Term · Attack on Titan
Titan
Naked giants with no digestive system, no reason to eat you, and an apparent determination to do it anyway.
In Otakana the clue reads: Giant humanoids beyond the walls
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Attack on Titan
- Letters
- 5 · Easy
Titans run from three to fifteen metres, walk with a vacant expression, and tear people apart without needing the calories. They have no reproductive organs and no obvious purpose. No injury kills them except a cut to one specific patch at the back of the neck, which is why the army fights them with grappling hooks and blades instead of the artillery any sane military would prefer.
The answer to that problem is vertical manoeuvring gear, gas canisters and steel wire that let a soldier fly at a titan's nape from above. The entire visual identity of the series comes out of that one design decision: humans swinging like insects around something enormous and slow. Wit Studio built the first season around it in 2013 and the sequences have aged very well.
What titans are, and where they came from, is the mystery the series is really about. The early seasons let you assume they are a natural disaster. They are not, and the shape of the real answer moves the show out of survival horror into something considerably worse. Three walls, Maria, Rose and Sina, held them off for a hundred years. The first chapter covers the day one of those walls stopped working.
Spelling TITAN
TITAN is five letters, English rather than Japanese, and the Japanese half is the interesting part. The original title uses kyojin, meaning giant, and the word titan appears nowhere in it. The English translators reached for the Greek one instead, and it stuck hard enough that TITAN is now what most of the world calls them, including a good many Japanese fans.