As the opening theme began, Nao’s expression changed.

In Rei’s previous life, the first season of Attack on Titan had been considered top-tier animation when it aired. Looking back years later, the image quality showed its age. But music was different. Good music never dated.

The number of exceptional tracks produced for the Attack on Titan anime was more than anyone could count on two hands.

Guren no Yumiya in this Japan version had been adapted with lyrics that stayed close to the original intent. Paired with the opening sequence’s visual quality, the combination hit hard.

Watching the boy on screen with a device strapped to his waist, firing two grappling cables and then weaving through the city and the gaps between a Titan’s palms with blades drawn, Nao stood up from the sofa without deciding to.

Is this what this work is.

She had come in expecting Shirogane-sensei’s production standard, so the visual quality did not surprise her.

The Attack on Titan animation was impressive, but it was not a groundbreaking leap beyond Demon Slayer. What was different was the storyboarding and visual expressiveness. Your eyes were captured immediately and completely.

’How many nights had the production team worked themselves through to produce this in just over half a year.’

The theme song reached its climax and ended. The plot began.

The opening spent considerable time on atmosphere and world-building. In this world, alongside humans, existed a species called Titans that preyed on them. Human territory had continuously contracted until what remained was enclosed by three enormous walls, each dozens of metres high, keeping the Titans out. The surviving humans lived behind these walls.

Nao had read the official world-building materials on the website before tonight. The anime’s presentation was considerably more detailed.

Then a series of cryptic shots appeared briefly.

Someone who had watched Attack on Titan to completion would understand why the protagonist Eren woke up startled under a tree at the start of the first episode, crying. They would understand why the episode was titled To You, 2000 Years From Now. Rewatching the first episode after finishing the series would reveal the extraordinary amount of foreshadowing embedded in it.

Nao had no idea what any of these images meant.

But she understood that a production at Shirogane-sensei’s level did not include shots without purpose.

The suspense is being established from the first episode.

The world-building introduction gave way to the protagonist and the town’s minor characters. Eren and Mikasa were not biological siblings but lived in the same household. Then the two of them carrying firewood home, encountering Uncle Hannes, a family acquaintance in the Garrison Regiment.

Eren, unable to tolerate soldiers whose job was protecting the walls spending the afternoon drinking, argued with several of Hannes’s colleagues.

"How can you behave like this? What if a battle happens?"

"When would a battle happen?"

"When they break through the wall and come in."

"That hasn’t happened once in a hundred years."

Faced with their mockery, Eren grew furious and powerless. He could only resolve that when he was old enough he would join the Survey Corps and go outside the walls to fight Titans himself.

Nao’s brow furrowed.

The information density of the first episode was high. Titans, walls, the Garrison Regiment, the Survey Corps, numerous characters introduced in quick succession. But the world-building was genuinely compelling.

And the protagonist’s dialogue had just set a flag.

He tells the soldiers to be prepared for danger in peacetime. They mock him and say the Titans haven’t broken through in a hundred years.

In any anime, once that flag goes up, the Titans are probably breaking through very soon.

While Nao was still wondering what the Survey Corps actually was in the story, the screen showed her.

A column of people returning through the gate. Nearly everyone injured. Several missing limbs. The crowd along the road mocked them. Then an elderly mother found the Corps Commander and asked where her son was.

The Commander handed her a bloody severed arm.

Nao’s mood, which had been cautiously light, went heavy immediately.

The mother asked the Commander with a despairing expression, as though she were about to cry.

"My son achieved something, didn’t he? He at least helped humanity’s counterattack in some way."

Her son was dead. She only wanted to know his death had meant something, even something small, even just some piece of information that might help the next person survive.

The Commander lowered his head.

"This time, the Survey Corps also... achieved no results. We still have not uncovered the true nature of the Titans."

Nao’s mouth hung open.

A weight settled in her chest.

When most anime depicted sacrifice, it was a number or a bloody scene with no substance behind it. But here, when the mother asked what her son’s death had meant, the weight of him came through completely. He had a family. A mother who couldn’t accept his loss easily. And his death had meant nothing. He had simply become food. He didn’t even have a name in the episode.

This was the Survey Corps that Eren wanted to join.

The freest people in the world, because they were the ones who went outside the walls instead of waiting inside them, charging toward the Titans for humanity’s future.

