Actual Podcast 2 Finished

of the AoT presentation. We'll be discussing the different themes present in this manga, which evolved into a show now. And I'll just start off by asking Alexei, well, what he thinks about AoT for now. It's gotten me into anime, I can tell you that much. There are a lot of themes that relate to our class that we can discuss, such as discrimination, and then the cycle of violence, which is kind of sad if you ask me. A dystopian society, definitely. And multiple other little surprises that we can discuss. Yeah, for sure. So, I want to start off one by one. Let's go with the discrimination part, which I feel like is highlighted really in the beginning of the show, and you just see it evolve throughout AoT. So, one point I really want to bring up is that the evolution of discrimination. So, in the beginning, as funny as it may sound, the Titans are bad, right? In our eyes. And throughout the show, they start off with a very obvious discrimination for the Titans, right? So, I feel like they portrayed the Titans as something very unnatural. Us as human beings, it's very kind of irregular for us to see that our natural instinct is that anything that's unnatural, unlike us, we throw violence right at it, right? So, in this show, as the show goes on, we see that this hatred is actually not necessarily just to the Titans, but it starts to evolve onto the people themselves, right? So, the hatred towards the Titan in the beginning shows that this is a work of fiction to all the readers. And this suddenly shifts towards hatred toward humans. And this recontextualizes the show and brings the Watchers back to reality and how this is genuinely a real problem. So, if we abort the fact of discrimination real quick. So, there's definitely an evolution of discrimination throughout this story. And so, it starts off with, obviously, a hatred towards Titans, which are portrayed as bad, of course, during most of the show. So, the discrimination is portrayed towards the Titans. And it evolves into this hatred into just the people, which are the Eldians, that can turn into the Titans. To us, we found that this could be this type of signification to that. So, the hatred towards the Titans in the beginning shows that this is a work of fiction. And after that, the sudden shift towards the hatred towards humans, this recontextualizes the show and brings the Watchers back to reality, and how it is genuinely a real problem in our real world, which relates back to Alex's point on dystopian societies. So, to touch on the dystopian society point, which I'm sure everybody here is very familiar with since we spent the whole semester on it. We've got three walled cities in AOT. So, the first wall is called Maria, is the outermost wall of the kingdom. And basically, this wall protects the poor, the common man. And then there is the Rose Wall. This wall protects the upper class, we could say. And then there is the third wall, Shina, which is the innermost wall of the kingdom. It's protected primarily by one of the factions in the military, or the branches, I should say, the military police, and it is where royalty stays. So, this clear separation or divide of individuals shows already that there is a dystopian society at play, especially if everybody's walled in from the outside world because of the Titans, which I'm sure that our teammates have gracefully explained to you guys. Yep. So, back to the hate, right, that I feel like connects everything. There was hate brought up from a very young age into many characters. And it's a lot of brainwashing present in the show. And you could say, I wouldn't call it propaganda, but it's definitely along the lines of that. One of the characters I say is really obvious would be Gabi, which basically, she was a character which they made her kind of reject her own heritage and viewed her own people as devils, which is a crazy fact. This common theme of hate is really present in the show. As another character, we got Zeke, which he's one of the characters that turns into the beast type. He's a great example of how he was brought up to kind of hate the opposition, right? He hated the people from Marley, although he himself lived there. He was brought up there. Next, I'll pass it on to Alexei. So, I've actually got one more person that we could talk about with the hatred emotion, specifically making the whole basis of his character, Mr. Aaron Yeager. So, in the starting scenes of this, well, there's the manga, but then there's also a movie that resumes chapter one to three. And at the start of this movie, Aaron Yeager could be seen as a little boy with his adoptive, we could say, sister. It's not like his sister, but like very close to him, right? Are you talking about Mikasa? Yeah, Mikasa. Yeah. So, somebody very close to him. Well, his mother gets pinned under the roof of their house while the Titans are attacking. And her legs are crushed and Aaron and Mikasa try to lift the roof off of their mother, which obviously they can't because they're like seven. And within this moment, a soldier comes and rescues them and takes them away from their mother. And as Aaron Yeager is on the shoulder of the soldier, being walked away from his mother, it's under house, a Titan grabs the roof, takes it off, grabs his mother and eats her right in front of him. So, as any of you can imagine, this births a extreme hatred towards the Titans. He wants to kill every last one of them, which I will then pass on to Yasin. Yeah. So, we can see that here, like the hatred that is birthed from Aaron is mostly like, you could say, due to trauma, right? So, everybody has their own way of how they started to bring up, I guess, violence in a way, because now we're going to talk about the cycle of violence that I think is really present in this story. If we talk about, I want to talk about euthanasia, which is the practice of intentionally ending life to eliminate pain and suffering. Everybody in this show kind of has their own way of trying to end this cycle, but we don't know what is the right way. So, just if we transition to real life, in many cycles of violence present in society, what is the right way? Is it to use more violence? Is it through diplomacy? And we see this, we've seen many examples. So, Zeke, one of the characters I talked about as well, his plan was basically eugenics, you could say. So, by just simply erasing his own race, which is the Eldians, the people that could turn into Titans, by just using what we call the Founders Titan to basically end all his race's reproduction, Eldian reproduction, right? So, without them, I guess, just no more violence, but I don't think this would work. But anyway, we'll move on to Aaron. Aaron's point of view here is just absolute, I guess, eradication of the opposition, which is basically just genocide. With no competition, right, there would be no violence, but once again, it's not humane. And as well, like, we don't know, right, if it's going to cause more violence at the end. And if we just go quickly through now, Hange's intention is to show the true face of Eldians, right? So, she wants to use diplomacy, and to kind of show the rest of the world that, you know, these guys that are stuck on Piraeus Island, they're not devils, they're just people that live, you know? This cycle basically started when the first born Titan came to life, I guess. And the king basically used it to conquer other countries and tribes. And this started a beginning resentment towards the Titan. And people associated that to the Eldians, since they are the only ones that can transform into these Titans. One day, the king, all right, so just like we're going to skip forward a bit, the king basically decides to isolate himself from all the other tribes, right? And made the Piraeus Island with all the Titans, right? Isolated his people. Now, the Marleyans are power hungry, they want that power, because not all the Titans were isolated onto that island, it was just the founder's Titan that has all the power. So Marley, as much as they're scared of the Titans, they use them to create more fear and try to get more power. Although they were scared of the Titan themselves, right? Because of the domination in the past. So it's kind of like a cycle, right? So Eldia now wants to retaliate, and Marley's gonna just attack. And it really develops throughout the show in a much better way than I just explained it, but it would be a very long story. So is there, Alexi, do you think there's any good way of ending a cycle of violence? Or do you, I don't know, do you have any suggestions, I guess? The best way to end a cycle of violence in real life, I find, is diplomacy. But it is also the longest way, and the hardest way, for sure. Everything else just leads to more blood, more death, and more hate in the future. That's why we like to try to find peaceful situations. But if we fall back to genocide, then that just doesn't work. Yeah, of course. I mean, in a world like this, in a fictional world like this, we don't know how this would end. I don't want to spoil nothing. But anyway, it's just a very interesting, I feel like, moral concept present in this story. 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