3 out of 5

As kind of the back half of Isayama’s task of shoving his puzzle-box epic out into a broader plane of story scope – gathering up the lore; combining it more interestingly with its politics – volume 16 has the same kind of clunky (if exciting) vibe as volume 15, almost exclusively stuck to the caves, Eren’s imprisonment, and Astoria’s hopeful conversion. As Mikasa et. al are staging a rescue, we periodically check in on their progress, and similarly swing by Erwen and Pixis to have a kind of muddled non-debate over motivations – this is part of the “shoving” I’m mentioning, where Isayama is bending over backwards to align threads and arcs to where they’re making sense with his evolving understanding of the book and its world – but for the most part, we’re doing a flashback journey in the caves.

The rescue has some “old school” AoT flair, but as we’re in hurry-up-and-wait writing mode, the internal illogics of a lot of this stuff feels a bit more out in the open; the rescue (and the defense against it) feels half conceived, and we lose the weight of taking place in a city, being in an impossibly huge cavern instead. I’m also really not sure how to feel about Kenny. I’m sure his colloquial speak is better untranslated, but it combines with the character’s general “I’m a bad guy” shallowness to make him sort of grating, although he gets a good chapter cliffhanger.

On the plus side, Hajime is better balanced with talking heads here: the pacing keeps chugging along, and conceptually, everything feels very interesting, even if the nitty gritty reads rather stiffly.