‘Attack on Titan’ Goes ‘Iron Man 3’ With A Character Fake-Out

Attack on Titan‘s third season has revealed a major political conspiracy behind the scenes, and the latest episode brought this to a climax with a full-on parallel to Iron Man 3 as “King Fritz” was revealed to be nothing more than a stand-in king just as The Mandarin was proven to be fake.

When the higher ups of the kingdom prove that they’re not thinking about the citizens, King Fritz is revealed to be a fraud who’s really just some old man who was sleeping.

After Erwin and Shadis successfully unseat the nobles from power, one of the former nobles angrily kicks Fritz’s chair. Yelling for the “dotard” (which can be used to refer to someone as a senile old man) to wake up, all Fritz responds is with questions over whether or not it’s time to eat.

This shares a strong parallel with the events of Iron Man 3, as for most of the film the threat of a mysterious terrorist named The Mandarin was being presented as a huge deal. But when Tony Stark finally confronts him, he finds out that “The Mandarin” is actually a persona created by a shadowy government in order to hide the fact that they were the ones carrying out its terrorist attacks.

So much like in Attack on Titan, the role of the figurehead was merely a way to insert a placeholder scapegoat to distract. In Attack on Titan, it had been distracting the Survey Corps and the people within the walls who already had enough problems dealing with constant Titan attacks as a select group of nobles were really making all of the decisions behind the walls.

Attack on Titan was originally created by Hajime Isayama for Kodansha’s Bessatsu Shonen Magazine in 2009. The series has since been collected into 23 volumes as of 2017, and it’s set in a world where the last remnants of humanity live within a walled city in order to escape the danger of the Titans, a race of giants monsters that eats humans.

The lead character, Eren Yeager, ends up joining the military with his two childhood friends Mikasa and Armin after the Titans break through the wall and attack his hometown. Now Eren, Mikasa, and Armin must survive in a world where they not only have the Titans to fear, but the very humans they are trying to save.