madnovel Chapter 336 336: Soaring
Chapter 336 336: Soaring
April arrived. Illumination Production Company and Shirogane Animation moved into full operational gear.
The Attack on Titan anime promotion was running at maximum capacity. After a significant period away from this kind of activity, Rei began holding autograph sessions for the Attack on Titan manga tankōbon across several major cities in Japan.
Only five volumes had been released at this point, but the average sales per volume for Attack on Titan had already surpassed 400 million copies.
Not the extraordinary figures of Demon Slayer, but sufficient to place it in the top twenty of the Japanese manga industry's historical records. And as the serialisation continued, the subsequent volumes' average sales would continue climbing alongside the anime's ongoing broadcast.
The second half of Attack on Titan Season Three began broadcasting in April.
Unlike the first half, which had opened with the coup plot and political manoeuvring, this half went directly into battle from the first episode.
Eren and the Survey Corps rode toward Wall Maria under a clear sky, the first time humanity had mounted an organised operation to reclaim the lost territory since the wall breach five years ago.
The mood in the formation was visible in how the soldiers moved: disciplined, tense, carrying the weight of what was at stake. Behind them, the operation to retake the wall. Ahead of them, whatever was waiting.
Reiner had been waiting.
He had been lying in ambush inside the wall itself, dormant in his Armored Titan form, concealed within the stonework. When the Survey Corps column reached the critical point of approach, the wall erupted. The Armored Titan emerged from inside the structure and the episode ended on the Survey Corps formation suddenly facing a threat from within rather than from outside, caught between the solid stone behind them and the open ground ahead.
Outside the wall, a Titan army under the Beast Titan's coordination had already assembled.
The Survey Corps and their horses were caught between both forces simultaneously. The open ground between Wall Rose and Wall Maria, the territory humanity had abandoned five years ago, had become a killing field.
Reiner in the Armored Titan blocking retreat from one direction. The Beast Titan's army controlling approach from the other. The horses, which the Survey Corps depended on for mobility and withdrawal, were exposed.
Genji watched the closing minutes of episode one and the specific dread that Attack on Titan produced better than almost any other series settled back into place. The formation had walked into a prepared trap and the trap had closed.
Welcome back, he thought.
The familiar Attack on Titan atmosphere had returned completely, and the viewership responded accordingly. Despite a two-week break between the first and second halves of Season Three, the second half's opening episode showed a slight upward trend from the first half's final figures.
Episode two moved quickly into the confrontation that episode one had set up.
Eren transformed to counter Reiner's Armored Titan. The exchange that followed demonstrated how far both of them had come since Season Two's forest confrontation, and also demonstrated clearly that the gap between them had not closed as much as Eren might have hoped.
The fight was different from their first encounter. Eren was using the knowledge from his previous engagements. He was reading Reiner's movements with more accuracy, exploiting the vulnerabilities in the Armored Titan's construction, targeting the joints and the exposed areas rather than trying to match the Armored Titan's raw defensive capability directly.
He defeated Reiner again.
The Armored Titan was a formidable ability on paper. Defensive plating that no blade could penetrate, physical strength that exceeded most other Titan forms, a level of passive protection that should have made Reiner one of the most difficult opponents in the series to neutralise.
In practice, through the first two seasons and now the opening episodes of the third season's second half, Reiner's actual combat record against Eren had produced a specific impression in the fan community: the Armored Titan was cool in concept and consistently defeated in execution.
This period was the busiest Rei had experienced since graduating the previous year.
The same was true for Miyu. Her new manga, Reincarnation, was moving between fourth and fifth place in the Dream Comic Journal rankings. Even with the accumulated reputation from her previous manga, the mangakas holding the top positions in Dream Comic were not weak competition.
A new work needed sufficient length and at least one tankōbon release before it could attract the casual reader base that moved rankings.
Miyu was genuinely anxious about this, though she managed it without showing it too clearly.
