Spoiler warning: this article contains my theories and wild speculation after watching the first 77 episodes of Attack on Titan.
Please read Part One before reading this article. You can find it here: A Two-Thousand-Year Dream: A Complete Plot Analysis of Attack on Titan (Part One)
Part Two gets a little wild; Part Three will bring things back around.
Part Two: The Origin of the Titans
Of the time, place, and characters I analyzed in Part One, the biggest thing that got me owned was my analysis of the “place,” because many readers pointed out that the area inside the Walls is actually larger than the whole of Iceland. So the story couldn’t possibly take place in Iceland as it exists in our three-dimensional world. That said, I could force an explanation to work (a nuclear winter lowering sea levels, or something). But hey, this was only wild speculation～～ My main goal was to guess where the author got his inspiration for the story, so I won’t argue my case. If I get owned, I get owned, hahaha.
With Attack on Titan nearing the end of its run, more and more of my wild theories will probably get owned. But that’s fine. If the official answer Hajime Isayama eventually reveals is very different from this article, I’ll simply treat the article as a creative blueprint and use it to write a science-fiction novel of my own (writing science fiction is my lifelong dream, and now I’ll have a ready-made outline—great)!
According to plan, we should next cover the “cause, process, and result.” In this middle installment, I’ll start with the “cause”—the origin of the Titans: what exactly are they, and where did they come from?
1. What Exactly Are the Titans?
In Part One, I said that Attack on Titan might be hard science fiction, and everyone laughed at me for not knowing what science fiction was. Well, I guess I published that one too early. I was actually planning to develop the idea that Attack on Titan might be hard science fiction here.
I think that even if only a small part of my Part One is on the right track, it’s clear how much effort Hajime Isayama put into constructing the world of Attack on Titan. So I don’t believe he would cut corners on the most eye-catching part of all: the Titan concept. That made me curious: could Titan technology be based not on arbitrary fantasy, but on some kind of real-world advanced technology—even technology imagined only in another science-fiction novel?
Let’s look at the Titans’ basic properties—
Titan Property 1: Light-Powered
All Titans seem to rely on light for power.
Specifically—
Pure Titans: According to Hange’s experiments, Pure Titans gradually lose their ability to move in the dark, eventually becoming still.
Ymir:
During the battle at Utgard Castle, Ymir deliberately waited for the sun to rise before transforming. That suggests Ymir also needs sunlight to keep moving.
Eren:
When he was injected, transformed into a Titan, and ate his father Grisha, it was nighttime. Whether he could continue moving at night is unknown. My guess is that he couldn’t.
The Reiss Family Titan:
When Frieda transformed into a Titan and fought Grisha, it happened in the underground cavern beneath the Reiss family chapel, where all the rock walls were glowing:
The first king must have built that illuminated cavern so that his descendants would still be able to transform and move there (Grisha could obviously use the light energy too).
The Warriors’ Titans:
They’re special: they can operate at night (including the Pure Titans created by the Beast Titan).
The Beast Titan transformed everyone in Connie’s village into Titans and led them to attack Utgard Castle at night, shocking everyone.
But it was a night with a full moon. Based on Hange’s analysis, the Warriors aren’t actually able to operate in darkness; they absorb moonlight instead:
So although they’re also light-powered, the Warriors have an astonishingly high energy-conversion efficiency. Moonlight alone is enough. They’re an advanced technological upgrade of some kind.
But whatever the type of Titan, the difference seems to be only how efficiently it uses light energy. Overall, a Titan seems to be a walking solar panel.
In other words, a Titan’s skin is covered with a substance that absorbs solar energy and converts it into other forms of energy. Since people who can transform into Titans normally eat normal food and handle normal objects, they shouldn’t contain any rare elements. So this surface substance must be synthesized from the most common elements in the human body and surrounding air: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen. In other words, it’s probably some kind of carbon-based compound—in other words, organic matter.
Carbon, the first time!
