Spoiler warning: this article is my theorizing and wild speculation after watching the first 77 episodes of Attack on Titan.
Please read Part 1 and Part 2 before reading this article.
Part 1 is here: A Two-Thousand-Year Dream: A Complete Plot Analysis of Attack on Titan (Part 1)
Part 2 is here: A Two-Thousand-Year Dream: A Complete Plot Analysis of Attack on Titan (Part 2)
Part 3: A Two-Thousand-Year Dream
Having covered the time, place, characters, and cause in the earlier parts, I’ll now continue analyzing the course of Attack on Titan’s story based on the speculation from Part 2, and then make a prediction about how it will end.
I. Ymir
The story’s “course” begins with two breaches of the Walls, involving two forces outside the Walls.
The first human force beyond the Walls is the surviving Ymir clan.
In the “parallel-universe World War II” I proposed in Part 2, the Ymir gods’ Titan power fell into Nazi hands. Although they lost the Titan power, the clan was still supported by its people and lived in seclusion somewhere along the Nordic coast. Then, in the generation born about 60 years before the story of Attack on Titan begins, for reasons not yet revealed, the position of clan leader—that is, “Ymir”—could only be inherited by an illegitimate daughter carrying the clan’s bloodline. She did not want to inherit the position of Ymir, so she left her people.
That is the Ymir we see in the story:
Her life before becoming a mindless Titan should be a mirror image of Krista’s, which is why she later develops a special affection for Krista after meeting her:
After leaving her people, Ymir was unfortunately infected and turned into a mindless Titan (as the ancestors of the Germans, the Ymir clan could also be infected by the runaway warrior-unit virus), sleepwalked for 60 years, and only returned to human form after accidentally encountering the hometown breach team and eating one of its intelligent Titans. Afterward—probably after Wall Maria was breached—she slipped into the Walls with the refugee tide. The rest of her story is mostly spelled out in the manga, so I won’t go into it here.
II. The Hometown People
The second human force beyond the Walls is the Hometown people.
Their main characteristics are:
- They are implacably hostile to the Wall people (the Germanic nation), apparently because of a blood feud;
- They possess intelligent Titan technology and have intelligent Titans of their own;
- They believe the Coordinate belongs to them and intend to “take back” the Coordinate inside the Walls.
If you accept the speculation I put forward in Part 2, the Hometown people’s identity becomes obvious—
They are the Jews who, in the parallel-universe World War II, were discovered by the Nazis to have the potential to turn into Titans and were consequently slaughtered on a massive scale.
They and the Wall people are mortal enemies both publicly and personally. Publicly, the Wall people’s ancestors destroyed the world in the past and might destroy it again in the future, making them humanity’s public enemy. Personally, the Jews were massacred by the Germans during the war. Put the two together, and the Hometown people—the Jews—have more than enough reason to exterminate the Germans inside the Walls.
The Hometown people’s story probably goes something like this:
Most of the Jews were wiped out in the war. Afterward, the surviving Jewish people awoke. Just like the Israelis in our parallel universe after World War II, this newly awakened people unleashed an enormous amount of energy. They have never lacked top scientists, and once organized, their military power became formidable as well.
The organized Jews gathered in the “Hometown” and began investigating the origin and history of the Titans. After acquiring a large amount of intelligence, they may have captured several intelligent Titans seized from the Ymir clan by the Nazis during the war, taking advantage of the chaos caused by the mass infection of Germans. Just as the First King led the Germans across the sea to build the Walls, the Jews of the Hometown began developing their own Titan technology around the few intelligent Titans they had captured.
By then, most modern technology had already been lost, so the Hometown scientists began researching Titans under conditions far more difficult than those faced by the Nazis. Their progress must have been painfully slow. I believe their technology, while certainly more advanced than that inside the Walls, was not vastly superior. Apart from Titan science, their technology in many areas had probably not recovered to pre-civilization levels. Otherwise, they could simply have used modern weapons of war to wipe out the people inside the Walls.
Worse still, the Titan technology best suited to them—the Titan power and technology controlled by the Reiss family—had been brought inside the Walls by the First King. They could only begin with the incomplete records left behind by their enemy, the Nazis, making an already difficult task even harder.
So, once again, the control unit had no solution. For the Hometown people, intelligent Titans were therefore a limited resource, inheritable only by having the next generation eat the previous one; every death meant one fewer. And in developing the warrior units, the Jews had learned from the Nazis’ mistakes and proceeded much more cautiously, so progress was slow. Thus, for the decades after the Titan disaster began, the Jews of the Hometown cautiously advanced their Titan research while trying to survive in a world overrun by Titans.
The Hometown people’s living conditions may have been much harsher than those inside the Walls. We can infer this from Grisha’s scattered remarks (yes, Grisha should be one of the Hometown people; I’ll analyze that later)—
From this passage, the Hometown people may have lived in constant fear of Titans, and there may have been no gap between rich and poor. My guess is that Hometown society resembled a wartime military administration, with the state and army organizing production and distributing resources. If the society inside the Walls is a feudal market economy, Hometown may be a militarist planned-economy state.
