Attack on Titan Is a Propaganda Textbook, and Nobody Warned Us
Anime, brainwashed children, and why the scariest lies feel like common sense.
I was watching Attack on Titan, casually, minding my business, when I realised I was getting a better education in how propaganda actually works than I ever got from school, the news, or anything with “political science” in the title.
Which is strange, because on paper it’s a show about giant naked people eating humans.
Underneath that, Hajime Isayama spent a decade building one of the most precise and uncomfortable portraits of how information gets weaponised, and how ordinary, decent people end up as instruments of systems they never chose.
Let me walk you through it.
Nobody in AoT is free
This is the thing the show takes its time revealing, and once it lands, it recontextualises everything you thought you understood in the earlier seasons.
The people of Paradis were told the walls were the whole world. They lived entire lives not knowing that beyond them sat oceans, nations, and a civilisation that had spent decades hating them for their bloodline. Their ignorance wasn’t an accident. It was maintained. A king used the Founding Titan’s power to erase memory, keep people compliant, and make organised resistance impossible before it could form.
That’s one side.
On the other side, Marley, the empire that runs the world outside, has spent generations teaching its population that Eldians are “devil blood.” Not enemies. Not threats. Sub-human. Biological poison to be managed, weaponised, or destroyed.
Every child in Marley grows up inside that. It’s in the schooling, the culture, the language. By the time they’re old enough to hold a weapon, the hatred feels like oxygen: invisible, natural, unquestioned.
Neither side chose its worldview. Both are trapped inside one.
That’s where AoT actually begins. Not with titans. With information control.
Gabi Braun is the most important character in the show
Gabi arrives in Season 4 as the most infuriating person on screen. Aggressive, self-righteous, and responsible for something that makes a large chunk of the audience hate her on sight.
But she isn’t a villain. She’s a case study.
She was born Eldian inside Marley, which means she grew up inside a group her own society told her was dangerous and shameful. The only exit, the only route to mattering, was to become a Warrior. Serve loyally. Prove she was nothing like the island devils.
She didn’t pick that framework. She was installed into it at birth. By the time we meet her she isn’t reciting propaganda, she believes it, the way you believe the sky is blue, the way you believe your mother loves you. It’s foundational.
Then she ends up on Paradis. And she meets Eldians. Farmers, soldiers, kids. Scared, complicated, ordinary people. Not devils.
Her worldview doesn’t collapse on impact. It resists, because a mind protects its own foundations. But it cracks, then crumbles, and eventually she can’t hold the original story together anymore.
That’s the one thing propaganda cannot survive: sustained, direct contact with the people it has dehumanised. You can’t maintain the devil narrative while eating dinner with someone’s grandmother.
Which is exactly why systems built on dehumanisation work so hard to prevent that contact. Separation isn’t just cruelty. It’s maintenance.
Eren Yeager didn’t become a villain. He became a product.
This is the harder argument, because Eren ends up doing something genuinely monstrous. The Rumbling flattens most of the world outside Paradis and kills hundreds of millions of people who had nothing to do with any of it.
So how do you argue he isn’t a villain?
You don’t, exactly. You argue that he’s understandable, which is more disturbing than if he were simply evil.
Trace the path.
He watches his mother get eaten when he is a child. Not as an abstraction. He is held back, he cannot act, and he watches. That’s the founding trauma of his entire existence.
He spends years fighting inside the walls believing titans are the final enemy. Then he reaches the basement and learns the truth: there’s a whole world out there, Eldians have been hunted for generations, and every nation on earth broadly agrees his people should not exist.
He tries something like diplomacy. He watches it fail. He watches Marley prepare another assault. He watches the Survey Corps debate while the clock runs down.
And he concludes, with logic that is internally consistent even when it’s externally horrifying, that half-measures will never hold. That the only way to end the cycle is an act so total that no nation will ever again have the will or the numbers to threaten Paradis.
Tactically, he might not be wrong. Ethically, he is catastrophically wrong.
Here’s the part that matters though: Eren is a propaganda product too. He grew up in a society that told him titans were the enemy and violence was the only legitimate answer to threat. Nobody taught him negotiation, or coexistence, or that the people beyond the walls were as human as he was. He inherited a warrior ideology, had it confirmed by real suffering, then had it amplified a hundredfold by the scale of the oppression he uncovered.
He isn’t evil the way a cackling villain is evil. He’s a traumatised person with unlimited power, shaped by systems he never thought to question, who became precisely the kind of monster he swore to destroy.
The show asks a question here and refuses to answer it: does having a reason make the unforgivable forgivable?
The silence is the point.
What the show teaches that the news doesn’t
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Every technique Isayama uses has a real-world twin. Not vaguely or metaphorically. Documented, historical, this-actually-happened.
Dehumanisation. The language of “devil blood” is the documented precursor to every major atrocity of the modern era. In Rwanda in 1994, Tutsis were called inyenzi, cockroaches, on state radio for months before the killing started. Roughly 800,000 people died in a hundred days, largely at the hands of neighbours. The language came first. It always does. You cannot commit mass violence against people you still recognise as fully human, so you change the words until they aren’t.
Historical revision. The Tybur family’s manufactured hero myth has an obvious cousin in the Soviet Union, which airbrushed purged officials out of photographs so thoroughly that men who had stood at the centre of power simply stopped existing in the record. Japan’s postwar textbooks spent decades minimising the Nanjing Massacre. Colonial powers everywhere rewrote the histories of the people they conquered and filed invasion under “civilising mission.” Whoever controls the past controls the present, and AoT understood that.
Manufactured consent. Zeke’s spinal fluid in the wine has a real architect: Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, who effectively invented modern public relations in the 1920s. He ran a campaign for the American Tobacco Company to get women smoking by tying cigarettes to women’s liberation and calling them “torches of freedom.” He took a real social movement and used it as a delivery mechanism for a product. People consumed something harmful without ever understanding what they were swallowing. Zeke would have respected the craft.
Fear as fuel. The oldest tool in the box. McCarthyism generated a terror of communist infiltration potent enough that thousands lost careers and families on accusation alone, no evidence required. After 9/11, the threat of terrorism underwrote two wars, mass surveillance, and a steady erosion of civil liberties, with limited public resistance, because fear at that volume makes clear thinking almost impossible.
The pattern never changes. Name a threat, amplify it until it’s all anyone can see, then do whatever you want in its name.
The deepest thing AoT says
It isn’t about Eren. It isn’t even about Paradis or Marley.
The deepest thing the show says is that propaganda works best on people who are certain they’re immune to it.
Gabi was certain she was right. The Survey Corps was certain they were the good guys. Willy Tybur told the truth about his own family’s lie and used that truth to start a war. Every single person in this story is operating inside a frame they didn’t build and can’t fully see.
That isn’t a fictional problem.
The question the show leaves you holding, long after the credits, is simple and unpleasant: what frame are you inside right now, and who built it?
There’s no comfortable answer. There’s only the discipline of asking.
Which might be the best thing fiction can do. Not hand you answers, but hand you better questions than the ones you walked in with.
Written after finishing AoT Season 4 and falling into a conversation that went far deeper than expected.