24. The Rumbling - Attack on Titan Season 4-2 OP
https://animethemes.moe/anime/shingeki_no_kyojin_the_final_season_part_2/OP-1080
23. Akuma no Ko - Attack on Titan Season 4-2 ED
https://animethemes.moe/anime/shingeki_no_kyojin_the_final_season_part_2/ED-1080
These are the two AoT themes I actually developed a strong memory/attachment to. They have really strong
identity
and a place in AoT's plot arc.
The Rumbling may not be the most pleasant to listen to, but it revives that feeling of horror and ugliness in the world that the epic fights and drastic widening of the world may have started to lose in earlier seasons. Its sound is kind of instantly iconic - a Chekov's nuke that winds up becoming the point of contention for this arc (and for the series as a whole, because if you allow Eren to pull that trigger then YIKES).
The ED is great. A gentle song that slowly builds with a coherent visual story: Young Eren walks out of the dark, sees the world and ruins, ages... and then finally disappear as he's reaching his goal.
Like many other anime I watched with my partner, I didn't watch all the OPs and EDs of each episode of AoT. I could usually persuade her to watch an OP once per sitting, but we could blow through many episodes in one sitting, and with only 12 or so episodes per song, any given theme would just not get that many reps. Ironically, it's her hatred of S4 that limited us to one episode per sitting, and thus had me watching this set many times.
I haven't kept up perfectly with my MAL and haven't seen that many series lately, but if I'm not mistaken, Attack on Titan is in my top three or so series I've seen in the last decade (with Romantic Killer and HxH as the other two).
I don't know that I have the strongest emotional connection with it, and it doesn't make me laugh the most, and I kind of dislike the characters, but the mystery/mythology/worldbuilding is... maybe best in any anime I've ever seen? (FSN actually might be the next best?) And while I'm not particularly emotionally invested in most of the main characters or anything, it does elicit very visceral reactions due to its unflinching depiction of violence. On top of that, the characters and world seem very intelligent, coming up with actual strategies going into battle and cooking up cunning schemes that really captivate my interest. It's perhaps gotten a little too dark for my taste (and it's annoying that the anime series kind of refuses to end??) but man it's been gripping for me.
World-wise, it's absolutely brilliant, starting humanity off inside of three walls, with a steampunk-y, medieval-esque tech setting. The series throws so many questions at you right away, and it just keeps raising more and more. Weird shit keeps happening -
Eren turning into a Titan, Annie being a Titan, two different-looking Titans appearing and disappearing after busting down the outside Wall...
through Season 1 and even Season 2, I didn't even really think AoT was going to have real/good answers to this stuff. In general, for most shows in which I'm not deeply invested, I've become a "just accept it" kind of viewer. Sometimes it just doesn't make sense, or the explanation sucks, but you're just there for the cool shit that goes down.
This attitude toward viewing
kind of
worked for my experience.
Right from episode 1 and throughout the first season and a half or so, until beating them becomes trivial, the Titans are straight-up horror movie villains. Yeah, you can kill them later once you learn the rules, but a single fuckup can still result in an extremely gruesome death. And we do see a lot of those fuckups early on. That was enough to make the beginning compelling, but actually evening the odds was needed for it to continue being interesting, and we saw how rapidly the human characters gathered intelligence, identified weaknesses, and sought out new strategies to combat enemies. They'd make inferences as I was making them (identifying Annie as the Female Titan) and have rationale that I hadn't even come up with beyond "foreshadowing/plot kinda indicates this might be true." Humans also wanted deeply to understand Eren's own power and what exactly made Titans tick.
Yet we kept being introduced to more and more mysteries, and even the answer to a single question -
say, the identity of the Colossal and Armored Titan, or Ymir's backstory
- and be left with a dozen more resulting from the explanation. Fortunately just enough cool stuff was happening to take my mind off it. even with a horrifically annoying set of protagonists (
when Eren died, I actually thought he was really dead and that Armin/Mikasa would be our joint protags. Was disappointed when Eren came back, but suffice it to say that at this point, he's no longer your typical shounen lead...
)
Then Season 3 hits, and the entire focus of the show... completely changes.
Even though the S2 finale was a last hurrah of basic Titans being terrifying enemies, we now quickly pivoted from the obvious external threats to humanity's government itself and killing people.
While it didn't result in us getting answers, it was different, and it was also fairly quick. For suckers like me who thought that
overthrowing the government
would last all season, they actually wrapped that beginning part fairly quickly with
the coup
. And from there, we finally started getting answers. Was fascinating seeing how
Grisha committed so many horrific actions
and how that led us to where we were. The first half of S3 also (to me) finally crystallized
how the Smart Titans actually functioned
, and I imagine that the frustration of the vagueness of these mysteries would be gone if I rewatched S1-2, which would improve my enjoyment of them!
The second half of S3 is action-packed, and its OP reflects that as well. (Love a good battle-arc OP -
@KommunistKoala
mentioned Kuroko no Basket S3's final OP, which did something similar, and there's another battle-arc OP coming up pretty soon.) And the battle payoffs are indeed incredible -
thunder spears, Eren absolutely demolishing Reiner in their rematch, the fall of the Colossal Titan, the charge and Levi versus Zeke
- but what may be even more important is the aftermath of those battles,
when we FINALLY get to see what's in Grisha's basement and essentially have the core mysteries of the series answered.
It's almost unbelievable how successfully AoT fits it all together and manages to unveil each segment of the mystery in such a compelling way, all while maintaining near-perfect control of the tone of the series
(horror to war to battle shounen to politics to mystery)
and having characters who are smart enough to solve mysteries, with plot-based limits on their perception that get eventually knocked down as they push past them.