Mugen Monday - Fourteenth Edition

The world of Anime traverses through an enigmatic journey, in some sense. While some series are rebooted, some are remade - although such a thing has not happened in a great while.

Talking about this sure takes me back to the good old 2000s, especially in regards to Fullmetal Alchemist.

For the uninitiated, Fullmetal Alchemist Anime had somehow overturned the Manga and was left with no more immediate chapters to adapt, given that both were being developed simultaneously.

The producers dared to take a route no modern Anime takes in the current era - to continue with the Anime story separately and independently of whatever story the coming Manga chapters may have told.

What happened? not much - the Anime still came out as a noblesse masterpiece. We as humans do tend to judge things on a relative basis, however. And when Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood came out later on, people finally said “Oh I see, so this is what the true FMA was truly about”.

Don’t get me wrong, Full Metal Alchemist Anime was amazing. FMAB came out much later and was a faithful adaptation of a manga that had concluded.

The Manga and the original story it told was so divine that it happened to outcast Full Metal Alchemist - the anime that had strayed to its own path away from the spotlight. Today both the series remain popularly positively regarded and evaluated, although Brotherhood (FMAB) is critically acclaimed higher than FMA.

This topic finds relevance in Anime fans who were hoping Attack on Titan Anime would take a drastically different route from the Manga, doing something similar to what FMA had done long back. Yet no such thing happened. There could be multiple interpretations of the reasons as to why this happened, but few do stand out -

a. The Attack on Titan Manga had already finished, unlike the FMA Manga back when the Anime was first adopted.

b. Such a drastic step is not commonly acceptable nowadays in the industry. Producers are way too scared of the insanely huge Manga base, which has now merged with Anime fandom - even slight changes may incur heavy reactions from the fans which may not work on giving the producers the green papers.

c. As it happens Japan is facing a huge shortage of animators, putting the available ones into heavy overloads of work day in and day out. Given such disparity of work environment towards prioritising profit, it seems the heavy tendons and obstacle of creative imagining and thinking up a whole new plot line for an anime, straying from the source manga, is quite a daunting thing to even imagine. Also, here are top 5 places in Japan you should visit.

All these lead us to the Attack on Titan Anime ending, which did not stray much, if at all, from the ending bestowed upon us by Hajime Isayama in his Manga.

There’s much more to be said about Attack on Titan, however. Such as why no other Anime may make it as big while retaining a similar level of complexity and quality to its work as Attack on Titan ever again - and this will be elaborated by our writer Mayukh down below.

This may interest you: Top 5 Anime to watch after you’ve finished Attack on Titan

One may notice that when Anime is caught by the masses, they are usually simple shonens. Nothing was simple about Attack on Titan, with its deep thematic core and highly philosophical notions - yet masses upon masses of fans loved it.

Take for example Monster - one of the most critical Anime ever made by the same author as the recent Pluto. Sure, there are quite many Monster fans, but these fans are quite limited in number. These are often elite few with very refined taste.

For an Anime to be as complex as Monster and be as popular as Demon Slayer - only Attack on Titan had done it perhaps a decade after Fullmetal Alchemist.

Given such, it may not be wrong to say some Anime truly are once in a decade's worth of creation. Do you know what else is worth in a decade? This newsletter.

Also check out Which Attack on Titan ending was better: Anime vs. Manga?

- From the Editor’s Desk

Rhytham Das, Editor-in-Chief, Spiel Anime