Source 1 (Social Media)

Alden, P. (2017). Is it true that the author of attack on Titan is a Nazi

sympathizer and pro-japanese-imperialism? Quora. Published May 29,
2018, from
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-author-of-Attack-on-Tit
an-is-a-Nazi-sympathizer-and-pro-Japanese-imperialism

The source is an answer from Paul Alden on a quora post, the question
that someone asked was essential “Is Isayama a Nazi sympathizer and
pro-japanese-imperialism?” and the answer Alden gave was that yes he
is, sourcing that on top of the nazi subtext and the fact that the author
admitted to creating a main war general in the story after a historical
Japanese war general who committed many atrocities and war crimes on
neighboring Asian countries besides all that the “good guys” in the show
are Germanic coded characters that possessed an extremely powerful
ability that only those of the pure bloodline (only those who are a
“Subject of Ymir”) could possess, but the power was feared and abused,
and the subjects of Ymir were taken over, forced to wear armbands, and
essential oppressed for many years to come by a group who, the author
says, is an African coded (although I would correct the author and say
they are Middle Eastern coded more specifically, even to go as far as to
say they are Jewish coded). The point the author is making is that the
whole thing resembles this rhetoric of “what if the poor Nazis had been
the ones who were oppressed by the Africans?” this is the only source I
have found that takes it from that perspective, and if I were conducting
research I would find it valuable to include many interpretations of the
themes of the show.

I can not remember the word, but I came across a word that the author
identified his story as, and the word essentially meant a story that
doesn't have clear moral messages which I think is what makes this
analysis so interesting, there are so many facets and details that can
create infinite moral interpretations, which is why I think this show is so
fascinating to me, and why it is a global sensation.

Source 2 (Website)

Amin, S. (2022, April 18). Why "attack on Titan" is the alt-right's

favorite manga. The New Republic. Published November 16 2021,
from
https://newrepublic.com/article/160193/attack-titan-alt-rights-fav
orite-manga

This is truly one of my favorite sources, the author doesn't add in too
much of his own opinion or interpretations, he simply presents how it is
being interpreted by many alt-right, neo nazi groups. I love this, because
at the end of the day when making a research paper about whether or not
a piece of art is dangerous or healing, it is less about the intention of the
artist and more about how the art is being interpreted and how that
interpretation is being used. I would use the quotes taken from neo nazi
and alt-right spaces to show how it is being interpreted by some.
Source 3 (Journal Article)

Metraux, D. A. (2017). Japan’s historical myopia. Japanese War Crimes,

301–314. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203788059-18

The specifics that I would pull from this source that none of my other
sources have, is the list of influential Japanese elites who are
self-proclaimed revisionists, the examples of the revisionist work in the
media, and the author explains why it matters in a distinct and
captivating way. They also have some critically important details about
the comfort women issue, I have read so much about the comfort women
issue in this research but this article includes details i had not heard that
show the severity of it while also pointing to the fact that many of his
Japanese students do not know anything about the atrocities committed
by the country in the past. I will use this to show what it even means to
rewrite history and to point out some of the potential dangers. Also the
erasing of the memory of the brutal and oppressive history of an entire
group of people happens in Attack on Titan and could be compared to the
erasing of Japanese historical atrocities.

Source 4 (book)

Alan Tansman. (2009). The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism. University of

California Press.

Again I haven’t read the book so I can not really say exactly what I will
take from it for my research, but from the abstract, I have an idea of
what it would supplement for me in my research. Japan wasn't just a
normal country that woke up one day and suddenly decided to join Adolf
Hitler in his pursuit to create an ethnically pure race. I had the feeling
that they had to have been flirting with fascism before the war. This book
is about how Japanese culture embraced ‘fascist aesthetics’ in novels,
essays, popular songs, films, and political writings. The author traces the
flirting with fascism that Japan did from 1920 up until the war, and I just
know that would be relevant for my research and would probably
connect in 100 ways to the themes of attack on titan. It would also just
deepen my personal understanding of how a country properly
brainwashes its people using media, I just think it would be a very
valuable book in the context of this project and even in seeing how our
(the US) flirt with fascism in the same time period (the 20s and 30s)
(referring to eugenics) and seeing what went differently in the parallel
evolutions that had us not side with Germany in the war.

Source 5 (Website)

Motamayor, R. (2021, January 17). The true themes of 'Attack on Titan'

are finally coming into focus. Observer. Retrieved April 27, 2022, from
https://observer.com/2021/01/attack-on-titan-fascism/

I could sit here for the rest of the week and show you websites pointing
to how bad and dangerous this show is because of the not always so
subtle context and I am so sure I could write a very compelling research
paper at this point about why the history of Japan and the modern and
historical culture of Japan and the complex relationship with
ultra-nationalism, ultra militarism, and fascism creates the context for
this show and connect the dots so that all signs point to the show being
extremely dangerous. But I think it is important to acknowledge the
other side of things, which this article shows. The perspective that this
article shows me that none of my previous sources have shown is that
yes, it has fascist and historically accurate themes, but the message that
the author is showing is that both Marleyans and Paradis islanders
(which are synonymous with China and Japan) are two sides of the same
coin, two people hating and oppressing each other without actually
knowing each other. The Reiner and Eren dynamic, according to the
article, is to show that neither side is right and both sides are good
people who are fueled to kill each other by blind bigotry, propaganda fed
to them by their governments, and the redundancy of punishing each
other for a historical war so ancient and rewritten and retold so many
times that it is hardly a reason to suppress and murder each other
anymore. I would use this in my research to show other interpretations
of the show, even though ultimately I do think the show has lots of
alarming and dangerous themes. Also, something that I realized from
reading this article (not really because the article talks about it, but it did
inspire the thought in me) is of course it has fascist themes, it is a
Japanese piece of work and Japan has a really complicated relationship,
between flirting with and being fully engaged with, very fascist
ideologies and media always reflects the ideologies and themes of a
given culture. The real question shouldn’t be does it have fascist themes,
but does it encourage the people who consume it to expand their
thinking away from the fear and hate-based fascist ideologies that they
are saturated in in the culture of Japan, and honestly the culture of the
whole world or does it reinforce the fear and hate-based beliefs.