Freedom had a price. The first ten minutes of Attack on Titan had just told every anime fan watching exactly what that price was.

The plot moved forward. Eren’s ambition was exposed, met with his mother’s distress and obstruction. His father, by contrast, quietly approved, and reached into his shirt and removed a key on a cord.

"When I get back from this trip, I’ll take you to see the basement."

A basement.

Sealed all this time.

’What was in there?’

The father was going on a trip and asking his son to wait for his return.

Nao recognised this immediately as the second flag.

People who say things like that generally do not come back.

The plot moved forward and the third major character appeared. Armin. Eren and Mikasa chased off the bullies who had been picking on him, and the three of them stood in the town square looking at the wall in the evening light, talking about what they wanted.

This blond boy had a dream: he wanted to see the outside world. Both he and Eren had been captivated by descriptions of it in books. Forests. Deserts. The end of the world. And there, an endless expanse of water called the sea.

Their conversation turned to the wall.

"A wall that will absolutely never break. I also think the people who believe they are forever safe inside it are a bit off."

"Who says it hasn’t broken in a hundred years."

"There’s no guarantee it won’t break today."

Third flag.

Nao’s attention was completely inside the anime now.

And the anime responded to her premonition immediately.

A golden light appeared in the sky above the wall. Then a massive head rose above it, blood-red, taller than the dozens-of-metres-high wall itself, resting a hand on the top and peering down at the people below.

The BGM hit.

One kick. The Colossal Titan kicked through the wall.

Titans of the fifteen-metre and seven-metre class walked in through the breach one by one.

Then came the scenes of humans being consumed, and Nao felt physically uncomfortable watching them. Like poultry in a slaughterhouse that cannot resist. Humans facing these creatures were just as pitifully helpless.

When the Titan broke the gate, debris fell on Eren’s house. A beam came down and pinned his mother’s legs. Eren and Mikasa together could not lift it.

A Titan began walking toward them.

This is the first episode, Nao thought, her eyes wide. Shirogane-sensei, what are you doing.

Her heart was racing. The BGM and the approaching footsteps were producing a physical sense of suffocation.

Please. Let Eren save his mother.

Carla told the two children to run and not worry about her.

Then Uncle Hannes arrived in his ODM Gear.

"Hannes, take the children and run," Carla said.

"Don’t look down on me, Carla." For one instant, determination crossed his face. "I’m going to kill the Titan and save all three of you."

Nao felt something was wrong immediately.

How are you going to fight a ten-metre Titan alone. Call your teammates first. Don’t throw your life away.

In the animation, Hannes drew his dual blades and moved toward the smiling female Titan. One thought in his head: repay the debt to Carla and her husband who had saved his life years ago.

He ran to a point not far from it.

He saw the Titan’s massive body. The cruel, instinctive grin.

The determination left his face at once. The passion, the anger, the conviction: all of it went out like fire doused with water in winter. What remained was the human body’s most basic instruction.

The anime used no narration. No internal monologue. Just the change in his expression, and then the camera moving from his front to his back, showing the contrast between one middle-aged man’s body and the vast flesh of the Titan before him.

Despair did not stay inside the anime. It came through the screen.

Hannes simply turned around. Ran back. Came to Carla’s side, looked at her once, and picked up her children.

He fled, launching into the sky with both of them.

"Eren, Mikasa, you must survive."

Carla’s last words, spoken through a sob, broke through Nao’s defences.

But those words were not the most devastating part.

The most devastating part was what came after Hannes took her children and ran. After she watched their backs disappear. When she was alone.

She used all her remaining strength to cover her own mouth.

In a voice only she could hear.

"Don’t leave me."

Nao’s fingers were trembling.

Letting Hannes take the children was the rational choice. Carla had made it clearly and deliberately.

But those last three words were not rational. They were the body refusing to accept what the mind had already decided.

She knew what would happen when Hannes left. She had made the choice anyway. And then the part of her that was still just a person, not a mother making a rational calculation, said the thing it needed to say to no one.

Under the setting sun, the Titan dug her out of the rubble.

Put her into its mouth.

The blood hit the sky.

That was the last image Eren saw of his mother from Hannes’s back.

The ending theme began.

Nao sat with her eyes open and did not move through the full runtime of it, and through the preview for episode two, and for some time after that.

She finally understood what Misaki and Himari had meant on the variety programme when they said Attack on Titan was very tragic from the very first episode.