This kind of organic matter exists in the real world too (though perhaps not this efficiently), such as oligothiophene derivatives that can be used to prepare organic solar-cell devices:
Titan Property 2:Extremely Light
A Titan’s body is extremely light, and it also seems to appear out of thin air.
What could be absurdly light, made from raw materials found everywhere, and manufactured on the spot from whatever is around you—something that could be “made out of thin air”?—
In theory, the ubiquitous carbon in the body or surrounding air could be used to make carbon-fiber and graphene-fiber materials lighter than air!
Carbon, the second time!
Titan Property 3:Hardening
A Titan’s body can harden:
After hardening, it can even be used to build Walls:
What has raw materials found everywhere, can be manufactured on the spot from whatever is around you—“made out of thin air”—and is hard enough to build Walls?—
Carbon fiber can.
Carbon, the third time!
Titan Property 4:“Crystallization”
Annie can also generate something resembling “crystal”—
Transparent, crystalline, and unbelievably hard. It’s obviously another allotrope of carbon: diamond.
Carbon, the fourth time!
At this point, we can see that the Titans’ basic ability is—on the molecular level, manipulating common elements such as carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in the human body or surrounding air, and arbitrarily transforming these substances into various elements and compounds at the atomic and molecular levels.
So here comes the “reverse of the obvious”:
The Titans’ true nature is precisely the opposite of their “gigantic” appearance. They’re actually made up of things too small to see!
They are—capable of modifying matter at the molecular scale—
Nanobots.
More precisely, every Titan contains countless nanobots: a nanobot swarm.
That’s the true nature of the Titans!
Next, let’s look at how Titan Shifters transform, which will help us understand the Titans’ mechanism in greater detail.
The book clearly mentions two conditions for a Titan Shifter to transform:
Condition 1. A determined will to become a Titan;
Condition 2. An injury:
This suggests that the nanobots inside a Titan fall into two types, with different functions.
The first type is the control unit:
The control unit is located in the human central nervous system. It responds to neural signals from the brain and transmits the signals it receives to the peripheral “working units.”
More precisely, the control unit is located in the human cerebrospinal fluid:
The second type of nanobot is the working unit:
The control unit itself cannot exert any substantive effect on the human body. It must act through the working units.
The working units are located in the circulatory system. That’s why a person must create an injury in order to transform into a Titan: it opens a channel through which the working units can be released from the bloodstream.
The working units follow the control unit’s instructions. At the molecular level, they alter substances inside the body and in the surrounding air they come into contact with, generating new forms of matter by breaking and recombining chemical bonds. Since the body and air are rich in elements such as carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, the working units specialize in producing various carbon-chain organic compounds and forms of elemental carbon (graphene, carbon fiber, diamond, and so on).
Of course, this ability isn’t unlimited.
The working units’ basic abilities are limited—
Working Unit Ability 1: Generate a Titan Body
They break down the carbon in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Some of it becomes carbon fiber, forming the Titan’s body; carbon fiber is extremely light but incredibly strong. The rest combines with hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements to form light-converting organic compounds, which attach to the Titan’s surface and become its skin. The converted light energy becomes electrical or chemical energy, supplying the nanobots and the entire body with power for continuous operation.
Because these processes involve a huge number of complex chemical reactions, a Titan’s body is extremely hot, and transforming into or out of Titan form releases a great deal of heat:
Working Unit Ability 2: Repair Damage to the Host Body
The basic principle is the same as above.
Let me add one point here: I think a very important feature of the working units is that they can replicate themselves to a limited extent, maintaining a certain quantity inside the body. But this replication can remain stable only under the control unit’s direction. Once the control unit fails, the working units replicate uncontrollably and may even invade the nervous system.
Working Unit Ability 3: Special Abilities
The working units in different Titan Shifters seem to come in different subtypes, each specializing in a different ability. Some subtypes can harden a Titan’s skin; some can create the Colossal Titan; and some produce Titans with exceptionally high mobility.
The special abilities of Titan Shifters (Armored, Colossal, and so on) are determined not by the control unit, but by different subtypes of working units.
