Headscratchers / Attack on Titan

New entries on the bottom. Beware SPOILERS!

Title

• Okay this isn't a plot point but it's been bugging for a while. Why is it called Attack on Titan? Wouldn't the title Attack Of The Titans make more sense grammatically speaking?
  • Most likely they are trying to keep the double meaning of the Japanese title, which could be translated to either Advancing Titans or Advance Toward the Titans. If Attack on Titan is said with a pause or comma it becomes Attack on, Titan, which implies the Titan is the attacking party, like Advancing Titans, but if said as it is spelled it implies the Titan is the one being attacked, like Advance Toward the Titans.
  • Titan Attack or Attacking Titans would both work in that case.
  • Pixis mentions that if the Trost mission succeeds, it'll be the first human victory and the first time humans successfully advance on the Titans. It makes sense that the wording would be the way it is if humanity is trying to fight back for once.
  • This seems like one of those cases was deviating from the literal Japanese translation would have been a good idea.
  • The official English (or more accurately, Engrish) title is "Attack on Titan." The US licensors didn't come up with it; the original author likely did, or else one of his editors. "Attack of the Titans" would indeed be a loose but appropriate translation of "Shingeki no Kyojin"; however, it's worth noting that the spoken part of the theme song does indeed say "Attack on the Titans" in German.
  • It's also possible that the somewhat confusing wording is supposed to reference the ambiguity of the setting, and the question of whether the Titans are the hunters or the hunted. The Titan Shifters add to the presumably-intentional confusion over who's supposed to be on the offensive.
  • For what it's worth, the English title "Attack on Titan" actually appears as a subtitle in the Japanese version of the manga. So odds are high that the author came up with it and it's Engrish because of a questionable grasp on English grammar. And because the author came up with it, clearly that means that it's the one true name that must be used in translations. Nevermind that Japanese speakers aren't any better at English grammar and words than your average English speaker is at Japanese.
  • As of the new revelation of Chapter 88, Eren's titan form is called the Attack Titan, thus he is the 'Shingeki no Kyojin'/ 'Attack (er of the) Titan (s)'
  • Perhaps the Assaulting Titan would be a better name.

Shifter Appearance

• A minor issue, but why do the human/Titan hybrids look much less human than the Titans themselves? The average Titan is a giant naked humanoid with disturbingly realistic features. Eren has an exaggerated Jaw with pointy ears, Reiner has glowing gold eyes and full body armor, Ymir has black eyes, jagged teeth, and pointy ears, while Bertolt and Annie lack skin.
  • Maybe it means that the humans themselves are the real monsters.
  • Probably just to make them look more distinctive and badass. The Rogue Titan looks cool as hell and menacing without treading into the Narm/Uncanny Valley territory of the other Titans, who are usually Fat Bastards and aren't admirable visually. This almost makes him appear noble; despite the jaw thing and ears (or maybe because of them), Roguey looks striking and fearsome in a way that instills admiration. Similarly, the Female Titan's lack of skin makes her eerie, and her realistic facial features offer a distinctive contrast that serves to make her oddly relatable while still remaining unsettling, etc. Also, the lack of skin could hold some Rule of Symbolism, considering the identities of the two main skinless Titans.
  • There's also the possibility that, as shapeshifters, they have subconscious control over their forms more. The normal Titans are all stuck in a basic "default" form due to being mindless, but the others have more choice. The Rogue is a Berserker; his Titan Form is a Glass Cannon. The Female Titan is a skilled fighter who makes strategic use of her ability to armor parts of her body. The Armored Titan is, well, armored. The Colossal Titan is just giant but is quite skilled at the actual shifting process. The Dancing Titan is the closest to normal Titans, but she might be an odd case—we still don't know how Shifters are supposed to be made.
  • Also consider that, before becoming a shifter, the person is in a "Pure Titan" form, which usually is similar to the form they will have after getting the power, but said form changes depending on the power. An example is Armin, when he is transformed into a titan he is the size of a regular Titan (more or less), but he is almost skin and bones (probably because of being almost burned to death), then he consumes the power of the Colossal Titan and we later see his transformation as a Colossal, but similar to his pure titan form, his Colossal form lacks muscular mass (opposed to Berthold's form, that had muscular legs and torso). Eren and Frida Reiss also got "standard" titan forms, and with the powers, they become more muscular (And Frida's eyes changed). In Ymir's case, she didn't got the jaws, but sharper teeth, and also a more muscular build (Also note that Both Ymir and Galliard titans do have skin, but when Ymir is turned into a titan, she receives a "normal" or "not special" serum). Maybe the warriors got special titan serums, or maybe its just something to do with the power itself.
  • The Nine Titans are the original Titans, while the naked humanoids are mutations created by injecting their spinal fluid into regular Humans. That's why the later look closer than Humans, despite lacking the ability to transform at will.

Crying

• Why was the Female Titan crying after Levi gave it a beatdown? Did it just give up?
  • She kinda HAD to give up at that point because it was totally cut up and very tired besides. There was not really much of a chance to still catch Eren especially since it is implied (more strongly in the manga) that she was close to her limit to uphold in her Titan transformation as well (which quite frankly was about time, considering all the punishment she took). I am not sure about the tears because they might just be caused by her eyes getting gauged out. But she might actually feel despair about failing at her mission, especially considering how desperate all the Titan Shifters are to catch Eren later.
  • What I'd like to ask is why he 'gave up' on trying to kill the female Titan. It was completely defenseless, and could not compete with Levi's speed, much less Mikasa's on support. In the anime, Levi's attacks left the Female Titan completely incapable of hardening his skin-the cliche which Levi brought up that claimed she couldn't be killed. To save Eren? Killing that creature was entirely within his capabilities to do well before it left the forest. He made a terrible call.
  • actually considering the fact that 1. Levi's leg was broken and so it's likely that he wouldn't have been as effective, and 2. The Female Titan called backup, and 3. The troops were decimated, I would have to say that Levi made a good call.
  • Before he broke his leg, he had every chance to kill the Female Titan and DID NOT TAKE IT. He was faster, stronger, and more mobile than it was. They could have easily-EASILY-killed the Female Titan and saved Eren straight after.
  • Rewatch the anime and listen to his words and his actions. Even though Levi did not show it, he was incredibly pissed that the Female Titan murdered his comrades he had been fighting beside for quite some time, however instead of going for revenge (Like Eren would do) he reminded himself that the highest priority was to save Eren, not to kill the Titan who slaughtered his comrades. Want more proof? When Mikasa saw an opportunity to kill the Titan and went for it, Levi intercepted her due to the fact that he knew the Female Titan was luring them into a trap to take them out, and so he sacrificed his leg to prevent that. It didn't matter if he could have killed the Titan, his main priority was to save Eren, and get the hell out of there which he did flawlessly. It's a simple concept really.
  • More than anything Levi clearly states it's useless trying to kill her when she can crystallize her skin, which is why he decides they should just focus on rescuing Eren.
  • You remembered incorrectly. Levi's attacks DID NOT leave her unable to harden her skin. Mikasa simply stated he was attacking so fast she couldn't respond in time. That is she couldn't harden her skin against Levi because she doesn't know where he's attacking until it's too late. This does not apply if they go for the kill.
  • Because Levi's top priority was getting Eren back. If they had gone for the kill, there could have been the slight chance that something could have gone wrong (regardless of Levi's and Mikasa's skill) and he wasn't willing to take that chance. He knew his primary objective, executed it flawlessly, and retreated. He made the right call.

Training

• Not getting into how it would spoil us getting inspired by Erin's success, but how did everybody miss the faulty maneuver gear. If their training is anything like any other military, they'd be expected to know their gear down to the last bolt and be able to field strip it blindfolded. Based on that, I don't see how anybody would miss the problems with the gear Erin was assigned for more than a week.
  • Keith Shadis sabotaged his gear before the test in a bid to get him to fail and thus not follow the same path he and others had. Presumably any follow-ups went through him and did not go anywhere.

Swords

• Why are swords the primary weapons? The manga states that it's because the swords, when swung fast enough, are the only things capable of piercing the nape. That doesn't make any sense. You think that they would use some kind of rifled, pneumatic hand-cannon or something. (The ammo would certainly weigh less than lugging 12 swords into battle. They could easily pierce the nape, shatter the spinal cord, or kill an operator from a safe distance.
  • It's indicated that the metal used is far lighter than ordinary steel or iron.
  • Using that would require a greater degree of precision than using swords and they probably won't have the best aim while swinging mid-air. Plus, with the already limited amount of living humans and high levels of casualty, one wouldn't want to bear the risk of having friendly fires.
  • There are a lot of potential reasons, most of them boiling down to "it's just more pragmatic": for one thing, it's easier, faster, and cheaper to produce what amounts to giant-sized box-cutter blades than it would be to provide guns and ammunition for the entire army (they're living inside a Walled City; material resources are very limited), especially when those materials could be put to more productive use in cannons, and training someone to use a gun is automatically signing up to lose ammo in target practice. Further, they don't know what about the nape of the neck makes it a vital weak point in a Titan's body, and it's usually a large area. That's why the army teaches trainees to use two cuts, boosted by the 3D maneuver gear: to tear out the whole back of the neck in one shot because a second opportunity isn't likely to arise.
  • It's a lot more than just "piercing the nape"; a successful cut takes out a chunk roughly the size of a person. It's even outright stated in the backstory that humanity had superior firepower in the past, but it didn't do any good since all the Titans did was regenerate. The current methods are simply one solution that has been developed over time, and more may arise over the course of the story.
  • Mind you, that explanation makes no sense in light of the Battle of Trost, where most of the Titans are explicitly said to have been cleaned up by cannon fire, but the story seems to be leading to there have been some other reason behind Humanity's fall than just their weaponry being inadequate.
  • That time it worked possibly because 1) there were many, many cannons firing at a relatively small space 2) they were explicitly using "High Explosive" shells 3) They had a clear line of sight on the back of their necks for once. I think the main reason that cannons weren't being used to target their weak spots is that they never line up a shot. Titans always go for humans that would be manning the guns and I imagine it would be next-to-impossible to move a cannon behind a Titan, fire it, then not have any of the others notice. They also didn't get a chance to aim wall-mounted cannons straight down at them before because the past three walls were quickly breached (not to mention the Colossal Titan taking out the cannons right at the start of Trost).
  • You don't have to hit the nape of the neck from behind, you just have to damage that spot enough to kill the Titan, so why haven't humans added simple rifling to their cannons to vastly increase accuracy and range? Why haven't they made further use of the wall-mounted cannons during Titan invasions?
  • Yes all cannons should be able to do more damage than a sword swing if hit. But consider what's shown. From what's shown, the cannons on Wall Maria (or rather, in front of) sucks. They're about Napoleonic tech, so can't hit anything with precision. The ones shown at the Battle of Trost are about Armstrong Gun level siege guns. In other words, the technology in-universe already advanced in 5 years what in real life took 50. And Eren seems pretty proud of them. If they are Armstrong Guns, then yes they have rifling. The thing is Colossal Titan took out the guns lining Wall Maria's barbican walls (effectively what Trost is). With those guns lost, there's no way to slow down Titans entering Trost. The initial Battle of Trost was the Garrison buying time for the evacuation. Titans don't run away. And there's no way Armstrong-level guns could reliably kill Titans when they're designed to hit something the size of a house. Using them in this circumstance would probably do more bad than good by hitting the troops engaged in melee, or damaging their anchors, or just, in general, causing so much smoke and havoc to make the fighting even more confusing. When they finally tried to retake Trost, those guns were used to great effect.
  • To the tropers above; that makes no sense. Are you seriously suggesting that maneuvering your entire body parallel with the spinal cord and boosting with a steam-powered 'jet pack' is any easier than flanking the target and firing at a few dozen/hundred meters away? It would be challenging, but Marine Corps recruits are required to hit man-sized targets at 500 meters away, I'm sure, with training, they could be taught how to use "shoot n' scoot" tactics. Friendly fire is laughable. Unless you're blind, stupid, or Dick Cheney, there is no way you could confuse your ally with a giant naked man. Don't tell me it's because they would be zipping around, because the use of firearms would render extremely close combat obsolete, in favor of baiting and ambush. Resource consumption clearly isn't an issue. If the military has enough metal and manpower to average 30 casualties per Titan kill (that includes lost 3D Gear, holsters, and blades), then I'm pretty sure they have enough to give their soldiers some guns and ammo. Finally, having a hail of high caliber bullets come from behind would effectively replace the double sword slash. Heck, if they made a repeating rifle (child's play for a nation that invented steam-powered combat gear), each man would have several chances to strike the person inside the Titan.
  • Basically, yes. No gun can carry a large enough caliber to consistently hit the (once again) rather large target and yet still remain mobile enough to use in a variety of scenarios. Tanks are perhaps the one possibility, but while there seem to be remnants of technology, tanks are perhaps too much to ask for. If you were to use any calibre other than one large enough to get a 1 hit death, you also run the risk of the Titan collapsing and blocking the weak point, as well as simply wasting time while it regenerates the small arms fire. Guns in this setting have severe limitations, which is why we rarely see them. It's also worth noting that while Titans in a city (Zhigahnshina, Trost) are seemingly quite slow, they are capable of bursts of speed far faster than foot travel. Flanking and surrounding simply isn't an option without the increased mobility of the 3DMG or intentionally sacrificial tactics like those used at Trost.
  • I never suggested that the 3DG be done away with, only that rifled firearms replace swords as primary weapons. Frankly, I'm not sure if you realize just how powerful a rifle is. Rounds from standard-issue assault weapons can go through concrete and plated metal. Hell, even old fashioned 19th/20th century rifles can pierce light armor. And if a Titan were to collapse, I doubt a 3 foot blade would fair any better than a gun.", unless you plan on carving through a still living Titan like a holiday bird.
  • I don't see how small calibre firearms would be able to tear out a rather large chunk of flesh from a hard to reach spot, unless you have a good ROF and coordinated Improbable Aiming Skills. Especially if we take into account a moving target that might weave around a bit all the time. Also penetration power isn't really the point as killing Titans is not about piercing vital organs. It MIGHT work if they develop some kind of fragmenting Hollow-Point projectiles that actually tear open the flesh after impact but even that might do most of the damage deep inside the Titans body where it won't have any real effect and would still require some really good repeated shots within a few seconds. I think you can kinda compare that to either Highlander or the Mythbusters episode in which they tried to fell a tree with guns...which failed till they brought out More Dakka in form of a heavy stationary machinegun (and that was motionless target!). Slashing, explosives, or extreme blunt trauma (Titan Eren) are really the only effective way to get rid of the weak point.
  • A high power shotgun could easily fix that problem: You don't need to aim very well and they could use it in combination with the 3D Gear. Not to mention the addition of Flechette rounds to the equation makes the idea of lugging 12 swords around seem very ridiculous and impractical. I've seen 12 gauge hunting shotguns tear through trees with no problem.
  • Fragmentation rounds or heavy-caliber bullets (both of which can be carried by a modern sniper) could do the job easily. It's not like you have to blast the entire back of its neck off, you just have to terminate the man-sized target within. And like I said, if a soldier can be taught how to align his/her body in just the right way to boost and tear out the nape, they can sure as hell be taught how to fire at a moving target with some semblance of accuracy.
  • Actually, as far as we know, you DO have to carve/blow out the large chunk of flesh with the person within, otherwise it would just regenerate. Just hitting it's heart/head would not kill it when it is in Titan-form. But honestly at the moment it is hard to say how exactly the Healing Factor works and when exactly it stops for the human "pilot". I would assume that there is some sort of two-sided healing, meaning that Titan and pilot keep each other healed when one is injured. All we know is that Titans have to have the back of their neck cleaved out completely and that would be almost impossible with firearms that a person can carry.
  • Seriously, I don't know why this is in the Headscratcher page it should have been obvious. The guns in this anime aren't some modern-day rifle that can be loaded with explosive and anti-tank rounds, the guns are Flintlocks for crying out loud. Flintlocks are horrible inaccurate have very short-range compared to modern-day guns and can only be fired one shot before needing not only to reload but replace the powder charge as well. And considering how large the Titans tend to be, I doubt the bullet will even pierce the skin or produce enough damage. The only firearm that can possible do damage is the cannon, which is very inaccurate.
  • I guess the real Headscratcher would be how a society could develop something as advanced as 3D maneuver gear but otherwise be stuck at an 18th Century level of technology.
  • Necessity is the mother of invention. Once they got an idea that might work they probably poured all their resources into it to make it feasible (threat of getting eaten alive would be a good catalyst to speed things up). Once they had something that worked, maybe they decided to focus their crude infrastructure on that only? Guns got more and more advanced in real life because humans were fighting other humans wielding guns, why go through the trouble of developing semi-automatic rifles when no one's shooting back at you but rather trying to grab and eat you?
  • Chapter 51 reveals that the reason why cutting the nape is so effective is because it houses the nervous system of the original human before he turned into a Titan. Essentially, the Titan gets killed because its brain or spinal cord got sliced or blown out by a cannonball. A tiny bullet wouldn't be able to ensure that it would damage the nervous system.
  • So maybe firearms alone aren't enough to finish off Titans, but even the long reload times and inaccuracy of flintlocks can't negate the huge range advantage firearms grant. Plus, the inaccuracy issue can easily be circumvented by rifling the barrel, which was around ever since muskets were around, and the long reload time could be solved by breech-loading, which had come about at on 1836 with the invention of the Dreyse needle gun. The technology isn't that far off from the Brown Bess musket technology that the humans seem to use in this world. I can easily imagine a squad of soldiers specifically trained to fight, instead of close range with the swords, using rifles in conjunction with their 3DMG, shooting from one stationary position and then grappling away to the next. And perhaps instead of trying to hit the Titan's neck, they would focus on shooting the face to blind the Titan's eyes, or shooting at its legs to immobilize the Titan, thus making the job of the sword-wielding soldier so much easier to come in behind the blinded, crippled Titan and finish it off.
  • Would it though? At over 200 yards the spent bullet from a browns bess couldn't penetrate a soldier's uniform. We're shown that point-blank range can hurt their eyes, but that doesn't say much. Arrows can penetrate armor at point-blank range. It was very special circumstances that got the weakest class of giants in point-blank range. Meanwhile a sword strike in-universe would be much more powerful than real life due to the much higher speeds and the entire weight of the user behind the strike, so for all, we know Titan skin and/or flesh could be as tough or tougher than medieval armor. So damaging the ankle from any range is unlikely with small arms. There's probably a maximum range where an in-universe musket shot could hurt a Titan's eyes. The question is what that range is. If it's over 50 yards then the tactic you outlined would be useful. If it's under 15 then that tactic would be suicidal.
  • I agree with the above thought, except for one part, the flesh is clearly shown to be weak, most notably with that-one-guy that ended up being bit in half the first time we see Levi being awesome, he stabs his blade into the cheek of the titan, it isn't their speed or their weight, it's the fact that the flesh is actually weak.
  • In Throat-Cutter Kaney and his Anti-Human Squad's introduction, we find out the government has been suppressing all kinds of knowledge and innovation, and we're treated to a panel of a squad firing at a couple trying to get into a hot air balloon. Given that, it's not a long stretch to say that they also kept guns from advancing beyond their personal bodyguards. They obviously don't trust the Scouting Legion, so you'd be unlikely to see them with such weaponry. Anything that can kill a Titan from 50 meters has some dangerous assassination potential.

