Attack on Titan: 8 Psychology Lessons
In 2006, Hajime Isayama experienced a Eureka moment. That spark of genius caught on to television in 2013. Little did he know that it would blossom into one of the most acclaimed animes of the past 2 decades. One that packs more juice than a whole semester majoring in psychology.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking: “Am I in the wrong place?”
Isn’t this supposed to be a space for grownups? Where we talk about real-life problems of real-life people?
I say let’s ditch real life for a moment with all its mud walls and booby traps! Sometimes, the best thing to do with reality is to escape it.
Imagine a village in pre-industrial Europe. It’s a bright summer day: the sun is shining, the grasses are green, the rosebuds are flowering — the very picture of idyllic. Good, close-knit, hardworking people. Children playing in the streets, horses prancing around, women carrying food baskets leisurely gossiping about the new bachelor in town or whatever pre-industrial women gossip about. Nothing out of the ordinary.
And then out of nowhere, BOOM! Gigantic, zombie-like humanoid creatures of various forms come thrashing about, destroying homes, hungry for human flesh.
I’m not even a fan of anime. I watched Naruto Shippuden and caught some episodes of Jiujitsu Kaisen but that’s pretty much it for me. I never even saw the first 2 episodes of Attack on Titans. My sister had just started it and at some point, I was curious about the shouts of “Eren!” every two minutes. So, I took a brief look.
And then I sat down to watch a little more.
And then I got hooked.
The idea was original, the plot was riveting and the characters captivating. Much as I was tempted to, I couldn’t very well suspend everything else I needed to do to binge on the whole season. Nevertheless, it only took us 2 weeks to go through 4 seasons (I forbade my sister from watching it without me). It has its flaws but all in all, it was a brilliant series. Don’t take it from me; it has a score of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The mark of a good book or movie is that it stays with you after you’re done. I couldn’t help thinking about the characters and the plot and what might have been. I later came to realize that the map of the fictional world in the anime is our world turned upside down: a beautifully illustrated mirror of our journey through history. Reflecting deeply on its themes, I found a couple of lessons about psychology and human interaction. Some are stuff you may already know and some are rather profound.
Oh, and one more thing: spoiler alert! If what you’ve read so far has intrigued you, you’d better go see the series first.
1. Our group identities are walls.
They shield us but they also imprison us. Perhaps the biggest theme in the series is the walls. 3 concentric walls stratify the society of Paradis from the common folk on the outside to the government functionaries and royalty in the centre. For a hundred years, the people had lived in peace until the outermost wall (Maria) was breached and the Titans came pouring in. To the average villager, the walls were the saving grace against the extinction of humanity. Only people like Eren recognized it for the prison it was. The sacrifice for that ‘spirit of Liberty’ was to join the extremely dangerous Survey Corps, the only people who got to venture beyond the walls.
As pack animals, we have evolved to stick to our groups for survival — family, tribe, nationality and the places we grew up in. They can also be doctors’ associations, political parties, sports teams or even your small clique of debate comrades. There’s no denying the importance of groups. But you will only realize the limitations they impose when you try to transcend them. Psychologists have always been interested in group identity and what this does to us. One fallout of group mentality is that it’s easy to get carried away, to see the people in other groups as the enemy. It makes us suspend reasoning and view the world as black and white, with those in our circle being the good guys while those outside are the bad guys.
2. We’re slaves to the stories we’ve been told repeatedly.
People in Paradis had been told that their king had erected the walls to keep them safe from the Titans. For a hundred years, that story was taught in schools to kids and repeated in legends in beer parlors. The people had no choice but to keep the king ruling over them since he was the custodian of this story. It didn’t help that the king’s bloodline had the power to make people forget any alternative history. On the other side of the world, the same people were called Eldians, said to be descendants of the witch slave Ymir. The people here had been told that the descendants of Ymir were devils that did all manner of atrocities and would unleash unspeakable evil on the world were they not caged in by the walls. Now, the rulers on this side did not have the magical power to make people forget or cherry-pick their history but they didn’t need to, the story was strong enough to sustain that hate for generations. It was so effective that the Eldian minority bought into it wholesale, repudiating their bloodline and doing everything to be seen as different from their brethren in Paradis. They went to ridiculous lengths for this, living in concentration camps and having their children go through military training preparing them to go and wipe out their brethren inside the walls.