The Key Difference Between Titan Shifters and Pure Titans
And whether a control unit is present is precisely the difference between Titan Shifters and Pure Titans!
A Titan Shifter’s control unit is governed by human neural impulses and directs the working units under the commands of the human brain.
The control unit also protects the human central nervous system by preventing the working units from invading it. If the control unit malfunctions, the working units may run wild and invade the nervous system. Once the entire human body is controlled by the working units, it merges with the Titan body. That is a Pure Titan.
In other words, a Pure Titan is a Titan with no control unit, only working units.
But the human nervous system inside a Pure Titan has not been completely destroyed. These people simply cannot form conscious thoughts. In fact, the Pure Titan’s working units still seem to be influenced by the nervous system—only now the nervous system retains nothing but instinctive, unconscious impulses, such as the fixation “I want to become human again.” That is why Pure Titans have the instinct to eat people.
In other words, whether it’s a Titan Shifter or a Pure Titan, its behavior is ultimately controlled by a human being. For the former, the commands come from clear consciousness; for the latter, they come from the human unconscious instinct.
After the Pure Titan’s nervous system has been assimilated, the remnants of the original nervous system remain in the nape. That is why destroying the nape can eliminate a Titan Shifter (destroying the host body) as well as a Pure Titan (destroying the remaining nervous system of the host body).
So, in summary, we’ve basically explained the scientific mechanism of the Titans—
Those humans who can turn into Titans actually have huge numbers ofnanobots—each only about the size of a molecule—parasitizing their bodies. Thecontrol unit lives in the spinal cord, while theworking units live in the circulatory system, and the working units come in different subtypes. The control unit converts neural impulses from the human brain into instructions, directing the working units in the circulatory system to break down and assemble matter inside and around the body, repairing physical damage, generating a Titan body, and so on.
At this point, I can say Attack on Titan has a bit of a hard-science-fiction flavor to it, right?
That answers the question of what the Titans are. Next, let’s look at where they came from.
2. The Cause of the Story: Where Did the Titans Come From?
Let me bring out this diagram again:
At least a hundred years before Eren’s era:
1. Humanity erupted into a world war, and most humans died in the conflict.
2. Then the Titans appeared and hunted down the surviving humans.
3. Most of humanity’s original territories became uninhabitable, and the surviving humans began fleeing to a new continent.
Now here’s the question:
Question One: Who Was Fighting Whom in This World War?
Based on my analysis of the “characters” in Part One, most of the people inside the Walls are Germanic. In a certain sense, they are the “devils” and “sinners,” the source from which all the disasters began. So we can basically determine that the world war back then was—
Germany and its allies v. the rest of the world.
Why does this setup feel so familiar? Germany first beats the hell out of the whole world, then the whole world beats the hell out of Germany. Isn’t that exactly how both World War I and World War II played out?
What’s more, according to the information in the diagram above, humanity was already nearly destroyed before the Titans appeared. Given what we currently know, what kind of weapon could have the destructive power to wipe out most of the human population? There’s practically only one answer: nuclear weapons. They were first—and so far, only—used in actual warfare during World War II.
So, if we continue with the same line of thought as in Part One and speculate about Hajime Isayama’s sources of inspiration, then the model for this war was obviously World War II.
In other words, the story of the Titans begins with a world war between Nazi Germany, led by Hitler, along with its allies, and the other countries of the world.
What? Attack on Titan actually has something to do with Hitler? That’s ridiculous!
Indeed, when the idea of “the Führer making a surprise entrance” first popped into my head, even I thought I had let my imagination run a little too wild. But I soon realized that if you grafted Attack on Titan’s background onto World War II, a whole series of mysteries in the story suddenly made perfect sense. So, for now, please go along with me and accept this seemingly far-fetched idea. Let’s see whether the analysis later on can make it hold together.
