Check out this week’s Manga Madness: a look at Attack On Titan!
Check out this guest article from Jamey Nunley about Attack On Titan!
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Have you heard the latest episode of the JustUs Geeks Podcast yet?
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Welcome to Manga Madness. As a geek I’m constantly reading/watching manga and anime. I mostly read Shounen manga (young to teen male) due to it being the most prominent. However, I do stumble across a good Seinen (adult male) and Shoujo manga (young to teen female) occasionally. I believe there is a manga or anime for everyone. This series is to spread the madness.
Attack on Titan, or Shingeki no Kyojin, is a fantastic anime! I’ve only recently started watching, and from the first episode I was hooked! This anime is about survival. No one is safe and seemingly important characters die at the most unpredictable times. The story goes from 0 to over 9000 at a point blank range making this instantly one of my favorites. Every site I’ve seen says it’s a Shounen, but this dark story feels more like a Seinen. If you are a fan of The Walking Dead comic you may like this manga.
The setting takes place on a world where most humans have been eaten by giants called titans. With the largest class of titan being 15 meters tall, only one place is safe—a territory that is surrounded by a three layers of 50 meter high walls. The layer contains peasants, the middle wall belongs to the rich, and the inner most wall is for the king and his men.
The titans look like huge naked humans with no reproductive organs that appeared nearly a century ago. They have the ability to regenerate any body parts lost, even their head, and show no signs of intelligence. One of the biggest catches about these giant monsters is that they don’t need sustenance. A titan only eats people out of what seems to be pleasure. However, a small spot in the back of their neck is their only weak spot. If a chunk deep enough is cut out of this area a titan will die without regenerating. No one knows their origin or how to kill one efficiently.
The soldiers that train to battle these monsters have been trying to learn how to efficiently kill a titan and have made no progress past cutting that one spot. Guns exist in this universe but are rarely used as that a gun has no effect on the adversary at hand. Rather, these warriors are armed with swords and a steam punk-ish harness that shoots wires. This allow them to move like Spiderman, making for some amazing fight scenes.
For the first time since the titans arrived, a special titan that appears to have no skin shows up. A lightning strikes outside of the wall and instantly the titan is there, but this titan is tall enough to see over the top of the wall! He only sticks around long enough to kick a hole in the wall then vanishes. Unfortunately, this causes the normal titans to flood into the first layer of the city, devouring anyone they can find with the greediest of smiles. One fifth the remaining population was consumed that day with the few survivors that escaped to the second layer were traumatized. One of the children that survived, the main character that watched his mother killed then eaten, has chosen to join the military to take revenge and one day live outside the restrictions of the walls.
If You’re a Fan Try:
Berserk
This manga/anime is an adult manga full of gore, violence, graphic images and (non-porn) nudity. This fantasy world is filled with demons that is set in a medieval time with knights in full armor defending their king’s castle. Gutts is young orphan that was raised by a mercenary’s woman after being found recently born under his dead mother’s body that was hanging from a tree. The teenager, now a mercenary himself, has proven himself a strong warrior and has joined the mercenary group “hawks,” becoming best friends with the leader, Griffith. Griffith is seeking to become a Demon God and offers all his soldiers, including Gutts, as tribute to do so. Gutts and the woman he loves (now insane) are the only to escape alive. This begins Gutts’s lust for revenge. This a manga that you’ll want to read if you like a very dark story line filled with demons, cults, and the main character slowly giving up his humanity for the sake of revenge.
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