With Attack on Titan 3, developed by Omega Force and published by Koei Tecmo Games, reportedly scheduled to release on December 10, 2026, Attack on Titan fans have another reason to love the franchise, but beyond the Titans, battles, and all the emotional damage, this series has been deeply relatable and has inflicted on us one of the most unsettling stories about how Marley and Paradis raise generations of children to fear each other.
Marley and Paradis are presented as enemies separated by geography, history, race and a lot of violence. For much of the story, the people of Paradis believe that those away from them are the greatest threat to humanity. Eldians living under Marleyan rule are taught to understand their own ancestry through shame, while the people of Paradis are presented as dangerous devils who must never be allowed to threaten the rest of the world. However, neither society operated with the complete truth.
By the time the characters in Attack on Titan begin discovering what has actually happened, generations of people have already been raised on versions of history that make their fear seem fully justified, and the scary thing is how ordinary it looks.
Most Effective Propaganda Might Not Look Like One
Honestly, it feels reasonable that Attack on Titan spends so much time showing ordinary people repeating what they have been taught rather than just giving us a list of leaders coming in and delivering speeches. Propaganda becomes especially effective when it enters the day-to-day life: appearing in school lessons, family conversations, public rituals, and the stories a community tell about itself.
It presents which historical events deserve to be remembered and which people are presented as a permanent threat. Marley does not need each Eldian child to understand the entire Eldian history; it needs them to accept that their ancestry makes them responsible for its crimes. Similarly, a society that believes its survival depends on defeating the enemy can begin to treat every compromise as weakness and empathy as disloyalty, perhaps. This is how the political fear becomes social pressure.
If everyone around you insists that a particular group is dangerous, challenging that belief carries consequences, and you risk losing the approval of your family, community or even the institutions that determine one’s future. Agreeing to the dominating narrative can be an easier choice than admitting that the people you have been taught to fear might be more complicated than the stories about them.
The Marley Portrayal
The Marley’s treatment of Eldians is one of the clearest examples of how government can turn an entire community’s identity into a justification for its oppression. Marley’s treatment of Eldians is one of the clearest examples of how a system can make an entire community’s identity into a justification for its oppression.
Eldians are forced to live in the designated zones, wear identifying armbands and face discrimination because of their ancestry. Marley also exploits Eldians’ ability to transform for military purposes, even when using their “inherent danger” as an excuse to keep them as subordinates. The contradiction is right on the face: Marley wants the power Eldians possess but does not want to treat them equally. There is also the education system. Let us look at it through Gabi’s worldview! Gabi’s worldview makes sense to her because the adults around her have constructed it in a certain way, with teachers reinforcing it and family living within it.
Her future looks as though, depending on it, which is not to say that everything she does should be excused, but to recognise that children do not develop their beliefs in isolation; they absorb the language, anxieties and prejudices of the people responsible for raising them, and when the beliefs are repeated oftentimes, questioning can even feel like betrayal. However, Falco Grice shows that propaganda is powerful, but it does not make every individual incapable of independent thought.
Paradis Has Its Own Problem
For a long time, the people inside the Walls believe they are the last of humans, trapped in a world of Titans. Their understanding of the past is limited by the circumstances that surround them, including the suppression of historical knowledge under the royal government. When the truth about the outside world comes up, the story seems to change, and the Titans are no longer just some mysterious monsters posing a threat to humanity; the people inside the Walls discover that they belong to a larger history involving Eldia, Marley, imperial violence and conflicts.
The revelation does not make Paradis enlightened all of a sudden but gives the people something new to know; however, the information alone does not guarantee a wise response. The people of Paradis inherit the consequences of Eldian history without having personally participated in it. Eldians living under Marley inherit the shame and punishment attached to the same history. Marley, meanwhile, uses the threat associated with Titans to justify its military expansion and discrimination. The past becomes an instrument of political power in the current day.
Who Gets to Decide What Survival Looks Like?
There is a particular kind of trap in the way both societies understand survival. When people are taught that their existence depends on defeating another group, violence starts to appear less like a political decision and more like an unavoidable necessity. While Marley claims that it must maintain its military strength and control over Eldians to protect itself from its enemies, Paradis faces an actual threat and struggles to protect its people. Both have histories that explain their fear, and the consequences of the people’s beliefs are not equal in every situation, and neither society discharges its responsibilities simply because their people are in fear.
The more interesting question is what happens when the fear becomes the only language through which survival can be discussed. What happens when children want to question the narrative? What happens to the person who refuses to hate someone just because everyone else insists? What happens when leaders benefit from making the questions seem rather dangerous?
There appears to be no easy answer, of course, but the series does make it clear that when children are taught that another group is less human, they are also being taught which form of cruelty they should learn to tolerate. The children do not “choose” the world they are born into, but they have to eventually confront what they have been taught to believe about the people living outside it, and that is a much more uncomfortable thing to ask of a person than simply asking them to identify the enemy.
What are your opinions about the show’s premise? Tell us in the comments.
Watch Attack on Titan 3 – Official Gameplay Reveal Trailer on YouTube.
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