  • As noted above a wound to the nape of the neck containing a human nervous system is only deadly when the nape or a large chunk of it is cut off. It is shown that way on the diagram that the instructor drew when he was teaching the recruits. It is later demonstrated when Sasha tried to kill a 3-meter titan by swinging an ax into the nape of the neck with no result other than frustration. modern firearms would be viable, but not flintlocks. At best those guns could be used as a support weapon against titans to shoot their eyes and make them temporarily blind, but as shown when Sasha and Connie failed to kill their titans in the supply depot not long enough to be of much use. Those titan's eyes had healed by the time they turned around to see what had just slashed them in the back.

Flight

• Why don't the Survey Corps or the military, in general, make greater use of lighter than air technology? It should be completely within their means to build and would provide huge advantages for purposes of scouting during the Survey Corps extramural excursions. A hot air balloon would grant them line of sight far exceeding what a scout on horseback could ever had and be visible to the entire unit, thus expediting communication. During battle situations out in the open or in the city, where there are very few high objects for the 3DMG to lash on to, the balloons could provide a stable platform low enough for the soldiers to grapple on to, but high enough to be out of reach of the Titans. Plus, they could just chuck bombs positions in the balloons with impunity.
  • This, along with the questions about firearms being little more than flintlock, is revealed to be done on purpose as of Chapter 55. The government is purposely stifling technological growth and killing off anybody who has knowledge of people turning into Titans, who tried to make more advanced guns [a guy was killed for trying to invent a revolver], or even try to fly [killed off makers of a hot air balloon]

Underground Cities

• Why aren't the cities underground? This was partially explained in the Fridge logic section, but their explanations don't really hold up. Since the Titans don't attack crops or livestock, could they easily just keep the animals and plants on the surface, peep out from a hole in the hole in the ground, take what they need, and go back under? And don't tell me it's because of the little quakes their footsteps would make. It's established that the Titans are very light, and mining trusses could easily stabilize the tunnels.
  • It's very unhealthy for people to live underground for long periods of time, humans need to synthesize vitamin D using sunlight. Plus any underground settlements would need extensive ventilation, providing weak spots where Titans could enter. In addition, there are intrigues in the plot that suggest various entities with considerable power created the status quo.
  • If you were a cookie, would you want to live in a cookie jar, knowing that your life would just be a long wait in the dark until a giant hand came down from above to carry you to a gruesome, horrifying death?
  • And with the Headscratcher below, we have another answer: It's easier to make use of that convenient Walled City you found than to build an elaborate underground city.
  • Just try to keep that place lit. And every time you go up to take care of the crops there are probably Titans right there.
  • Because then this would be called Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
  • Chapter 51 has confirmed that there ARE underground cities. They just don't live in them solely. This makes sense; the Wall was already there when they showed up, it's healthier to live above ground, and for 100 years they were safe. The above-ground cities are just a better option. Not to mention, there's probably not enough room for everyone below ground.

Building the Walls

• Is it ever explained how humanity managed to build three fairly huge walls in the first place? The first one perhaps could be justified as it's not too big, but the other two walls I'd imagine would take quite a bit of manpower and materials to build considering how big of an area they're supposed to cover. Then again, we could always just chant the MST3K Mantra...
  • There are Colossal Titans within the Walls serving as its primary supports, kept dormant by being sealed up away from the sunlight. How the Hell they got there is still anyone's guess, though.
  • The runes on the manga's back cover are actually upside-down Japanese. They mention, among other things, that the Walls were already there when the humans fled across the sea from the Titans. This explains the Wall Cult that calls them "Gods Gift to Humanity". No one knows where the Walls came from, and with recent revelations it's likely they are a trap.
  • It has since been revealed that the walls were constructed by a powerful Titan Shifter using the "Coordinate" ability. The Shifter in question, known only as "The First King" at this time, controlled what could very well be thousands of Colossal-sized Titans to join together and use their hardening abilities to create the three walls along with the four districts protruding out of each one. The motivations behind these actions, however, are not yet explained.
  • Counts as Fridge Brilliance. According to Chapter 99, this was all intentional on the part of the First King, Karl Fritz, who wanted the extinction of his people for their crimes. If you put all the people above ground, it'll be easier for them to be decimated by the Titans, who can't be in small, confined spaces.

Eren's mental state

• Does Eren have some sort of personality disorder? He's awesome, but even before the death of his mother, he's shown some major warning signs.
  • Probably, but considering the state humanity's in, it's hard to think of it as a negative trait; Eren seems to have a pathological loathing for anyone and anything that preys upon humans, and immediately stops thinking of a person as a human being once they've done something to abuse or betray someone else. He's the Hunter, after all. Eren's rescue of Mikasa may be the reason Grisha gave him the ability to change into a Titan because it means that even at his most psychotic, he won't lose his nerve to fight, and he won't forget whose side he's on.
  • Given the time frame, There Are No Therapists, and historically (even as recently as Vietnam) wartime mental healthcare has ... not been optimally helpful, to put it one way. After all, everyone is screwed up and there's only so much time you can spend with each soldier.

Modern Weapons

• Other than Rule of Cool, why aren't there any modern firearms/weapons platforms in this series if it were really 2,000 years from the present? Did the Titans manage to wipe out all the military installations in Western Europe, along with the factories of several weapons manufacturers? For that matter, how could Titans nearly wipe out humanity in a world where we have remote control drones that can blow precisely human-sized holes from hundreds of yards away?
  • I believe that the "to you 2000 years in the future thing" is supposed to mean that they're 2000 years in the past.
  • Even if it were 2,000 years in the future, the Genius Bonus runes tell us that humanity mostly wiped itself out. There's a pretty good chance that even if modern weapons do exist, the Walled City doesn't have the means to produce them, and going into the outside world to find some is practically suicide. It doesn't matter how powerful modern weapons are anyway; the Titans regenerate and when they die, they dissolve. You can blow a human-sized hole in a Titan and kill it, but by the time anyone got there to examine the body, it would be gone. If humanity did fight the Titans that way, it could have been decades before anyone finally figured it out.
  • But even according to the Genius Bonus runes, humanity only turned on each other after they started fleeing from Titans. So the modern militaries of the world never thought to train their aircraft and missiles against this new threat, and instead decided to start World War 4? Also, we don't really need to examine a Titan body; we have cameras and digital recording. A registered kill can be reviewed later for analysis. You can't even argue lost technology, as the founders of the last city were allegedly the rich and powerful. There should've been at least one defense contractor among them, who still possessed knowledge of advanced weapon systems.
  • Dude. 2000 years in the past. None of this technology exists in the Attack on Titan world. Saying there should have been at least one defense contractor available to fight the Titans is like saying Megatron should have been there to defend Constantinople. More to the point, it doesn't say that humanity turned on each other after they fled from the Titans, it says that by the time the Titans showed up, humanity had already almost wiped itself out, and those able to flee to the Walls were only a small fraction of the extremely wealthy. Even currently in the story, knowledge of the history of the world and the outside world as a whole is considered taboo to the point of conspiracy. Of course, you can't "argue lost technology", they never had it to begin with! The most advanced weapons tech they have are cannons, and you're wondering why they don't have TiVO?
  • Well, it says that at the time that they fled to the Walls, humanity had been wiped out by each other. So presumably, the Titans showed up, and then humans wiped each other out, and then they fled.
  • On the Gregorian calendar, the date would probably be something like 4100. It is intended to be the future, and it's implied that Titans appeared after humanity had already weakened themselves in a large war, or that there was another complicating factor. Who's to say what happened between now and the 2000 years that passed by before Titans appeared??
  • It's an alternate history. It does not take place in the future.
  • What do you mean by "alternate history"? It can't take place 2000 years in the past (from 2013 C.E. in which would put it around 13 C.E.) because Hange references Real Life cannibalistic serial killers when naming her Titan test subjects: the legend of Sawney Bean comes from is based on 15th- or 16th-century Scotland (Sawney and Bean's namesake), Hamilton Howard "Albert" Fish was a 20th century American serial killer (a previous Titan whom as Albert was named after his preferred name), and Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was a 20th century Soviet serial killer who died in 1994 (another previous Titan was named Chikatilo). The story taking place in an After the End version of our world, or one with an extremely similar history, makes the most sense so far. Unless you think Hange can see into the future with amazing detail, since in the anime she made it quite clear she isn't picking these names at random by describing the story of Sawney Bean to her squad while naming the Titans, when the legend doesn't exist until 15 or 16 thousand years after the time period you claim the series is set in.
  • An alternate history allows an author to pick and choose whether or not events from real history occurred or not. There are no rules governing what an author can make up, ignore, or include. We know very little about this world, except that it has analogs to some famous mass murderers and there is a part of the world analogous with Asia.
  • "Alternate" means "different". Why is this so difficult a concept to grasp? Who says Sawney Bean, in the Attack on Titan timeline, didn't exist a few thousand years sooner than in the real world?
  • To everyone above saying that it's "alternate history" and that it's "2000 years in the past". I want to inform you that that argument is absolutely ridiculous. 2000 years ago, the most advanced weapon humanity had was the catapult. A cannon would be even more futuristic to them than a plasma beam is to us (the invention of gunpowder alone happened 800 years later and the first cannons, the first ones, not the 18th century ones seen in the anime, were recorded to be used in battle in China in the 12th century, or the 1100s). Now, you're telling me people during the Roman Empire (trust me, this doesn't give off the Roman vibe) had the resources to invent not only firearms but something as advanced as the 3D gear while running for their lives from Titans?
  • Well, the reason is this isn't the future. The people outside the Walls have steam-powered warships, guns, planes, electricity, and even zeppelins.
  • For everyone above It is revealed that there are more nations outside the walls, the one more known being Marley, which is actually in war. The world shown is pretty much like our world (in the WWII/Cold War age but with titans). The nation resembles the Nazi Germany era and is where the warriors (Reiner, Annie, Berthold, and the others) come from. The only people that can become titans (shifters or not) are a race called Eldians (the people in the walls are Eldians, but there are more outside), and the nation of Marley rule them (Like Nazis over the jews). Anyways, at some point the other nations (wich are normal humans, and do not have titan to fight for them) manage to develop weapons strong enough to almost kill the Armored titan with a single shot (Reiner takes the bullet for Zere, aka Beast Titan), that shot could certainly have killed Zeke, and the only reason Reiner survives is thanks to his armor, and the shot didn't hit his neck. Marley notices this with consternation. Of course, the people in the walls do not have access to this technology or knowledge (thanks to the government suppressing technological development, and the People in the walls being like 200 before the rest of the world in those matters)
    • Probably for the better. I'd hate to see how the main cast reacts to a 12-meter tall metal Titan that hates Communists and throws nukes at people.

Resources

• During a siege, usually it is a battle of attrition between the besieger and besieged. So, where do the humans get their resources, like metal, from? Unless they have a high stockpile but it's dwindling at an accelerated rate considering the number of deaths in the series...
  • Well, the original.. uh, settlers, in the Walled City were supposedly the amazingly wealthy, so maybe they brought it with them? During some of the training chapters, they mention manufacturing as a chump's alternative to enlisting, so there's got to be at least one factory/refinery. Maybe there are iron mines somewhere within human territory. Of course, there's always the possibility that they don't use metal at all. All the stuff that looks like metal? Hardened Titan skin.
  • Would rules of attrition apply when the besieged "castle" is the size of most of Western Europe?
  • No and yes. The "siege" has forced the level of Schizo Tech we see; clearly, there is technology higher than what most people have access to, it's just very expensive. What little is used in the way of rare resources are the military's use of pressurized gas and their weaponry. We've seen that the blades they use are basically glorified razor blades and are definitely made as cheaply as possible, especially when considering there is resistance to change these designs based on input from the troops. The only other things shown are cannons, of which there are few, and of course the 3D Maneuver Gear, which seems to be at least partially aluminum-based as it's lightweight and the way it sounds in the anime. Basically, what technology we do see is clearly being self-limited based on resource scarcity, and later on, the series may explore ramifications of these resources running out.
  • Bonus information states that they have massive deposits of natural resources within the Walls, such as natural gas and various minerals. In terms of resources, their largest concern is food since much of the land isn't focused on agriculture.
  • The prequel manga "Before the fall" states that the metal used for the blades comes from a "metal bamboo forest". The natural bamboo absorbed minerals and grows with a layer of the metal.

Titans Hiding Five Years Ago

• I know that the Colossal and Armoured Titans use the 3DMG to escape and blend in with the humans but what about the incident 5 years ago, when Bert and Reiner weren't in the military yet? How did they run away from the Titans and safely enter the Inner Walls?
  • They were kids at the time. All they had to do was change back and blend in with the refugees, and nobody would have had any reason to question them.
  • In Episode 2 of the anime, li'l Annie can be seen lining up for rations. Later on, we see Bertolt and Reiner among the refugees as the plan to retake Wall Maria is announced.
  • There are many possibilities for the first time. It is mentioned that they believe Annie did participate in the attack on Wall Maria, luring in the hordes of Titans. If she was transformed, more than likely she would have been able to sneak the other two into the city and past other Titans. Another possibility is that they were not acting alone, and had helped to get through the city without being harmed.
  • This is touched upon in the Marley arc when Reiner has a flashback to his younger days. The plan started with Annie transforming and transporting Bertolt and Reiner to Wall Maria, while using her screams to lure the Titans to the Walls. However, she was supposed to be switching between these duties with Marcel (the comrade that Ymir ate) because his Titan was more quick-footed, so she got tired very quickly. She stopped and fainted, so Reiner transformed and transported them the rest of the way. Once they got to the Wall, Bertolt transformed and kicked a hole in, then left his Titan form. Reiner - still in his Titan form - left the pair atop Wall Maria where they would be safe and broke down Shinganshina's gate, then presumably went back to retrieve them and from there they went to Wall Rose. Although we are never shown how, he likely stayed in his Titan form and transported them to Wall Rose, as Annie was still unconscious until they awoke in the refugee camp and Bertolt's Titan is the slowest due to his immense size. From there, they passed themselves off as refugees and hid in Wall Rose, with Reiner and Bertolt working as lumberjacks for two years. They gathered knowledge about the Walls, such as that few are allowed to live in Wall Sina unless they are not of the common bloodline in the Walls (and Annie couldn't just marry a member of the royal family because of her blood and inability to seduce) until they decided the quickest way to get to the royal family and retrieve the Coordinate was to join the Military, make it to the Top 10 and join the Military Police.

Dancing Titan

• Why is Ymir called the Dancing Titan?
  • She jumps and swings around as if she were dancing. A Dance Battler.
  • Being of a smaller size means she can't just run around overpowering everything like the others, forcing her into the role of a Fragile Speedster.
  • Dancing Titan is a fan nickname, as far as I can remember. The Real name of her power is The Jaws Titan. Of course, she don't have that particular feature, but one of the abilities of the Jaw Titan is being small and agile, as stated above.

Helmets

• The soldiers are constantly in the air and there is a possibility of them running out of gas or messing up and crashing, yet why do none of them wear helmets?
  • Apart from the artistic choice (helmets cover hair and sometimes faces; having a bunch of uniformed soldiers in helmets makes it harder to tell characters apart), it's because the helmet would do more harm than good. The technology level in the series means a helmet is just a metal hat, possibly with a leather pad inside it, which won't do anything to protect your head from any kind of high-speed impact. It would also obstruct peripheral vision and hearing, both of which are utterly crucial to being able to fight Titans effectively.
  • Not true. Motorcycle helmets were invented in the 1930s after the death of T.E. Lawrence (yes, as in Lawrence of Arabia) to reduce injuries from high-speed impacts. The earliest of them were no more than "metal hats" and more sophisticated designs should be within the reach of a culture that can produce 3D Maneuver Gear.
  • Except no. The technology level and culture of the Walled Territory never extends past early-Victorian levels, and that's in the highly privileged Sina districts. The 3DMG is clearly displayed to be the only piece of regularly used Schizo Tech that the humans possess that exceeds 19th-century constraints, and the design for those was revealed in the prequel material to be the work of a single man. Plus, there's the little factor of the upper echelons for some reason refusing to update the military's equipment for what is implied to be a couple of decades, meaning no one can make helmets standard even if the could make a practical design.

Titans attacking Titan Shifters

• I know this is one of those mysteries that the story will probably cover eventually, but: Chapter 46 shows that Titan Shifters need to worry about being attacked by regular Titans just like anybody else, it's not just Eren. So why the Hell haven't they done something about it?
  • What? If you're asking why the Titans haven't attacked, it's because the Shifters are currently in trees. If you're asking why the Shifters haven't attacked the Titans, it's because all of them are in a critical condition after the last battle.
  • Good question. It does seem like they have almost as much to fear from the Titans as normal humans do, yet have been utilizing them as a weapon against mankind. It raises all sorts of questions concerning just how safe their homeland is from Titans, as well as the reason for attacking the Walls in the first place.
    • Their homeland is safe from normal titans, in fact Their homeland, the nation of Marley, who rule and oppress the Eldians, the only ones that can become titans (they are normal humans beside that detail). Marley punishes the Eldians transforming them into titans and sending them to the walls. All this is because Eldia once was an empire that ruled with the power of titans, but at some point they were almost defeated in a war by Marley somehow, and the King Fritz escaped to the island where the walls are now, taking some of his people with him. Of course he got one of the 9 titan powers, and the reason of the attack to the walls is to steal that power. The rest of eldians were left behind in Marley.

