literal zombies. When a metaphor is presented in the context of a reality as though the metaphor is more powerful, you may have taken one English class too many.
Anyways, Japanese is kind of different. I’ve taken very few lessons on Duolingo and been trapped in learning the katakana/hiragana characters. This is difficult for me because my drawing abilities are terrible, I have fat fingers, and memorizing characters and how they’re drawn is very difficult for me. I make a lot of English letters and numbers backwards or in weird orders, and Duolingo is like my 2nd grade teacher who insisted we learn to draw 8’s the right way, not as a sad snowman with only two balls.
Two balls. Heh.
My understanding of the original Japanese title of Attack on Titan is that it’s a bit of a play on words because it can be translated as The Attack of the Titans, The Titan of the Attack, or The Advancing Titan(s), with some ambiguity on who is the attacker, attacked, and whether the attacker or attacked are plural.
This is the sort of thing I first experienced when I learned of the existence of Wario’s brother, Waluigi. To my English-speaking ears, this seemed like a weird thing, like we decided to just throw “wa” on the beginning of a word and that means “evil version,” sort of like how we put “-gate” on the end of something, and that means “scandal.”
But then I learned that all of this is clever wordplay in Japanese, the whole Wario/Waluigi thing, that just doesn’t translate to English.
it’s a little sad because I feel like English doesn’t have as many puns of this type, except for the “Two-Est” jokes I make, most of which are based on the idea of calling a very small version of a forest a “Two-est,” two being half of four. The humor of these might be totally lost on a Japanese speaker, although it also doesn’t seem to get much action from English speakers. It almost makes me think they just aren’t funny jokes, but at this point, I’m married to the format, no going back now.
5: We should make an official Goodreads ruling that spoilers for a series are totally acceptable a certain number of books in. Like, 10? Why would anybody be looking at volume 10? Either you’re at volume 1 or you’re committed to reading and have no reason to look ahead like that.
6:
I don’t feel like I fully understand how the whole vertical maneuvering thing works, and the real issue is that I don’t want to know. I feel like if I watched the TV show, I’d get it, and I’d be like, “Oh…I guess that’s pretty cool or whatever.”
Some things just work better in comics, I think, where you don’t have to fill in every gap, just get the sense of what’s happening.
This is also how I feel lovemaking should be evaluated. My lovemaking, anyway.
7:
I just searched “Attack on Titan” on Etsy and saw someone offering to create artwork that presents you and your family members as Titans.
If you’re unfamiliar with this book, Titans are these weird-looking, giant naked dudes with no genitals. They have crazed looks and eat people whole.
And I must say, the person making these does a good job of conveying that weirdness: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1376719718
I don’t usually send out Christmas cards. But occasionally, I really want to.
8:
I just discovered that in Japan, a bath tub is typically more like a barrel shape, being shorter in length but deeper, so you’d sit in it about up to your neck. Also, it’s designed to keep the water at a consistent temperature, usually by recirculating it through a heater.
I just have to ask, what the fuck are we doing, bath-tub-wise? Filling up a mini coffin-shaped tub to be painfully hot at first, then pretty quickly turning tepid, then straight up cold? And the length only allows a person to choose between having their entire torso above water or to bend their legs so their knees/thighs are above the water and they can be in about up to their nipnips?
How did this become the standard tub? Who agreed to this? I want names.
9:
I looked up “Attack on Titan memes” because I need something to write about in this book review, we’re 9 volumes in with no end in sight.
Almost everything was about one character or another having sex with each other or being sexually attractive. Which is hilarious.
I don’t mean to kink shame or anything, if that’s your bag, go for it, but I DO think there are some kinks that, while I wouldn’t say the holders should be ashamed or face any sorts of consequences, we all should all be permitted to acknowledge they’re hilarious.
I’ll go first: My first sex dream was about a female ninja turtle. You could tell because her headband was pink!
Is that something I should be horribly ashamed of? No, BUT it IS hilarious.
10:
Doing some googling for this one, I found out there are Attack on Titan Funko Pops.
Now, don’t call me a cynic, but the characters in this book, many of them have very similar looks, and the Fonko-Pop-ization process DOES make all characters in all things look very similar, so the result is that the AOT Pops (of the human characters) are pretty underwhelming, kind of just the same guy in a few different positions, same clothes, same body, know what I mean?
The Titans are a bit better, but they don’t retain their menace. Which is I guess the whole Funko Pop vibe, much more cute, not so much designed to create a feeling of existential dread while simultaneously kind of making you want to puke.
HOWEVER, the potato girl has a potato. So that’d be my AOT Pop of choice, obviously.
11:
I just found out that the creator of Attack on Titan opened up a bunch of AOT stuff in his hometown after he noticed the town was struggling and lots of shops and things were closing. There’s a museum, a cafe, and a couple of bronze statues of characters from the series in his hometown.
Maybe one of the cooler ones, there’s a statue of the three main characters, when they were kids, making the expression from the book that they make when the Colossus Titan smashes the wall.
What’s neat about it is that the statue is placed right in front of this huge dam, which looks a bit like one of the giant walls from the series, and the creator has said that the dam and surrounding mountains played a big part in inspiring the series.