Source 6 (Scholar Article)

Cabrera, N. (n.d.). Japanese Nationalism in Manga .

https://scholarexchange.furman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1846&
amp;context=furmanengaged. Retrieved April 27, 2022, from
https://scholarexchange.furman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1846&
amp;context=furmanengaged

I like this source, it doesn't have enough information as stated in my

evaluation but it offers good support for my argument. if i were really
writing a research paper, this would be a great resource. It talks about
another very popular but less known outside of Japan manga,
ShinGomanizumu Sengen. (I did my infographic over these manga
volumes). It really reinforces my view of the issue, and captures the
essence of my research. The point i would take away from it that no other
source offer, besides the fact that only this source talks about this
manga, is the claim that after being occupied by the Allied Forces, Japan
was requested to change their constitution and introduce history
textbooks that pushed for democratization, ( i haven't seen that yet!)
while Japan was pushing to whitewash their “masochistic” historical
past. It also supports my claim that manga is an influential part of
Japnese culture.

Source 7 (a video)
Shingeki No Kyojin Opening 1 [With Lyrics]. (2015). Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgBUP8TJqV8.

I was searching through the hundreds of articles about attack on titan,

trying to find one that said something unique or something that struck
me as something I hadn’t considered. I was reading a source that was not
super relevant, but as a connected link they had the attack on titan
theme song from season one. Now, I love that song, I listen to it literally
all the time, have I already considered the suspiciousness that the song is
half in German and half in Japanese? Sure, I think it is icing on the cake
to the argument that the Eldians are German coded and possibly Nazi
coded characters. I also frequently listen to the English version of the
song, which they translated and rewrote a little bit to make the song
make sense in English. I know all the words, and that never tripped my
meter. But this was not either of those, this was the Japanese version of
the song, but with the true Japanese translation playing on the bottom. I
have watched the lyrics several times now and it is still giving me chills. I
would use this as a resource in my research because this is not
someone’s opinion about if the show is portraying fascist, ultra
militarist, ultra-nationalist themes, this is the lyrics that you listen to
over and over while watching the protagonists very valiantly fight for
their country. And in the context of everything that I know about
Japanese history and culture up until this point, the true lyrics reveal to
me the intentions of the show, to glamourize and boost the rhetoric that
Japan is the victim of history and that we (we being the Japanese
population, specifically the male youth, who this show is targeted at)
have to be prepared to die and have as many die as it takes to reclaim the
power that was stolen and stripped from Japan. I won’t go into a detailed
lyric analysis, but if I were to do a paper on this I would definitely pull
lines from this song and show how they could correlate to the rhetoric
that historical revisionists in Japan push.

I was looking through the comments on the video and someone wrote
“This song makes me wanna sacrifice my life and cry at the same time”
while probably a joke, this is very relatable to me and everyone I know
who watches the show even without understanding the words to the
song. I just thought that was supporting evidence to the powerful
indoctrinating powers of this song and ultimately this show.

Source 8

Xu, C. (2018). Nationalism, Necessary and Sufficient for Genocide? A

Counterfactual Account through a Comparative Case Study of Nazi
Germany, Shōwa Japan, and Fascist Italy. Genocide Studies
International, 12(2), 234–252.

This was such a fun source. It would have been more fun if it was written
with a little more life and color but the content once you weed through
the academic jargon was very helpful to my hypothetical research
project. The article basically looks at what is needed for genocide to
occur (in case you havent picked up, the main character in AOT commits
mass genocide with the intention to kill every man. woman, and child
who is not of his homeland) and it goes into how nationalism by itself is
not enough to create the conditions for genocide and goes into the
specifics of what is needed to have the right conditions for genocide
which i would use to compare to the show because the conditions in the
show are exactly ripe for genocide. I would use this to talk about modern
Japan and their modern flirting with fascism, and you could even use this
source to see how America is gently flirting with fascism in many ways.

Source 9

Yoshiaki Yoshimi. (2015). Grassroots Fascism : The War Experience of

the Japanese People. Columbia University Press

This was a book, so i did not read the whole thing but i read the
introduction and if i were really doing a research project this would be
critical to read to fully understand the situation. I was expecting this
project to just be all about Attack on Titan but what I have discovered
this semester is to understand Attack on Titan you have to understnad
the history of japan and most notably, the Asian Pacific War. So much of
the story is linked to this war, and the rest of the content for AOT is
linked to WW2, and this book goes deeply into the mindset, culture and
just the real storied from the times of those wars. I think it would make
Attack on Titan makw so much more sense to read and fully understand
the mindsets of the people when their military was acting out of
imperialism and fear, the way that it is important to understand what
Hange and Armin think when the Jagerists were on their rampage to
destroy the whole earth.

Source 10

Sigley, A. (2022). Next It’s Japan’s Turn: Nation and Otaku Masculinity in
My Hero Academia. Mechademia: Second Arc, 14(2), 1–23.
This was also such a fun one. My Hero Academia is one of the biggest
animes in the game right now (although not quite bigger than AOT) and
this person is analyzing the masculinity, militaristic and nationalistic
themes that are right under the surface in this show. I would use this
article to prove that again, this is not just an Attack on Titan exclusive
thing, this is a cultural thing that goes deeper and wider than very many
people are realizing, i believe.