Cannons as knockback

• Why has it not occurred to anyone to use the cannons to knock the Titans over or injure them and then have a team slice the nape of their necks while the Titans are reeling from the impact (especially if their heads are blown off)? This seems like it would solve a lot of problems with Titans getting back up and regenerating and would probably help dispel the fear of being eaten while doing so.
  • That would be extremely riskful to do, considering the very precise timing a maneuver like that would require. Add to the fact that Titans can sometimes regrow missing heads/limbs within seconds, you would have to be an ace of a soldier in order to pull that. Also, you would need a lot, and I mean a lot of cannon fire in order to incapacitate a large concentration of them all at once. Imagine moving in for the kill and then suddenly one sneaks up behind you.
  • It still seems like a better tactic than "Throw men at it and hope we kill it by the 30th casualty".
  • There are two battlefields for a Titan vs human smackdown: Scouting Legion expedition, where cannons are impractical to bring, or a town that the Colossal Titan breached, when the cannons would be hitting people's homes and fleeing evacuee crowds. There's a reason cannons are only used late into battle's or at relatively close range.
  • It has occurred to the Garrison to do that before: remember the beginning of the battle of Trost, after the Colossal Titan vanished. Remember the Garrison spamming barrages of cannon fire upon titans, dismembering them and cutting them in half, followed by 3DMG-equipped veterans to go for the kill. And remember how it ended: with everyone dead and Trost breached.
  • When the titans mysteriously appear inside the walls, there is a short scene where some old faces from the garrison bring a titan to its knees with cannon fire before Rico dives in with swords to finish it off.
  • I will copy my answer from a previous entry: It is revealed that there are more nations outside the walls, the one more known being Marley, which is actually in the war. The world shown is pretty much like our world (in the WWII/Cold War age but with titans). The nation resembles the Nazi Germany era and is where the warriors (Reiner, Annie, Berthold and the others) come from. The only people that can become titans (shifters or not) are a race called Eldians (the people in the walls are Eldians, but there are more outside), and the nation of Marley rule them (Like Nazis over the jews). Anyways, at some point the other nations (which are normal humans, and do not have titan to fight for them) manage to develop weapons strong enough to almost kill the Armored titan with a single shot (Reiner takes the bullet for Zere, aka Beast Titan), that shot could certianlly have killed Zeke, and the only reason Reiner survives is thanks to his armor, and the shot didn't hit his neck. Marley notices this with consternation. Of course, the people in the walls do not have access to this technology or knowledge (thanks to the government suppressing technological development, and the People in the walls being like 200 before the rest of the world in those matters)

Scaling the Walls

• So, if the Walls were already there when the first settlers came, how did the first settlers of the city scale the Walls to build a society in them?
  • They didn't scale them. The gates were probably open when they got there, and then they just closed it behind them.
  • The newest chapters seem to imply that the first humans controlled the titans to build the walls, and the current population is their descendants. The way how the walls were built just wasn't passed down in most families.
  • Later is revealed that the walls were made by the King Back then Karl Fritz, who had the power to command titans. The walls are made by hundreds of thousands of Colossal titans, who were aligned in circles and then hardened to make the walls.

Projectile Weapons versus Titans

• As we've seen in Levi's first battle and Sasha's little storyline, low-velocity projectile weapons like arrows are actually pretty effective in blinding or weakening the Titans, because the projectiles get stuck in the body and prevent a complete regeneration (especially of the eyes). Why has no one ever considered training some squads of archers as mobile support or outfitting some of the soldiers with small crossbows to effectively blind the slow-moving Titans? Or use large, stationary harpoons to obstruct their movement without triggering their regeneration like the cannons do?
  • Squads that aren't outfitted with swords aren't able to kill Titans. That's also a squad with even more limited ammo than the guys with breakable swords. Further, while slow Titans like the Colossal might be easy to hit, most of them are actually outrageously fast, which makes that form of support risky at best... not even considering friendly fire. Last but not least, the Titan you aim your bow at is the only one you're able to focus on. Considering that during an attack, like Trost, Titans show up everywhere, it would be too easy for a squad to get blindsided and chomped on. As for the harpoons... ...That's actually pretty good. They'd have to be inside the town though to be any use, given how the Colossal Titan could easily swat wall-bound defenses before they were useful.
  • From what we've seen even squads with swords often aren't able to kill Titans and just act as cannon fodder to buy time (for the Garrison troops at least, veteran Scouts are a different matter). I just thought that using some archer-heavy squads in combination with the regular ones might help all those less skilled soldiers to actually get some kills on the weakened Titans instead of being slaughtered. They could just carry a lightweight bow in addition to the regular 3D gear and switch a few spare blades for a decent supply of arrows (supply stations should be nearby anyway), thus keeping the mobility intact. Friendly fire should be less of a problem than colliding soldiers with 3D gears and can be avoided by coordinating the attacks properly. Of course it would require a different strategy and modified equipment but it is doable and can't be worse than those blind suicide rushes we've seen so far. Also, archers without 3D gear could be used as stationary defense at gates, walls, or towers. Those could even be composed of some half-trained militia who would be useless civilians otherwise.
  • Sasha knows how to use a bow because she used to be a hunter. Archers take a lot of training to be any good; add that to the 3 years of training for regular soldiers since they would be expected to be proficient with most of the same techniques (3DMG, physical fitness, swords if necessary), then you could have upwards of 5-7 years of training for an archery division. They simply don't represent that much of a return on investment, especially since regular soldiers are trained with rifles if rarely used.
  • I'm not sure where you got that 2+ years of archery training from (serviceable archery can be taught within weeks, and professional level can be taught within months), or why you assume that it couldn't be integrated into the daily curriculum to save time instead of being tacked on the end of training. Either way, I'd wager that 5-7 years for a 3DMG support unit with bow/crossbow sidearms and a few bolt quivers would be preferable to their horrific kill/casualty rate.
  • Archery fell out specifically in real life because it takes a minimum of 2 years to have an archer who's got enough skill and strength to hit targets at a distance; guns can be taught to be as effective with much less training, in a matter of weeks. There's also the fact that archers would be completely ineffective while moving with 3DMG, which is the exact opposite of what needs to be done in fights versus Titans. Bows simply aren't as effective as guns in the setting and regular soldiers are already taught how to use guns. The one positive is that they may prevent regeneration, but that seems to be situational at best.
  • 2 years of archery training is a huge exaggeration if we are just talking about learning the skill. Sure, if you need to drill untrained peasants into an organized army of archers it would fit, but that would also include extensive formation drills, endurance training, and the ability to rain coordinated hails of arrows over long distances as it was a popular tactic during the medieval warfare. Training recruits that are already schooled in the common tactics and abilities of their style of warfare to use bows against large targets at short to medium distances with direct fire would at the most add a few additional months to the training, especially if they can work it into the preexisting curriculum. That's a small payoff for a type of mobile ranged weaponry that can actually be useful in contrast to the completely ineffectual guns. Or alternatively, you train them with crossbows, which can be done within a few weeks.
  • Bows probably are going to become pretty important at some point, given the fact that the opening theme (the first one, anyway) never shuts up about them, even though they've only been used once. So, my guess is they're going to be some of the specialized weapons developed as time goes on and humanity starts gearing its efforts toward defeating Titans, rather than acting as bait.
  • Dude, the song is metaphorical, the arrow thing is a symbol, just like everything else. You just said that we saw a bow used once: it was used by the only introduced character with past experience using one, and it just barely made an effective battle tactic against a single small Titan. Annoying Arrows are in full effect as far as the human side is concerned, stop trying to say otherwise.
  • I'm not saying otherwise. The above was my only comment in this headscratcher. It doesn't surprise me that bows haven't been in widespread use, since the goal was never to kill Titans as effectively as possible, just to distract them long enough for the civilians to escape. Yeah I know it's metaphorical, but it's still strange for a series that has only had one appearance of a bow to be talking about "taking up your bow and beginning the resistance", rather than, say, "unsheath your sword and begin the resistance". I'm just saying that they could be pretty useful in conjunction with other methods and that as the humans target their methods more toward actually fighting, they may develop their use as a tactic.
  • Sasha's arrows worked because she was using them at a very close range against a small Titan. Arrows have fallen out of use in the Walled City for the same reason they fell out of use in real life; the advent of the firearm made them obsolete, and firearms became obsolete with the advent of the 3DMG. We do see all of them being used effectively in the story, but arrows and guns require very specific circumstances (and, in the case of archery, trained specialists) to do so, and they still aren't anywhere near as effective as the 3DMG; if Sasha had hers when she confronted the Titan with it, she wouldn't have bothered with the bow at all.
  • It's one thing to become a proficient archer, it's another altogether to be expected to consistently be able to shoot the eye of a target from a 50-100 meter distance. Hell, that's practically impossible.
  • In addition to the above, we're not just talking about stationary targets here. The Titan's move in herky-jerky manners much of the time and are incredibly fast. You would need people who could fire their arrows with pinpoint accuracy in the eyes at a good enough distance that they're not in danger of being eaten or have a large enough mass of them able to hit joints with enough accuracy to disable them. Plus, much like the guns, they'd be nearly impossible to shoot accurately if you're on the move and standing still in the middle of a Titan attack is a really bad idea. If they could rig up some sort of highly mobile ballista platform they could move around and fire then we'd be in business.
  • Also to the people talking about how "easy" it is to train someone to be functionally effective with a bow, you're forgetting key details here. Part of the reason the bow was abandoned in favor of the crossbow was how easy it was to train. Point, shoot, and reload — that's all you need to use a crossbow in a massed group. But a bow requires technique to even hold properly, ability to aim it over a long distance and then firing it as part of the archery mass. Also, arrows only need to hit a human the slightest bit to potentially take them out of a fight, so a massed arrow barrage is incredibly deadly. With Titan's only about 5% of its body mass would be vulnerable to any real effect of the arrows and you have zero benefit to using them except in very rare situations. But even a crossbow requires a bit too much accuracy considering the situations that they regularly fight in.
  • Why use a bow when you could just use a gun? Flintlock revolvers were already being mass-produced in 1822, and they would be perfect for the soldier to use while operating his 3DMG. Breech-loading technology isn't that far off from musket tech. The Dreyse needle gun came out in 1836 and fired off a round every 6 seconds. The 3DMG could perhaps be modified to allow the user to simultaneously operate both the rifle, thus taking advantage of its greater range and accuracy over the handgun, and the harness system, thus maintaining his mobility.
  • I believe they've already said elsewhere that if someone invented firearms more powerful than the ones already in use (like revolvers), the Government would kill them... because... Forget the Titans, they should wipe out their paranoid lazy government first. Then they could have real guns and artillery to deal with the Titan threat.
  • When they did just that, they came up with new, improved weaponry within months.

Berrik's Death

• So about those extra details about Berrik's death revealed in Chapter 47. The timing and location of his death suggest that all three boys possessed Titan powers when they encountered Ymir. So why didn't they use them to defend themselves?
  • Same reason Eren didn't turn into a Titan immediately at Trost. They may have not known how to control them until an offscreen event occurred, particularly if they were living as humans.
  • Since it happened close to the same time they attacked Wall Maria, that's pretty much impossible. That attack was coordinated, and both showed full control of their Titan forms. Though you could be right about them still being new enough to it that — like Eren — they hadn't built up enough stamina to function post-Transformation. It definitely raises a lot of questions about how skilled they were at the time, and what role Berrik was supposed to play in the whole thing.
  • Or perhaps unlike Eren, who was swallowed more or less whole, Ymir chewed Berrik up a bit before swallowing him, leaving him dead or unconscious by the time he went down the gullet?

Eating meat

• How does anyone still have the desire to eat meat after seeing the Titans eat people?
  • Well, for one, they eat to survive unlike the Titans, and they actually kill and cook the meat before eating it, so it doesn't scream and beg for life.
  • Also, meat is a rare delicacy. When Eren and co. freak out upon finding out that Sasha stole meat from the upper brass, it wasn't just because she stole food from their superiors. It was because she stole their world's equivalent of edible gold.
  • The same way people ate meat throughout the vast bulk of history during which we were both predator and prey — because meat tastes great and is an important part of a balanced diet. As Mikasa often notes, the world is cruel. It's one of the series' themes that you're either a hunter or dinner.

Future?

• Assuming that the story takes place After the End and not in the past, how come the humans were so unable to defend themselves from the Titans? And why are their technology and civilization so backward? Couldn't they just Nuke 'em? Firebomb them? Throw missiles at them or use bombers, tanks or even mechas to combat them? And what's with the primitive weaponry? Where are the machine guns, the rocket launchers, the pistols, the landmines, and the artillery or the nerve gas? Putting that aside, couldn't the humans built stronger walls made of steel? Or simply evacuate their own and re-locate them into airships, large vessels, islands, or underground cities?
  • The story takes place in the future; tanks are outright shown in flashbacks. As for why humanity's superior firepower didn't succeed, that is kind of one of the mysteries of the series, though it's hinted humanity had nearly expended itself in a massive war prior to Titans appearing. The current weaponry is simply what's most cost-effective and can be produced with the limited industry left. And lastly, they didn't build the Walls.
  • In what chapter are tanks shown? I never recall seeing anything other than cannons being used.
    • In the manga we learn that the outside world is "good and well" (as far as a world in WWII/Cold War can be) and of course they have rifles, tanks, machine guns, planes, etc).
  • There's a chance that this story doesn't take place after the end, though. Many fans are theorizing that To You in 2000 Years means that the story takes place in an alternate history, 2000 years in the past. More evidence to support this: When Hange recalls records of the era in which humans fought each other, she recalls a medieval knight and compares it to the Armored Titan. If this were after the end of our history, the era of knights would have been long since gone and forgotten.
  • As opposed to if it were 2000 years in the past, in which case the story would be taking place over a millennium before "the era of knights" even occurred.
  • Or perhaps the setting is simply an alternate history that is different from our own.
  • This has to take place in the future given the constant references to our world like "Sonny and Bean." Annie clearly knows Muay Thai which I don't think Europeans knew at that time and The Beast Titan references baseball.
  • Later chapters of the manga states that the people of the walls (and some other outside) are a race called Eldians, descendants of Ymir Fritz, a person who make a contract with the devil of earth, or get in contact with the origin of all organic life (depending on who you ask), and the person where the titan powers come from (when she died, she separated her powers in 9 parts). At some point, we learn that all the eldians are connected through invisible paths, that transcends time and space (and supposedly, a dimension were the bones and flesh of the titans come when a shifter transforms). The people who got a titanic power can inherit the memories of the predecessor, but Eren is capable of sending a tiny bit of information TO THE PAST (a previous user of his titan power mentions Armin and Mikasa, and when asked who are those, he doesn't know and asks himself who these memories belong). It is possible that in some ponit either, someone receives a memory from 2000 years ago or, sends a memory 2000 years to the past, so that memory can be sent to the future (creating a possible Stable Loop). Some theorize that this may happen if someone get all then titan powers at once (but that last piece is just that, a theory).

Titans finding people

• So, how do the Titans actually locate people? I ask because it has bugged me that stealth hasn't been brought up as a reasonable means of facing the Titans. If it's just sight-based, then people could travel at night, and move slowly. If it's by sound, they could move in smaller groups, and again, move slowly/with minimal gear. If it's by smell, then using pungent chemicals to hide their scent could be used. I understand that these methods wouldn't guarantee success, but it's odd that they're never even mentioned or tried. The series just seems to zigzag in regards to how easy/difficult it is for the Titans to find people. Jean hid in a building and was safe from a Titan; yet dozens of Titans swarmed the resupply building and the people hiding within. Not to mention how the Titans even knew that people were on the other side of the Walls. I can only assume that Titans locate people supernaturally, like a permanent detect human spell.
  • Well, most of the time when Titans are devouring and searching for humans, it's in a city that's overcrowded and is filled to the brim with humans. So, it's relatively easy to find humans. Also, most "normal" Titans appear to be using sight. Aberrant Titans, however, seem to be using supernatural means of detecting humans. Also, the problem with traveling at night is that humans can't see at night either, and would require using a lamp or some artificial light source, which would be the equivalent of putting a bullseye on yourself. As for how they get into buildings, most of the Titans that infiltrate buildings are about 3-4 meter Titans, which are small enough to get into the doorways if they crouch (and since they are anatomically similar to humans they can do that), or they could have saw humans fleeing into/toward any building and try to get them.
  • Actually, traveling at night makes sense since Titans appear to be powered by sunlight and "power down" after a few hours in the dark. But, I suppose since it varies from Titan to Titan and they have a sample size of about 4 it makes sense that they would hesitate to do so since they don't have enough data to confirm the maximum amount of time it takes for them to "power down".
• Travelling at night, such as on a long-distance recon mission, also presents the problem that, at some point, you're gonna need to rest and sleep. If you've been traveling throughout the night, then you're going to be tiring around dawn, when the Titans are just starting to wake up... you can see why that would be bad.
• A possible reason is that they locate people by noise (but in the first chapter someone mentions that just a few titans wander near outside the walls, and it was unusual that so many titans entered the walls). The Survey Corps ACTUALLY knows that at night most titans are "resting" or "powered down", but as mentioned above, that can result counterproductive (in second season, while searching the hole from where supposedly the titans entered again, the soldiers are clearly worried because there is no moonlight, so they can't see more than a few meters ahead with his lamps/torches, meaning a titan can appear any time). The reason why so many titans were present when the Colossal kicked the hole in the wall were that they were attracted on purpose by the Warriors, to maximize the damage and deaths. Even later we discover that almost all the titans were killed when the main party finally gets outside the walls and reach the sea finally.

Conny's hairstyle

Seriously, how does Conny shave his hair without a modern electric shaver? I can't imagine that he'd be able to do it with a simple Absurdly Sharp Blade and a mirror without a lot of time on his hands...and a lot of shaving cuts.

• There is artwork of Eren shaving Conny's hair, so that's likely how it works. He has others shave it for him, first his parents and then later likely his comrades in the squad.

Gas reserves

• Where do their gas reserves come from? If they have a natural gas mine somewhere, they must be pretty reliant on it, but it's never been mentioned as a tactical concern when they are losing ground to the Titans. Unless it is located in the Inner Wall (and thus, all the highest class people are operating it, not something associated with mines usually), they seem to completely disregard the possibility of losing their gas reserves, and therefore, their ability to fight back, since they're helpless without 3D gear. So far, it's the only resource they have that has no explanation for how they got it. Besides the Walls, but that I trust to be an explained mystery.
  • It's explained in one of those in-between pages that the lands inside the Walls are rich in both minerals and gas. Also, apparently the innermost part has the largest deposits of it. Even those rich, more densely populated areas should have some sort of working-class consisting of miners, farmers, and such...someone has to do the physical work, after all. Also, I assume that those giant furnaces producing the hardened steel (also mentioned in one of the additional info) are also in the inner part since we have never directly seen them.
  • It's not emphasized much, but the lands inside the Walls are really, really big. Even if they're not all that resource-rich or were mostly depleted by the old world, with a population of only ~1 million people and relatively low demand thanks to the generally low tech level... they could probably mine for centuries without running out.
  • The bonus details reveals that the Walled City is roughly the same size as Alaska or Texas, which is comparable to some small countries. And considering that Middle-Eastern countries have been selling their own oil supplies to billions of people in other countries for over half a century and still have enough to keep chugging out, it's doubtful that they will run out any time soon. A city with less than 1 million people (250,000 people were sent to their death due to high food demands, so there are only 750,000 left), with relatively low demands, they really could keep it up for over a thousand years.
  • 250,000 was stated to be 20% of the population, so they have a million now.
  • Actually, they said that they LOST 250,000 people which was 20% of the population. So, they have around 750,000 people, minus all the death as a result of the Battle of Trost.
  • 20% of 1 million people is 200,000, not 250,000. It is, however, 20% of 1.25 million people.
  • And there's always the possibility that there's a reason the gas looks so similar to Titan steam...
• Recent revelations reveal that the Walls are actually located on an island called Paradis, which is basically their world's version of Madagascar. As such it has an area of around 580,000 square kilometers (in actuality it would have less than this, since the area around the Walls is large enough for the scouts to explore for decades and never reach the ocean), but even with half that area, it's still fairly huge. Interestingly, the real Madagascar also has large quantities of oil, natural gas, and titanium ore, which might explain their swords.

