In a way I feel quite liberated with Shingeki no Kyoujin now, for whatever reason.  Maybe I’ve just accepted it warts and all in a way I wasn’t able to in the past, or perhaps (this is my hunch) the mania surrounding it has died down to the point where it no longer has an irritatingly outsized reputation for what it is.  Once you get past the fascism it’s basically an enjoyable show most of the time, because even when it has its not-that-infrequent clunker moments, they’re often so awful as to be entertaining in their own right.

The elephant in the room here, is of course the fact that Eren and Mikasa have been almost entirely a non-factor this season.  Can it be a coincidence that the show is more enjoyable with these two excessively irritating characters offstage?  More than just their own selves, though, I think their absence helps because the series tends to be more grounded and less histrionic with the two of them not at the center of it.  Perhaps the even bigger elephant in the room (I guess it’s a pretty big room) is that the titans have been AWOL this season too – and likewise, I’m pretty sure Attack on Titan is a better show without titans in it (or at least, with very spartan use of them), ironic as that is.

Really – Eren out of the picture, Mikasa offstage, Erwin (WHY WON’T YOU DIE) shackled and beaten, no titans – this season has been an embarrassment of riches so far.  In theory the fact that there’s no one who’s expressly heroic to root for here (except maybe Armin) could be a narrative problem with the story staged as a struggle between the Survey Corps and the Interior Squad, but it kind of helps feed the Nihilistic vibe that AoT brings to the table in sometimes-thrilling fashion.  It’s a fucked-up world and it’s going to take fucked-up people to save it – that’s definitely one of the messages this story sends, and folks like Levi and Hange are always doing their best to live up to that challenge.

One of the things that keeps me hooked into this story is curiosity as to what happens when the members of the cadet corps who we’ve been with since the beginning see the full extent of the moral sacrifices they’re going to need to make if they follow Hange and Levi to the end.  Forget Mikasa – we’ve pretty much seen that “whatever Eren needs” is her only rule in life.  But the others, that’s different.  Armin is smart, Connie and Sasha have ideals of a sort, even Eren has a sense of right and wrong in his knucklehead fashion.  How far are they going to go here – how much will they give themselves over to consequentialism and do evil in order to theoretically achieve good?

For now, it seems we’re going to see this part of the struggle come to a head pretty good.  Through Pyxis Erwin seems to have set the wheels in motion for something to happen soon, and out in the real world the remains of his team are doing their best to foment revolutionary feeling in the streets.  The Military Police no doubt think they’re doing the right thing too, and I’m still not convinced that one side in all this is morally any better than the other.  But then, at this point in the story that’s more or less by design I think, and it’s going to be that way for some time yet.