why did Attack on Titan become such a global huge success?

I’ve been watching anime for over 10 years, and after seeing countless anime , I’ve thought a lot about why Attack on Titan became such a massive global success.

People usually credit its brilliant plot, foreshadowing, and attention to detail, and rightly so. But I think one of the most overlooked reasons is Eren’s personality.

Anime often recycles character types. After enough series, you can usually predict a character’s whole personality from the first episode: the overpowered but humble isekai protagonist with clingy jealous female followers, the calm genius strategist, the loud muscle-headed comic relief, the shy character, the tsundere, and so on. The plots may change, but the personalities often repeat.

At first, Eren seems like another familiar shounen protagonist: impulsive, hot-headed, brave, determined, and obsessed with defeating the enemy. We think we’ve seen this character countless times before.

Then the twist reveals that future Eren influenced the past and allowed his own mother to be eaten by a Titan so his younger self would hate Titans, join the Survey Corps, and eventually follow the path toward wiping out humanity through the Rumbling. This forces us to reinterpret everything we thought we knew about him. The emotional, reckless boy from the beginning was also doing an unimaginably cold and calculated plan.

That twist doesn’t just redefine the plot, it redefines Eren himself. He changes from what seems like a standard shounen protagonist into one of anime’s most psychologically complex and morally ambiguous main characters. In my opinion, this subversion of a familiar archetype is one of the most overlooked reasons Attack on Titan left such a lasting impact, regardless of whether people liked or disliked the ending.