Lost History

• Minor one: allegedly, the society within the Walls was set up a hundred years prior to the Colossal Titan's attack. A hundred years is not a very long time. Obvious-as-the-nose-on-Annie's-face conspiracy aside, how come everybody acts like it was an era ago, in an age lost to the mists of time? Granted, life expectancies might be shorter, but they actually should probably be right around modern-day numbers, given the fact that medicine seems pretty sophisticated, syringes and all. Oh, yeah, and, y'know, the ability to turn people into enormous rage monster death machines that come out of thin air). So, there should be people still alive whose parents or grandparents were on the original ships and who could explain, say, what this other continent/world/planet/thing was, under what circumstances the Titans showed up, how they knew these Walls existed, etc., etc. I guess most of these people would have been silenced by the government, but there's still this feeling that nobody remembers what it was like before the Titans, or even before the Walls. And the implication was that the time between the Titans' appearance and the flight to the Walls was quite brief. Do you know what I mean? It's like the world before the Titans is a legend now. Well...maybe a century is longer than I thought. Or maybe that'll be explained. I dunno. (I'm not accusing this manga of not making sense, by the way; I'm assuming there's a rational explanation related to the conspiracy. I'm not sure I could ever accuse AoT of anything. <3)
  • Armin mentions that his grandfather has a book about the outside world and Eren says the military police will bust him for it, right around the time he says his parents are "going outside". A hundred years isn't a long time, but think about all the other things piling up on that issue: the government bans knowledge of the outside and is not shy about ejecting people into the Godforsaken wilderness to preserve its resource management, medicine is relatively advanced but the conditions within the Walls leaves people prone to plague, and the Titans present a constant and handy threat for the royalty to use to coerce compliance from citizens. It wasn't a long time, no, but everyone who actually remembers the outside world has either been killed or folded into the conspiracy, while its culture and probably a strong propaganda machine have taught the younger generations (which, given the turnover rate, have probably been numerous) that the outside world is practically ancient history. For some perspective, the Great War began about a hundred years ago, and if we didn't teach about it in our history classes, you probably couldn't find a kid of Eren's or Mikasa's age (as of the start of the story, at least) who'd ever even heard of it.
  • It's said that the humans have been fighting the Titan's for A LOT longer than a mere century. It was only 100 years in which the humans found the Walled City and called it home, but the Titans have been attacking presumably decades before. It's also hinted that humanity has already wiped itself out, prior to the Titan attack and reduce all of humanity's knowledge and technology to Dark Age-level. And just because they have syringes doesn't mean that they have advanced technology. Syringes were invented as early as the 9th century with hypodermic needles around 1844.
  • AHAHAHA BRILLIANT Isayama, you continue to amaze. Chapter 55 actually brought this up, concerning the government conspiracy. Erwin recounts how he realized that the accounts didn't add up and that the people from the first generation of humans who entered the Walls should have been able to pass on their knowledge. So, consider this in the category of "weird conspiracy stuff". Oh, and also, to the troper above me, that's not quite correct. According to historical records, which may or may not be complete bollocks, it's been 107 years since the Titans appeared.
  • In fact, Erwin suspects that the first generation of humans who entered the Walled City had their memories altered to forget their past knowledge of the Titans and the outside world. Since then the history taught in the Walls has been heavily sanitized by the government and anybody who publicly disagrees is quickly made to disappear by the Military Police.
• King Fritz, who built the walls and moved the people 100 years ago erased the memories of the people (excluding a select number of people) so anyone can't remember the outside world, and the reason behind their actual situation and why they move in the first place. That is the same reason why technological advance is forbidden (along with other knowledge). Also, the titans have been around a long time ago, much more than 100 years.

Killing the Titans with your own gear

• I can't remember if this was explained, but when Annie kills the two Titans that Hange was experimenting on why did she choose to use her own 3D Maneuver Gear, rather then use Marco's and show hers as at the inspection? I mean, if a person had two options for equipment to use, why would you show off the dead guys, something that could lead to your suspicion if you're recognized? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
  • I think it was explained once that each 3DMG is delicately fine-tuned on the user in terms of weight, body strength and such. Using someone else's 3DMG might have caused her problems in such a risky task (like how Jean was much more clumsy with the other 3DMG he salvaged in Ep 13). And I would assume that she never thought of someone noticing the difference from the outside anyway.
  • Going by the wikia here, but that doesn't seem to of been a restriction that was explained.
  • Not yet, no, but that's mainly because the 3DMG explanations are there for information we don't see in the story. We see pretty clearly that a 3DMG has to be custom-fitted to the user just by the way they're treated by the characters.
  • Uh... not it isn't. In fact, it seems pretty clear that the gear can be used interchangeably between people, you'd just need to adjust the harness, like with Eren during the balance practice. You could try and say that this is made clear during the Titan Attack when Mikasa runs out of gas, but you also have to keep in mind there — that Titans could attack at any moment, and stripping gear off would be impractical. Besides even if gear had to be specifically fitted to a user and couldn't be adjusted, Jean managed to just fine, and Annie is ranked higher then him among the trainees, so she SHOULD be able to do kill two bound Titans with Marco's gear.
  • It was outright stated in Chapter 32 and Episode 24 that 3DMG's are finetuned to the user and using a different one is more difficult. That's why Annie used her own for that difficult task of killing the two Titans that were under guard. And Jean in the anime did seem to move more clumsy with the salvaged gear especially for someone so skilled (I think he had almost the same 3DMG ranking as Annie).
  • It was explicitly stated at one point in the manga that, since killing Sonny and Bean meant performing the deed in the middle of military-controlled space, it required great skill and stealth to do without getting caught. The manga states that the perp would want to use their own gear because there ARE minor differences between sets of gear - not enough to make them unusable when swapped, but possibly enough to get you caught in a high-risk stealth operation if you're expecting to move at a certain speed and you suddenly find that your borrowed gear has lower gas propulsion speed. In all honesty, Annie did the right thing - no one would have caught on if Armin hadn't been the one standing right there, and hadn't been intimately familiar with Marco's gear. If Armin weren't so observant, Annie would have likely gotten away with it.
  • The gear isn't finetuned to the user. Case in point, when Bertolt and Reiner kidnapped Eren, Reiner equipped himself with Eren's gear, while Bertolt took the gear of nameless soldier #231. If the gear was made for those individual people, then how can Reiner wear the gear of someone who is 70 pounds lighter than him with the same level of finesse that he normally has?
  • The source material disagrees with you; during the battle of Trost when Jean had to swap his gear around he lacks a lot of the finesse he normally has because the triggers are stiffer than his own and almost gets killed because of it. There are differences in the gear which doesn't prevent people from using them, but as Jean's example shows it can cause problems you don't want springing upon you in the middle of delicate and precise work. As for Reiner you could chalk that up to luck or skill or the situation not requiring 100% efficiency.

Edible Titans?

• So after the reveal of the Wall Titans, why IS meat a delicacy? It seems to me they've got a supply of infinite meat right there.
  • In case you are referring to Titan-meat: It disappears quickly after the Titan dies and might not really be all that edible for humans, let alone filling.
  • It also might be a little too close to cannibalism for their tastes.
  • Not to mention those Titans are crucial to their survival seeing as how they make up the Walls. Doing anything to move them from their spots- much less moving them just to eat them- would be incredibly stupid.

Underground Cities, part 2

• A common Fridge Logic on 4chan includes Frodo Baggins asking why the humans don't just live underground considering they can produce a wide range of three 100-feet walls in a considerably short period of time.
  • As with a lot of the weirder aspects of the setting, this eventually gets commented upon, though not directly answered yet. Apparently, the church has some conspiracy to keep things the way they are that has been insinuated to matter more than the continued survival of the human race.
  • It can also be perfectly explained with practical reasons, such as the city lacking the technology necessary for the minimal infrastructure of an underground city. It could be difficult to build, and picking the necessary cattle and crops from the surface would be insanely dangerous. Underground cities exist since before current technology, but they need a very specific type of rock or soil or otherwise metal for the support. And it is very evident the city lacks the possibility of mining ores for such construction (or, you know, the actual excavation), that there are mines inside the Walls is mentioned in passing, but come on, any materials inside such a small area would hardly be enough for building anything long-standing. So, yeah, it is quite justified.
  • "Small"? If the information-available-for-public-disclosure can be believed, the area within Wall Maria is significantly larger than France (within Wall Rose is about 2/3 of the total). They've got all the raw material they could possibly want and more.
  • There's also the fact that giant Titans are walking about, so while they walk on the surface, all of the earth below it trembles, which could cause a cave-in for the underground city. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann provides an excellent example of this effect at work.
  • Titans are actually extremely lightweight.
  • It turns out that the humans aren't able to build the Walls on their own. The Walls were actually created (and filled) by dormant Titans.

Using 3 DMG

• What are the means of operating the 3D maneuver gear? Considering that all the soldiers in the series are usually dual-wielding blades when they use the gear to travel, there seems to be no practical mechanism of launching the hooks manually or aiming them. Even the design notes don’t seem to have a description of how the user can release the hooks without his hands.
  • An omake following Chapter 3 shows an illustration of how the Maneuver Gear operates: the blade handles each have a cable attached to one end along with two individual "triggers" for releasing and retracting the hooks.
  • I can see the triggers used to release and retract the hooks, as well as the gas switch to release the gas. Now... how do they attach or release blades at will?
  • Another trigger on the back of the sword guard that opens the blade slot when held down. It isn't shown on the linked sketch because it isn't a part of the actual Maneuver Gear system.

Schizo Tech and tactics

• If humans possess the technology needed to produce maneuver gear powerful enough to propel human beings at high speeds to attack the Titans with blades, why don't they just build guns that fire larger blades that can cut through Titans and hit their weak point without throwing people at them?
  • Some of the cannons do just this. It is explained in-universe that they are very inaccurate, and thus mostly ineffective.
  • It would still cost fewer lives and require much less training than the maneuver gear. When in doubt, More Dakka.
  • They do use the cannons when they can. Titans move fast and the cannons load slowly (shown when one is used on Eren and friends), so without Improbable Aiming Skills, you can't kill much of anything with them unless the conditions are just right. Garrison troops tend to use their Maneuver Gear as a last resort when the Titans get past the cannons, and the Survey Corps can't carry cannons out with them on their expeditions because they're immobile.
  • Remember that the military rejects all weapons not made to specification, even when the new design is superior. It's quite likely that advanced modern-style accurate artillery would make very short work of the kinds of attacks we've seen so far (dudes on the Walls with anti-materiel rifles would chew through most of them on their own!), and that the implied conspiracy knows this, and for whatever reason, doesn't want to make things too easy.
  • Well, they do eventually create guillotines that can easily kill Titans without using soldiers. They manage to clear all of Paradis Island of the Titans within a year.

Dividing the rings into sections

• Wait, why didn't they divide the rings into sections when building the Walls? That way, if one part of the Wall were to fall, you lose just one section, not the entire ring.
  • It could have something to do with limited resources.
  • It becomes Fridge Horror when you realize than the Walls are made of Titans. The Walls are massive enough to have possibly hundreds of Titans. By adding sections, you're also adding more Titans. The day those Walls come down completely...
    • Also, the titans could also be "limited" at the time, so the King was "just" able to make the walls as we know it. In addition, when the wall came down and all those titans live again, it would mean the end, but not for our protagonist's...

Swimming Titans

• Did the manga ever say if Titans could swim or not?
  • No, the manga never mentions if the Titans are actually able to swim, but it is presumed they are able to if they were able to get rid of all Orientals, seeing as Asia has a lot of countries separated by water (particularly South East Asia).
  • Is it even certain that the series plays on OUR Earth, languages aside? The geography of the world could always be different than the one we know. Though granted, Titans should be able to somehow cross water just fine considering they don't need to breathe.
  • Wasn't it said they weren't very dense? So they can't plunge underwater but might be able to bob up and down, paddle somewhat, and ride the current to the next patch of land. Though I would like to see what sharks think about swimming hunks of meat bobbing in the ocean.
  • The Titans would be able to regenerate from shark bites, and the larger ones would be able to kill sharks fairly easily.
  • The Titans don't seem to even notice other animals though. It is possible that sharks (and other carnivorous swimmers) never existed or went extinct in-universe as the possibility of the setting being an alternate reality is still uncertain.
  • Considering that Titans tend to be impossibly hot, sharks and other carnivorous sea-life may not want to eat Titan flesh. Even then, if a Titan is made to feel pain, it may just swat the annoying carnivore away, and with their immense strength, that could get... messy.
  • In Chapter 87, the Marleyans created a 30-meter wall at the southern end of the island so Titans can't leave. Titans also don't have any reason to leave, with a lot more humans at the center of the island which they're drawn too.
  • Though the fact that the Colossus Titans that make up the three walls are explicitly treated as a threat to the whole world despite being isolated on an island pretty much heavily implies that water isn't much of an issue for Titans anyway; at the very worst they can probably just walk along the bottom of the ocean.
  • Chapter 130 confirms that Titans can indeed swim- faster than ships in fact. Though it is unknown if they can swim without being ordered by the Founding Titan.

Plan to reach Eren's house

• I understand that Erwin had an ulterior motive in luring out and catching the Female Titan, but when they planned the route to Eren's house, why didn't they just run in a straight line out of the east gate, all the way across to the nearest section of Wall Maria, use the 3DMG to climb Wall Maria, and then walk along the top of the Wall, all the way to Zhiganshina? The Wall still exists, and the only damage is to the south gates, so the rest of the Wall is fine. You'd have to leave your horses at the bottom, but since the Titans don't eat horses, they would be fine, anyways. You could carry enough supplies with you on foot to keep the team fed, and avoid direct confrontation with the Titans. You risk having fewer supplies and no horses once you reach Zhiganshina, but from a pure logistical standpoint, the avoidance of battle and massively decreased loss of life is way more important when your mission is an information run, not a battle.
  • I don't remember the exact dimensions, but a troper formerly mentioned that the inside of Wall Maria has a larger surface area than France. The troops probably wouldn't be able to carry the resources to walk that far.
  • It's possible that that was never a real plan anyway. Chapter 40-something confirms that they have portable elevators capable of lifting horses and that cavalry can ride along the Wall, so if they seriously wanted to get to Zhiganshina rather than fake out the Female Titan, they would probably either do that, or just leave from near Trost, anyways. Among other things, they also conveniently forgot that Trost has a second gate into Maria; the river gate.
  • First off, the Female Titan was never a concern for Erwin when planning the expedition, he didn't even know about her until she attacked during the expedition. What he was worried about was a saboteur messing with information gathering projects. Second, the shortest path to a destination isn't always the best, especially when the most direct course is still over 62 miles of open terrain past man-eating giants, a winding path through any available cover on the route was the safer approach through Titan territory. Also, after five years of abandonment, it is a safe bet that the top of Wall Maria is no longer in an easily transversal state.

Mikasa's strength

• While I'm not complaining, is it ever explained how Mikasa ever achieved her enhanced physical strength and ability? I'm not sure how one could argue the power needed to pass a blade through someone's ribcage without some close scrutiny being paid. It wouldn't be a big deal normally —Rule of Cool would usually deal with it — but she clearly did not have it before the event.
  • I'd say it's the overall theme of the manga — you need to be willing to do stuff yourself in order to be strong. Eren, being the Determinator, has his Titan-shifting and mental control over mindless Titans. Mikasa is equally ruthless in her willingness to step up and get stuff done herself rather than falling into complacency.
  • It's implied during the scene where the trafficker is strangling Eren that her mental limits capping her physical capabilities were removed.
  • In the manga, Mikasa says something along the lines of "since then, I've been able to master perfect self-control."
  • It's likely that it's related to Eren's Coordination abilities. Recall that when she attacked the kidnapper, we saw her brain...or...something...flashing and pulsing, in a similar effect to what happened in Ch 50. Not only that, but both major instances of her nearly giving up — the kidnappers and just prior to Titan!Eren's debut — had Eren nearby. Also keep in mind that the first time, he was specifically telling her repeatedly to fight. The second time, he wasn't talking to her, but he was talking to himself about killing Titans. Coordination works via voice command. So yeah. Best guess is that she's telepathically bonded to Eren somehow, and so his determination in conjunction with her natural abilities is what makes her so capable. Now, you could say that the kidnapper incident couldn't have been Coordination, since Eren (probably, it's kinda vague) hadn't been injected yet, but that's my main reason for thinking that the injection wasn't the Coordinate, but rather a Shifter serum designed to make sure he would stay alive long enough to use it. "Get to the basement; this power will help you then," etc.
  • Chapter 63 implies that it may be a family trait on her father's side. One that is apparently shared by Kenny Ackerman and Captain Levi.
  • Chapter 93 has Zeke says there's a legend about the Ackerman family being the product of some kind of Titan experimentation. If true, it would mean that Mikasa and others of that bloodline have augmented genes of some kind.

