Attack on Titan - seeing beyond violence

Hi all.

I've decided to continue the anime/manga review trend - recently I watched two anime series, and one of them is Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin).

I started watching it mostly because I had heard the name before and someone posted a meme on the interwebz asking who would win in a fight - Kirito (from Sword Art Online) or Eren Jeager (from AoT).

Shortly, AoT follows the story of three friends who fight giant humanoids who feed on humans while exhibiting a creepy grin - titans. The titans appeared several hundreds of years ago, and led manking to the brink of extinction. In order to survive, the humans build 50 meter-tall walls and for 100 years lived away from threat within them. One day, however, mankind remembered the fear and terror caused by titans when an exceptionally tall titan opened the outer wall. The three main characters, Eren, Mikasa and Armin, eventually lost they're families and joined the military forces in order to fight the giant beats.

There is little knowledge about titans, their origin and why they eat humans. However, an unexpected turn of events during a battle challenges the formerly clear definition of humans and titans (If you are interested and can handle violence and blood, go watch it!).

I knew it was a survival themed anime, so I jumped ahead
into the extremely bloody first episode. I can  still remember how episodes 1 to 8 left an unpleasant feeling when dinning meat (I quickly learned that you should not watch this at meal time). I had to take a pause between Ep 8 and the remaining episodes (goes up to 24 I think) - I like survival settings but humanoids eating humans was a bit too much for me at a certain point.

Other than that, the story is amazing. Yes, I think there is unnecessary violence, which I usually look at as lack of quality: the use of violence to compensate for a weak setting. But this is not the case. For the rest of the series, what I saw was humans protecting their closed ones, fighting for survival, even against humans. What makes us humans? Is it our size, skin, intelligence? Or is it the ability to love and respect others? Mikasa's story is shoking and yet beautiful.

 Regarding the plot, it left more than enough juice for another season. I want to know what comes next (well I spoiled myself accidentally by opening a random AoT manga chapter, but what can I do?) - I want mankind to beat the titans, I want to know where they came from.

Not because they are interesting. But because in this world, there are no races. People from different parts of the world live together, and the racism and conceit we live nowadays is eferred in the anime as something from the past , when humans populated all Earth. So what brought the Titans? was it to end wars? To stop mankind from killing itself for pointless reasons? For distorted religion interpretations, for xenophobia?

Well, it feels like I wrote an awful lot about this. Overall I recommend the anime series. But while the series is good, the soundtrack is a masterpiece:

And this song is tightly related to the characters:

Cheers!