The Hometown people’s Titan research probably focused on several areas:
Research 1. Like the Nazis before them, alter the warrior units’ infectiousness so they can affect their own people without running out of control.
Research 2. Develop and test warrior-unit variants with different functions, and develop and improve Titan abilities. For example, they may have developed the Armored Titan and the Colossus Titan. We still don’t know whether these abilities were directly inherited from the intelligent Titans they captured or redeveloped from scratch. But at least the following ability should have been developed by the Hometown scientists themselves: the ability to operate by moonlight (as mentioned in Part 2)—
It was precisely because Hometown Titans possessed this “new ability” to move at night that Ymir was unsure whether the principles behind her intelligent Titan and the Hometown Titans were the same:
Research 3. Among all the Titan abilities developed by Hometown scientists, one was naturally very special: the “Coordinate” ability. Once the Hometown people learned about the Coordinate, they desperately wanted to develop it. If they were determined to destroy the people inside the Walls, they would almost certainly clash with the Reiss family, and only an ability resembling the Reiss family’s Coordinate could counterbalance it and improve their odds of victory. More importantly, the Coordinate both protects normal humans and controls Titans. If developed and improved, it might even become a superweapon capable of eliminating every Titan in the world and turning the tables in one stroke.
But Research 3 was clearly blocked. Developing such an ultimate ability as the Coordinate was extraordinarily difficult. So the Hometown people’s goals in developing Titan technology became twofold:
- Use Titans to take back the Coordinate.
- Use Titans to exact revenge—to give them a taste of their own medicine—and kill every German inside the Walls.
I say “take back” because, beyond their personal grudge against the people inside the Walls, there is an even subtler relationship: the rulers inside the Walls—the Reiss family—were originally their own ancestral Ymir gods. The Coordinate used to seal the people inside the Walls should, in theory, have been the divine power of their own clan. Their own king had become their ultimate enemy.
But the Hometown people decided to “kill the god.” If you help the enemy, then even if you were once our god, you are our enemy now.
They not only wanted to reclaim what had always belonged to them; more importantly, unlike the First King, burdened by too many dark memories, the newly risen Hometown people had a far more optimistic view of technological development. They trusted their scientific ability. Once they obtained the Coordinate, they hoped to break the fate of its weakening and turn it into humanity’s ultimate shield. They believed that, with the Coordinate’s blessing, humanity might be able to sweep all the Titans from the world and become its master once again.
These two goals for developing Titans were, in fact, the two missions later assigned to the breach team.
Mission 1: Take the Coordinate.
Mission 2: After taking the Coordinate, kill everyone inside the Walls.
By comparison, Mission 1 was more important. Once they had the Coordinate, anything was possible.
The Hometown group’s Titan research took the efforts of several generations of scientists and only barely succeeded shortly before 845, when the story begins. They finally developed warrior units whose compatibility, stability, and functions basically met requirements, and assembled a small army of intelligent Titans capable of challenging the Reiss family’s forces inside the Walls.
More importantly, the Hometown group developed a knockoff version of the “Coordinate”! Compared with the real Coordinate, its effects may have been much weaker, but it could still do quite a lot.
For example, by canceling out the Reiss Coordinate’s ability to suppress warrior units, they could infect the nervous systems of people nearby who had been infected with warrior units and turn them into mindless Titans. That is what the Beast Titan did in Connie’s hometown—
But the effective range may have been very short, perhaps only a few kilometers, and subject to conditions we still don’t know about. Otherwise, the Beast Titan could simply have turned many more people inside the Walls into mindless Titans.
They could also control mindless Titans with a roar—
But this control did not seem to work as precisely as the “official” version inside Eren; at times, it apparently failed to take complete control:
In any case, even a knockoff version could at least protect its user in a showdown with the Reiss family’s genuine Coordinate.
The knockoff Coordinate’s warrior units were installed in at least two people: Annie and the Beast Titan.
The Beast Titan was not only the strongest warrior commander in the Hometown military; some of the warrior units in his body may have been the first generation successfully developed by the Hometown. Before that, these warrior units may have been tested on apes and then transplanted into him, which may explain why the Titan he transforms into has an ape-like form.
And so Reiner, Bertholdt, Annie, and some random guy—the four-person breach team—set out after receiving two missions from the Hometown leadership: take the Coordinate and kill everyone inside the Walls. (Why the warrior commander did not set out with them remains unknown.)
But disaster struck before they even got started. The breach team happened upon Ymir sleepwalking in the wilderness, and the random guy was eaten. Ymir became an intelligent Titan. The breach team was down to three.
III. Two Breaches of the Walls
In 845, the breach team finally reached the outer side of the Walls. Wall Maria was breached.
What’s very suspicious is that the timing of this breach was almost too perfect.