(This is definitely not the most far-fetched idea in this article. An even more famous historical figure will show up later~)
If we treat the war in Attack on Titan as World War II in a parallel universe, then the situation at the beginning resembles World War II in our universe: the German Führer goes to war against the world. But the course and outcome of the war are completely different from those of the real World War II. In reality, the United States alone possessed nuclear weapons, and it defeated Germany without using them, then defeated Japan with two atomic bombs; in the parallel-universe World War II of Attack on Titan, Germany and the United States must have possessed nuclear weapons at the same time. They fired missiles at each other, nearly reducing the Earth to a nuclear wasteland.
That was when the Titans appeared. Which brings us to Question Two—
Question Two: Who Invented the Titans, and for What Purpose?
Given the background above, the Titans appeared in the later stages of the war rather than at the beginning, so there are two reasonable possibilities:
Hypothesis One: The Environmentalist Hypothesis.
A third party that cared deeply about the Earth and possessed the black technology of nanobots couldn’t stand by and watch humanity carry on like this. If things continued, it wouldn’t just be humanity that was destroyed—the entire planet would be ruined. So why not destroy humanity, the Earth’s scourge, instead? They developed the Titans to wipe out humanity.
If that’s the case, then the background of Attack on Titan would resemble another classic work that shares common ground with it both in tone and content: Parasyte.
The Titans’ mission in this world, like that of the parasites, would be—wiping out the human species.
This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable hypothesis in itself. But I followed this line of thought and tried to work out what would happen later in the story. I found that matching it with many of the later details required taking far too many detours, so I abandoned it (I won’t write out the whole chain of speculation).
That led toHypothesis Two: The War-Weapon Hypothesis.
Since the first hypothesis is difficult to sustain, all the wild speculation that follows is based on this war-weapon hypothesis—
The Titans were a piece of black technology hastily activated by the side on the verge of losing the war, in a desperate attempt to turn the tide. In other words, even though the two sides were firing nuclear weapons at each other, Germany, outnumbered and outmatched, was still on the verge of defeat. So it deployed an immature piece of black technology on the battlefield, and the experiment ran out of control, causing a catastrophe.
If the Titans were weapons, then they must originally have been controllable. So the ones brought out as weapons must have beenintelligent Titans—that is, Titans with control units. Themindless Titans, obviously, were the result of the black technology running amok, leaving no one safe, including the people who invented it.
This would mean that the ancestors of the Germanic people inside the Walls—the people corresponding to Nazi Germany in the real world—were among the inventors of Titan technology (why “among” rather than the sole inventors is something I’ll get to in Part Three).
Then the next question is: Was this nanobot black technology called Titans invented from scratch by Nazi scientists? I don’t think so. Intelligent Titans were not an invention of modern humans, but prehistoric high technology handed down from ancient times, whose true origins no one knows. (I speculate this way because otherwise it would be very difficult to connect it to the clue involving Ymir.)
I won’t write out the reasoning (writing out my reasoning for every single step is exhausting~). I’ll just give you the result of my wild speculation:
Even before World War II began, Hitler placed great importance on finding an ideological theory that could rally the hearts of the entire Germanic people and stoke their national pride. The theory he eventually came up with was the famous “Aryan” theory. In fact, the Nazis distorted the archaeological concept of the Aryans. They defined the blond-haired, blue-eyed physical traits of the Germanic people in the five Nordic countries and the Scandinavian Peninsula as Aryan traits, and claimed that the Germanic people of the present day were descended from the divine Aryan race of antiquity.
Before and during World War II, Hitler really did send large numbers of people around the world in search of surviving pure-blooded, primordial Aryans. One especially famous example was a Nazi expedition that went to Tibet looking for Aryans, because they had encountered a theory claiming that some of the ancient Aryans had reached the Tibetan Plateau and become the ancestors of the Tibetans.
(Please note that the two paragraphs above describe real history.)
But in the parallel universe of Attack on Titan, Hitler didn’t send the expedition to Tibet. He sent it to the “five Nordic countries and the Scandinavian Peninsula,” the regions whose people most closely resembled his own, to search for their ancestors. (The Nordic region mentioned in Part One makes another appearance.)