When she had set her condition for marriage, she had not been making things difficult for Rei. She had wanted to put a small period on the first stage of her career before entering that next phase of life.
After becoming Rei's wife, any achievements she earned would inevitably be read by the industry as downstream of having an exceptional husband's support. She wanted at least one achievement she could point to that predated that interpretation.
Her resistance to actually marrying Rei was nonexistent. The condition was about the career, not the relationship.
On the day the second episode aired, Rei actively forwarded all Attack on Titan related materials across his social media accounts, cooperating fully with Shirogane Animation's promotional push.
In offline channels, promotional posters appeared in subway stations, buses, and airport corridors. At major ACG conventions and game exhibitions in Tokyo and other first-tier cities over the past two months, Attack on Titan anime elements, exhibition halls, and large-scale promotional setups had been arranged with dedicated funding.
Rei understood precisely where the Attack on Titan anime's peak was located.
Without question, it was the second half of Season Three, currently broadcasting.
If he rated the arcs, this one earned a ten. The first season was a seven. The second season an eight.
The window for promotion that could genuinely influence Attack on Titan's trajectory toward mainstream breakthrough and expanded global reach was now.
The fan community had perceived this clearly, and the discussion heat on every major platform was running accordingly.
On the forums, the discussion heat was running at peak levels.
"The recent Attack on Titan promotion is overwhelming. Every major convention has an official booth."
"More than that. At the Tokyo convention two days ago, the final invited guest to appear on stage was Shirogane-sensei himself. He showed up in a full Survey Corps uniform. A billionaire performing for the audience in cosplay. The surreal quality of that moment was significant."
"He was clearly enjoying himself. Before the convention ended he gave away a hundred sets of signed collected works manga tankōbon to audience members randomly. Just gave them away."
"A complete set of Shirogane-sensei's collected works tankōbon would cost at least 100,000 yen at market price."
"They are already being resold online for over a million yen. Official plastic-sealed hardcover complete set, signed, unopened. Overseas Shirogane-sensei fans are buying them at more than ten times the market price. He does not travel abroad for fan meetings, which means signed materials in overseas markets are extremely limited."
"Is Attack on Titan as popular abroad as it is domestically?"
"Top tier internationally. Many overseas rating platforms actually score Attack on Titan above Demon Slayer. In terms of pure word-of-mouth, Hunter x Hunter is close to number one among the overseas fan community."
"Demon Slayer is simply too broadly appealing."
"My daughter watched two episodes of Attack on Titan and was scared enough that she could not sleep. My middle-school son found it too graphic. This is the specific problem with Attack on Titan's demographic ceiling. Children make up at least half of the active anime fan base and Attack on Titan cannot penetrate that market."
"Demon Slayer is also graphic."
"Demon Slayer does not kill its own people at the start. Beheading demons is graphic but children find it satisfying rather than disturbing. Attack on Titan eats the mother in episode one, kills teammates throughout, has the protagonist captured repeatedly, reveals the best friend as a spy, and involves plans to kill tens of thousands of one's own people. Children finding that enjoyable would require a specific kind of child."
"Demon Slayer is probably the peak of commercial success among Shirogane-sensei's works. Nothing else will surpass it."
"Do not speak too soon. Bleach, which is currently in production at Illumination Production Company, has significant potential."
"With a name like Bleach, if the author was anyone other than Shirogane-sensei, I would not even click on it. He does have works that did not become massive hits. Higurashi: When They Cry. Five Centimeters Per Second. I think there is a reasonable probability that Bleach will not reach the top tier."
As the third episode of Season Three's second half approached broadcast, the Attack on Titan fan community was at its most active. Everyone was waiting on the forums, speaking their minds freely in the hours before eight o'clock. One episode per week was twenty minutes of plot.
The surrounding discussion, analysis, speculation, and argument could fill several hours. For the community following this work, that surrounding activity was as much a part of the experience as the episode itself.