If things had happened a few years earlier, and the Reiss family’s Titan power had still been with Uri, the Warrior unit would probably have been wiped out by Uri on the spot. But in 845, the Reiss family’s Titan power had only recently changed hands, and Frieda, who had possessed it for barely any time at all, still couldn’t bring out its full power. That gave the Warriors a chance to fight their way into the Walls.
That is precisely why Frieda later died at Grisha’s hands—the
During this period, the Reiss family’s Titan power (the Coordinate) was at most half-activated. That created the perfect window of opportunity for the Warriors to attack the Walls.
This inevitably makes you wonder whether the Warriors—at least the Warrior unit—had access to some intelligence about the Coordinate before they made their move. They attacked at this particular moment not only because their own technology had matured, but also because they had chosen their window carefully.
So how did they know that the Coordinate couldn’t exert its full power at the time, and that this was the right moment to attack inside the Walls?
Two explanations.
Explanation 1: There were spies from the Warriors’ homeland inside the Walls, occasionally passing messages back home.
This seems extremely unlikely at present. After all, getting in and out of the Walls is incredibly difficult and dangerous for humans, so how could intelligence have been transmitted?
What’s more, we seem able to establish that the homeland knew very little about the situation inside the Walls. When the Beast Titan first encountered the people inside the Walls, he seemed never to have seen ODM gear before, and appeared to know nothing about the fighting ability of the people inside the Walls—
As for whether the Warrior unit communicated with spies inside the Walls after reaching the foot of the Wall, we simply have no way of knowing. So I can’t completely rule out the spy theory. Personally, I would love a later plot twist revealing that a character who had appeared long ago was actually a spy who had been hiding inside the Walls for years. Now that would be explosive.
Explanation 2: No spies, but there was a form of ‘sensing.’
I lean toward this explanation. I think the Coordinate was somewhat like a signal tower that the intelligent Titans could sense. The Coordinate was a cloud-computing CPU, while the control unit on an intelligent Titan was an ordinary CPU. The two should have been able to interact to some degree. For example, when the Coordinate’s ability to roar was active, every intelligent Titan would feel its mind and spirit being shaken:
So my guess is that while the Coordinate was functioning normally inside the Reiss family’s intelligent Titan, the Warrior unit could detect the strength and general direction of its signal like a radar.
When the Reiss family changed successors and the Coordinate entered the body of the new heir, its signal weakened for an extended period, until the new heir learned to use it skillfully. If the homeland’s intelligent Titans could remotely sense a pattern in which the signal suddenly weakened and stayed weak for a long time, the most reasonable conclusion would be that the Reiss family had changed successors.
This explains why the Warrior unit attacked at that moment. Before setting out, they had concluded from the scraps of old, fragmentary information the homeland had gathered over the years that the Coordinate was in the hands of the Reiss family, on the innermost side of the Walls. Then they set out after sensing the signal pattern described above. Once they reached the Walls, they could still sense that the Coordinate was weak, and that it was somewhere at the center of the Walls. So the reasonable conclusion remained: the Coordinate was inside the body of the new Reiss heir, located within the innermost Wall.
At this point, the two missions assigned to the Warrior unit—‘reclaim the Coordinate’ and ‘kill everyone inside the Walls’—were really one and the same. They would break through the Wall and let mindless Titans in to kill the people in the outer districts, while advancing toward the Reiss family’s location on the innermost side. At most, they would leave the people in the innermost district alive a little longer, then wipe them out once they had confirmed that the Coordinate was in their hands. That way, both missions would be accomplished.
So when the first Wall—the Wall of Maria—was breached, the Warrior unit followed the flood of refugees toward the second Wall—the Wall of Rose—as planned.
But then something bizarre happened. While they were on their way to the Wall of Rose, the Coordinate’s signal suddenly vanished!
The reason, of course, was that Grisha had eaten Frieda beneath the Reiss family’s chapel, and the Coordinate had entered Grisha’s body.
The various components of the system have compatibility requirements, especially the Coordinate. Based on the clues we have so far, only members of the Reiss family can use the Coordinate’s power—
And since Grisha did not have Reiss blood, he couldn’t activate the Coordinate. It was effectively dormant, and its signal fell too low to detect. (Of course, the Coordinate didn’t stay with Grisha for long. That same night it moved to Eren, where it also seemed to remain dormant until it awakened in Episode 50.)
So, with no idea what was going on, the Warrior unit had no choice but to suspend its attack. The people inside the Walls thus managed, thanks to Grisha’s meddling, to hold on to the Wall of Rose in a state of total confusion.
The Warrior unit slipped inside the Walls along with the refugees and began investigating the mystery of the Coordinate’s disappearance. The reasonable guess is that they had learned to some extent that the Reiss family had been wiped out and the Coordinate stolen, but since they had failed to find the clue that was Grisha, they could never locate the Coordinate. To avoid accidentally harming it, they had no choice but to postpone their plan to breach the Walls indefinitely. Disguising their identities, they began searching for the missing Coordinate throughout the entire Wall territory.
