Themes, Focalization and the Flow of Information: The Case of Shingeki no Kyojin

This article discusses the interaction between themes, narrative structure and focalization points employed in Shingeki no Kyojin (‘attack on Titan’, Isayama 2009–ongoing), a manga featuring the desperate battle of humankind against the mysterious Titans. Following a narratological approach, the article explores how the themes underpinning the narrative, especially the ‘control’ theme, act as information filters on both narrative structure and background knowledge of Shingeki no Kyojin. The resulting interplay of these themes with a focalization point are explored in detail, and connected to ongoing discussions on focalization in comics and other media.


Introduction
Shingeki no Kyojin or 'Attack on Titan/The Attacking Titan' (Isayama 2009-ongoing) is a manga that features the fight of humankind against the 'Titans', human-looking creatures that vary in height and size, display little or no intelligence and eat humans for no apparent reason. The last survivors of the Titans' onslaught found safety in three cities surrounded by concentric walls: wall Maria (outermost), wall Rose and wall Sina (innermost). Each wall also marks social and economic distinctions. The city inside wall Sina is home to the nobles and the royal family.
The outer cities and districts host peasants, workers, and merchants. The story focuses on step-siblings Eren Yaeger and Mikasa Ackermann, and their friend Armin Arlert, who lose their families in a Titans attack. They seek revenge by enrolling Ursini: Themes, Focalization and the Flow of Information 2 in the survey corps, a military force with the mission of reclaiming Titan-infested territories, but become involved in a complex web of conspiracies involving the survival of humankind.
Shingeki no Kyojin blends themes from shōnen and seinen meta-genres (Bryce & Davis 2010;Shodt 1996), but also from post-apocalyptic fiction, horror, and other genres. It also presents a peculiar approach to narrative structure, mostly focused on the characters' perspectives (Niederhoff 2015;Schmid 2010: 30-34). Therefore, readers mostly discover the truth about its world when the characters win battle(s) against the Titans and their masters. This paper addresses this connection between narrative, focalization and themes, specifically focusing on how the so-called control theme drives the use of an internal focalization point. We have analysed in detail the 88 issues released so far and their underlying narrative structure. To frame our discussion, we first individuate the key themes intertwined with the control theme, and then analyse how they are brought together in the series' narrative structure.

Themes, Focalization and other Elements of Narrative Structure
We start by making precise the theoretical notions we implement in our analysis, beginning with theme. In narratology, a theme 1 is usually a (possibly) complex concept that an author can use in a narrative to create the plot (e.g. Childers & Hentzi 1995;Curtius 1953;Mikkonen 2011;Miller 1990). For instance, the pain theme is a central concept in Shingeki no Kyojin, as it is used to explore characters' emotions and reactions to various events and challenges (Yamazaki 2015). Given the multi-modal nature of comics, our discussion focuses on their visual and textual realization, and how these realizations interact. We use the graphical convention of representing themes via italics (e.g. control).
Shingeki no Kyojin blends several themes as conceptual 'building blocks' or 'rules' in a cohesive narrative, e.g. Nietzschan philosophy (O'Cuana 2014), pain, Norse culture and myths (Yamazaki 2015). The control theme implicates three other themes that are tightly interwoven with it: world, social structure and Titans. Control is typically defined as one individual or group's ability to determine the actions of another Ursini: Themes, Focalization and the Flow of Information 3 individual or group, possibly involving resources and information (Innes 2003: 5-6).
Control generally involves the ability to determine the space in which a controlled group is constrained, and the relations between and with the controlled individuals.
Indeed, various forms of authoritarian governments and punishment systems are mostly based on this principle.
Control can be also exerted by manipulating the choices of a group, possibly without the group being aware of it. For instance, when control manipulates the flow of information amongst the public, it can manufacture or manipulate ' consent' so that the controlling group can exploit it to force choices and policies that are detrimental or threatening to the other often unaware groups (Innes 2003: 7-14).
Although several models exist, Hermon & Chomsky's notion of consent manufacturing fits our analysis best. This model revolves around five 'filters' that permit an elite group to create consent among a controlled group. These filters are 'profit orientation', ' advertising license', 'sourcing news', 'flak', and 'the war on terror' (Hermon & Chomsky 2001: 5-38). Consent is thus formed when at least one filter is active, and can be successfully used to control opinions and lives. 'Flak' and 'the war on terror' play key roles in the narrative economy of Shingeki no Kyojin. These filters allow elites to use consent manipulation to discredit those who disobey them, and to construct a terrifying enemy to create consent. The other filters are not relevant in this case.
The world within the walls (or simply world) theme explains how the political forces controlling this (bounded) space exert their consent. Shingeki no Kyojin's world is modelled on a dichotomy of Norse culture: ingards and utangards (Lindow 2001: 30-40;see also Yamazaki 2015). Ingards (i.e. 'inside') was a space where the laws of a community held, opposed to utangards, an outer space of lawlessness. Fences and walls symbolically separated the two spaces. In Shingeki no Kyojin's world, the external world of the Titans and the internal world of the world of humans indicates this separation.
The world theme in Shingeki no Kyojin radically interprets the ingards/ utangards distinction: its 'inner' laws and walls place humans in captivity and ignorance. The walls look like gigantic versions (around 50 meters tall) of the Ursini: Themes, Focalization and the Flow of Information 4 walls that still surround European cities with a medieval heritage. Throughout the series, the walls act as barriers that prevent humans from seeing the Titans' world ( Figure 1).
Isayama uses the world of Shingeki no Kyojin as an allegory of Japan, given its isolationist story and its inward-looking culture (Isayama, 2014: ch. 1), but this metaphor has a wide cross-cultural appeal, given the global distribution of walled cities (and countries, viz. the Great Wall of China: Mark 2009). The world theme also presents a dystopian interpretation of renaissance city-states, such as Campanella's Città del Sole (' city of the sun': Eco 2013: 20-30; Sullivan 1983: 1-10), bearing a strong resemblance to the Benthamian/Focauldian 'Panopticon' model of society (Foucault 1995: 4-21). This is shown in a map acting as 'information available for public disclosure', and depicting the world's structure (vol. 3, #12, Figure 2).
The world theme permits the author to establish a precise 'fictional space' The third theme is social structure, which allows us to shed light on the relations governing and connecting the controlling and controlled groups. The world within Titans appear as humanoids of variable size, from 3 to more than 100 meters tall.
On average, Titans are between 7 and 15 meters, like Eren's Titan, which is 15 meters.
Taller Titans include Bertolt Hoover who is 60 meters. Titans also lack primary and secondary sexual features, giving them a gender-less appearance, except for Annie's  interaction, its precise impact is unclear.

