Did the Attack on Titan's anime only changes make the ending better than the manga? By Ian Merrifield

 WARNING I WILL TRY TO BE AS VAGUE AS POSSIBLE TO KEEP SPOILERS TO A MINIMUM, BUT I WILL STILL BE DISCUSSING THE ENDING OF A SERIES

 

            Attack on Titan (AoT) is one of my favorite mangas/animes of all time. It has a gripping story with real stakes and interesting ideas/themes. I started by watching the anime and I was hooked. I remember spending several hours a day just watching the show, until I ran into a problem: I really wanted to see the ending, but the anime was still a few years from completion. And with the very misleading naming system of the anime* I decided to check out the manga. Luckily I though the ending was pretty good. Not super great, but still a decent ending to one of my favorite shows. Although I had heard that the anime had made some changes when compared to the source material based on the general consensus of how the fans felt about certain parts of the manga. This made for an interesting case where the ending might be different from the manga as the manga ending was met with very mixed reactions.

* Basically the first two seasons were normal with one part, third season was still pretty simple, having two parts, but the fourth season– titled “The Final Season” – at first had two parts, then a third one solely consisting of a hour long special, finally ending with a second hour long special (with this naming system the final episode is called “Attack on Titan the Final Season Part three Part two).

            Now a few years later after the anime has finally finished concluding (technically it ending in November of 2023) I can confirm that the ending in the anime definitely changed a far amount about the manga ending. How much did it change the ending? Where the changes any good? Both of these questions are still very much up for debate among the community. The core of the ending is pretty similar. The same character deaths happen, the general plot points are the same, really the only differences are some changes in dialogue and the scenes. But, depending on your interpretation of those changed scenes and dialogue, the manga and anime’s stance on the main issue can be read pretty differently. Naturally from an ending of this sort, I’ve heard people say that these changes enhanced an already perfect ending, but I’ve also heard that the changes made a mediocre at best ending far, far worse. Personally, as I’ve mentioned, I though the manga ending was good enough, and that the changes made by the anime enhanced the ending quite a bit (a show ending being better than an book ending!?!??!?!?!?!??!). Now, to show these change’s impact, I will get into some of the changes with as few spoilers as possible (THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING, WHILE I AM VAGUE, AOT IS BEST EXPERIENCED BLIND).

            By far the most prevalent change is in one of the character’s final messages to one of his friends. In the manga, he revealed he had committed a massive atrocity very early in their conversation, only to be met with, at first shock and sadness, but then it sort of just faded into empathy, which is pretty strange considering the nature of the crime. In fact, I remember while reading the manga that the character receiving the message seems very apathetic when they really shouldn’t have been like that at all. There are also quite a few other times where the dialogue/narration in the manga just doesn’t feel right and almost like it is trying to say this crime was slightly reasonable (looking back this is even weirder than I realized as the show itself’s theme is generally against this point of view). The anime negates this issue by mentioning this bombshell MUCH later in the message and has the receiver get extremely angry with the sender until they realize that they were the one that sort of put the idea in the senders head, giving more context to the empathy of the manga. The anime also decides to focus a lot more on the sender’s personality and removes a lot of the more weird or confusing parts of the manga. It also fixes the tonal problems by shifting dialogue and honestly made me way more invested in some of the final interactions between characters than the manga got. Now, this blog post is getting pretty long so I will wrap it up with one final example: the closing scenes. The closing scenes are instrumental in the shows themes about the kill or be killed mentality and humanity’s tendencies towards violence. And I believe that the anime’s work a bit better then the manga’s as the anime’s closing scenes sort of accentuate the final scenes more than the manga’s do.

            All in all, I really love both the anime and the manga, and AoT will most likely go down as one of my favorites of all time.