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INTEREST: Hajime Isayama Shares His Inspiration for Attack on Titan

There are several reports, pre anime reports, that he was heavily inspired by the 2006 Muv Luv Alternative visual novel. Some even claim that he publically admited he "plagiarized" the concept to make AoT.

casenumber00 wrote:

There are several reports, pre anime reports, that he was heavily inspired by the 2006 Muv Luv Alternative visual novel. Some even claim that he publically admited he "plagiarized" the concept to make AoT.

Hi. As the subscriber who always drags Muv-Luv into it (and does ML panels at your local convention) let's say this is somewhat true, but not the complete story. Yes, there are several places that Isayama explicitly credits Muv-Luv Alternative as an influence, such as this video: https://youtu.be/rHj0qUwuu2Y?t=2m13s. He has also appeared as a guest on the weekly Muv-Luv livestream.

But! Isayama has also cited other inspirations for Attack On Titan. Aside from the rather impressive geographic influence discussed in this article… IIRC, at one point the Wikipedia entry for Attack On Titan said he was inspired by Project Arms and Berserk (the page doesn't show it now; maybe an edit, or maybe my memory's wrong).

And as much as AoT resembles MLA (humanity pushed to the brink of extinction by man-eating monsters, fighting back with cool technology, but betrayed by its own political in-fighting), it also sharply differs. Notably, AoT completely disposes of Muv-Luv's harem setups, eliminates sexual content more or less entirely, and opts for more of a screaming shonen protagonist, as opposed to ML's videogaming slacker (though he becomes more of a screamer as the story continues). The premise and tone are similar, but structurally these two are miles apart.