Eren Babied

• Is Eren really supposed to be this babied and taken care of? He's not useless, and these Dude in Distress situations are taking agency of a character who should be severely effective. The fact that he can turn into an Allied Titan should be exactly as advantageous and useful as that sounds, but no, they tell him not to use it or things like that. If he had ever gotten any kills with the Maneuver Gear combat, I wouldn't have a problem, but at least let him participate. You'll save more lives that way.
  • As useful as Eren is, it's known that he's not totally in control of his Titan form, and anyone who doesn't know him personally could see him as a mindless berserker who just attacks everything. And once the Female Titan arc starts, it's more about protecting humanity's greatest asset for when he's absolutely needed than not trusting him. This idea is reasonable, considering all his unassisted fights against intelligent Titans have resulted in him getting kidnapped.
  • So, he can't fight back against his opponents, and everyone just looks at him and says, 'Oh, poor baby. Be a good little damsel and stay on the sidelines, we'll take care of you.' You see, I'm proud when he tries to fight back, because it feels like he's actually trying when no one else can think he can do anything. This is the guy who killed two grown men with his own cunning at child age. I think there's some loss of competency here...or at least a perception of one from the Corps. Mikasa strikes me as knowing better mentally, but her actions dictate otherwise.
  • Well, yeah. They're not correct in being so protecting of Eren, but they're not portrayed as being so. The Female Titan slaughtering his friends was meant to show that he's better off taking the risk than missing the chance and wishing he had.
  • Also, if Eren did get to keep fighting the way he wanted to scot-free, the theme that the writer is trying to do would not be highlighted as much. Like most Japanese manga-ka (at least, the ones I am aware of), the writer of Attack on Titan wants to emphasize one thing — hard work is the best way. The author uses the Dude in Distress scenario just to make it easier for us to see just how 'bad' relying on the problem to be solved by others, or the 'easy way' is when compared to Eren doing the stuff himself and taking the 'hard way' to ultimately succeed.
  • So, okay, we don't succeed and not use the means by which to actually succeed. How many people died in the scout forces protecting him? If there is no success, then what is the point of keeping him behind? They could have beaten the Female Titan working together.
  • You're forgetting the mission at hand. Everything that's been going on has been a distraction from the mission that Eren is actually on: getting back to the basement of his house. The reason he keeps ending up in distress and not sent to the front lines to make a full-on assault on Titankind is because he's too important to risk until he gets back to that basement and finds whatever his father wanted him (and pointedly him, not Mikasa) to find, which has always been assumed to be vital information about Titans. Unfortunately, there's a whole bunch of people who think they have better things for him to be doing, so he gets kidnapped all the time.
  • Then explain the lack of agency. Right now, Eren matters about as much as a Dude in Distress save when he finally decides to fight against his opponents. Others make him passive and without any ability to act on his own. Mikasa does more than he ever could, and Armin actually came into his own during the Battle of Trost with his quick thinking. Levi...it is Levi. But Eren — supposedly the main character — is seen as nothing more than a liability by the corps and the audience.
  • Liability? Are you serious? Jean expresses doubt that Eren is worth all the lives that get lost in saving him all the time, but Eren is still the closest thing humanity has to a superweapon, right down to the part where enemies afraid of his power want to steal him for themselves. Physically, outside of his Titan body, he's not more capable or experienced than most of the other Scouting Legionnaires. His lack of agency comes from the fact that he's still a soldier and still has to obey orders. Did you forget the part where he sealed up the breach in the Wall with a boulder? Or fighting the Female Titan? Or controlled the Titans into attacking the Armored Titan? Or how the only way Reiner and Bertholdt could stop him from losing his shit and killing everyone was to cut off all his limbs? Are you complaining that he's not enough of the main character because he doesn't fuck off on all his responsibility, turn into a Titan, and just kill everything outside the Walls until he dies?
  • Eren is more a strategic asset than anything else. The thing is using him correctly. Sending him out solo to fight titans would just waste this asset, as he would eventually become tired, and get overwhelmed and eaten by regular titans. It's been obvious that even with the power of his titan form, Eren needs support from regular troops to be fully effective. Even if all he does is have enemies try to kidnap him, that is still a valuable resource, as they can anticipate their enemy's goals, and move to counter them. Look at it this way. Even if Eren ends up just being an Agro Sponge tank, that makes it easier for the Rogues live Levi to get their backstabs in.
  • That's a waste of resources on par with taking one sip of milk from the carton and dumping the rest down a drain. Eren isn't just a tank, he's the closest thing the Scouting Legion has to an answer key to the entire frickin' universe. Wasting him in direct combat (especially now that we know the MPs are specialized to fight humans, as well as Titans} just so everybody else can get their sneak attack damage Dungeons & Dragons style basically means killing a bunch of normal Titans (which, given their numbers and what we know about them now) is a meaningless victory, won at the cost of the only hope they have for change.

Killing Titans at night

• If the Titans are solar-powered and become dormant when cutting off from sunlight, why don't the humans go out and kill them at night? Yes, I know visibility would be a problem with 3DMG, but they have torches, and by that light, they could get clean shots on the necks of slow-moving Titans with their firearms.
  • This is pretty much explained in-story. Torches just mean that the Titans can see them long before they see the Titans.
  • You might be overestimating how much light torches and other such light sources actually give off. It's really not a lot. If you really pushed your luck with an enormous and unwieldy chemical light source, you might have enough light to illuminate the whole Titan... but how do you find it in the first place?
  • You wouldn't need to have a great view of it, just enough to aim at the weak spot. As for finding one, they seem to be everywhere, and, y'know, Titans. And besides, they're dormant at night, it wouldn't be easy to attack, but it's better than going at them when they're active.
  • Again, it comes down to making yourself far easier to spot without helping your own visibility by much. The downsides of fighting Titans in the dark outweigh the benefits.
  • You're missing the point. It doesn't matter if the Titans see them, they can't move at night. You're walking up to a Titan that's completely unconscious, sluggish at best, and killing it in cold blood. It wouldn't even count as combat, just cleanup duty. My answer would probably be resources/time. Going out on expeditions just to slaughter random Titans at night probably wouldn't accomplish much, I think, and you'd have to make sure you could get back to the Walls by sunrise. Seems like it could've been a lot of help when Maria came down, though.
  • Finding out that Titans power down at night is one of Hange's more recent breakthroughs. They just plain didn't know that Titans can't move at night before then. Even so, the rates at which they become dormant are different for each, so properly organizing something like that would take more time and resources than the military has had available so far.
  • Expanding on that, it's been seen that the bigger Titans can still move well after they stop being exposed to sunlight. Smaller Titans would be simple to eliminate, but there's nothing stopping a big one from grabbing you before you're even close enough to see it.
  • On THAT note, Titans are creepy enough in the daylight, aside from Levi, who in their right mind would want to take that risk period?
  • To begin with, it's easy to overestimate the density of Titan population outside the walls. Sure the Titans are big, but the area is truly MASSIVE. Think about the fact that when the Survey Corps steps outside the wall there are generally no Titans in sight at all. It's quite possible it'd take you more than a whole day to even stumble across one Titan in the dark...
  • After the conversion of Connie's village, Titans have been seen moving at night...

Titan Shifters

• Are there more Titan Shifters inside the Walls? If so, where did they come from? Do they have their own agendas separate from the ones of the main three? Do the Titan Shifters know they're Titan Shifters?
  • There could be, but it's unlikely. Ymir, for example, was just a random Titan who got lucky and happened to eat a shifter. Any other shifters in the walls aside from Eren and Ymir should solely come from the Marley faction since they're the only faction that has plenty of shifters to eat at the moment. As for your second question, it would seem that they're only aware that they're shifters if they knew they were given the drug beforehand. Frieda Reiss for example injected herself with the serum so when she ate her uncle and transformed back, she must've known what she did. But Eren and Armin had to find out/be told about their powers.
  • Right now, inside the walls, there are 4 Shifters: Eren (With 3 powers), Armin, the crystallized Annie, and Zeke.

Carrying Kidnapped Victims

• When Reiner/the Armored Titan was carrying Eren and Bertolt while being chased by Erwin and the rest, why didn't he just pop them inside his mouth as he did when he initially defeated Eren? Not only would that ensure Eren's incapacitation, it would allow him free use of his limbs. He could have crushed the Titans and the Survey Corps that way, rather than having Eren literally snatched right under his nose.
  • The insides of their mouths also look pretty fleshy and relatively soft. The Armored Titan's mouth is really more of a beak in a lot of ways. It might be that there wouldn't be enough room and he might accidentally crush them if he did; Bertholdt is pretty tall, after all.
  • When Annie popped Eren into her mouth, it was noted that she was a lot slower and didn't fight back. Sure, she was tired by that point, but maybe she might've accidentally bit him or swallowed him if she did.
  • Also, it's demonstrated that humans who aren't killed when the Titan eats them are killed in their stomachs due to the very high body temperature of the creature. Ymir only has Historia in her mouth/stomach for a very short time.
  • Remember that scene with the Armored Titan breathing fire? Most Titans exude steam when exerting themselves a lot, but the Armored Titan can't due to completely solidified flesh covering almost all of its body. It overheats and has to exhale the extra heat. Having Eren in his mouth when Reiner was running as a Titan would almost certainly have been a death sentence since the heat buildup would be exponentially greater. The only option left is to let him and Bertholdt ride on the crevices in his collar armor.

Titans fighting each other

• In a certain comic, it seems like two Titans are fighting each other. As we know from the episode where Eren first transforms, Titans attacking each other is a rare occurrence. Why did this happen?
  • Maybe because we've usually seen Titans in the presence of humans, where the drive to eat them probably overrides anything else they might do. When Titans are bored and alone, they might fight each other all the time.
  • It may have something to do with the implications that the Beast Titan created those Titans from humans just recently. We see one Titan that has limbs too small to move its body, and it even talks (albeit briefly and simply), something only one non-Shifter has been seen doing (and that in a flashback). It's entirely possible that "fresh" Titans are either more unpredictable, may not form Titan bodies correctly, or remember enough about themselves that hatred of Titans may cause them to attack other Titans, still seeing them as enemies. For added evidence on their unpredictability, we see another Titan disobeying the Beast and getting killed for it, while another waits until it's told it can eat a captive.

Historia's Knowledge

• When Pastor Nick told Hange about Historia, he said something like "she may not know anything yet, but she can tell you everything she knows", and then "she may even know the truth unknown even to us". Now, it seems she really doesn't know anything. So, which is it, and how is it supposed to help? Or is it that Nick was prepared to tell the secrets of the Wall Cult to Historia because she was a Reiss, and then she would be free to decide if she wanted to share?
  • The last one.

Wooden Bridge

• When the Colossal Titan smashed the gate of Wall Rose, why didn't the humans destroy the wooden bridge that leads over the moats? The way it looks in Episode 5, it was the only way for the (non-aberrant) Titans to reach the city.
  • The moat wasn't all that deep, especially when the bigger Titans showed up in large numbers. Titans could have climbed up or built a living ramp if they were tenacious enough, which they always are.

Rose Inner Gate

• After the Colossal Titan breached the outer gate of Wall Rose, why didn't the Armored Titan appear to do the same with the inner gate?
  • Because Reiner was either not in the right state of mind to transform, couldn't find a good hiding spot like Berthold, or both.
  • This was pretty clearly explained. It's because of Eren. The details aren't entirely clear yet, but the Shifter trio's mission was primarily to find the Coordinate, AKA Eren. That's why they stopped their attack halfway through when a mysterious Titan suddenly showed up.

Outside the Walls and back

• How was Annie able to get all the way out to Wall Rose and back to attack the Survey Corps without anyone noticing her being gone? She's stationed with the military police and considering the amount of space between the Walls, it would seem to take at least a day to get out and back and I would think someone would notice her missing during that time.
  • The expedition didn't even last a full day. The Survey Corps left at maybe midday and returned at sunset. It is possible that Annie was simply on her day off, secured a horse and managed to make it back by night. She's a loner, so I doubt anyone paid her absence much mind.
  • In Wall Sina, Goodbye, it's revealed that she asked Hitch to report her as sick.

Kidnapping becomes escaping

• Why did the Female Titan change her mind about kidnapping Eren in the middle of their second fight? I'm talking about when she angrily smashed his head in with her fist while he was down and he looks defeated, which made it look like a good opportunity for her to again tear his Titan head off and grab Eren like before. Instead, she looks at his beaten self, then turns and runs away. It doesn't make sense if it's because she was scared Mikasa or someone else would stop her when she clearly tried to take him before he transformed.
  • She didn't think she could keep him. At that point she had to make a choice: run away and potentially save herself while Eren was down, or commit suicide by taking the time to pry Eren out of his body and then run like hell while avoiding Mikasa and the rest of the Legion.
  • But she still tried to take him earlier even though the threat of Mikasa and other Survey Corps members stopping her was still as present. I'm guessing it wasn't so much the people who would try to save Eren so much as it was her suddenly getting scared of him, seeing how persistent he was to fight/kill her, and she was starting to lose her cool by then.

Leaked Ending

• I'm guessing people rarely read the discussion page so I'm gonna ask here instead. It's revealed that the story and ending to SNK has been leaked (except for the fact that the ending itself apparently is changed now) in this video, so is that taken into account anywhere here, such as on the WMG page? (It explains everything about who created the Titans/Titan Shifters, for what cause, what's in the basement etc.) Or is it ignored here until it's actually confirmed in the story?
  • Doubtful, even if the information was accurate at the time of that video, it isn't now, on top of that, stories evolve over time when they're still ongoing, look at Naruto and Hitman Reborn as examples.
  • As far as I've read about that, it doesn't mention the Coordinate, it doesn't mention Ymir, it doesn't mention Monkey Trouble, and it doesn't mention the Reiss family or the government conspiracy, per se. It's pretty safe to say it was never accurate to begin with. On the other hand, the person who leaked it apparently was fired, so it's possible it was an earlier version of the story developed before Isayama started work on the manga, and he was fired because of that.

Androgynous Titans?

• Fairly minor, but I'm a bit confused about how when the Female Titan shows up, it's mentioned several times that the rest of the Titans appear male. I get that some of them are pretty androgynous. But this one from the opening [1]◊ looks just as "female" as the Female Titan, so why do they act like female-looking Titans don't exist?
  • If I don't recall wrong, then in the flashback of Eren and co. listening to the teacher talking about Titans he says that most Titans have a male appearance, not all of them.
  • Isayama was once asked about Female Titans in an interview. He answered rather vaguely that they exist, but are rare. Make of that what you will.
  • Isayama understands that Rule 34 exists, and as such is doing what he can to either mess with the audience — Colossal Titan body pillow comes to mind — or avert any sort of sex appeal to the Titans. Annie was purposely made in a way that could not be fantasized about, except for a select few.
  • It could just be that they only mean "female-bodied" Titans. The Female Titan has breasts and curves; the Titan in the OP (which isn't canon to the manga and wasn't in the anime) has what appears to be a masculine chest.
  • We learn later that the Titans menacing the humans of Paradise are Eldian dissidents from Marley. That sort of selection could mess with the gender ratio.

Knowledge of the Walls

• Why do the Wall Cult and the Reiss family know so much about the Walls? The walls were never built by them in the first place, so surely they shouldn't know any more about them than the average person?
  • I'm guessing that's for future revelations to explain.
  • One of the theories (in-universe) is that there are a few Titan-Shifters among the Reiss family, so they'd have a better position to understand everything.
  • It's eventually revealed that the Reiss family is descended from the Titan Shifter who did build the walls by using the coordinate ability to force the titans within the walls to use their hardening ability to shape the walls around them, and that this shifter does a body surf through the shifters in the Reiss family. Why the Wall Cult is in on it hasn't been revealed yet.

Geographic Location

• Assuming this is our world, where in the world could this series take place? The radius of Wall Maria is 480 Km according to the wiki, which would make the total area inside the Walls around 724,000 Km 2 (for comparison, the area of France is 640,679 Km 2 the U.S. State of Texas is 696,241 Km 2,and Germany is 357,168 Km 2). Most of the names are of Germanic origin, but the area inside the Walls are is much larger than Germany.
  • Well, this could be a plot point, so it's just speculation. As you said, we have to assume that this is in our world, and that's a big assumption right there. The theory I hear kicked around most often is that it's somewhere in Russia, but I've heard people speculate that the people aren't native to the area; there's an implication that the humans had to cross an ocean to get to where they are now, meaning they could be ethnic Germans (and scant other Europeans) who sailed to the Americas. Of course, the European castles that apparently pre-date the Wall seems to imply Europe. However, there are ways to explain that away. In the end, the only thing we can do is keep reading. And again, all this is making the assumption that it takes place on Earth. And also, that the Writer did his math properly.
  • Also, we have this useful little tool that you can play around with. It's a map of the world with the apparent dimensions of the Walls overlayed on it.
  • Another question that could be asked about the Walled City is why it's having so many problems with overpopulation, especially if the map above is taken into account. Unless the land that the Walls surround and encase is very infertile, then supporting a little over one million people and a small amount of livestock should not be difficult, let alone require the forced deaths of 250,000 people to prevent famine. The Walled City is roughly the same size as France or Texas, both of which have much, much larger populations, but could very easily sustain an overall population of one million if it was necessary. And if it's truly in Europe like it's implied, then the Walled City is likely located in an area that's known for relatively medium to high crop yields. They would probably even have an abundance of resources to spare, so long as they don't squander them like a bunch of pre-French Revolution fools. Which, of course, makes one wonder if the nobles inside of Wall Sina are purposely keeping the population down for their own purposes...
  • Landmass isn't a good indicator of crop yield. If it was there would be no famine. We need to consider 1) Agricultural technology, 2) food stores, and 3) the amount of land that could be opened up for cultivation under short notice. For 1)in Modern times crop seed:harvest ratio is 1:30 minimum. In Medieval times, a year with 1:7 is considered incredibly good, 1:3 or 1:4 is normal, and 1:3 is the minimum necessary to break even (1 for seed 2 for food). 2) All the food stores between Maria and Rose are lost. It's stated the people within Rose hasn't been as careful rationing. 3) How much land could be cleared for farming and how long would it take to do so. The landmass isn't the issue here.
  • The population of Agricultural society has always kept pace with food availability. So as explained above it's very realistic to assume there is just slightly more food than the minimum needed to support the existing population. We don't know the population or cultivated land distribution, but it's stated the fall of Maria resulted in a 20% loss in population and 30% loss in land. Now if both are even, then the refuges from Maria would have been 30% of humanity. I highly doubt any government in history has ever had food stores to deal with that kind of population pressure. So suddenly 70% of cultivated land has to support 100% of humanity. If Maria fell in summer (not unreasonable given what's shown in the first episode), it would be too late to try to open up new land for that year's harvest. So, it's not unreasonable to think that the food stores within Rose and the harvest of year 845 would not be enough to sustain the entire population until the harvest of 846. The further from 846, the better it would be as more land comes under cultivation. But they have to get through 846 in one piece first. There is no way there wouldn't have been extreme social upheavals had the 20% of the population not been driven out.
  • The ancient Egyptians were known for storing immense amounts of grains during years of plenty in order to weather through years of scarcity. It wasn't unusual for them to be able to provide for very high percentages of the population during times of poor weather or crop failure, perhaps dating all the way back to 5000 B.C. Similar methods were also used in Ancient China, Persia, and Turkey. Of course, despite being much older than this particular storyline, these cultures were well-aware of potential famine, didn't take times of plenty for granted, and actively employed any agricultural or storage methods that could possibly see them through times of scarcity. When they didn't remain vigilant, dynastic upheaval and war tended to erupt in their lands. It's very possible that the Walled City, even without Wall Maria, would be quite capable of providing for the entire population in that lost year, but they simply grew lazy, careless, and ignorant of the Titan threat (as evidenced in the first chapters when Eren outright compares society's complacency to livestock), which then led to them not storing or harvesting extra food in case of a catastrophic attack. Many people within Wall Sina are also shown to be living in extreme luxury, so it's likely that a large chunk of past harvests or food stores have been squandered there as well. Just because they can produce enough food doesn't mean that they are producing it. So, 200,000+ people probably died because of the agricultural carelessness of the Walled City's government and interior farmers.
  • A few things come to mind here, first is that they do not appear to have refrigeration which goes a long way towards food preservation. It's not that they shouldn't have massive grain stores from the good years but that may be the limit of their ability to store food long term. As for ignorant to the Titan threat there wasn't one. According to the story they've had a century of peace. The only people who've seen Titans up close are the scouts who volunteer to leave the walls, after them you just have soldiers who've patrolled the wall and seen Titans clamoring to get into the city. It's probable that no living person has had a Titan attack their home as of the start of the story. So they have good reason to be fairly complacent. We also have no idea how fertile the soil is where they live.
  • They actually have special yeast to help with food preservation. But in any case, preserving food for two or three years even with modern techniques is hard (unless non-perishable foods). Keep in mind the grain storage of ancient (and modern) cultures were never designed to support a full 1/5th of the population for an entire year because even in the worst of harvests that simply doesn't happen because bad harvests are usually local events. And usually they are a bad harvest. Not entire crop failures. Especially not entire crop failures in 1/3 of the nation. (Ancient Egypt is a bit special as everything depended on the Nile). The worst famines were when climate change (little ice age, volcanic irruption, etc) caused an entire nation to suffer bad harvest and entire regions of the harvest to fail. It'll be like if the population of every state in the American South minus Texas are suddenly without food. I have no doubt the USA would have to resort to foreign aid if this happens. Not to mention it's not unlikely that considerable amount of food stores were stored within the lands lost between Maria and Rose, and those stores would have been the most full judging from Armin's statements. So not only did they lose considerable farmland, but they also lost considerable stores of food they were saving for bad harvests.
  • Chapter 93 appears to have answered this: The Island of Paradis, where the Walls are located, appears to be on Madagascar, of all places. No explanation as to the prevalence of Caucasians and absence of Africans. Unfortunately, the writer did not do his math properly, and the Walls with the dimensions given would never fit on that landmass.
    • Given that the map is flipped upside-down and mirrored relative to our own, and neither Marley nor Paradis bears the slightest resemblance to their supposed "locations", it can be assumed that the resemblance to Earth's landmasses is simply a devious easter egg of sorts for observant readers. Furthermore, later chapters show that there are black, Asian, and Middle-Eastern people in this setting, just not from Marley or Paradis. Thus, it can be assumed that the island of Paradis is much larger than the Madagascar we know.