Not long afterward, they joined the Training Corps. The reason isn’t entirely clear from the clues we have so far, but possible explanations include: 1. As underage ‘orphans’ living inside the Walls, joining the Training Corps was the ideal livelihood and the most reliable cover identity; 2. Confident in their own abilities, they expected to easily rank in the top 10 at graduation, which would let them choose where to go afterward and make it easier to get close to the people in power and continue their investigation. In fact, that’s exactly what they did.
A quick aside on the three-person Warrior unit:
Reiner
Key word: Split personality
During training, Reiner couldn’t bear the psychological pressure of possibly murdering his comrades in the future, and developed dissociative identities. One personality was the ‘soldier,’ who believed he was an ordinary Training Corps soldier; the other was the ‘warrior,’ a person from the homeland carrying out a secret mission. After that, Reiner had several episodes of mental short-circuiting, including prematurely exposing his identity and abducting Eren before they had even confirmed that the Coordinate was inside Eren.
Reiner is also split in terms of his sexual orientation. He’s bisexual. On the one hand, he’s obviously attracted to the universally adored Krista, and in several inner monologues dreams of marrying her; on the other hand, he has feelings for Connie that go beyond those between comrades.
Bertholdt
Key word: Air
No presence whatsoever.
Annie
Key word: Combat
The inspiration for Annie’s fighting style probably came from the Jewish people’s own martial art—the Israeli close-quarters combat system Krav Maga.
(If you’re interested, search for ‘KRAV MAGA’ yourself. You might be able to find all the moves Annie used in the manga. If you do, let me know.)
In 850, the Warrior unit graduated from the Training Corps. At the same time, five years of investigation had yielded nothing. The Warrior unit mistakenly believed they could now conclude that the Coordinate was not inside the second Wall, the Wall of Rose, so they decided to shift the focus of their investigation to the inside of the third Wall, the Wall of Sina. The Wall of Rose had become worthless. And so the goal of ‘eliminating the people inside the Walls’ was activated once again.
The second breach begins—
Unexpectedly, the Titan power inside Eren awakened for the first time at precisely this moment. He also conveniently sealed the hole in the gate that Bertholdt had kicked open.
And just like that, the thread that had gone cold five years earlier was picked up again. Reiner and the others realized that the Coordinate that had inexplicably vanished five years ago was connected to Eren, but they still couldn’t confirm that the Coordinate was inside Eren because they hadn’t ‘sensed’ it. Either way, the suspicion that Eren was carrying the Coordinate was overwhelming. They had no choice but to abandon the breach once again, observe him from the shadows for the time being, and wait for a chance to seize Eren.
At last, the opportunity came. During the Survey Corps’ expedition outside the Walls, Annie appeared as the Female Titan and abducted Eren, but failed. She later exposed her identity and was captured after losing the fight.
At that point, perhaps tired of how long Reiner and the others had been dragging things out, the homeland’s strongest intelligent Titan—the Beast Titan, commander of the warriors—came in person, bringing a new group of people with him. He first slipped into the border area inside the Wall of Rose and activated a knockoff Coordinate, turning everyone in Connie’s village into mindless Titans. He then launched the battle at Utgard Castle to test the fighting ability of the people inside the Walls. During that battle, Ymir exposed her identity to protect Krista.
After the battle at Utgard Castle ended, Reiner’s brain short-circuited on the Wall after taking one stimulus too many. The simple-minded Bertholdt got worked up too, and the two of them tied Eren up without caring about the consequences, even though they still hadn’t fully confirmed whether the Coordinate was inside him.
During the later pursuit, Eren used the power to roar, and the Coordinate inside his body began to awaken. Every intelligent Titan felt its mind and spirit tremble, realizing that Eren was the Coordinate.
At the same time, Rod Reiss inside the Walls finally confirmed that the Coordinate stolen when his family was wiped out was inside Eren, and he also tried to seize Eren.
The events that follow are basically all out in the open, so I won’t go through them in detail here.
4. Grisha Yeager
As the outline above makes clear, the homeland’s plan was thrown into chaos entirely by Grisha Yeager’s interference. So who exactly was Grisha?
1. Grisha was probably from the homeland
He knew a great deal about the world inside and outside the Walls. His medical skills also seemed highly advanced—he once helped the people inside the Walls deal with a major epidemic—which suggests that he possessed scientific technology far beyond what existed inside the Walls. Both points fit the premise that the homeland knew more about the truth of the world and had more advanced technology than the people inside the Walls.
As of the latest point in the serialization (Episode 77), there is no clue that any other power besides the homeland and Ymir’s people exists outside the Walls. So the reasonable guess is that Grisha was from the homeland. More precisely, Grisha may have been a doctor or biochemist from the homeland.
2. Grisha’s purpose in coming inside the Walls—the basement
Grisha came inside the Walls to find the basement.
