Attack on Titan - Season 2
This review contains spoilers
The closing image of Attack on Titan’s first season—a grotesque, slumbering Titan visage revealed within the cracks of Wall Sina—was a brilliant visual provocation. But it is in the show’s masterful second season, released in 2017, that this image blossoms into a profound meditation on the nature of state power. If the first season tricked us into thinking we were watching a straightforward apocalyptic thriller about humanity raging against external monsters, Season 2 executes a dizzying pivot. It demands we look inward, asking a fundamentally Foucauldian question: What if the structures built to protect us are actually the very mechanisms of our subjugation?
Arriving in a global cultural moment deeply fractured by debates over borders, post-truth politics, and the resurgence of authoritarianism, Attack on Titan’s sophomore outing hits with the force of a revelation. It is an electrifying piece of television that shifts its gaze from physical combat to the battlefield of discourse, exposing how institutions maintain control through the weaponization of the body and the strict policing of truth.
To understand Season 2 is to understand the Walls not as mere masonry, but as an advanced technology of biopolitics. Michel Foucault argued that modern power functions by managing the biological lives of populations—dictating how they live, reproduce, and die. The revelation that the Walls are composed of millions of dormant Colossal Titans radically recontextualizes the Eldian existence. The citizenry of Paradis is not being protected by a benign architectural marvel; they are being corralled by a carceral apparatus made of the very flesh and blood they fear. The state’s monopoly on violence is built, quite literally, into the foundation of their reality. The Panopticon here is total: the watchers are asleep inside the walls, and the threat of mutually assured destruction is what keeps the subjects docile.
This docility is maintained through the strict regulation of knowledge. Season 2 introduces us to the true function of the Church of the Walls and the ruling government. They are not merely out-of-touch elites; they are the arbiters of epistemic control. In this world, history is not a factual record to be discovered, but a discourse to be managed. The state suppresses aviation, regulates printing presses, and silences dissenters to ensure that the "truth" of the world begins and ends at the Walls. When Hange Zoë threatens to drop Minister Nick from the top of the Wall, it is a clash between two epistemologies: the scientific drive to uncover objective reality versus the institutional mandate to obscure it. The season brilliantly illustrates that power does not just repress; it produces reality. By controlling what can be known, the Crown produces the very concept of "humanity" as a dying, isolated species.
Yet, as Foucault noted, where there is power, there is resistance—and power inevitably leaves scars on the subjects it forms. Nowhere is this more devastatingly realized than in the characters of Reiner Braun and Bertholdt Hoover. The mid-season reveal of their identities as the Armored and Colossal Titans is widely lauded for its casual, jarring execution, but its true brilliance lies in its psychological realism. Reiner is the ultimate shattered subject. He has been molded by two entirely contradictory disciplinary regimes: the state that forged him into a "Warrior" (a living weapon of subjugation), and the Scout Regiment that trained him to be a "Soldier" (a selfless defender of humanity).
Reiner’s mind simply cannot house both discourses. His psychological break—forgetting his mission, slipping into the persona of the heroic older brother—is not a mere plot device. It is a terrifying depiction of what happens when the human psyche is crushed by the demands of competing biopolitical systems. The state demands his body for violence, and in complying, his subjectivity fractures. It is a stunningly empathetic portrayal of a "villain," revealing him instead as an adolescent victim of the military-industrial complex.
This theme of reclaiming one’s subjectivity from the grasp of systemic power echoes beautifully in the arc of Ymir and Historia (formerly Krista). Historia’s rejection of her state-mandated, artificially sweet persona, and Ymir’s fiercely unapologetic ownership of her own monstrous existence, act as a counterweight to Reiner’s collapse. "Live a life you can be proud of," Ymir tells Historia. In a world that dictates who must die and who is allowed to live, choosing one's own name and dictating the terms of one's own survival is the ultimate act of defiance.
By the time the season climaxes with Eren unlocking the power of the "Coordinate"—the ability to biologically compel the mass of mindless Titans to his will—the show has laid bare the terrifying trajectory of power. The Coordinate is the absolute zenith of biopolitical control: the literal overriding of bodily autonomy to direct a population like a swarm of locusts.
Attack on Titan Season 2 is a triumph because it treats its audience with immense respect. It slows its pace to map the intricate, suffocating web of statecraft, religious dogma, and psychological conditioning that binds its characters. It strips away the comforting illusion of a black-and-white war against mindless beasts, replacing it with the chilling realization that the greatest horrors are those we engineer, systematize, and build into the walls of our own homes. In doing so, it transcends the boundaries of genre animation, standing as a razor-sharp, essential critique of how modern life is violently, quietly managed.