To the Basement

• So, what's stopping Eren and co. from going to that basement? Couldn't Eren transform into a Titan and travel there himself that way? Perhaps the threat of being attacked by Titans was a good reason not to before, but now that it turns out he can control them, it would seem like the perfect opportunity, at least for them to discuss it.
  • Eren cannot sustain his Titan form for more than a few hours, and he currently does not know how to properly control Titans yet. Also, Eren has no way of plugging the hole without the Survey Corps' assistance, and that's assuming there's even a boulder they can find to plug the Wall with. The Survey Corps is currently very low on manpower and funding due to their repeated failures. That's why they must do the coup first; it's the only way to steal all the power within the Walls so that they may pour all their resources into reclaiming Maria.
  • they do just that, there is a huge fight, but at the end, Eren seals the hole, they get into the basement and discovers the secrets that Grisha was about to reveal to his son before everything goes to hell.

Covert Transformations

• How did Bertold Hoover manage to covertly transform at the Battle of Trost? We see that the gate was closed when he appeared, so it's unlikely he came through there. The only other way to get to the other side would be using his 3D Gear, but that would have to attract a lot of attention, especially since we know that there were people stationed at the gate and they all survived. How did Eren's team not notice him when he went over the Wall? For that matter, how did he get back inside without any of them noticing? Eren had his eyes on the outside of the gate when the colossus disappeared, while the rest of his team was looking from the other side, and guardsmen appear to guard the gate immediately afterward.
  • Probably a Hand Wave. However, what probably happened is that Bert, who as a part of the 104th also had to clean the Wall, snuck off on his own and, by some miracle, managed to make his way over to the gate without being seen the exact moment Eren started inner monologuing.

Nature of the trap

• The nature of the trap for the Female Titan confuses me. Before the expedition, they only knew of two hostile Titan Shifters: The Colossus Titan and the Armored Titan. No other hostile Shifter had ever been seen. So, does it bug anyone else that the Titan Shifter trap they prepared would have been useless on either of the known Shifters? The Colossus would simply be too big. The spikes, as they were aimed, would have only hit his legs, leaving his arms free to take swipes and free himself. And the Armored Titan is capable of shrugging off cannon blasts and bursting through Walls with precisely no damage, so any plan which includes breaking his skin seems like a doomed proposition.
  • Erwin is just THAT good! But seriously, I think Erwin just looked at what resources they had, which was very little, and decided hell, let's wing it and hope that it's a normal Titan like Eren, and got very lucky.
  • One of the Currently Publicly Available Information sections mentions the Special Target Capture Weapons mentions that they look like the standard trailers, but with barrels in them, and that their purpose is to capture titans of interest to the Survey Corps. I personally think that development began after they found Ilse's diary and learned about the Talking Titan-the 57th Expedition was partially meant to show that they worked, and when the Female Titan appeared they used it on her.

How did the trap work?

• For that matter, how did the trap work on the Female Titan? How is a handful of wooden cannons sturdy enough to keep her from any movement, despite the Female Titan previously showing enough strength to break one of the giant trees with ease?
  • The basic idea is More Dakka. They used so much that it somehow worked. In Episode 25, it actually DID fail because they didn't have enough cannons.
  • The hooks are going through her muscles preventing them from contracting or relaxing so she can't move period.
  • It's also stated that when she heals it pulls the hooks in deeper, causing even more damage if she tries to move, yes in episode 25 it was because they didn't have enough of the wooden cannons, but they clearly had her top half constrained, it was that her legs were free to kick the wooden cannons apart, so she could move her arms and get away

Lack of lightning

• In the first episode, why isn't the Armored Titan's appearance preceded by a lightning strike like every other shift we've seen? The Colossal Titan was heralded by the lightning in the previous episode, so was it just Early-Installment Weirdness, or was there a special reason for it? Something else maybe?
  • Hand Wave. Most definitely a Hand Wave. Plus, I think if there was a second lightning bolt, that would be too big of a clue for the big Titan Shifter secret.
  • He simply hid and transform somewhere the light and explosion wouldn't be noticed.
  • We didn't see him appear. He didn't show up until he walked into the area. So presumably, he transformed earlier on, then walked to his attack position.
  • The transformation lightning is very difficult not to notice. It is possible that Reiner transformed simultaneously with Bertolt, so only one transformation was heard.
  • Or maybe no one noticed the lightning in the mass confusion and panic that the Titan attack made. Colossal Titan's lightning was seen as the people were having a peaceful day to notice the lightning.
  • Actually the lightning is something that just appears in the anime, and even then, in the second season we just see a bright explosion (like in the manga).
  • Actually the lightning is something that just appears in the anime, and even then, in the second season we just see a bright explosion (like in the manga).
  • Explained in chapter 96. Reiner was already transformed because he was carrying Annie and Bertolt to Wall Maria.

Faces of Titans

• If the Titans that attacked Wall Rose were from Connie Springer's village... Why didn't Connie recognize any of their faces during the attack?
  • Eren and Ymir show that Titans can have different faces than the humans they come from, and that's on top of the fact that Connie probably would write off any similarities as coincidence. The idea that Titans were transformed humans hadn't even crossed his mind at that point.
  • Connie didn't encounter any Titans before reaching Rakago village, where of course he kinda sorta DID recognize the House Titan. That night at Castle Utgard well it was dark and he was by his own dialogue trying to go into denial. Hell maybe he did just hey combat going on and no way that Titan could be Mr Schmitz from next door, right... right?!

Ackerman

• Whoa, whoa, whoa... The leader of the Military Police's Central 1st Brigade — the guy who killed Historia's mother and just kidnapped her and Eren — is Captain Ackerman. Eren's adopted sister/wannabe girlfriend's name is Mikasa Ackerman. Coincidence? ... or could he be a paternal relative?
  • ...They're obviously intended to be related in some way.
  • They ARE relatives, but distant. Levi and Kenny are more close relatives, but Mikasa is also a relative of them. In the manga is not stated the exact relation, but maybe her father is a distant cousin, like a third cousin or something similar.

Titan weight

• Does anyone know how heavy the Titans are? They're described as being impossibly light, and Hange managed to punt a severed head easily. But if they're that light, a cannon blast should send them flying, and a strong enough human could lift them.
  • I can't say exactly how much heavier they are, but they are still heavy enough to crush horses underfoot and their bodies are made solid enough that they can smash through stone walls and bridges. They don't really leave craters in the ground when they walk, which they probably should, so they must not be heavy enough to crush pavement. I'd have to guess that they're light for their size, but not light enough to easily lift, per se.

Nape and Humans

• I've only seen the anime and I might have missed something but when experimenting on the Titans, did it ever occur to anyone to try and find a human around the neck area considering that's how they found Eren?
  • They try that later in the manga. They can't find them because the humans are fully absorbed into the Titan body.

Fanservice

• This is more of a question about the author than the series itself: why does Isayama hate fanservice? I mean, he seems to go out of his way to avert it or turn it into Fan Disservice.
  • Not so much "hate" as just trying not to detract from the story. Fanservice would be a distraction from the serious plot.
  • That'd make sense for the exclusion of it. But in the case of the Female Titan and Eren's face being ripped off despite being shirtless, there is a deliberate effort to mock the concept.
  • Because if you're reading a mystery/war story about conspiracies, life-or-death battles against humanoid abominations, and the deconstruction of Black-and-White Morality and all you care about is whether or not you get to see tits and ass, you deserve to be disappointed.
  • Considering Mikasa's rock hard abs, I think he has a different idea of fanservice.
  • Perhaps because fanservice adds nothing to a work, in particular, a work of mystery/horror like this. It only cheapens the work. The author is just a rare example of a mangaka who avoids fanservice, unfortunately so.
  • Well, is last chapter (110 I think it was) we have a badass, long-haired and shirtless Eren, with his abs and all, so that may be considered fanservice. Of course the situation he is in is not ideal, but still.
  • Speaking as an American, the question most of us have is why most other manga and anime writers are so obsessed with fanservice, and why it's always so one-sided towards male audience members. I mean imagine if you watched a show full of Lean prettyboys, and which couldn't go two minutes without interrupting the narrative to give someone a wardrobe malfunction that put their abs and junk on display.

Faking way into military

• How did Ymir manage to join the 104th? From dialogue surrounding Annie, Bertolt, and Reiner, I get the impression that someone would need some form of identification to actually join the military. Presumably, the Shifter trio either collaborated to falsify some form of ID or (as is kind of implied by Ymir) have someone else inside the Walls that could do it for them. Ymir wouldn't have either of those things — how would she be able to pull it off? Am I just overthinking this?
  • Would a 12-year-old really need an I.D to live within the Walls? Heck, they all escaped from Wall Maria as far as the military was concerned; they'd most likely think that they lost their I.D's or simply never had them at that age. They could easily get a new I.D through the military.
  • It isn't so much "living within the Walls" that caught me, just the military part of it. That works for me, though, thanks.
  • Erwin mentions that following the destruction of Wall Maria identify documents are incredibly hard to come by.

Alternative Calendar

• The series opens in year 845... But 845 years *from when*? It's obviously not 845 CE, nor is it 845 years from when Titans appeared or when the city was founded.
  • They clearly have their own calendar that's different than ours, since it takes place in the future, so it's been 845 years since the start of the new calendar and there may or may not have been a specific event that prompted them to change calendars.
  • A good theory for MWG is that it's from the devastating war that knocked humanity back into the dark ages. Considering the tech shown is roughly 1845 CE, maybe the war knocked humanity to the tech level of 1000 CE and then everything redeveloped at the same pace?

Becoming a Shifter

• Eren gets eaten and turns into a Titan Shifter, Ymir eats a Titan Shifter and she turns into a Titan Shifter? Is Eren just the oddity, in this case, maybe because of whatever his dad was giving him?
  • Eren was always a Shifter, it just took a life-threatening situation to bring it out. The implication is that whatever Grisha injected Eren with is what gave him his Shifting ability. So, in a sense, yeah, Eren is an unusual case compared to Ymir.
  • It's noted in chapter 62 and clarified in chapter 63 that Grisha Yeager was a Titan shifter, specifically one who developed or procured a formula to cause Titanization. He administered this to Eren, and then allowed himself to be eaten, which granted Eren both his shifting ability, and the coordinate ability.
  • Not exactly, Eren was a shifter at the moment he was eaten in his first mission but was not able to remember how to transform. Is not stated that Grisha developed the serum, he maybe just got it somewhere safe, and then used it, but yes, he transforms Eren and then gets eaten by him. A titan turns into a shifter when consumes a human (specifically his spinal fluid) who is a shifter.

Not becoming a Shifter

• If eating a Shifter gives a Titan their abilities, why didn't the Titan who ate Eren do so?
  • Because he didn't die, I suppose. He broke out before his powers were absorbed.
  • It is actually revealed that one must ingest the Shifter's spinal fluid specifically to gain their power.
  • Which just begs the questions? How much is needed? Is it possible to cure the titans with a drop or two of the spinal fluid? Seems like a spinal tap is all that you need to cure them.
  • Good luck trying to give anything to a Titan and not getting eaten in the process.
  • If the amount of spinal fluid is small enough and a non-lethal means of extraction exists, having as many soldiers as possible carry a vial would be a viable tactic. Average casualty rates per titan are about 30 soldiers. If you can better that, you can guarantee a downed Titan when the soldier is eaten at better rates than presently. This will have a cascading effect, each newly awakened titan-shifter is a potential ally and is recognized by other titans as prey. A handful of spinal fluid vials could cause a lot of titan casualties as they eat soldiers, awaken, get eaten by other titans who then awaken, who subsequently awaken more titans when those newly awakened titans get eaten in turn.
  • In the manga Zeke got some of his spinal fluid extracted safely, and is a common procedure (but he uses with other purposes, no to make more shifters). Anyways, until now is not explained or even discussed if you can make, for example, another shifter by giving a small amount of spinal fluid to a normal titan (So you can have 2 Armored titans, for example). Something that we know is that there are only 9 powers, in other words, just 9 shifters (or less, because a shifter can consume another power, like eren who right now have 3 powers).
    • Yeah... That's not gonna work. We see Falco ingest Zeke's spinal fluid and it does not turn him into a shifter. It's still not clear why there are nine shifters but that number is a constant. On the other hand when Falco eats Porco who was the previous Jaw Titan, then he can become a shifter. But basically it seems one must die for another to revive.

Saving Armin

• How exactly was Eren able to reach Armin to save him from the bearded titan in Episode 5? With one leg, no less. Also, he was a good 20 feet away from the Titan, lying on the ground. Considering how much pain a recently torn off leg would produce, I would doubt he'd have enough stamina to walk, let alone jump to the Titan, which already had Armin inches away from the esophagus. I don't know, kind of seems like a cheap Deus ex Machina to me.
  • Using his 3D gear + adrenaline rush + Rule of Cool all together I guess.
  • Or just being a Titan Shifter.
  • Or all that together.

Doctor Jaeger's living situation

• Why is a doctor who saved a lot of people from a plague living in the outer ring? One would think that curing a plague would give Eren's dad some prestige and a spot further in the city.
  • It's worth noting that the neighborhood they live in isn't poor and hopeless; modest, but not too terrible. It's possible he just liked living there.
  • Considering he had some kind of creepy secret in his basement and married a woman who looks alarmingly like royalty, he might be living there because he's hiding from the authorities.
  • Then there's the fact he's a shifter...
  • And also he comes from outside the walls...

1000 years in the future

• If it's 1000 years in the future, why didn't the governments just nuke the Titans into molten slag? I don't care how good your healing factor is, a nuclear bomb to the face will end you.
  • That's just a fan theory, and even if they could we don't know if the government is intentionally keeping the Titans around or not.
  • This seems simple enough. First and foremost, nukes are a lot less powerful than you're giving them credit for. Google up Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were survivors. Scores of them and they were ordinary humans. A Titan that wasn't at ground zero or was behind cover might very well survive a nuke and then regenerate. Second, Titans seem to be relatively difficult to herd in most cases, the problem there being where would you nuke? If you blanket the planet you'd take us out too. Third, it's heavily implied the Beast Titan can simply make humans into Titans at will and nobody knew about him until recently. If you miss him you receive nothing. He'll find some more humans and turn them. In that way, the Titans have all the worst factors of a kaiju (size and strength) and a zombie plague (if you didn't kill them all you didn't solve the problem.) Even knowing what we know though, it's possible they did try that and that's why humanity is trapped inside the Walls.
  • Small point, but you're actually vastly underestimating the power of modern nukes; there were survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but we've long since created nukes that make Fat Man and Little Boy seem like firecrackers in comparison. We've just never used them beyond tests, so they don't have the same place in cultural consciousness as the two bombs that were actually used on human populations.
  • Also, this is a Japanese manga, and given the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are you really surprised Isayama hasn't brought in nuclear weaponry?
  • That never stopped the likes of Fist of the North Star, Shin Megami Tensei or Metal Gear Solid.
  • Assuming the series is actually meant to take place on future earth and the hints aren't just the author messing with the audience and planting false leads, then I'm inclined to believe the theory that the titans didn't start showing up until after the humans had already blasted themselves back into the dark ages. With late 20th to 21st century level of weapons technology, we'd annihilate the Titans as they're depicted in the show; there'd probably be heavy casualties, mainly among civilians, but ultimately we'd tear them to shreds without ever having to drop a single nuke. The thing about the Zombie Apocalypse genre is that to make it work you have to portray militaries as unrealistically useless or incompetent, because - as is examined on many pages of this wiki and many places throughout the internet - we'd actually be very, very capable of nipping the zombie threat in the bud. Titans, if anything, would be easier to deal with than most zombies because they're large, easily detectable - even if they weren't super easy to spot visually, they give off tremendous amounts of heat that would make them easy to locate via modern methods, and their vulnerable spot is a lot easier to hit than a target the size of a human head. And titans lack a major advantage of kaiju; they're insanely fragile. Compared to Godzilla, they're essentially made of paper. Now, the rub is the Beast Titan, and - assuming he isn't working alone, his kind/faction/people. Without knowing exactly how the whole, turning people into titans thing works, it's impossible to say what effect he'd have, but that would be their only real advantage.
  • It seems that technology has only gotten up to WWI level at this point.
  • The series is not set in the future, as far as we know right now (manga included).

Zip-lines

• How do they get their zip-lines back for the 3D gear? If it's a hook that pierces stone and smaller hooks pop out to remain hooked into said stone to make a sharp turn, which would wrap around the building, how would they get the zip line back? The angle would be too much when they try to retract it back, wouldn't it? Or if they try to break it down, wouldn't it just pull them back to where the zip-line was?
  • Maybe the barbs can retract when the lines need to be released from a wall.

