The thing about Attack on Titan was, that was just how it was. You watched the first season and thought it was incredible. Then you watched the second season and felt that compared to it, the first season had been a little weak. Then you watched the third season and saw Erwin lead the Survey Corps in a charge against the Beast Titan, Captain Levi fly into a rage and hack the Beast Titan to pieces, and Armin get burned alive to create an opening for Eren. Then came the climactic, emotionally charged scene in the Final Episode, where Armin and Erwin's lives hung in the balance, followed by the moment when everyone went to see the ocean together and Eren pointed toward it.
Only then did you understand what it meant for something to be a masterpiece!
What it meant to be the perfect union of commercial appeal, artistry, and thematic depth!
Fullmetal Alchemist only became a masterpiece after it ended, too. But ninety-nine percent of Attack on Titan fans believed that it would be just as good, as long as it got a normal ending! Its early story was just that incredible. It was like taking the Gaokao: you got perfect scores in every subject but English, and won gold medals in every national competition. As long as you passed English, you'd still score nearly seven hundred points. Would getting into Tsinghua or Peking University be a problem?
As long as the ending was normal, even if it fell a little short, that wouldn't be enough to knock Attack on Titan off its pedestal. But the ending was like a student beating up the proctor during the English exam, then beating up the other students in the exam hall, causing total chaos, and getting their results canceled for