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Attack on Titan and K-pop are both making huge cultural waves in Japan right now. Attack on Titan, presumably, because of its inherent badassness (plus its currently screening and upcoming movies), and K-pop because men and women alike find the melodies extremely catchy and, let’s face it, the girls and guys in the videos extremely pleasing to the eye.

So it was, of course, only a matter of time before these two pop cultural, ahem, titans clashed in one way or another. And while we were expecting, eventually, some kind of official collaboration between the anime franchise and, say, KARA – the K-pop band largely credited with kicking off Japan’s current K-pop boom – it turns out the first piece of Internet ephemera to, accidentally, hilariously, combine the two is just so, so much better.

At first glance, the video for K-pop group SISTAR’s “Shake it” looks basically like any other non-Psy K-pop video: A bunch of attractive women doing a highly choreographed dance, colorful high school backdrop, wildly shocked and disapproving authority figure watching from the sidelines (in this case an inevitably foreign teacher)…you know the drill.

But when the video made its way to Japanese shores, Netizens started realizing that there was something about the specific choreography at the 1:45 mark of the video that somehow seemed very familiar. Let’s take a look:

Still can’t spot the AoT connection? Okay, take a look at this conveniently mashed-up video a Korean Titan fan put together:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWuwhr_AEsE

Yep, the Japanese Web can’t get enough of SISTAR’s video because of that brief dance move that looks exactly like an early, iconic Attack on Titan scene, and now you too will never be able to unsee the completely hilarious resemblance. In the eyes of the Japanese Net, this particular dance move looks a whole lot like the way a specific type of Titan in the anime franchise runs. The especially child-like, even by mentally-stunted Titan standards, Titan in question is called the “kikoshu” in Japanese, which seems to have been most commonly rendered in English as Deviant Type Titan, but AoT fans can feel free to debate the proper translation in the comments.

It’s probably safe to say that the girls of SISTAR and their dance choreographer probably never made the connection during production of the video, but considering the otaku crowd’s propensity for both Attack on Titan and dancing, we can see this happy accident leading to the group getting a lot more traction Japan-side!

Top image: YouTube/1theK (원더케이)
[ Read in Japanese ]