English Dub Review: Attack on Titan ”The Response / Attack On Trost, Part 6”

 

 

 Spoilers Below

So, let’s recap a little. Eren comes out of his Titan which really confuses the rest of his fellow soldiers, and as a result, they decide to kill him, Armin, and Mikasa. Eren bites his thumb, and he transforms into a partial Titan. Elsewhere, Daz is losing his mind from losing his squad,  with Marco  trying to hold him back, while Sasha is in pains from hunger. The people inside the wall hear a shot, and see smoke, so they’re worried the Titans breached the wall.

Everyone who was near Eren when he transformed is in shock. Woerman is worried that Eren is going to attack, even though he only transformed to save his friends. Eren frees his arm from the Titan’s muscles, and worms himself free. Eren meets up with Armin and Mikasa, and they try to flee before Woerman comes to his senses. Eren grabs his key, and remembers that he needs to get to the cellar in his house. His daddy issues come out, because his father didn’t share any knowledge with him. The Titan skeleton starts to disintegrate, and Eren decides to flee back to Shinganshina. Unfortunately, Eren doesn’t know how to fully control it, but he was able to draw exactly enough power to stop the cannonball as he tries to split from Armin and Mikasa, with the latter making sure to follow him to the end.

Woerman is holding hire until the smoke clears, meanwhile Armin is crunching numbers, and wondering  whether this is the end for himself, Eren, and Mikasa. Eren comes up with an idea to have Armin  convince the Garrison Regiment and Woerman that Eren poses no threat to everyone, and leaving him to use his Titan abilities at the direction of the military. Eren proves that he never saw Armin as a burden, and Armin is an important part of this group as the rest.

Woerman is going gun-ho about Eren being a Titan and he wants to kill Eren on sight. Armin uses the fact that hundreds of soldiers saw Eren attacking the other Titans, and the Titans saw Titan-Eren as an enemy as much as the humans. Woerman isn’t hearing a word, and wants the Garrison to attack. Armin dedicates his heart on behalf to Eren, and Ian wants him to reconsider but Woerman wants them all dead.

As Woerman gives the order, Commander Pyxis stops him, and tells him to look at Armin’s heart-felt salute. Pyxis takes Eren, Armin, and Mikasa to the top of Wall Rose to hear them out. Eren tells him that he needs to go to Shinganshina to sort out everything about Eren’s Titan ability to better use to save Trost. Armin says he wanted to start by using Eren’s Titan ability to move the boulder and block the big hole in the wall, and Eren is willing to try.

This week’s episode moved at a rather quick pace, as before I knew it, I was at the commercial, then BOOM the episode ended. I think that goes to show how well Attack on Titan is doing with its storytelling. I love how they showed Woerman take that deep dive into insanity as he goes from protecting the Garrison Regiment from Eren because of his Titan ability, to just not listening to reason, and wanting someone’s blood spilled.

Armin sure knows how to think, eh? He goes from wanting to die in a corner from a cannonball, to saving Eren’s, Mikasa’s, and his ass with Eren telling Armin to make the biggest decision of his life. Right then, he realizes that shit’s serious, and he needs to get in gear. Armin shined really bright in this episode, and gave any doubters all the reason in the world that he’s a really cool character to have.

The beginning of the episode, where the Titan skeleton falling apart and Eren was trying to free his way out, was pretty visceral as it was well drawn, and a lot of detail went into Eren ripping his arm out of the Titan’s muscle.  One thing I found a little odd was that Eren, Mikasa and Armin were able to see through the smoke screen and have tabs on what the Garrison Regiment were doing, but Woerman had no idea what was going on. It’s a small detail, and it was on screen for all of 15 seconds, but it’s an oversight that almost anyone could pick up on.

Dub / Sub Comparison

The narrator in the sub wasn’t Eren, and it was weird for me to hear a female’s voice doing the narration. The intro was a little different as well. Where the dub focuses on the destruction the Titans caused, the sub focuses more on the fact that daily life was interrupted. I’m sorry, but all of the destruction the Titans caused kind of wins out here because in the grand scheme of things, daily life seems rather trivial.

Woerman seems more of a scared militant in the sub instead of a psychopath, which also kind of fits. I guess both sides would work, depending on which you would prefer. I prefer scared militant Woerman over nutcase Woerman. A bit later, Daz sounded like an Italian man trying to speak Japanese, then the Italian accent dropped. There are some differences in the script, like Sasha wanting to be carted with the injured in the dub, where she wanted to be put on the casualty list in the sub.

The voices of Mikasa, Eren, and Armin don’t sound quite right, because of their high pitch, where the slightly deeper voices of the dub makes the characters seem a bit tougher. It suffers from the normal Japanese problem of the characters either sounding like they’re 12 when they’re supposed to be 24, or they’re sounding like they’re 24 when they’re supposed to sound like they’re 12.