The basement should have existed long before that. The reason is that when Grisha first approached the Walls and happened to encounter Instructor Keith on patrol, he already seemed to be holding the basement key that would later be passed on to Eren—
Therefore, the basement should have been built before the war began, and it seems to conceal secrets that neither the people from the homeland nor the people inside the Walls fully understand. Grisha must have learned something about the basement while investigating in the homeland, and then risked coming inside the Walls to look for it.
3. Grisha’s position
Judging from the dialogue above, Grisha’s position was:
He believed it was wrong for most people inside the Walls to stick their heads in the sand and merely eke out an existence. He obviously didn’t think the Reiss family’s inaction was right either. Nor would he agree with the homeland’s militarized rule at home and extermination of other peoples abroad—otherwise, why would he have risked coming inside the Walls? He was more sympathetic to the Survey Corps: fighting the Titans for the freedom of humanity.
I think that, as one of the central figures driving the plot, Grisha’s own position should not be an alliance with any of the camps above, but should in some sense transcend them. What Grisha carries, I suspect, is some kind of ultimate ideal that the author has poured into the story.
So I think his position should be: we should neither slaughter one another nor play ostrich; we should stand together against the Titans. Grisha may be the most relentlessly positive person in the whole series. He may be hoping to find a way to defeat the Titans without making humanity turn on itself. There may very well be relevant material in the basement. Before the Great War of Destruction, some scientist or prophet may have stored valuable documents there. During all those years inside the Walls, he was probably studying, from a technical angle, how to solve the Titan problem in that basement.
To sum up the positions of the various forces in the story—
The First King: technologically pessimistic, the ostrich faction (hoping the people inside the Walls will slowly die out);
The Survey Corps: technologically indifferent, the hawk faction (wipe out the Titans beyond the Walls);
The Warriors: technologically optimistic, the hawk faction (hoping the people inside the Walls will die quickly);
Grisha: technologically optimistic, the reconciliation faction (let nobody die; solve the Titan problem with technology).
Eren: technologically indifferent, the hawk faction (hoping to kill all the Titans beyond the Walls, though I think that once the various memories inside his body begin to surface, he will ultimately turn toward reconciliation; I’ll analyze this later)
4. Grisha After the Walls Were Breached
Grisha had clearly investigated the Reiss family and knew their affairs inside out. After Wall Maria was breached, he found the Reiss family and took the Coordinate.
Since he did not go to persuade the Reiss family to act but instead took it by force, Grisha must have known about the Reiss family’s deadlock. The deadlock was this:
(1) The Reiss family’s Titan power (the Coordinate) is invincible;
(2) The Coordinate can only function when it is in the hands of someone of Reiss blood;
(3) Anyone from the Reiss family inherits the First King’s memories and will, becoming an absolute pacifist who refuses to act.
Therefore, if the Coordinate remains with a member of the Reiss family, it is useless; if it is taken by someone outside the Reiss family, it cannot function, and is still useless.
—This is a textbook deadlock.
So how do you break a deadlock like that?
Grisha had prepared the tool for breaking it long ago. That tool was—Eren!
V. The Origins of Grisha, Carla, and Eren
This brings us to the second-deepest instance of “writing the real subject in reverse” hidden in Attack on Titan (the deepest one comes later).
Let’s take a brief detour and chat about something less serious. I said in the previous installment that Attack on Titan has an intensely literary quality. So, when you get right down to it, what is literature?
Although I haven’t read much, I’ll venture to offer my own understanding. I think literature portrays nothing more—and nothing less—than the miserable state of wanting something and being unable to have it.
You want to be with her, but she happens not to love you; you want to live that kind of life, but you happen not to be able to; you want to become that kind of person, but you happen not to be one. Isn’t literature about the struggle along the road of pursuing desire?
That is why, when depicting people themselves, “writing the real subject in reverse” is often exactly what literature ought to do—you want to become that kind of person, you may even look exactly like that kind of person, but in reality, you just aren’t!
The savior recognized as the chosen one may actually be nothing more than an utterly ordinary person;
while the mediocre nobody whose goal is to live an ordinary life may in fact possess noble blood and talents beyond any ordinary person’s reach.
Perhaps all people are destined to try to break free from the constraints of fate, struggling to become the opposite of who they are.
Yes, I’m talking about Eren’s parents, Grisha and Carla.
Grisha, whom Keith had always regarded as someone special, a chosen one, was actually just an ordinary person with little talent and no noble blood.
And Carla, the indistinct-faced housewife who seemed to want nothing, actually carried royal blood from the Reiss family!
Here is my reasoning:
Why Grisha Was an “Ordinary Person”
1. The Surface-Level Reason
This is not to say Grisha had no talent. It is to say that Grisha in Marley did not seem to command the respect and following he later enjoyed inside the Walls; he should have been nothing more than an utterly inconspicuous “little nobody.”
