The Good ‘US’ vs. the Evil ‘THEM’ as Fluid Constructs in the “Attack on Titan” Manga

Hajime Isayama’s manga “Attack on Titan” represents one of the artistic literary works that questioned the politics of co-existence in the world. The manga tragically depicted the polarized world of Good US vs. Evil THEM humans and human-eating Titans co-exist in. In this context, Nietzsche (1886/2009, p. 81) [9] once said that “What an age finds evil is commonly an anachronistic echo of what previously was found to be good—the atavism of an older ideal.” This is what this article tries to foreground; the fluidity of morals and the inconsequentiality of the separation between Good US vs. Evil THEM when humans’ existence is at stake. Indeed, Isayama showed us that we all have the Titan gene and we all transform to a Titan that destroys everything the moment our sole existence is endangered. This study is based on Nietzsche’s perspectival view of Good vs. Evil and on Van Dijk’s US vs. THEM polarized ideology coupled with a quantitative inquiry of the frequency of this polarization in the manga text using the semi-automatic annotation software, the UAM CorpusTool.