As it turned out, the expedition really did discover an isolated primordial tribe that had been cut off from the outside world for at least several thousand years. The people of this tribe worshipped as gods a hereditary royal family that had ruled for thousands of years. Every generation, the royal heir—the tribe’s chief—was calledYmir!
Most incredible of all, the central royal family of Ymir’s divine clan could actually transform intointelligent Titans!
Some of them could transform into Colossal Titans, while others could transform into Armored Titans…
Thousands of years ago, the Ymir clan somehow acquired the power of the Titans. From that point on, the Titan mythology began spreading throughout the Nordic region:
There were only a very small number of intelligent Titans in the Ymir clan. Whenever Ymir and the members of the divine clan passed the power down, each successor had to eat the spinal fluid of the predecessor in order to gain the power of an intelligent Titan. The divine power of the Ymir clan was passed down this way for thousands of years.
(The most distinctive feature of the Ymir royal family was thefreckles on their faces. That’s why Ilse, the freckled girl from the Survey Corps, was mistaken for “Ymir” by a Titan. And that Titan, when he was still human, must have been a member of Ymir’s tribe, deeply familiar with the royal family’s freckles.)
With this Titan power, the Ymir clan—the ancestors of the Aryans—allowed their tribe to multiply and flourish, eventually splitting into different branches. One branch became the Germanic people, and later the German nation. The core of the Ymir clan, however, remained in this Nordic tribe, cut off from the outside world for unknown reasons and preserving traditions that had lasted for thousands of years.
The Nazi expedition that broke into the tribe immediately realized that this was mysterious ancient high technology (as for where it came from—aliens, or high technology from a lost ancient civilization? Isayama can make up whatever he wants~). If they could develop this technology using modern science, they might be able to turn it into an invincible weapon of war.
Perhaps after a battle between a modern military force and the ancient Titans, the Nazis finally captured several intelligent Titans, including the intelligent Titan successor of the Ymir clan at that time—that generation’s Ymir—and began their research.
During this research, they must have uncovered many of the secrets of the intelligent Titans—the nanobots.
They separated serum from the blood of the Titan bodies (which contained working units) and made it into an injectable form, so it could be conveniently introduced into the circulatory system:
The Nazis injected it into test subjects. The subjects transformed into mindless Titans. The Nazis began to understand that to create intelligent Titans, the working units in the injection alone were not enough.
At the same time, an astonishing fact emerged:not everyone could become a Titan by getting an injection!
In other words, if we think of the nanobots as a virus, then their ability to infect is limited: they can parasitize only people of a particular race—or genetic makeup. Apart from the Ymir clan and their descendants, the Germanic people, no other race can turn into a Titan.
(I came up with this idea from the clues below:
The Reiss family’s Titan power can affect only most of the peoples inside the Walls—that is, the Germanic people—but has no effect on minorities such as the Ackerman family and the Orientals. In other words, the range of the Titan power is closely tied to genetics.
I therefore suspect that even the ability to turn into a Titan may be limited to people with specific genes. In other words, even those mindless Titans wandering all over the world outside the Walls are of the same Germanic stock as the people inside the Walls—not everyone in the world can become a mindless Titan.
Of course, this guess could be spectacularly demolished. If, later in the serialization, Captain Levi injects that serum into himself and turns into a Titan, then my theory is completely toast.)
Next comes anenormous, enormous, enormous, enormous, enormous, enormous leap of imagination:
In fact, the Nazis were utterly horrified by their own experimental results: there may be only two ethnic groups in the world capable of becoming Titans. And they turned out to be—
The descendants of the Aryans: theGermanic people and theJewish people!
With the Nazis in a panic, if this powerful weapon—quite possibly capable of overturning the course of history—were to fall into the hands of Jews, a people they considered outside their own kind, the consequences would be unthinkable.
What is even more chilling is this: if the German people could become Titans because they inherited the bloodline of the ancient Ymir clan, then by the same logic we can infer that Jewish history must also have had an ancestor who was a Titan of Intelligence. The Jews, too, would be descendants of Titans of Intelligence.