Arriving in a global cultural moment deeply fractured by debates over borders, post-truth politics, and the resurgence of authoritarianism, Attack on Titan’s sophomore outing hits with the force of a revelation. It is an electrifying piece of television that shifts its gaze from physical combat to the battlefield of discourse, exposing how institutions maintain control through the weaponization of the body and the strict policing of truth.
To understand Season 2 is to understand the Walls not as mere masonry, but as an advanced technology of biopolitics. Michel Foucault argued that modern power functions by managing the biological lives of populations—dictating how they live, reproduce, and die. The revelation that the Walls are composed of millions of dormant Colossal Titans radically recontextualizes the Eldian existence. The citizenry of Paradis is not being protected by a benign architectural marvel; they are being corralled by a carceral apparatus made of the very flesh and blood they fear. The state’s monopoly on violence is built, quite literally, into the foundation of their reality. The Panopticon here is total: the watchers are asleep inside the walls, and the threat of mutually assured destruction is what keeps the subjects docile.
This docility is maintained through the strict regulation of knowledge. Season 2 introduces us to the true function of the Church of the Walls and the ruling government. They are not merely out-of-touch elites; they are the arbiters of epistemic control. In this world, history is not a factual record to be discovered, but a discourse to be managed. The state suppresses aviation, regulates printing presses, and silences dissenters to ensure that the "truth" of the world begins and ends at the Walls. When Hange Zoë threatens to drop Minister Nick from the top of the Wall, it is a clash between two epistemologies: the scientific drive to uncover objective reality versus the institutional mandate to obscure it. The season brilliantly illustrates that power does not just repress; it produces reality. By controlling what can be known, the Crown produces the very concept of "humanity" as a dying, isolated species.
Yet, as Foucault noted, where there is power, there is resistance—and power inevitably leaves scars on the subjects it forms. Nowhere is this more devastatingly realized than in the characters of Reiner Braun and Bertholdt Hoover. The mid-season reveal of their identities as the Armored and Colossal Titans is widely lauded for its casual, jarring execution, but its true brilliance lies in its psychological realism. Reiner is the ultimate shattered subject. He has been molded by two entirely contradictory disciplinary regimes: the state that forged him into a "Warrior" (a living weapon of subjugation), and the Scout Regiment that trained him to be a "Soldier" (a selfless defender of humanity).
Reiner’s mind simply cannot house both discourses. His psychological break—forgetting his mission, slipping into the persona of the heroic older brother—is not a mere plot device. It is a terrifying depiction of what happens when the human psyche is crushed by the demands of competing biopolitical systems. The state demands his body for violence, and in complying, his subjectivity fractures. It is a stunningly empathetic portrayal of a "villain," revealing him instead as an adolescent victim of the military-industrial complex.
This theme of reclaiming one’s subjectivity from the grasp of systemic power echoes beautifully in the arc of Ymir and Historia (formerly Krista). Historia’s rejection of her state-mandated, artificially sweet persona, and Ymir’s fiercely unapologetic ownership of her own monstrous existence, act as a counterweight to Reiner’s collapse. "Live a life you can be proud of," Ymir tells Historia. In a world that dictates who must die and who is allowed to live, choosing one's own name and dictating the terms of one's own survival is the ultimate act of defiance.
By the time the season climaxes with Eren unlocking the power of the "Coordinate"—the ability to biologically compel the mass of mindless Titans to his will—the show has laid bare the terrifying trajectory of power. The Coordinate is the absolute zenith of biopolitical control: the literal overriding of bodily autonomy to direct a population like a swarm of locusts.
Attack on Titan Season 2 is a triumph because it treats its audience with immense respect. It slows its pace to map the intricate, suffocating web of statecraft, religious dogma, and psychological conditioning that binds its characters. It strips away the comforting illusion of a black-and-white war against mindless beasts, replacing it with the chilling realization that the greatest horrors are those we engineer, systematize, and build into the walls of our own homes. In doing so, it transcends the boundaries of genre animation, standing as a razor-sharp, essential critique of how modern life is violently, quietly managed.
Mini Review: Attack on Titan’s second season pivots from apocalyptic thriller to profound political critique. The true terror isn't external monsters, but the carceral architecture built to "protect" humanity. The state maintains docility by monopolizing truth and weaponizing discourse. As characters psychologically fracture under the weight of competing military regimes, the season exposes how institutions claim ownership over the biological subject. It is a razor-sharp meditation on biopolitics.