If Grisha had been famous, someone who attracted a great deal of attention in Marley, then his disappearance there more than a decade ago would necessarily have been a major event. A shifter who possessed so many Titan secrets disappearing would have caused an enormous uproar in Marley, no matter how you looked at it. If that were the case, the Warrior unit should have arrived at the Walls carrying intelligence about Grisha, and finding him would have become a third major mission alongside their other two.
But the fact is that the Warrior unit knew nothing whatsoever about Eren’s family. They seem never to have connected the disappearance of the Coordinate with the Jaeger family, to the point that they did not realize the Coordinate was inside Eren until he transformed into a Titan. Even if Grisha was an alias, there should have been other clues for the Warrior unit to investigate, shouldn’t there? Yet in reality, the Warrior unit and Grisha seem to have had no connection at all. Even after Eren became a Titan, the Warriors never mentioned Grisha—not a word.
(In fact, for a while I was convinced that the so-called “Coordinate” was not a Reiss family ability at all, but something Grisha had stolen from Marley, and that the Warrior unit had come to the Walls to find Grisha. This assumption could actually explain quite a few mysteries in the story, such as why the people from Marley always said “take back” when they mentioned the Coordinate. But because it contradicted too many clues, I abandoned it.)
2. The Deeper Reason
The point above is a surface-level logical inference. What truly convinced me, however, was the conversation between Keith and Grisha in Chapter 71:
Keith warned Grisha not to drag his family into this so casually—you yourself are “special,” but your son may not be. Grisha turned, fixed Keith with a look that was both angry and a little bewildered, and said: “This boy isn’t like you. He’s my son.”
On the surface, Grisha seems to mean: I’m not like you. You’re an ordinary person, while he is my son, and I’m special, so my son is special too.
But it immediately reminded me of a famous case from A Song of Ice and Fire: why did Tywin Lannister hate his son Tyrion so much? At first, the clues the books reveal on the surface are that Tyrion’s father hates him because he suspects Tyrion was born after his wife cheated on him and is not really his son, so he gives him endless trouble. And, to be fair, that does seem to fit ordinary human psychology rather well.
But as the story goes on, more and more evidence suggests that the truth is precisely the opposite: Tywin hates Tyrion so much because the incestuous siblings are the ones most likely to have been born from his wife’s affair. Jaime, the handsome and capable son, may have no blood relation to him at all, while the dwarf Tyrion is his only true son—and that only true son embodies all of Tywin’s own shame and disappointment.
—Now that is the kind of technique you expect from a literary master! Once we see this layer, we draw a sharp breath and realize that this reason, the exact opposite of the surface explanation, is what truly takes us into the darkest corners of the human heart!
Maybe I can’t convince you, but that look in Grisha’s eyes in the image above gave me exactly this feeling—this is “writing the real subject in reverse.” Keith had actually hit Grisha’s deepest psychological fear. The anger in Grisha’s eyes, that attacking posture aimed at belittling the other man’s character, was really a shield protecting the dark corner inside himself: yes, I’m just like you. I’m actually nothing more than an ordinary person too.
This is where the irony and tragedy of Grisha’s fate lie—how can an ordinary person accomplish a world-changing feat?
Putting these two reasons together, I imagine Grisha’s true identity was probably something like this: Grisha may originally have been an inconspicuous junior scientist in Marley’s Titan research unit. By some twist of fate, he discovered a key left behind long ago, and while investigating it, learned the secret of the basement. Though he had no particular abilities, he dreamed of saving the world and made a grand vow to devote his entire life to helping humanity solve the Titan problem. Then his chance came. An accident occurred while experiments were being conducted on a shifter. Amid the chaos, Grisha injected himself, ate the shifter, and became a Titan shifter himself. As the sole survivor, he destroyed the scene and headed for the Walls with the key to the basement. The people from Marley, meanwhile, were deceived into believing that the shifter and all the researchers had died in the experiment. They therefore never even noticed that one of their own had defected long ago.
That is the story of Grisha, the ordinary person.
(A lot of readers dislike Chapter 71, thinking the flashback was just padding. I had exactly the opposite reaction: it gave me goosebumps. It was downright nerve-racking.)
Why Carla Was “One of the Reisses”
1. The Surface-Level Reason
The surface-level reason for suspecting that Carla had Reiss blood is almost laughably simple—Carla and Eren look far too much like the Reiss family members (while Grisha looks nothing like them).
This is the scene from Eren’s body-memory in which the Reiss family’s memories first awakened—
Frieda’s image suddenly surfaced in Eren’s mind. His thought at the time was: Is that Krista? No, it isn’t.
In other words, Frieda looks a lot like Krista. But the way this was drawn clearly makes her look a lot like Eren himself! From the shape of the face to the way the eyes are drawn, they are identical. Isn’t Frieda basically Eren with long hair?