Eight o'clock. The third episode began.
The opening fell into a flashback.
The day the wall was breached in Season One's first episode. The specific sequence of events that had followed Reiner and Bertholdt's initial attack: their conversation about Eren being overheard by a fellow soldier, forcing Reiner to have Annie remove that soldier's ODM Gear and leave him to be consumed by a Titan. The moment where the mission had required them to directly cause the death of someone they had come to know.
The flashback established the origin point of Reiner's psychological fracture. The split personality was not a character quirk. It was the mechanism his mind had developed to survive the contradiction between what he was required to do and who he had become in the years of doing it.
As a warrior sent to complete a mission, he had to use any means necessary to capture Eren. As the person who had spent three years building genuine friendships with his classmates, he was watching those same people die because of choices he was making.
The tragedy they had personally committed had killed over a hundred thousand people. Reiner's mind had divided itself rather than face that accounting directly.
The camera returned to the current timeline.
Before the Survey Corps had arrived, Reiner and Bertholdt had said goodbye to each other on the wall.
Then the camera cut to Reiner in his defeated Armored Titan form.
The Beast Titan picked up a barrel and threw it high over the wall in a long arc. Bertholdt was inside, intended to transform into the Colossal Titan within the barrel and rain destruction from above. But with Reiner's Armored Titan below, he hesitated. Transforming immediately risked catching Reiner in the blast radius.
The episode's first half was almost entirely dialogue and character work.
Bertholdt's psychological journey was the opposite of Reiner's. Where Reiner had fractured, Bertholdt had arrived at a specific kind of clarity.
He was evil.
What he had done was inhumane.
He knew he was beyond forgiveness.
But for the forces behind him. For his family. For his friends back in the homeland. He had to complete this. He had to destroy the people within the walls. There was no version of this where he was the one who refused.
He gave the heavily injured Reiner a brief window to adjust position.
Then the episode's BGM, which the fan community would immediately name the Flying God Song, began to play.
Under the attacks and verbal challenges from Mikasa and Armin, his former classmates demanding answers, Bertholdt found his final resolve.
"I don't feel fear, and I can observe my surroundings well."
He was moving through the abandoned city on his ODM Gear at speeds that the Survey Corps members attacking him could barely track.
"I must be prepared for any outcome."
"Yes, no one is wrong. Everyone was forced."
"Because this world is just that cruel."
He launched himself into the sky, the ODM Gear cables pulling him upward in a long arc above the city.
A bolt of yellow lightning exploded.
What appeared before tens of millions of Japanese viewers was not a Titan transformation they had seen before. The scale of it. The specific way the explosion of energy manifested. A scene with the visual impact of a ten-thousand-ton detonation, the energy radiating outward across the abandoned city in every direction simultaneously.
When the light cleared, the Colossal Titan stood in the city's centre.
Between heaven and earth. Enormous beyond anything the previous transformations had produced. The steam rising from its surface. The red of the exposed muscle and the quality of its presence against the sky.
Like a demon standing in the ruins of everything it had already destroyed.
Kenji sat in his living room and did not move for several seconds.
The Survey Corps had watched Bertholdt transform into the Colossal Titan once before. They had known what he was since the episode six reveal. The audience had known for months.
None of that prepared anyone for this.
Bertholdt had been the low-presence member of the trio. Quiet. Easily overlooked. The one standing slightly behind Reiner in every confrontation. The character that some viewers had forgotten was a Titan Shifter at all between his reveal and now.
The presence of the Colossal Titan in this episode was the opposite of everything Bertholdt had been as a human. Immense. Unavoidable. The kind of image that an anime produced once in a generation.
And the episode had just spent its first half making Bertholdt genuinely comprehensible as a person before delivering this.
The audience felt both things simultaneously. The sympathy for the person. The terror of the transformation. Shirogane-sensei had constructed it so that neither one cancelled the other.
The forums erupted before the episode's ending theme had finished.
...
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