Ravioli

When Theo pitched Attack on Titan Ravioli, he did it the way he pitched everything: with a grin that dared you to laugh first so he wouldn’t have to risk being ridiculous alone.

“Okay, hear me out,” he said, twirling his fork like a conductor’s baton. “Ravioli, but the pasta pieces look like tiny people. And you’re the Titan. You eat them.”

Mara stared at him over her coffee.

“You’re trivializing genocide,” she said.

Theo blinked. “I’m… talking about pasta.”

“Attack on Titan is about cycles of violence, historical trauma, and inherited guilt,” she said, as if reading from a sacred text. “And you’re turning it into novelty food.”

“I just thought—”

“You thought it was funny.”

“I did,” he admitted, softly.

Silence grew between them, thick as broth.

“I can’t be friends with someone who treats suffering like a joke,” Mara said, standing. “Even fictional suffering.”

Theo watched her leave, a man abandoned by both a friend and an imaginary plate of dumplings.

The ravioli idea sat in his head, cooling, growing slightly embarrassing.

Later that night, he wrote a story about it instead.

A Young Writer’s Analysis

The story’s surface humor—human-shaped pasta consumed by a metaphorical Titan—acts as a thin veil over something far less playful: the author’s fear of social rejection. The absurdity of the ravioli concept isn’t really the point; it merely provides a low-stakes stage upon which a very real anxiety can perform.

One suspects the author genuinely thought of the pasta idea first, chuckled to himself, and then immediately imagined a chorus of invisible critics sharpening their ethical knives. Writing the story becomes a kind of preemptive self-defense: by letting the friend reject the idea within the fiction, the author gets to experience that rejection in a controlled environment, where it can be shaped, aestheticized, and ultimately survived.

Mara’s indignation is telling. She speaks in the language of moral certainty, a tone that suggests not just disagreement but disqualification. The author seems quietly terrified of this; of being judged not merely wrong, but unworthy of continued connection.

That the story ends not with reconciliation but with writing is perhaps the most revealing choice. When conversation fails, the author retreats into narrative, where ideas can be offered without eye contact, and laughter can be risked without consequence. It’s a lonely solution, but a familiar one.

And yes, somewhere beneath all of this, there is also probably just a guy who thought Attack on Titan ravioli was funny.

Which, inconveniently, it kind of is.