IF YOU LIKED ATTACK ON TITAN, THESE ARE NEXT (Part 2/3): CHAINSAW MAN to 86 EIGHTY-SIX

CHAINSAW MAN

This one is not for everyone. It is absolutely for you.

Chainsaw Man, twenty twenty two. Available on Crunchyroll.

Denji is the most pathetic protagonist in anime, and that’s a compliment. He has almost nothing. He wants almost nothing, just a normal life, some food, someone to hold. The world he lives in is absurd and grotesque and funny in the darkest possible way. MAPPA animated this with an unhinged commitment to craft that makes every action sequence feel like an event.

But the real trick this show pulls is tonal. It is genuinely funny, and then without warning it becomes genuinely devastating. Midway through the first season, a mission goes catastrophically wrong in a way that redefines the show’s relationship with its own characters. You realize the rules are different here. Attachment is a liability. The show knows that and keeps making you attach anyway. If Attack on Titan’s ability to flip from hope to horror in a single episode kept you addicted, Chainsaw Man runs that same playbook with even less mercy.

KABANERI OF THE IRON FORTRESS

This one feels almost engineered to land on this list, and that’s not a criticism.

Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, twenty sixteen. Available on Crunchyroll and Prime Video.

Humanity is barricaded inside fortress stations. The dead walk outside. A young engineer refuses to accept the rules everyone else has accepted, and that refusal costs him and transforms him. The visual DNA here overlaps with Attack on Titan in ways that feel intentional. The original director worked on both. You will feel that in the framing, the color palette, the way danger is staged.

What this show does differently is its pace. It moves fast, almost recklessly. There is no slow burn. The action arrives early and it’s spectacular. Around the midpoint, a faction conflict introduces a level of human cruelty that rivals any Titan-related threat, and that pivot gives the show real teeth. It’s not Attack on Titan. It doesn’t need to be. It’s a focused, thrilling, sometimes brutal survival story that scratches the exact itch you’re here for.

TRANSITION HOOK

Six in. We’re about to get into shows that are slower, stranger, and possibly more haunting than anything else on this list.

MADE IN ABYSS

This next one looks like a children’s adventure anime. Do not be fooled by that for even one second.

Made in Abyss, twenty seventeen. Available on Hidive.

A girl descends into an ancient pit of impossible depth to find her missing mother. A robot boy with no memory follows her. The art is gorgeous. The world is genuinely wondrous in the early episodes. You will feel the pull of exploration, the excitement of discovery. The show earns your full trust.

Then it spends that trust. Midway through the first season, the tone shifts in a way that is difficult to describe without spoiling, but it involves the actual physical cost of descending. The deeper you go, the worse it gets. The show does not protect its characters. It does not protect you. There are sequences in this anime that are genuinely disturbing, not for shock value, but because the show has made you care so completely that consequence lands with full weight. This is the same emotional mechanism Attack on Titan used in its earliest seasons. That creeping realization that nobody is safe.

86 EIGHTY-SIX

If the political machinery behind the Titans made you angrier than the Titans themselves, this is your show.

86, Eighty-Six, twenty twenty one. Available on Crunchyroll.

A republic is at war with autonomous drones. But the drones aren’t the enemy. The real story is what the republic has done to a group of people it decided weren’t citizens, calling them eighty-sixes, sending them to fight in machines, and erasing them from official existence. The show splits between a young handler who communicates remotely with the squadron and Shin, the squadron leader who has seen everything and feels almost nothing anymore.

The first season is methodical and heartbreaking. It builds. The relationship between handler and squadron develops across radio transmissions, and somehow that distance makes the emotional connection more intense. In the final episodes, the show escalates to something close to unbearable. Characters you’ve spent twenty episodes with face the kind of ending the story always promised but you hoped it was wrong about. This show is about institutional dehumanization, about how a society decides who counts. If that theme burned through you in Attack on Titan, this one takes it further.

MID-ROLL CTA

We’re two thirds through. The last four picks are the ones most people miss entirely. Don’t go anywhere.