Library Read // Attack on Titan, Vol. 10 by Hajime Isayama

FORTRESS OF BLOOD With no combat gear and Wall Rose breached, the 104th scrambles to evacuate the villages in the Titans' path. On their way to the safety of Wall Sheena, they decide to spend the night in Utgard Castle. But their sanctuary becomes a slaughterhouse when they discover that, for some reason, these Titans attack at night! ? PRAISE FOR THE HIT ANIME "A visceral and fantastically intense action/horror story." - Anime News Network ? "Japan's equivalent of The Walking Dead." - io9 From the Trade Paperback edition.

It's wild how even when you know what's going to happen, what's coming for you, how you can still be surprised and just as excited reading it. There's a big moment from the anime that I wasn't expect to see for a while longer that kind of just ran up on me in vol. 10 of Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan. I won't say what moment I'm referencing, I'll let you figure or discover that out for yourself, but when I first experienced it changed the game for me. When I watched the first season of AoT I was in it for the horror and the gore, the triumphant feeling of resistance and fighting to survival. By the end of the first season and starting the second it became an insidious conspiracy thriller, a thriller that we were going to suss out.

Volume 10 throws so much at you. Again, being that I'm not a regular manga reader, maybe it's that I'm not used to relative speeds of storytelling. Sometimes that fast pacing works really well. In a lot of the action heavy volumes it can feel like it goes too fast because the story is so light. It's hard to say how vol. 10 compares because it's feel like so much story but it ends up equating to about three episodes, from about episode 4 of the second season to episode 6. With at least 20 volumes left in the series (who knows how many will be available to me through the library in the short term, the short term being the next year) this pacing sets an exciting expectation for loads of story coming my way.

The relationship between Ymir and Krista, at this point pretty nascent in the manga, comes across as more intimate on the pages. The sense that the web of convolutedness is so tangled has only become that much greater and I eagerly await future volumes. Maybe the libraries are open? 5 stars from me.