Scandinavia: Ymir → ancient Aryans → the German people
Middle East: _____ → ancient Israelites → the Jewish people
That blank is almost too easy to fill, isn’t it? Obviously, it would be that ancient Jewish divine/royal clan, including the Jewish ancestor King David and Jesus.
In other words, Jesus himself was once a Titan of Intelligence.
(I know. Once I let this particular flight of fancy loose, you probably really want to beat me to death~)
And just like Ymir, there is a good chance this Jewish royal bloodline has continued down to the present day, secretly carrying on the power and secrets of the Titans of Intelligence.
So the terrified Führer ordered the slaughter of the Jews, while also launching an all-out search for the descendants of this Jewish royal family. (That’s right: in this parallel universe, that’s why the Nazis carried out the Holocaust.)
The Disaster Triggered by the Operational Unit
On the other hand, what tormented the Nazi scientists was that they could not manufacture Control Units. They had no way to let ordinary people obtain a Control Unit the way they could inject them with an Operational Unit. As a result, Control Units became an extremely scarce resource that humanity at the time could not reproduce, apparently transmissible only by eating the spinal fluid of the previous holder. Every death meant one fewer.
So the research team found some volunteers loyal to the Nazis. They ate the captured Titan of Intelligence from the Ymir clan, and the power of the Titans from the Ymir clan finally fell completely into Nazi hands. (The Ymir clan was effectively wiped out—rather like the later Reiss family nearly being wiped out by Grisha.)
Since Control Units could not be reproduced, the Nazis shifted the focus of their research to Operational Units.
There were two research goals: 1. narrow the genetic specificity of the Operational Unit so that it would apply only to the German people, preventing this dark technology from falling into enemy hands; 2. enhance the Operational Unit’s reproducibility, so that once research on Control Units made a breakthrough, Titans of Intelligence could be mass-produced.
Just then, nuclear war broke out, and the human world became scorched earth in an instant. The German people seemed destined for total ruin.
In desperation, the Nazis dramatically accelerated their research into Titan technology. As a result, both research goals were achieved—indeed, achieved far beyond expectations. This was also the beginning of every disaster that followed.
The Nazis successfully developed a special kind of Control Unit: its genetic specificity was enhanced until it could “infect” only the German people.
At the same time, its ability to reproduce increased dramatically—far beyond what they had anticipated.
If the original Operational Unit was like a blood-borne virus, then the improved Operational Unit became an influenza virus spread through the air. In other words, a plague! A catastrophe was brewing.
The “Titan plague” began to spread, and large numbers of Germans were infected. Without the restraint of a Control Unit, the infected person’s nervous system was invaded, and they immediately became mindless Titans. Anyone else who came near these mindless Titans carrying the virus was also very easy to infect, becoming a new mindless Titan. Large numbers of Germans turned into mindless Titans this way. They began slaughtering the remaining human beings.
III. The First King Takes His Seat
At the critical moment when humanity was about to be destroyed, the Jewish divine clan finally appeared. Like the Ymir divine clan, they had hidden themselves for thousands of years. To keep people from discovering their true bloodline, they changed their surname to Reiss.
(Well, the Reiss family’s ancestor was Jesus. Please don’t hit me~)
Now everyone understands why every heir of the Reiss family comes with a built-in aura of “divinity,” right?
And the head of the Reiss clan at this point was precisely the Titan who would later be called the First King.
The First King Reiss was powerless against the nuclear weapons of modern warfare, but in the war of the Titans, the special ability of his clan could save humanity from destruction.
The special ability of the Reiss Titan of Intelligence was to invade a human body’s nervous system remotely and serve as a Control Unit from a distance.
—That is the Coordinate.
In other words, a mindless Titan was like a computer missing its CPU, the central processing unit: once switched on, all it could do was spin its hard drive. The First King, meanwhile, was a cloud-computing center. He could remotely control those computers without CPUs.
