thasero
6mo ago
You're not supposed to actually seal your mouth - you put just enough tape on that it's annoying or difficult to open your mouth while awake, so that while asleep you won't mouth-breathe by reflex. If you (say) roll over and your mouth would otherwise fall open, the tape keeps your mouth closed or compels you to roll back over and keep breathing through the nose - but if an assassination squad of tiny spiders tried to kamikaze up your nose to suffocate you, you could still snap awake, force open your mouth, and take the tape off.
Attack on Titan got popular for two big reasons:
Once it was popular, it hit the problems intrinsic in a long-running series that has both a high death count and a horrifying, faceless threat: If you keep killing off named characters, you run out of characters important to the plot. If the threat is a mindless horror that refuses to negotiate, you can't have a good villain monologue. On top of that, you have to escalate somehow, i.e. make a Titan that's even worse than the ones that came before. Say, maybe it's a super-special Titan that could ruin everything, but this one is also a guy who used to be Eren's friend - treachery! Unless Eren can talk him out of it...? Now you have a villain monologue, you're getting as much mileage as possible out of a newly-important character, and the situation for Our Hero is both worse than, and interestingly different from, the last 13 times he fought a big monster in this week's episode of Big Monster Fighting Team.
So it eventually got bogged down in this kind of nonsense, obviously because the author was a victim of his own success and didn't expect to still be writing the thing years later (IIRC, he's admitted as much). The Wikipedia summary cuts out the parts that made it successful in the first place, so if you just look at the summary of each character's biggest plot beat, it's a mystery why anyone would have ever liked it.
More options
Context Copy link