Cities around the walls

• Maybe I missing something, but when I'm looking at the map and it seems that the cities are built in little bubbles around the main walls. So why was losing one city fatal to the entire wall at that tier? It seems there should be three more cities on Wall Maria that are at the worst cut off from receiving food from the interior, but otherwise still secure.
  • Those cities are a tiny fraction of the outer region (more people live in rural settlements in the large areas in between the Walls), and they'd quickly starve because they don't have any farmland.
  • Titans show so little interest in animals and are easily lured by large masses of humans. In fact, that's the rationale of the cities. Patrolling the entire Wall to keep it clear of Titans was impossible, so the cities were put together to keep the Titans concentrated in fewer places, and many animals like cows can be trained to return home. They likely wouldn't bother any crops, either. They probably wouldn't be able to maintain their current populations but in addition to that, they should be able to destroy some buildings and plant crops inside the cities.
  • The case of Shiganshina being lost meaning all of Wall Maria was doomed was only because of The Armored Titan busting the gate between the rest of the land and the town itself, thus granting the other titans free access to all of Wall Maria. Had the gate been left alone and sealed, then only Eren's hometown would have been lost.
  • Explaining further, maybe you are forgetting that the Collosal titan breaks the wall of Shingasina (The little bubble) and then the Armored Titan makes a hole in the actual wall (Maria).

Setting the trap

• The Scouts routinely lose 30-50% of their number every time they venture outside the Walls. When and how did the scouts set up the trap for the Female Type Titan? Even with 3DMG getting those cannons into place would take time, probably an hour or more. The front of the formation was at most a few miles ahead of Eren and on horse back a few miles a head equates to at maximum a half hour. (An in shape human can run 3 miles in under 20 minutes. A horse can do it considerably faster.) So, it stretches belief that the people in front of the formation had enough time to set up ahead of Eren.
  • Don't think of them as cannons. They don't seem to operate as standard artillery batteries. Rather, think of them as Katyusha rocket launchers. All they need to do is have the launchers pre-loaded, something that can be done before the expedition. Then when they see a good spot, they'll just park the launchers in the right direction and fire. Or wait and fire in this case. Most of the time setting up rocket batteries is calibrating the range to fire at targets miles away. Not needed when you're firing point blank. It's not at all surprising the command squad and other support squads could set it up in maybe 15 minutes.

Hannes with the scout insignia

• Hannes is a member of the Garrison, right? So how come in episode 4 he has the Wings of Freedom on his jacket instead of the insignia of the Garrison?
  • Could have just been an animation oversight.
  • He lost his own jacket and needed to borrow one, or something.

Shifting while healing

• Maybe it will be explained later in the manga, but how could Eren do his first Titan Shift after losing an arm and a leg when it's later explained that they could not transform while healing?
  • While it wasn't explained out right, the thing that would make the most sense was that Eren hadn't activated his shifter abilities yet, and thus wasn't healing until he had already transformed into a titan.
  • It's also likely that they had just expended too much energy in their Titan forms, and wouldn't have been able to transform even if their physical bodies were fine. The Armored and Colossal Titans both mention that while they're in better shape than the other two, it's not by much, which is why they're resting as well. There's a sequence later where they're testing the limits of his Titan form; he transforms three times, keeping the form active as long as he can every time. The second and third forms are significantly weaker and stupider than the first one, and at the end he almost fully fuses to the Titan body, to the point that his face rips off when they pull him out.
  • It's possible that they could still transform with enough willpower even if they are healing.
  • If they are hurt before transforming, they can transform (Eren without two limbs, and later Reiner with an arm almost split and Berthold hurt too), but if they transform, being hurt or not, they need to rest, and of couse, if you have your limbs severed and regenerating, you are consuming a lot of energy, so that plus being tired from your orevuious transformation leaves you without transformation for a while.

Technological Stagnation

• So the human beings had several decades to prepare themselves for another titan attack. Then why didn't they spend that time to put as much research as possible in defense mechanisms, like manufacturing more mobile cannons that can recharge faster, or ways to fix a big hole in the wall quickly? Why didn't they build massive underground tunnels to hide when the titans attack? They simply put up those walls and then go about their business as usual. That's ... pretty shortsighted, considering.
  • The government has been assassinating people developing technologies they deem dangerous, such as revolvers and hot air balloons. And they have some dark secret related to the walls and the Titans, as well.
  • It's also your basic Evil Versus Oblivion situation. So long as the governement suppressess technology that could permenantly defeat the Titans, then humanity has to remain united behind them to survive.
  • If you're referring to the attack on Wall Maria, We Have Become Complacent is the theme of the first chapter. They have the Walls and the Walls work. They don't need any other defenses. If you mean the attack on Wall Rose, they only had five years to prepare and did make some significant strides in improving their cannons and Titan fighting strategies.

Ilse and the Aberrant

• In the side story about Ilse Langner, why does the Aberrant react that way towards her?
  • Because she looks like Ymir, with the same black hair and freckles.
  • And when it finally does kill her?
  • It's because she's gotten frustrated with it and lashed out at it. Ymir is usually very calm and snarky. That's how it realized that Ilse wasn't Ymir.
  • It is implied that the Ape Titan and Titan Shifters possess an ability to control the behavior of regular Titans. It is also implied that Ymir "stole" this ability, and may have used it to exert her will upon lesser Titans. The Talking Titan may have initially mistaken Ilse for Ymir, but eventually realized it was not her either due to the difference in their demeanors or the fact that she could not use Ymir's ability, and perhaps even both of these reasons. It is interesting to note that the Titan appeared to be restraining itself from eating Ilse, but since she could not control it as Ymir herself may have been able to, it soon succumbed to instinct and devoured her.
  • We don't really know yet. The Aberrant clearly mistakes Ilse for Ymir which implies the said person is important and known to Titans in some way. Beyond that, we have only speculation.
  • If it had suspected her for Ymir, and then eaten her because it realised she wasn't, why does it so such odd veneration for her corpse?
  • There's no telling just yet, but that Titan seemed to be much more intelligent than most. Apart from being able to talk, it was able to choose its targets instead of just mindlessly eating whatever was in front of it, and it only ate Ilse's head. If I had to take a guess, it thought Ilse was Ymir at first and ate her when it realized she wasn't, but the resemblance may have to lead it to believe that Ilse was one of "Ymir's People", and thus deserving of respect for some reason.
  • It was struggling against the titan instinct to eat her, and when she starts to run away, the drive to catch and eat her becomes too overwhelming. It behaves the same way with Hange, trying to show her something but still tries to grab her when she gets too close.
• Some of the theories above are correct; indeed, it thought it was Ymir and got frustrated when it realized it wasn't her.
  • Maybe not frustrated, but being a titan, something that does not have too much intelligence (even in his case) he maybe just lost the battle against his urges to eat people, or maybe he lost control over itself when Illse screamed at him, like a troper above mentioned. Later he makes an "altar/shrine" and puts her corpse in there.
• We later learn that he does know Ymir, or knew. This was because some cult took the poor homeless (and most probably orphan) Ymir as the object of adoration to the Real Ymir, but when they government find this out they all were transformed into titans, that's how Ymir later eats Galliard (the friend of Reiner and company) and became human once again.

Petra is too young for marriage?

• Given the life expectancy of Scouts why did Petra's father think she was too young for marriage?
  • The scouts don't appear to marry any earlier than anyone else. For everyone except the scouts, life expectancy is actually pretty good, and Petra's age (mid-twenties at the latest) is a bit early for that. True, from one perspective marrying off the scouts early would be a good idea, in the same way that no one raises a fuss when a soldier fresh out of high school gets married before going off to war. But the Walls already have an overpopulation problem, and the scouts were always slated for death anyway, it's just the secret police didn't see the need to bother killing them, since they knew the titans would do the job for them. Encouraging them to get married and have kids would cause their dangerous ideas and ideals to spread.
  • I think her father meant she was not mature enough to marry just yet, or she shouldn't be so hasty to settle down.
  • Considering the medieval level of culture and technology, it wouldn't be surprising if the marriageable age was around 12. Scouts probably don't marry often due to their high death rate, and if they do it's likely after a retirement.
  • It's her dad. He's overprotective.

What overpopulation problem?

• Given how vast the interior of the walls is, how is there an overpopulation problem? Is the soil so poor that they can't grow much food even on such vast tracts of land?
  • I'm guessing it's more of an infrastructure problem than a strict overpopulation problem. In time, they could establish the farms and such necessary to provide for the entire population within just the inner two walls, or maybe even the inner-most wall. However, at the beginning of the series, that does not exist. The sources of food are spread out over the entirety of the terrain between the three walls. This means that when a wall is lost, humanity has suddenly lost a large amount of its food sources and supplies, without an equally large population loss. Since establishing new sources and supplies of food takes time, they are unable to provide for the population despite the land providing the theoretical means to do so.
  • Think of the number of times we've seen people hiding out in the mountains, forest, or mountainous forest. A large portion of the land is either unusable or hasn't been prepared. Sascha's father at one point mentions that the forest people have been losing territory because the city folk *have* now started cutting down trees for more farmland.

Titan Density

• Titans are specifically stated to be very light. Light enough that punting their heads is apparently surprisingly easy. Granted Eren is really the only one we see consistently doing it but Titans are apparently quite capable of hitting a lot harder than their bodies can actually hold up against. Given how they seem to form from and dissolve back into steam it's possible they are actually primarily air instead of water like humans are. However, they are just as likely, not counting the Armor Titan or Annie who both have excuses for why they can do, do things that creatures who are light enough to punt just shouldn't have the necessary mass to accomplish. How hard you hit isn't entirely dependent on how fast you're going, some of it a lot of it, comes from your mass and density.
  • They are certainly lighter than their sizes would suggest, and we can infer that this is due to them having far a more simplified anatomical structure. We can reasonably assume they have a circulatory system due to spilling blood, a crude nervous system reliant on the human host and only three practical senses (sight, touch, hearing), a very simple digestive system due to only having a stomach, which is probably linked directly to their circulatory system, and at least a respiratory system due to their vocal capacity and the need to vent out excess heat. The rest of them is muscle and bone. Their proportionally lightweight would, if we accept this explanation, be due to their lack of the majority of organs humans require. Density, on the other hand, would be similar to our own, but the evident lack of pain induced reactions would mean they do not have a preservation instinct. If humans could punch something at their absolute maximum, they would do just as much damage to themselves if not more so. Humans unconsciously hold back so as not to destroy themselves. Titans lack that instinct, which is compensated for by their healing factor.

"He's just glad that he doesn't have to leave me."

• No, but, seriously. What was the point of having that line there? It's never expanded upon, nothing comes of it, and we never get any insight as to why she believes Eren would be thinking that. I cringe every time I hear it, and it just bugs me.
  • Mikasa is creepily devoted to Eren. Note the looks everyone else has on their faces when she says that—they're kinda like "...seriously?" Whether you interpret their relationship as romantic or platonic, Mikasa has never made any attempt to hide that she'll do anything for Eren. This was just an extension of that, a little bit of her hoping he feels the same way. He does care about her of course, he's just more devoted to wiping out the titans (which is the real reason he was so happy he was making it into the Scouts).
  • Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe she says the opposite in the manga; "He's just happy he doesn't have to be stuck with me" or along those lines with a sad face, referring to him being irritated with her overprotective nature. Either the director completely misread the line or he purposefully changed it because of his tendency to add Eren/Mikasa-centric lines and moments to the anime that weren't in the manga. Again, I might be wrong but I don't recall what chapter it is she said it or have the opportunity to check it right now.

Eren's Abilities

• Why didn't Eren transform when he was trying to master the 3DMGs? He had a clear goal in mind, and it looked like he was bleeding a lot, and if the flashbacks are anything to go by, he already had his powers. If the simple goal of picking up a spoon is enough to trigger the transformation, surely trying to master something is more than enough.
  • He hit his head hard enough that his eyes roll back into his head. He wasn't awake and couldn't transform. Now if it had been a lighter hit...
  • The difference between the injury from hitting his head during the 3DMG training and his missing arm and leg for his debut as a titan shifter was that the former was Played for Laughs mixed in with the drama. It was to make him look like a total idiot despite his determination to exterminate the titans, while he was in a life-or-death situation from the latter.
    • And also, when he was inside the titan's stomach, he has the goal in mind, that was to elimite the titans, something that he could only accomplish by transforming, something that he may not know counsiously, but deep in his mind were some memories, or something that triggered the transformation. As stated above, dominating the 3DMG was not a live-or-dead situation, and it was something that he could accomplish without transforming.

Saving Daz

• How did Ymir go unnoticed when she saved Daz from the snowstorm? The implication was that she turned into a Titan, but there was a cabin full of people close to where she and Krista were. Wouldn't someone have noticed the huge lightning bolt?
  • She apparently transformed at the top of a cliff, in heavy snow (if not an actual blizzard), and changed back when she reached the ground. Everybody in "the cabin" was simply too bothered trying not to freeze to death to notice.

3DS video game

• Why does the European version have to use the Japanese name instead of the English one, when the manga and anime don't have that problem?

Bertholt's inaction

• Why didn't Bertholt transform into the Colossal Titan to assist Reiner against the Beast Titan? I am sure he'd have had enough rest to do so within the 2 months between the Uprising Arc and the current reveal. I mean, the Beast Titan can punch through Reiner's armor, but I doubt even he could withstand Bertholt's assault if it worked out.
  • Bert's Titan form is huge. If he transformed, he would've been spotted within minutes, unlike the Armored Titan and the Beast Titan who are conveniently shorter than the walls.
  • It seems implied that the Beast Titan and Reiner had a duel of some kind. If Reiner won they could work on saving Annie, while if BT won, they would focus on the Coordinate. Bertolt probably wasn't allowed to intervene. I'm not sure if that's a Titan Shifter culture thing or the only way they could get BT to agree to their terms, but that seems to be what happened. That or Bert would have had no way to actually hit BT, since he's five times his size, very slow, and can't bend over without collapsing.
  • It could also be possible that Reiner's still suffering from dissociative episodes, and picked a fight during one of the times that he thought he was the Beast Titan's enemy. Bertolt does not have this mental condition, and probably still wants to keep BT as an ally, so he didn't transform in an effort to keep BT from outright killing Reiner. He might have also anticipated that Reiner would be understandably wiped when he ditched his Titan form this time (he looked exhausted in the last panel of 72, like he had only just summoned up the energy to get out of bed that day), so Bertolt stayed human in order to help Reiner out of his Titan body.
  • OP here to confirm the one who pointed out that Reiner and Zeke had a duel. As of chapter 77, it was confirmed that they fought to decide, and they could try again with a higher stake.
  • Also they were companions all this time, they just had an argument of what they need to focus first

Grisha's remains

• When Eren had his father's final memories unlocked within him by Rod Reiss while he was chained up under the chapel several chapters earlier, it ends with Eren screaming over Grisha's partially eaten corpse after realizing what he did. In Chapter 71, Keith Shardis reveals that he found Eren unconscious in the forest after Grisha injected him with the titan serum and subsequently devoured him. There was no trace of Grishna's body when he found Eren. What the hell happened to it? Now I know that regular Titan corpses disintegrate rapidly upon death until nothing remains. This same thing may very well apply to the human forms of Titan Shifters. But what that doesn't explain is the lack of Grisha's clothing at the scene. His body was still wearing plenty of clothing after Eren ate his upper half, so Keith was bound to have at least found a shoe or a shred of Grisha's clothes when looking for Eren. Any ideas?
  • Maybe Eren had wandered away from the body before losing consciousness, and so Keith didn't notice the remains in the dark.
  • Or worse, Mikasa did a little bit of "cleaning up" because when Eren cries, acting as if his father was nearby, Mikasa says she "didn't see anything" in the same manner that she said Titan-Eren was "swatting a fly" when Titan-Eren attacked her.

Ymir's location

• Ymir was nowhere to be found in the Reiner/Bertolt/Beast Titan scenes. Has she been taken back to Homeland and the other two have returned again...even though their superiors knew they failed the first time? Or did she escape from them somehow and find her way back to her own people?
• With the latest info in chapter 93, presumably she went back to Marley at some point and let herself be killed. Why exactly is currently unknown.
  • That is almost exactly what happened.

Time, distance and travel

• So we have a timeline of events and a diagram of the walls. The area inside the walls is massive - the distance from Wall Rose to Wall Sina alone is 130km/80 miles (on horseback a one-way journey would be 2 days). There just isn't enough travel time as far as the events of the story are laid out.
  • Annie somehow getting from Stohess to outside Wall Rose (and back again) within 24 hours is probably the most glaring example. She could have been running in her Titan form, but even that wouldn't have given her enough speed and it wouldn't have been possible for the entire journey.
  • Your math is way off. You claim that 130km takes 2 days on horseback. If we assume 8 hours of rest during both days, that leaves just 32 hours of being on horseback to travel from Stohess to Calaneth. The speed required for this would be a measly 4km/h, which is lower than average human walking speed at 5km/h. So if you just kept walking at a steady pace, you'd get there within 2 days on foot. Considering the military's horses can in actuality comfortably maintain a speed of 35km/h, the distance between Stohess and Calaneth takes about 4 hours. (Annie could have gone faster than that, though; the horses have a top speed of 80km/h, and she did not need to conserve her horse's stamina since she was just travelling between two cities with it.) The expedition took from the early morning to around noon, so let's say 6 hours or so. Let's also give Annie some wiggle room by saying she needed 2 hours to prepare her ambush. That all adds up to 16 hours total. Adding 8 hours of rest makes for 24, meaning Annie could have done all this and gotten a full night's sleep at the end, all while taking her sweet time.

Other settlements along Wall Maria

• So the titan shifters broke through at the Shiganshina District, but there are three other(unnamed, as far as I can tell) districts along Wall Maria. Is it ever established what happened to them? Did they get overrun by titans, too? Did Monkey Trouble titanize their populations? Did they all starve to death, cut off from the inner walls? Is some portion of their population still holed up, crazy survivor style?
  • They fled to Wall Rose when Shiganshina's inner wall was breached because if they didn't they'd starve to death from lack of food. That was the reason there were so many refugees. If it had just been refugees from Shiganshina, it would barely have been a blip.
  • The second part is incorrect. The flood of refugees came from all the territory between Wall Maria and Rose, not just the four districts of Maria. There are many villages in-between the main walls as their districts. As for the other three districts they never explicitly say what happened to them, so we have to assume they evacuated once they heard that wall Maria had been breached to not be cut off and either made it inside Rose or were caught by Titans in the open.

Long-distance scouting formation - number of flares

• Minor nitpick, but it bugged me during the anime. The way the long-distance scouting formation works is by communicating titan sightings using signal flares and then changing direction. However, the expedition seems to be carrying way too few flares for this to work during long expeditions. We see the inside of a bag at one point, with only six flares visible. Even assuming they're double-stacked (the bags seem to be tall enough), that means that each expedition member carries only twenty-four flares (two bags). Of those, at most twenty-two are red, green and black flares. With every titan sighting, every team must fire both a red or black flare, as well as a green flare. Since we see that there are teams consisting of just a single person (the ones with the extra horses), that means that the corps can only encounter eleven titans per expedition. Considering how common those guys are, that seems like it'd make for really short expeditions. And that's assuming the ratio of normals/abnormals encountered is the same as the ratio of red/black flares stocked, and assuming everyone carries only a single yellow and purple flare.
  • Given what we've seen in the flashbacks and in bits of the Manga it seems that the formation they used during that scouting formation was both experimental and designed specifically to draw out a Shifter Titan they knew they had in their midst. So any shortcomings are likely due to the fact that they never intended to go any farther than they ended up going. Also, it's worth remembering that at the moment they were between the middle and outer wall. Any real expedition would be arranged differently.

