Attack on Titan Director Explains Season 4's Big Viral Cameos

The director behind Attack on Titan's fourth and final season explained the anime's two major cameos that had gone viral with fans! The second part of the final season is now heating up as it speeds towards its final episode, and the episodes leading up to the final climax have been full of a ton of notable reveals. Eren Yeager has undergone a massive shift from the type of character we had seen in the first three seasons, and it all began with a mysterious flashback that rushed through all sorts of strange images and teases for the future.

With Part 2 of Attack on Titan's final season nearing its end soon, director Yuichiro Hayashi and CGI Producer Yusuke Tannawa held an extended conversation that dug into many of the smaller details bringing Part 2 of the series to life. Speaking about the flashback's surprise cameos of the "Goth Mikasa," "Nerd Armin" and the sauna shot, Hayashi explained that these wild Attack on School Castes cameos were included as a special request from original series creator Hajime Isayama. 

As Hayashi explained, Attack on School Castes was originally included in the manga as a very tiny Easter Egg for dedicated fans, and Isayama had a special request to include it in the anime's version of the flashback, "School Caste was drawn small in the original manga, and [series creator Hajime Isayama] asked us to include it in the script. So we decided to include it in the script." But as Hayashi included this cameo, he wondered if there was another surprise to slip in, and thus led to that sauna shot from one of the manga's covers, "But then I wondered if we could include something else as well. That's when an idea of sauna shot came to my mind. Simply because I wanted some kind of surprise factor that's not in the original manga. I'm so glad it went well."

Explaining some of the other changes made to that flashback sequence, Hayashi revealed those were done to make it more visually appealing in the anime, "That scene in the original manga is very striking, which looks like glass breaking into pieces. But then, that kind of glass-breaking expression could be not so interesting in animation, I thought. I thought about what I should do for quite a long time. Then, I decided to make it more of a flowing image. Like all kinds of memories mixing in with each other chaotically and streaming by in high speed."

What did you think of the Goth Mikasa and Nerd Armin cameos? Was it a fun inclusion for the anime's final season? What are you hoping to see before Attack on Titan's anime comes to an end? Let us know all of your thoughts about it in the comments! You can even reach out to me directly about all things animated and other cool stuff @Valdezology on Twitter!