She had thought she had prepared herself. She had not.

The first episode of Demon Slayer had also killed the protagonist’s family. But Tanjiro’s despair in that first episode was not even a fraction of what this episode had just done.

Finding your family dead when you return home was different from watching them die. Having their bodies intact was different from watching them be consumed in front of you with the blood in the air. These were not comparable situations.

Not being present when something happens to family was regret. Being present and unable to save them was despair, and something that did not end.

Whether the first episode of Attack on Titan was good or bad by any objective measure, Nao could not say. What she could say was that no anime premiere had ever left an impression on her like this one.

In Japan’s animation industry, things had already exploded.

Not just Shirogane-sensei’s fans. A group of industry professionals were stunned as well.

"Can this even pass censorship?"

"Is this really Shirogane-sensei’s true capability? I had no idea."

"The first episode is already this bloody. What kind of work is this."

"It made me cry. How can a first episode be this devastating."

"The character work is extraordinary. Hannes and Carla. Two characters who appeared briefly and I will never forget them."

"If Hannes had actually gone through with it he would have died for nothing. But the fact that he stopped halfway was the most affecting moment in the episode."

"That feeling of wanting to be a hero and realising in the moment that you are just an ordinary person. Not a single line of dialogue. I felt it completely."

"Only when you are truly inches from something that can kill you do you understand its terror. Hannes in his imagination was the hero saving his benefactor. In reality he is just a person."

"This made me laugh. He stopped halfway? What a coward. If he had gone through with it Carla might have survived."

"You think you could do better? Someone who runs from a dog chasing them is looking at a ten-metre Titan and deciding they would have handled it differently."

"Okay fair point."

"Carla covering her own mouth after watching Hannes take the children and run. Saying ’don’t leave me’ in a voice only she could hear. That destroyed me more than anything else in the episode. She made the right choice deliberately and then her body refused to accept it."

"Shirogane-sensei put the Giant Titan appearing and the wall being breached in the first episode. Most series would spend three or four episodes building to that. He did it in twenty minutes and somehow the buildup still felt complete."

"The three flags in the first twenty minutes. Eren’s father leaving on a trip. The soldiers saying the wall hasn’t broken in a hundred years. Armin saying there’s no guarantee it won’t break today. Shirogane-sensei planted all three and then collected all three in the same episode. The craftsmanship is unfair."

"I have been watching anime for fifteen years. That is the most human moment I have seen in a first episode of anything."

"Shirogane-sensei. I waited so long for a new anime. And you started it like this. I am not sleeping tonight."

"I think this is a masterpiece. The first episode of Titan is a significant step above the first episode of Demon Slayer."

"Wait until a few more episodes are out before making that call. It is only one episode."

"I hope the plot does not become the protagonist fighting Titans mindlessly. That would waste the foundation this episode built."

"The information density of the first episode was very high. I need the analysis posts tomorrow before I fully process what I watched."

"The first episode frightened me. I also think Titan is good. Please no more deaths next week. Shirogane-sensei."

"Isn’t this just a bloody attention-grabbing premiere? You Shirogane fans hype everything."

After the first episode aired, the response was broadly what Rei had expected.

The majority praised the plot, then expressed discomfort with the atmosphere, the bloody scenes, and the specific emotional weight of the characterisation.

A smaller portion attacked it without engagement. Rei had opponents in Japan’s online spaces who reliably appeared whenever a new work launched, and this premiere was no different.

Both he and his fans were used to it.

When Rei had first watched Attack on Titan himself, he had also found it bloody and the plot cruel. Uncomfortable after watching.

But the more he watched, the more he felt it was a masterpiece.

That assessment held until the sea scene. After Eren grew up and the story moved into its final phase, setting aside the specific problems of the ending Chapters, the overall quality had declined from what it had been before. But that was a problem for later.

For now, the situation was very good.

The discussion heat that Demon Slayer had dominated in Japan’s animation industry for more than a year had, tonight, completely lost ground to Attack on Titan.

Fans were complaining about the bloody plot and the emotional weight. No one was saying the first episode was poor. No one was saying they planned to drop the series next week.

"That’s right," Rei said quietly.

"If the first episode didn’t scare them away, they won’t be able to leave once the later plot takes hold."

He was confident about this.

...

STONES PLZZ

Read upto 50 Chapters ahead at [email protected]/Ashnoir