In the real world, this is exactly the way we are. From a young age, we are taught that the devil is black and angels are white, and this is the story we will tell our children. Think about the things you believe and hold as sacred. How many of them did you verify personally? Were they not just implanted into your psyche by the stories you’ve been told over and over again? Time and again through history, someone has pointed at a group and said: “your life is bad because of those people on the other side. You need to get rid of them for you to have peace and prosperity!” And we know how this has motivated people to do unspeakable things. Nazi Germany is the unfortunate example that most readily comes to mind, but it is happening all the time. Just before the US elections, the same scenario played out. As Chimamanda Adichie said in her famous TED talk,
“Stories matter…Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.”
3. People become the devils we make them out to be.
In psychology, we call this a self-fulfilling prophecy! After generations of suspicion, hatred, subjugation and castigation, everything the outside world feared about the people of Paradis eventually came to pass.
They were called devils. They had in their bloodline something that enabled them to turn into Titans — hideous monstrosities ranging from 3 meters to over 200 meters in height, whose only mission was to bring death and destruction. Well, having watched the first 2 seasons, everybody watching the anime knows that the people of Paradis are like everybody else. They are small town people happy with their simple life. Each of them has their individual strengths and weaknesses, their ambitions and motivations, but we know that they certainly don’t want to destroy the whole world. They don’t even know that they can turn into Titans. However, by several twists of fate, the Titans of Paradis went on to wipe off the whole world (almost).
I talked about the Pygmalion effect and self-fulfilling prophecies here. Just as positive expectations motivate people to be better, think the worst of a man and the devil inside him will shock you (and maybe even him). In many ways, we as humanity, create our own monsters.
Labeling goes hand in hand with storytelling. We label people with certain characteristics that are different from us and we run with a single story about them. And then an interesting psychological hack known as confirmation bias comes in. Once that story has taken root, your mind only zooms in on the evidence that confirms that bias, ignoring everything else. This is how stigma gets recycled. Again, it happens all the time. Black people in the American justice system, Muslims pre and post 9/11, modern day Israel-Gaza war. People with mental illness in particular. One way or another, you will get the worst out of people you already expect the worst from.
4. There are hardliners on every side.
In Marley, the continental superpower on an expansionist drive, the average citizen understands that the Eldians are devils but they are content to let them be, either within their concentration zones in Marley or trapped behind the walls on a remote island. But there were those who would see them defeated, dehumanized and destroyed, effectively eliminating the threat that they posed as people with a poorly understood power.
On the other side, when Paradis becomes aware of the outside world and their hatred of them, most people are happy to stay within their walls — live and let live. Not the Jaegerists though. Following the tragic hero Eren Jaegar in his mysterious suicidal fate, they believe that Paradis will never know peace until Eren wipes out the rest of the world. And they are prepared to give their lives for this cause.
Both sides have good reason. The other side has designs to exterminate them. What they can’t see is that they are the reason. It is only the hardliners on either side that want to wipe the other side off the face of the earth. In the real world, hardliners are on every side too. When you study conflicts in any part of the world, you tend to see these same patterns — Israel-Gaza, Russia-Ukraine, Nigeria-Biafra war. The holocaust.
There is a well-recognized defense mechanism known as projection. People tend to project their poorly understood impulses — fear, suspicion, aggression, etc. — onto others. And this gives them the excuse to well…suspend niceness. For instance, I see somebody and I instantly dislike the person. Now, I’m not sure why I dislike them but it’s definitely not fair to want to kill them because I don’t like them. To justify my aggressive instincts, I have to somehow make myself believe that they don’t like me; it’s more logical to be aggressive to them because who knows what they already want to do to me.
Another thing about hardliners: they are often in the minority. But they shout the loudest. They’re the boldest and appear the most self-assured. They become the face of the movement. Looking from outside into a group, it’s easy to see only the hardliners. It’s then easy to conclude that the group’s average view is the extreme view of the hardliners.
To be continued…
Ps: Have you seen the anime? Share your experience in the comments, let’s nerd out a bit.
