Attack on Titan - Season Unknown

In an era characterized by paralyzing systemic crises—impending ecological collapse, late-capitalist alienation, and the encroaching shadow of algorithmic determinism—contemporary culture is overwhelmingly starved for narratives that treat human agency as something other than a cruel illusion. Pop culture frequently responds to our collective exhaustion with fatalism. Yet, the Attack on Titan franchise has always operated on a different frequency, positing that the sheer cruelty of the world is exactly what necessitates radical human responsibility. While the main series maps the geopolitical macrocosm of this struggle, the franchise’s Original Video Animations (OVAs)—comprising side stories like Ilse's Notebook, No Regrets, and Lost Girls—distill this philosophy into its most potent, agonizing microcosm. Viewed through a Sartrean existential framework, these supplemental episodes reveal themselves not as mere franchise filler, but as urgent meditations on freedom, bad faith, and the terrifying weight of individual choice in the twenty-first century.

To understand the philosophical stakes of the OVAs, one must first recognize the fundamental facticity of the Attack on Titan universe. In Sartrean terms, facticity comprises the unchangeable givens of our existence: our birth, our historical context, the physical limits of our bodies. The characters in these stories are "thrown" into an absurdly hostile environment, confined by massive walls and besieged by cannibalistic giants. Yet, Sartre insists that human consciousness is defined by transcendence—our ability to project ourselves beyond our facticity through action and interpretation. The OVAs are intensely focused on this very friction: the violent clash between the rigid boundaries of the world and the human demand to make meaning within it.

This friction is perhaps most violently realized in Ilse's Notebook. When the doomed scout Ilse Langnar finds herself stranded beyond the walls without a horse or maneuvering gear, her facticity seems to dictate imminent death. However, her encounter with an aberrant Titan ruptures the ontological hierarchy of her reality. The monster does not immediately eat her; instead, it halts, bows, and speaks, referring to her as a "Subject of Ymir." In this chilling moment, we witness a grotesque iteration of Sartre’s concept of "The Look" (le regard). For Sartre, the presence of the Other fundamentally alienates us, transforming us from the center of our own universe into an object in someone else’s. The Titan’s gaze strips Ilse of her assumed identity as a human predator-turned-prey, suddenly situating her within a vast, unseen historical architecture. Yet, in the face of this paralyzing objectification, Ilse refuses the comfort of panic or surrender. She asserts her transcendence by doing the only thing left to her: she writes. Even as the Titan’s inherent nature overtakes it and it crushes her skull, Ilse exercises her radical freedom by documenting the encounter, forcing her subjectivity to survive her physical destruction. It is a haunting testament to human agency persisting at the absolute limits of systemic annihilation.

If Ilse’s Notebook explores the limits of facticity, No Regrets—the two-part origin story of Captain Levi—is a masterclass in the Sartrean anguish of choice. Levi begins the narrative trapped in the literal and metaphorical underbelly of the world: the subterranean slums where sunlight is a commodity and survival requires ruthless pragmatism. When Erwin Smith forces Levi to join the Survey Corps, Levi is presented with the illusion of a deterministic path. But the climax of the narrative destroys this illusion entirely. Faced with a sudden Titan ambush in blinding rain, Levi must choose whether to stay with his closest friends or ride ahead to assassinate Erwin. He makes a calculated choice, only to return and find his friends brutally slaughtered.

Here, Attack on Titan captures the exact tenor of Sartrean anguish. Levi realizes that his choices are made in an ethical vacuum; there is no a priori moral framework to guarantee a right outcome. He is, as Sartre famously diagnosed, condemned to be free. The tragedy of No Regrets is not simply that Levi’s friends die, but the crushing realization that he alone bears the total responsibility for the choice that led to their deaths. In our contemporary moment, where individuals are constantly forced to navigate impossible ethical choices within deeply compromised systems—from consuming unethically produced goods to participating in exploitative labor markets—Levi’s anguish is deeply resonant. He learns that to act is to invite guilt, yet inaction is equally a choice. His subsequent commitment to the Survey Corps is not an act of blind obedience, but an existential leap; he invents the value of his life by choosing to bear the agonizing weight of his freedom.

Conversely, the Lost Girls OVAs offer a poignant critique of "bad faith" (mauvaise foi), the Sartrean concept wherein an individual lies to themselves to escape the burden of freedom, often by collapsing their identity entirely into a societal role. Annie Leonhart is perhaps the most tragic embodiment of this phenomenon in modern anime. In her episode, we follow her through a seemingly mundane detective subplot within the Military Police. Annie moves through the world with an overwhelming exhaustion—an affect deeply familiar to a contemporary generation burned out by the demands of late capitalism. She is Sartre’s famous café waiter rendered as a child soldier; she plays at being a Military Police officer, just as she plays at being a "Warrior", meticulously going through the required motions to avoid confronting the sheer absurdity of her existence.

Annie embraces bad faith as a survival mechanism. By convincing herself she is merely a tool, a cog in an inescapable geopolitical machine, she tries to numb the anguish of her complicity in mass murder. Yet, her suppressed transcendence constantly leaks through her deadpan exterior, manifesting in her quiet mercies and lingering hesitations. She is a portrait of ideological interpellation, perfectly reflecting the modern citizen who performs their systemic duties while harboring a profound, unarticulated dread about the nature of the system itself. Similarly, Mikasa’s segment in Lost Girls finds her retreating into an elaborate mental illusion—a world where the Titans never breached the wall and her trauma was averted. It is a flight from facticity into pure, unmoored fantasy. But the narrative brutally forces her to recognize that avoiding reality does not neutralize it. To live authentically, Mikasa must abandon the comfort of her illusions and accept the cruel parameters of her actual world.

Ultimately, the Attack on Titan OVAs demand to be read as more than mere mythological world-building; they are urgent existential texts. In a twenty-first-century cultural landscape that frequently vacillates between toxic positivity and nihilistic despair, these stories offer a third way. They acknowledge that our facticity is often brutal, shaped by indifferent forces and corrupt institutions. They concede that our roles in society often demand bad faith just to survive. Yet, through the bleeding, exhausted figures of Ilse, Levi, Annie, and Mikasa, the OVAs insist on the terrifying primacy of human freedom. They remind us that even when we are cornered by the monsters of our time, the gaze of the Other upon us, we are still condemned to choose our response. In the dark, claustrophobic universe of these side stories, that radical responsibility is not a curse, but the only proof we have that we are still human.