Carla’s face shape and eyes are only slightly different—
At first, Krista and Eren do not look all that alike, but the more they are drawn, the more they look like siblings:
And baby Eren’s face shape looks a lot like Rod Reiss’s:
I know Hajime Isayama’s drawing skills are not exactly flawless, but I don’t think all of these choices can be dismissed as random scribbling. The frankly outrageous similarity between Frieda and Eren in particular must have been deliberate.
2. The Deeper Reason
What truly convinced me that Carla had an extraordinary background was, once again, Chapter 71. Besides Keith, the person whose “ordinary” qualities are emphasized most heavily in this chapter is Carla, who is a thousand times more ordinary than he is.
The contrast between Carla’s “ordinariness” and Grisha’s “extraordinariness” was foreshadowed as early as Chapter 1, right at the beginning of the story:
And Chapter 71 begins with Grisha’s “extraordinariness” and ends with Carla’s “ordinariness”:
This scene, at least to my eyes, is exactly the same as that look in Grisha’s eyes. “Writing the real subject in reverse.”
Those who seem calm and effortless today must have been the big shots back then; those who say money can’t solve anything must be Daddy Ma; and the more fiercely someone pursues an ordinary life, the more likely they are to be carrying an extraordinary past.
So, Carla’s true identity should be that of an illegitimate daughter of the Reiss family (possibly a contemporary of Rod Reiss), though perhaps even she herself may not have been entirely clear about who she was.
That leads to the next inference: Grisha’s marriage to Carla may not have been as simple as it appeared. A more reasonable guess is that, during his investigation, Grisha discovered that Carla had Reiss blood (he may not necessarily have told Carla), and only then began to get close to her. The two later married, and how much of Grisha’s side of the relationship was “true love” and how much was “needed for the plan” is anyone’s guess.
Why do I say that marrying Carla was something Grisha “needed for the plan”?
Grisha’s plan was to have a child with Carla. Because that child—Eren—was precisely the key to breaking the Reiss family’s deadlock!
Eren, the savior
This is because Eren—
(1) inherited Reiss blood from his mother.
That’s why Eren, despite looking unrelated to the Reiss family, can activate the Coordinate—he is fundamentally a member of the Reiss family, just like Frieda, and simply needs time to learn how to control it.
(2) inherited from his father a fierce will to fight the Titans (a grudge).
This will may be able to suppress the First King’s will to passively wait for death.
One day, the First King’s will will awaken inside Eren. It is a powerful will that bound the Reiss family for many generations, and that leaves a deep impression on us—
But Eren is the first person who may be able to defeat the First King’s will. What leaves an equally deep impression on us throughout Attack on Titan is the dense, inextinguishable resentment and anger inside Eren. That resentment and anger come both from seeing his own loved ones and comrades slaughtered by Titans, and from inheriting Grisha’s determination—not to accept humanity’s humiliation, to leave the Walls, and to fight the Titans.
I believe that the fire of anger in Eren’s eyes and the sheet of ice in the First King’s eyes will one day meet in a final confrontation.
And Grisha’s gamble was that the First King’s inviolable will would ultimately be balanced by this fierce will, passed down through father and son.
And so Eren became the one and only savior.
The Reiss family had the talent to defeat the Titans but lacked the will; Grisha had the will to defeat the Titans but lacked the talent.
Only Eren possessed both the talent to defeat the Titans and the will to defeat the Titans.
The talent came from his mother; the will came from his father. That was the legacy Eren’s parents left him!
So, on the day Wall Maria was breached, after learning that his wife had died horribly, Grisha decided in a fit of rage to seize the Coordinate. But after eating Frieda, Grisha understood that if the Coordinate remained inside him, the deadlock could never be broken. So he sacrificed himself and let Eren eat him.
Grisha believed that one day in the future, Eren would use the will and talent inside him to break the deadlock and finally complete the great work Grisha had left unfinished.
6. The ending
Finally, let’s try to crack (though this is basically guesswork) the story’s two most headache-inducing mysteries:
Mystery 1: Episode 1’s “To You, 2,000 Years from Now”
Who exactly is saying this to whom?
Judging from the tone, what comes immediately after “To You, 2,000 Years from Now” seems to be the famous line from that same first episode:
In the TV anime, the story of Attack on Titan has a narrator, and the person who reads the lines above as that narrator is Armin.
Doesn’t this sound like the way an old man begins telling a story? In other words, it seems that after living through everything, Armin is telling (or writing down) the things he once experienced and knew for someone 2,000 years in the future.
So we’ve figured out the subject. It’s Armin. Then who is the “you” in “2,000 years from now”?
Mystery 2: What is Eren’s “prophetic dream” in Episode 1?
This is the strangest mystery in Attack on Titan so far.
It is abundantly clear that Eren had a prophetic dream.
The TV anime expanded this dream, adding more material to the dream sequence: Eren dreamed of the future scene in which his mother was eaten.
Although the original manga never explicitly says that it was a prophetic dream, there is almost no doubt that Eren dreamed of Mikasa after she had cut her hair short.
