[Avrorrange]

Originally Posted by BW95

You mean the sense of despair and how the author kills off the good guys?

Not entirely, it's about how the remaining human territories are surrounded by walls and how the story's mainly a conflict between different human characters even though there's a much bigger threat out there. There's also the fact that at the end of vol 4,

Spoiler for vol 4 and comparison to Shingeki no Kyojin:

the humans won, but basically, the entire human army's practically wiped out in the process of doing so, which was more than devastating than the Battle of Trost. If I remember correctly,90% of the JSDF was wiped out and out of the thousand Private Security who participated in the battle, less than twenty survived at the end .The entire battle was also about repairing the wall.The core characters does not die(at least for now), but the author does have a habit of introducing characters that were well developed for a specific volume and then have them killed at the end, usually with the MC doing all the mercy kills.The female lead's also MUCH more psychotic than Mikasa.