Patterns
Our central theoretical claim is defined as follows. As befits initial arcs, these parts of the story reveal only some initial information about the world and its structure, as shown in Figure 2. This type of information is ambiguous: it is not clear whether 'the public' consists of the readers, the citizens within the walls, or both. Internal focalization soon becomes an important narrative element. In the first two arcs, Titans are mindless enemies, the ' other' that besieges humankind. They are 'monsters' that Eren wants to wipe out, until he (and the readers with him) discovers that he is one of them (vol. 2, #8).
However, Eren's transformation reveals that Titans are not simply an external threat to the humans within the world, but also the tools that the elites controlling the world and social structure use to control humans, too. This arc already shows that the Titans theme has a precise intra-diegetic function: they prevent Eren and the other characters from discovering the truth about the world and its structure.
Since the story is narrated through the characters' eyes, the readers mostly experience this form of control on what they know about these themes as an extra-diegetic function.
Even if control doubles as a "meta-theme" on how the narrative structure is organized, certain visual cues allow readers to form hypotheses on the world and The Female Titan (vol. 5-9, #19-33) arc involves Anne Reinhardt, one of the cadets in Eren's class, who appears during an exploratory mission in the Titanravaged wall Maria territories. After a gruesome battle within the innermost wall Rose, Anne is extracted from her Titan, only to enshrine herself in an indestructible crystal cocoon (vol. 8, #32). When Anne tries to climb the walls and escape before her defeat, readers discover that the walls contain many colossal Titans, acting as 'pillars' of this control structure (vol. 9, #33; Figure 4).
In this arc, more 'narrative-internal' information about the world and the social structure themes becomes accessible to both characters and readers. The main characters discover that the members of the so-called 'Wallist religion' know the truth about the world and the walls, and that Anne and the "warriors" represent forces external to the world, and who wish to control the Titans. When the main characters become aware that the elites control the Titans' and humankind's lives (vol. 9, #33), control no longer holds as an intra-diegetic function nor as an extra-diegetic function, since internal focalization applies. Its function as a metatheme becomes even weaker, since by this point characters formulate hypotheses about how the world works that in turn act as cues for readers. In the Clash of the Titans arc (vol. 9-13, #34-50), a crucial change in the information that characters can access occurs. A Wallist priest, Father Nick, begs the survey corps to cover a damaged section of the walls. Father Nick reveals that the walls are made of the solidified skin of giant Titans, and that the royal family possesses the ' coordinate' power: they can force any Titan to obey their will and erase any memory of the citizens within the walls. Father Nick also reveals that 'Krista Lenz', a cadet, is Historia Reiss, the illegitimate heir to the royal family. By talking with her, the survey corps learn more about the secrets behind the world, its walls, the Titans, and those who control these factors.

Ursini: Themes, Focalization and the Flow of Information 13
Two factors allow Eren and the survey corps to further break free from control.
First, the battle with the 'warriors' indirectly causes a breakdown in the world system, in the guise of the revealed Titans. When this happens, control is weakened: consequently, characters and readers alike discover more about the world and the social structure themes. Second, the dialogue between Captain Zoe Hange and Father Nick is the first occasion in which the Titans and the monarchy are connected (vol. 9, #34).
In the meantime, the sudden appearance of More in general, once the control theme loses its intra-and extra-diegetic function, its meta-narrative function disappears as well. Readers can be certain that this visual information is correct, since it presents the bits of knowledge that the characters discover about their own world as being "true" memories of previous events.

Conclusion
Let us take stock. The control theme as an intra-diegetic function in Shingeki no Kyojin also acts as an extra-diegetic function. Our analysis, then, suggests that comics have medium-specific features regarding the interaction of themes and focalization points. Even if control as a theme determines that characters will have a limited access to their own narrative world, and even if the author adopts an internal focalization point, readers can still infer how a narrative works. Visual information and the fact that readers can access several events semi-simultaneously, via panels and pages of an issue, permit readers to infer how the story and the story world operate, thus partially bypassing the effects of control as a meta-theme (cf. also Groensteen 2013: 150-153). In this regard, Shingeki no Kyojin offers a clear example about how these multi-medial differences in the use of focalization points and themes can work.
In this article we have presented an analysis of Shingeki no Kyojin (Shingeki no Kyojin)'s narrative structure and the way information control that the elites apply in that narrative filters the information readers can access. We have shown that internal focalization, coupled with the control theme, can partially conflate the characters and readers' perspectives. However, we have also shown that the medium-specific use of visual information can reduce the impact of control as a meta-theme: readers can access different parts of a story and infer how its structure works, accordingly.