I just really like that someone is pimping out their creation for good, you know?
Buy my shitty books, and I could help out a struggling small town. Probably couldn’t get like a bronze statue, but maybe a 3D printed statue of a butt? Which would be pretty appropriate for my books.
12:
This review doesn’t actually contain any spoilers, I’m just reviewing like 4 of these in a row and have run out of things to say. But, aha!, if I just hide it because of spoilers, nobody will know that the ol’ idea bank is overdrawn. The ol’ spank bank is closed. That’s what “spank bank” means, right? Ideas?
God, this is possibly the cleverest thing I’ve ever done. And yet, it’ll be hidden. It’s both a tragedy and brilliant.
Maybe the spank bank ISN’T as empty as I thought…
13: If I lived in Titan world where I could be eaten by a giant man with no genitals at any moment, I’d never dust an object ever again. Can you imagine? You bust some dust, then ten minutes later you’re being eaten alive, thinking, “Why didn’t I build a giant deadfall in front of my house to trap titans or something?”
14: There MUST be dorks who are comparing current American politics to Attack on Titan, right?
Which is…I mean, there’s an extent to which bad politics is bad politics, but comparing our current status to one where there’s a country surrounded by literal man-eating giant monsters who massacre the shit out of everyone seems like a mild stretch.
15: Is it weird that Goodreads makes me to a captcha to write this review? What is this designed to prevent?
And can I set this up for my own books? “Always ask for captcha if the score is less than 5 stars, please, and make it a shitty one, like one where it asks if there are stop lights in the image, and you’re like, ‘Eh, kinda, does that count?'”.
16: As someone who is lazy, I find the captcha that asks you to click on stairs mildly offensive.
Just typed that, then got a captcha with mountains or hills, nature’s stairs.
I’ve always said the mountains are just uphill woods, and I stand by that.
17: At this point, I’m feeling very smug about reading this series now that it’s complete. No cliffhangers for Pete! Ha HA! I’ve beaten the system for once in my miserable life. Yes, in order to tout my accomplishment, I have to tell people about a manga series about giant naked monsters with butts but no junk in the front (junk in the trunk, as in elephant’s trunk? But that’s confusing because trunk is also the butt. Maybe we should use UK slang on this one? What rhymes with boot…).
18: Sometimes I wonder about the things people click “Like” on in Goodreads. Seems fairly arbitrary. Almost like none of this matters and all our Goodreads reviews will one day be dust, or not even dust because they don’t exist in physical form. Less than dust. Good title for my compendium of Goodreads reviews, coming to you probably never because who has time for that shit?
19: You know, something I have to credit this series for is creating a situation where swords and guns both exist in the world, but swords are actually useful and guns aren’t. They always try to pull this off, like in Star Wars, and it doesn’t usually work because it’s like, “Well, I think given the choice between a sword and a gun, I’ll take gun.” Don’t the blasters in Star Wars basically shoot out short segments of lightsaber? Is there any difference? Does even considering learning about this make me want to beat up a nerd, by which I mean, beat up myself?
20: Solid stuff, nothing pleases a Pete more than a series where nobody is safe.
21:The excitement of this cover, people opening a book, is not quite up to the level of a giant man with no skin smashing a wall from the first volume, and I say that as a librarian with a degree and everything.
22: At this point I had to go read a summary online of what is happening, just to make sure I had it straight in my head.
Many thanks to Reddit user aidanyyyy for posting a great summary, but more importantly, titling this “aot thing,” which is so much like the way that I title documents that I feel very seen right now.
23: Boy does this story get complicated. There are so many factions and so much going on, it’s a little…well, I have to wonder if the plot is going to continue to grow and expand like some kind of COLOSSUS TITAN or if it’s going to kind of even out, like…some kind of regular guy who grows when he’s like 16 and then smokes one cigarette that stunts his growth forever, as we all did.
24: I’m very distracted by the fact that there’s a country called “Marley” in this book. I just picture a country of super stoner college kids with Bob Marley posters on their walls. I would like for this country to exist, purely because I’m very curious what kids in that country would write essays about.
Now that weed is legal so many places, what do high school stoners write persuasive papers about? Now that they can’t really argue about hemp or whatever, what are these kids to do? Did we not even spare a moment to consider their fate when we legalized marijuana?
25: This was kind of like an awesome action movie where I have no idea what’s going on, but that’s okay because the action is great.
I’ll need to return to the AOT THING document I found earlier. I feel like this is going to be something I do every 4 or 5 volumes or so.
26: Can someone please name a kid Levi and then turn them against Levis jeans? I would find that VERY funny.
Probably thinking about these sorts of things is what’s preventing me from following the story of Attack on Titan very closely.
27: Some dickwad has volume 28 checked out from the library, so now I’m stuck waiting for them to finish it, and every moment that passes is a moment where more details of the story fall out of my brain. I know it’s only going to be like 2 weeks, but if you are the person who has this checked out from my library, please know that you’re basically denying someone with the inability to remember things for longer than 10 minutes the option to get through Attack on Titan. You’re one of history’s greatest monsters.