Of course, if the First King’s power had been strong enough to control Titans at will, there would have been no later story. In reality, the First King could do only two things—
Coordinate Ability One: Control
Controlling mindless Titans:
For those whose Operational Units had already completely invaded their nervous systems—in other words, those who had already become mindless Titans—the First King could remotely control the Operational Units inside their bodies through a roar (which was really just wireless networking), directing their actions. Since the neural networks remaining from the human bodies inside mindless Titans were already unrecognizable, the First King’s control over them was very limited (both the spatial range and degree of control were probably quite small: spatially, it extended only a short distance around the body; in terms of degree, it could only briefly change the mindless Titan’s attack target). Otherwise, he could simply order every mindless Titan in the world to kill itself and save humanity in one stroke.
That’s right. This was the so-called Roar ability—
Controlling the clanspeople (the German people):
As for ordinary people who had not yet become mindless Titans, their human nervous systems were intact, so this control ability was extremely powerful compared with control over mindless Titans. It could even allow some Operational Units to invade the brain’s nervous system and alter their memories.
That’s right, the Reiss family’s ability to alter human memory came from here.
Coordinate Ability Two: Suppression
This was the most important ability of all.
For those whose Operational Units had not yet had time to invade their nervous systems—in other words, infected people who still had time before becoming mindless Titans and remained in human form—the First King could use the network to invade their nervous systems, create a firewall, and suppress the damage the Operational Units caused to the nervous system. In other words, although he could not stop an out-of-control Operational Unit from invading the body, he could protect the most crucial nervous system and temporarily keep the infected person from becoming a mindless Titan.
The spatial range of this ability was probably a radius of several hundred kilometers—in other words, roughly the area that the later walls enclosed (in reality, it should have been slightly larger than the area within the walls; otherwise, the Scouts who occasionally went outside the walls would have turned into Titans very easily).
That, then, was the secret of “the Coordinate.”
IV. The First King’s Exodus
At the time, with nearly all the Germans seemingly about to become mindless Titans, the First King Reiss used the Coordinate’s “Suppression” ability to temporarily stop the Operational Units from invading the nervous systems of the surviving Germans within his range. This kept them from becoming mindless Titans for the moment, turning them into carriers of a virus that would not yet flare up.
But from that point on, these surviving Germans became terrifying time bombs. Their remaining population was still quite large. If the First King’s Suppression ability ever failed in the future, they would all become mindless Titans at once, and humanity in the future would once again have to face the catastrophe brought by a new army of mindless Titans.
What’s more, unless some measure was taken, this catastrophe was bound to happen. The Suppression ability placed an enormous burden on “the Coordinate.” It could not be maintained forever. One day in the future, these surviving Germans would inevitably all become mindless Titans as the First King’s power declined.
Next, the First King faced a choice that would affect the fate of humanity across the entire world.
He could choose to kill all these time bombs at once, solving once and for all the threat they might pose in the future.
But he did not do that.
Although the people inside the walls were practically the culprits who had nearly destroyed humanity, the First King still felt pity for them.
Unlike the abilities of the Ymir clan, the Reiss family’s Titan of Intelligence could inherit the memories of its predecessors. So this family had, in fact, always carried on the compassion that began with their ancestor Jesus Christ. They had witnessed at least several thousand years of humanity’s rise and fall, suffering, and ever more inventive ways of bringing disaster upon itself. They looked down upon all living things with compassionate eyes, deeply pitying human nature yet powerless to do anything about it. They were absolute pacifists.
We can actually see this compassionate expression on the faces of the First King’s descendants:
So even though the Germans around him had nearly managed to destroy all humanity in every imaginable way, and even though they had committed the unforgivable crime of attempting to wipe out the First King’s true people, the Jews, the First King still felt that they should be forgiven. These sinners, destined to walk toward destruction, deserved one chance to pass peacefully through the twilight before the end.
So what was he supposed to do? The First King did four major things.
The First King’s First Act: Building Walls After Crossing the Sea
The First King’s first act was to imitate his ancient ancestor Moses in Exodus: he led his new people to a new continent, taking these time bombs across the sea to a huge island.