Although in the manga’s only scene involving the dream, the character’s face is visible only halfway:
But judging from the scarf, this is unquestionably Mikasa. The scarf isn’t some random accessory; it has always symbolized the emotional bond between Eren and Mikasa, appearing again and again—
So there is no doubt that the person in the dream is Mikasa. And Mikasa began cutting her hair short when she was training with the military. In other words, this dream must have crossed over into the future.
That’s why there are so many hypotheses about parallel timelines, cyclical history, and so on in interpretations of Attack on Titan. Many excellent analyses introduce time travel from different angles, all in an attempt to crack this prophetic dream.
But in my series of articles, I haven’t included any element of “time travel” at all.
So how do we explain this prophetic dream?
To unlock every one of Attack on Titan’s locks, I seem to have used the same key—the “reversal of the real story.”
And now we come to the deepest layer of “reversal of the real story” hidden in Attack on Titan:
What appears to be reality in the story is actually the dream! And the dream is the reality!
The entire story of Attack on Titan: only this shot is reality.
(I’ll bet five mao that this shot will appear again near the end of the story, perhaps when Eren sets out on his final mission.)
Apart from that shot, the entire story of Attack on Titan that we’ve seen so far is a replay of Eren’s experiences in his dream.
In other words, at the end of the story, Eren will enter a very long period of dormancy. During that dormancy, Eren will replay his past experiences in a dream.
So what will Eren’s final fate be?
Once Eren learns the whole truth about the Titans, he will inevitably fall into an impossible dilemma. By blood, he is both a person from beyond the Walls and a person from within them, so the belief he has always held—that he is one of the people inside the Walls—will be shaken to its foundations. The people beyond the Walls will no longer be simple enemies. At the same time, once the Reiss family’s memories awaken, Eren will finally realize that the people beyond the Walls are also victims of the Titans, while the “people on his own side” inside the Walls will eventually become an even greater catastrophe. So my guess is that Eren will ultimately put away his anger, truly inherit Grisha’s mantle, and become the savior of all humanity.
Even more disastrously, Eren may realize that the Coordinate suppressing the transformation of the people inside the Walls into Titans is nearly exhausted. The end of the people inside the Walls is just around the corner. So what can he do?
Eren must sacrifice himself.
Perhaps, at the end of the story, the condition for getting the people beyond the Walls to abandon their hostility toward those inside them will be that Eren can ensure the people inside the Walls will continue to live harmlessly for a very long time.
Perhaps the Titans inside the Walls and Annie’s “crystal” give Eren his greatest inspiration: if he wraps himself in crystal and goes to sleep, like Annie and the Titans inside the Walls, he can slow the loss of the Titan power inside him and keep it running for an extremely long time.
That period would be an invaluable breathing space for humanity. Perhaps it would be 2,000 years.
The people beyond and within the Walls reach a pact and maintain 2,000 years of peace. During those 2,000 years, both sides suspend their conflict and search together for a way out of the Titans’ predicament.
And so Eren decides to enter 2,000 years of dormancy, trading his sacrifice for 2,000 years of peace. I believe that over those long two millennia, humanity’s descendants will surely find a way to save themselves through their own wisdom. In the future, at the moment he awakens, humanity will have entered a beautiful new era.
“Take care, Eren.” The tone of this line suggests that Eren’s final sacrifice may come out of nowhere. Mikasa did not realize that their parting was a final farewell, and she could not be by Eren’s side at that last moment. Before they had time to say goodbye, they were separated forever.
****
Before parting:
Eren: “2,000 years is such a long time. Armin, when I wake up 2,000 years from now, will I still remember you, Mikasa, and everything we’ve been through? Maybe by then I’ll have forgotten everything.”
Armin: “…I’ll write down our whole story, so that people 2,000 years in the future will know what we did for this world. On the day you wake up, we won’t be here anymore, but maybe our story will live on.”
Eren: “Yeah. I’ll try to dream, and remember everything about us in the dream.”
Eren closed his eyes and entered the dream—
The first thing he saw in the dream was Mikasa with long hair—
“Mikasa, your hair looks like it’s grown longer…”
Had Eren ever said this line in reality? No. We have all experienced this: when we first begin dreaming, our waking consciousness has not completely disappeared. Half asleep and half awake, we can’t distinguish reality from illusion. The person speaking in the dream is actually still the you who is awake.
“Mikasa, your hair looks like it’s grown longer. When you said goodbye to me just now, you still had short hair.”
“It’s good to see you again.”
Armin watched two lines of tears run down from Eren’s slowly closing eyes.
To You, 2,000 Years from Now—Eren Reiss Jaeger, my dear friend, this is our story. One day, you will remember all of this:
In 845, on that day, humanity finally remembered the fear of being under their control, and the humiliation of being imprisoned in a birdcage…
The Complete Attack on Titan Plot Analysis | Complete Series
Written until I coughed blood; now waiting to be proven spectacularly wrong~
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