If the speculation above is correct, then this is another instance of the real story being written in reverse—the king of the people inside the walls was actually supposed to have been on the side of their enemies;
and what the First King forgave and protected were precisely the enemies who had committed an unspeakable crime against his own true people.
This was the First King’s version of Exodus.
On this new continent, the ocean formed the first line of defense, separating the time bombs from the surviving humans on the old continent.
The second line of defense was this: through the power of his Coordinate, the Founding King had tens of thousands of his people injected with super-large Titanization units (all right, I can only assume that this particular subtype of transformation unit was compatible with the largest number of people back then; these people became the ‘necessary sacrifices’). He then controlled them, arranging them in three concentric circles. The moment their suppressive abilities were released, they collectively transformed into enormous mindless Titans. He then made them use their hardening abilities to build the three Walls. With the sunlight blocked out, the Titans inside those Walls entered eternal sleep.
The three Walls locked away the layers of time bombs inside them.
So the Walls had two purposes, one on the surface and one underneath. The obvious one was to isolate the Titans outside and protect the people inside the Walls. The deeper one was the exact opposite of defending against external enemies: their most important function was that, when the Founding King’s power eventually weakened and everyone inside the Walls turned into mindless Titans, the Walls could trap them and stop them from going out and harming the rest of humanity beyond them.
I think this is one of the most important reversals of the apparent story in Attack on Titan—the true purpose of the Walls is not to keep the outside world out, but to keep the people inside in.
The people inside the Walls are the real threat in this world!
The Founding King’s second act: rewriting memories
The people inside the Walls could not go on living while carrying the memories of the past:
They were the culprits who had turned this world into hell, demons, sinners against all humanity. And years later, their descendants were bound to become mindless Titans. The ultimate fate of the entire nation was destined to be extinction.
——No one could live under that kind of psychological pressure.
So the Founding King’s second act was to rewrite the memories of the people inside the Walls, making them forget their past and the curse they carried.
From then on, the people inside the Walls believed:
1. They were merely victims of the Titans, not the originators of the disaster, and they forgot that they themselves were sinners.
2. They forgot the miserable fate awaiting their people in the future, and could therefore muddle through their lives inside the Walls, barely surviving without really knowing why.
The Founding King’s third act: preserving the Titans outside the Walls
The Founding King’s third act was to maintain the oppression of the people inside the Walls by the Titans outside them. In other words, even though the Founding King actually had the power to wipe out the Titans outside the Walls, he did not do so.
Only in this way could he make the vast majority of the people inside the Walls give up on going outside of their own accord and stay obediently within them.
The Founding King’s fourth act: locking down technology
To serve this purpose, there was a fourth act: the Founding King and his descendants locked the level of technology inside the Walls in the pre-industrial age. That way, the people inside the Walls would also lack the power to break out of them.
I think the Founding King’s decision to lock down technology inside the Walls had an even deeper motive. The Reiss family had witnessed the devastating consequences of too many humans finding elaborate ways to get themselves killed with advanced technology, and as a result they fell into profound despair over humanity’s self-destructive nature in the face of high technology. It is even possible that something like this had happened in the distant past: humanity had already mastered highly advanced technology, then destroyed itself, sending civilization back to prehistory to start all over again. This may also be why both Ymir and the Reiss family chose to hide themselves away: they were wary of humanity and hoped to keep the Titan technology hidden within themselves as far away from humans as possible.
Therefore, the Founding King did not want these people to repeat the same mistake and use advanced technology to create an even greater disaster. So he locked technology down.
And that was how the Founding King built this group of sinners a paradise before the twilight. Even if their destruction was inevitable, he would change their memories before it came, grant them a peaceful land, and let them go on living.
——This was the Founding King’s will, and this was the compassion he felt for them.
This is the origin of the story of Attack on Titan.
Preview:
1. In the next installment, we'll analyze who the Hometown Group are and what they want to do.
2. Who is Grisha, and what does he want to do?
3. Eren's precognitive dream, previewed in the previous installment, can only be analyzed in the next one too~
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