Digestive Tract

• If Titans have incomplete digestive systems, then why does Rod Reiss' Titan form have a visible intestinal tract?
  • Titan Serum is supposed to be injected, while Rod licked it off the ground as it was evaporating. His form is simply a mutation.

Titan Shifter Steam

• Titans produce steam, with the Colossal Titan producing more than normal. Wouldn't Titan shifters be able to produce steam as well? And could they use it with the 3DMG? Heck, Titans are light for their size, what about slightly increasing the size of the shifter's arms, then shooting steam behind them for propulsion? Bam, instant flight.
  • First it's important to remember the 3DMG are not jet packs, they are more like Batgrappnels attached to your waist which is why they are useless out in the open. You are literally comparing two things that do the polar opposites of each other no matter how similar the end result manages to be. Second, there is no evidence they can control the steam to nearly the degree that would be necessary for propulsion at all much less controlled propulsion. Also, Titans very clearly weigh whatever the plot demands at any given moment. They can crush things with their weight.
  • Titans don't "weigh whatever the plot demands". Titan bodies are about as heavy as you'd expect, give or take the weird ones, until they're killed. Titan flesh begins immediately evaporating once it's not attached to a living titan, whether that means a titan whose neck has been sliced or a piece of severed Titan flesh. Also, steam doesn't work that way. Steam power works through pressure, and Titan shifters only produce steam when either transforming or regenerating; the Colossal Titan has a self-defense mechanism that releases superheated steam, not high-pressure steam.
  • Correction, the Colossal Titan does produce high-pressure steam. But, that can be attributed to its specific abilities that can't be found in other shifters.

Shifter Cure

• It's been established through Ymir and Rod Reiss that titans who eat shifters become human. But if titans do not have a digestive tract, how does the shifter spinal fluid become absorbed into the titan and revert the transformation?
• Flesh isn't completely solid. The serum probably just gets absorbed directly while being ingested. Injections are the most efficient route, ingestion is prone to mutations. It's also possible that direct skin contact would be enough.

Traffickers

• May not be a true head-scratcher, nonetheless I have to ask. why did Traffickers only try to kidnap Mikasa once? why not try multiple times throughout her life? or watch her throughout and once Mikasa's sufficiently alone swarm and capture her with a lot of people?
  • If I recall, the traffickers were more interested in Mikasa's mother, because she was fully Asian. When she was killed, they decided that Mikasa would do in her place, despite only being half Asian. It's likely that other traffickers wouldn't have gone after Mikasa for this reason, she was only ever going to be a substitute.
  • Well, now she is a killing machine, whoever dares to try that again might end pretty dead you know.

Eren no longer wanted revenge?

• For a guy who constantly said he wanted revenge and wanted Bertholt to suffer an excruciating death...he seemed rather disturbed by the fact that Bertholt, the Colossal Titan, was eaten by Armin.
  • Well, there is a big difference between WANTING revenge and thinking about punishment possibilities in your head.... and ACTUALLY carrying it out/seeing it being carried out... after all, seeing someone crying and screaming for help while being basically nothing but a helpless torso that can't do anything but cry and uselessly wiggle about, no matter what they did or how you felt... I think that would make anyone slightly sick to the stomach.
  • Or he could have just been taking in Armins titan form .....
  • We're talking about the same guy who, as a child, mercilessly stabbed and quite readily dehumanized two of the traffickers to justify said stabbing. Even when he tried to play nice when he was first captured by Reiner and Bertholt, he quickly lost his cool and tried to attack Reiner, forcing the latter to sleeper-lock him. I am pretty sure he would have been glad to have Bertholt die like that.
  • The traffickers were fully grown adults, while Bertholt, like Eren and Armin, is only a teen, not to mention they were NOT helpless and crying like a baby when Eren killed them and were acting on their own sick desires to sell Mikasa into sexual slavery and were not at all sorry about selling a little girl, while Bertholt was acting on orders that he did not want to do in the first place (heck, Mikasa killed the last one and she saw the guy strangling Eren, so that helps move along the "I don't feel sorry for this shithead" train as far as she goes).
  • I don't think age is a huge factor in Eren's decision making and emotional response.
  • So mass murder and attempted genocide are more acceptable than a sexual crime? Gotcha.
    • In my eyes, yes. There is nothing worse than sexual crime.
  • Bertholt is a soldier no different than Eren and a Child Soldiers at that. The slave traffickers murdered an entire family and stole their child for profit. For better and worst, Bertholt was fighting for a cause he mostly believed and was trained to believe that the people behind the walls were devils who were descended of people who also committed mass genocide before running behind stone walls, therefore avoiding karma. The slave traffickers, it was all about money.
  • Also, even though they weren't particularly close, keep in mind that this was a guy he trained with for 3 long years. No matter the circumstances, it's got to be a somber experience to see him getting eaten alive right before your eyes.
  • To be fair though, Bertholt didn't exactly go quietly into that good night. He was literally begging for someone to help him, even calling out to Reiner and Annie. Seeing someone cry and beg for their lives as they're being killed is disturbing in itself, especially when you add in the fact that seeing a titan eat anyone is always shown to be rather...off-putting, so I don't exactly blame Eren for being a bit disturbed at the whole scene.

Where Do Their Clothes Go?

• When humans are transformed into mindless Titans, their bodies are completely absorbed in the nape area with the exception of their brain and spinal cord, giving the Titans their weak points. With the few times we've actually seen mindless Titans regaining their human forms on-page, they all come out wearing the same clothes they had prior to becoming mindless Titans. How does this happen if their bodies were absorbed? If this truly were the case, by all accounts, they all should have emerged naked. Unintentional comedy aside, the fact that they come out wearing the same clothes doesn't make any sense.
  • When you see inside the titan body from the perspective of the shifters, their clothes are not destroyed, perhaps they are integrated to prevent destruction. Or it could just be an unintentional side effect, and the ones who created the titans figured 'eh, we'll go with it.'.
  • Well, Ymir spent 60 years as a titan, given the high temperatures that a titan body has, maybe the clothes just dissolved or something. The other cases we saw where Eren and Frida, who become shifters and the back to human form in a matter of minutes, maybe in that short period the body did not fully fuse with the titan yet, so their clothes would be Ok.

Eren's Confidence

• Why exactly is he so confident when he first faced The Colossal Titan after graduating boot camp? I understand his need for getting back at the Titans but that doesn't explain his confidence. It's like facing the neighborhood bully, you know you have to face him down but he's been kicking your ass for a while now and you're probably still scared of him. All Eren's had was training but, when we get right down to it, he's never faced a Titan and doesn't really know what to do especially since this is such a unique Titan.
  • That's exactly why. He doesn't know actual combat against a Titan, let alone the Colossal Titan. It's like a kid who took karate courses and thinks just because they became a blue belt or the like that they'd be perfectly capable of kicking ass.
  • That usually works until that kid realizes what a fight actually is which is what Eren should've realized the second he faced the Colossal Titan. All of the training in the world doesn't fully prepare you for the task at hand if it's your first time doing it.
  • That doesn't negate the point; Eren didn't think it through. All he saw was the titan that caused the destruction of his home and the death of his mother. He was fresh out of training and wanted revenge, allowing that to cloud his judgment. He's never really thought things through, and he's always had some form of a mental issue; his response to the slave traders who were going to kidnap Mikasa was to trick them into thinking he was just a lost child, then outright stab them to death. On top of that, Eren dehumanized his victims to make it easier for him to rationalize. He's kinda like [[Berserk Guts]], a psychopath who happens to be the protagonist of the story.
  • That would make sense if he was experienced enough to face a Titan. Even if the character is a psychopath is read, there's still the issue of ability. The second he faced the Titan, the first thought that should've raced through his mind as with anyone is "I don't know what to do here."
  • That's what makes Eren "Suicidal Maniac" Yeager different than most characters in the series. He usually doesn't allow fear or doubt in his capabilities to hinder his actions, at least not at first. Riding high off the confidence of graduating fifth place from training, burning with rage at the creature that destroyed his life, and determined to prove himself and not let the same tragedy that befell Shiganshina happen again, Eren forced back any fear he had and just pushed forward to go after the Colossal Titan. In his naive, headstrong mind, there is no reason why his training wouldn't allow him to bring down any Titan he comes across, including the Colossal. And to his credit, he handled himself pretty well considering his opponent. He very well could have brought it down if not for the Titan's special nature. It's only after his squad is murdered and he gets eaten that the fear that comes with fighting the Titans finally starts to sink in for Eren, leading to his future doubts and failures.

Eren X Annie

• Sorry if this sounds weird or downright creepy but Eren, such as he is, is still a pubescent boy. Assuming that Warchief Zeke was in contact with them after Eren becomes The Rogue Titan, why doesn't he run Annie at him? They don't have to make it a hentai but use her to capture him. He's 15, I'm sure the promise of hopefully getting to 2nd base would be enough to separate him from the pack.
  • It's not that kind of series. The author has been making a point to avoid romance/fanservice for a while, he's not gonna suddenly turn one of the more kickass women as a romantic lure for the protagonist. Plus, Annie was the first to try to capture Eren, look how well that ended for her.
  • That's just going from one extreme to the other. It doesn't have to be a romance subplot but the series has shown that the antagonists, at the moment at least, are very strategic. With that being the case, they left a near foolproof strategy on the table. Think about it, Annie lures Eren away from the rest of the team, knocks him out then Reiner and she take turns transporting him back to their homeland. They'd, at least, be past the next wall by the time anyone knows what happened.
  • By the point that Erin is revealed to be a shifter he already knows Annie well enough that her taking a run at him would come entirely out of the blue. Additionally, Erin may be a 15-year-old boy but he's surprisingly single-minded and rarely left alone during the window between when he is revealed and when Annie does make her move. Additionally, we don't know what Annie may have done if she hadn't decided to seize the opportunity during the scouting mission, and if not for Levi the snatch and grab would have worked.
  • He may know her but he's still a teenage boy. I that situation, he's not thinking about how well he knows Annie anymore.
  • Mikasa's been a step and a half from humping Eren's leg the whole series. Eren hasn't given it a second thought. Sure, she's his (adopted) sister, but he hasn't even NOTICED it.
  • Now you mention it, if Annie tried any tricks on Eren, Mikasa would probably have a knife on her neck before he could even put a tent up.
  • Not to mention the ever irritable Annie doesn't really seem like the type who would be best suited for pulling off the Honey Trap ploy anyway. I mean, she couldn't even pretend to be nice or friendly to anybody for the 3 years she spent with them.
    • Actually they made a note of mentioning Annie's own disbelief that she could pull that particular manoeuvre off, saying that she didn't think she was good looking enough for it to work.

Kill the Titans

• While we know the Titans are essentially infinite in number the cast is unaware of that. Titans may be tough but Levi and Mikasa prove that under controlled circumstances they are essentially harmless. Also, the cannons are likely fatal under the proper conditions so why not set up essentially a pen (dropping rocks to form a semicircle would due fine) and send out people to kill the titans daily until you run out? The only logical answer is plot since they are trying to hide so much but since the Scouts are essentially a suicide squad keeping them from trying this seems odd.
  • Given the fact that Reiner, Bertholt, Annie, and Zeke were taking a more proactive role in attacking the Walled Nation, simply sitting there and making it a battle of attrition is something that would not work out in the long run. And the survey corps aren't specifically trying to kill titans, they are trying to expand Humanity's territory to make the battle much easier, killing the titans is simply the most effective way to do so.
  • They actually do so by making a sort of guillotine, that is a giant piece of wood, that is released vertically and drop into the titans obliterating them, this work because the weapon is mounted on the walls, and when the guillotine drops it fall in the where was the gate of the wall. At some point there are no more titans to deal with

13 Years?

• In Chapter 88, Kruger revealed to Grisha that Titan Shifters will die 13 years after receiving their powers. This contradicts what Shadis told Eren and the others back in Chapter 71. Shadis stated that he found Grisha wandering outside the Walls 20 years ago, in other words, 15 years before Wall Maria was breached. Any thoughts?
  • It also contradicts Ymir's claims. Ymir was alive for at least 30 years, possibly more.
  • That's slightly incorrect, but Ymir's situation actually opens up a bigger can of worms of this issue the more you think about it. She told Bertolt back in the forest that she wandered around as a mindless Titan for 60 years before becoming a Titan Shifter by eating Marcel. Based on that, when Eldians are turned into mindless Titans, they stop aging completely until their humanity is restored. So when trapped as a mindless Titan, you're effectively immortal barring any nape injuries, but as soon as you acquire the power to control your Titan form, you only have 13 years left to live? There are bound to be more details surrounding this that haven't been revealed yet, but as of right now, hardly any sense can be made about this.
  • There are probably ways for a titan shifter to extend their life. And besides, there is still so much about the "Titan's Power" we don't know about. Plus Kruger called it "Ymir's Curse". That tells me that the 13-year limit has something to do with her. For all we know if you have any one of the Nine Titan Powers^note Colossal, Armored, Female, Attack, etc. you gain a few more years. We'll just have to wait to find out.
  • I think it has something to do with how much a shifter USES their titan powers, if they don't use them a lot then they won't reach burn out as fast .
  • Shadis may have been rounding up to 20 from 18-ish?
  • It could simply be an antiquated average: Ymir Fritz died after 13 years, or so they say, over 1800 years ago, and the Eldians simply drew the conclusion of '13 years' after it became the norm to them. Much like how the average lifespan of humans jumped from an average of roughly 30-40 years [ruling out cozy noble lifestyles that extended the age by several years after surviving to 21], to roughly 70 years average in the modern era, due to both improvements in quality of life and medical advancements, the average life expectancy of Titan Shifters has increased accordingly. Grisha was famed as a brilliant doctor who ended a plague within the Eldian Walls, so he may have figured ways to extend his lifespan on an individual case, while someone such as Annie may simply have trained her body to be more resilient to the strain her titan form imposes [given she can transform, revert, then transform again with relatively little loss in stamina].
  • I would be far more inclined to buy the rounding argument than anything about Grisha/Eren/Ymir being special or some pseudo-scientific extrapolation of shifter life span based on energy conservation/advancing medical technology. Grisha is coming from the edge of Paradis/Utopia toward the walled city and is discovered by Shadis in 832, which leaves still pretty much 12 or 13 years of Grisha's truncated life span. He is taken in, meets Carla, and Eren is born in 835 (~10 years left). Wall Maria is breached by the Colossal Titan in 845 (~0 years left). On the night of the breach, Shadis discovers Eren alone in the woods after Grisha took him away to perform the succession ritual, making Eren the new Attack Titan and starting another 13-year cycle. The meeting with Shadis happens sometimes during the year 850, tracing a timeline of approximately 18-19 years.
  • Pure Titans can live indefinitely assuming their napes are not damaged. But Titan shifters live only for 13 years after gaining the Power of the Nine Titans.

How does Asia relate to Eldia and Marley

• We are told that Mikasa is "Asian", which is a real ethnicity. However, we were recently told there was a huge war between Marley and Eldia, which are fictional ethnicities. So, is Marley/Eldia something orthogonal to being Asian? If not, how was Asia involved in the conflict? Is there even an Asia?
  • They aren't called Asians, instead they are called "Easterners" or "Oriental" in the Japanese version.
  • Given the memory modification within the Walls, it's safe to say that the concept of Asia/easterners exist, but just weren't focused upon in the story.
  • Whether or not this is a Fantasy Counterpart Culture in play: We don't know; it could be post-apocalyptic Earth or just a completely different world from our own.
  • Given how much misinformation we've been giving it's probably safe to assume that there are Asians in some other settlement, we know there are people living outside the walls in at least one location. Assuming that this is still Earth and that the popular beliefs that they are either in Europe or America combined with how any and all technology that would be useful in getting outside the walls effectively they may have simply lost contact with any other humans. This might be entirely localized we can confirm that the majority of known shifter titans are local for example. Add onto that the Asian population of most of Europe and America is fairly small in the grand scheme of things. With slavers rounding up who they can it might just have been a matter of time.
  • The later chapters have shown that there are a multitude of foreign nations with differing ethnicity that have relations with Marley, including Asians/Easterners.

Colossal Titan #2?

• We found out in Grisha's Journals that there are only 9 special titans, each with some unique abilities. One of them is Colossal titan, with the power of being colossal. How come then that the titan Rod Reiss transformed into was twice as large as him? Shouldn't being colossal be a unique trait for that one titan?
  • It's been stated that the dosage of Titan serum dictates the size of the Titan produced so being colossal-sized isn't really unique. The tens of thousands of similarly-sized Titans embedded in the Walls themselves are proof of this. Given what we know about the Kingdom of Marley and the extensive knowledge they have regarding Titans, it's very likely they modified the serum Bertolt was initially injected with to make his Titan form colossal-sized before he ate the Warrior who previously held the Titan's power. In other words, a person's initial Titan form could be modified in a variety of ways under controlled conditions and then given the power to control their Titan form. In the case of Rod's Titan, the Titan serum was exposed to air and he ingested it rather than injecting it, causing very drastic consequences.
  • The regular Titans vary in size, and it was never stated that a regular Titan cannot be larger than the Colossal Titan. The Colossal Titan unique ability is not just its size, but that it's practically a living atomic bomb.
  • Also, those inside the walls wouldn't have known a larger titan was going to show up. The Colossal was the largest recorded by far at 52 meters when it first appeared, so they called it the Colossal Titan. The Marleyans presumably didn't know about this sort of abnormal either and it's a pretty intuitive name to give to the biggest shifter power.

How did Marley won The Great Titan War

So in both stories, Marley managed to defeat Eldia and take control of 7 of the 9 nine titans, but how exactly did the Marleys succeed back then?

• The official history is that the Eldians began to fight among themselves, giving the Marleyans an opportunity to rebel and overthrow them. The real history claimed by the Tyburs is that King Fritz and the Tyburs deliberately destroyed their own kingdom and propped up the Marleyans as heroes.

explosive big arrows

Why don't they use giant ballistae with mobile or even stationary platform pulled by horses and steam-powered orientation mechanism to facilitate aiming and use explosive arrows, not explosive-tip arrows (I mean the whole arrow is filled with explosives), these vehicles will be lightweight relatively to canons and have more penetration than canons. Three meter long arrows filled with HE will be more than enough to disable a titan heck they may even use big ass handheld crossbows for 1 meter explosive bolt is enough to damage the nape. Range limitations due to heavy bolts isn't an issue here for the combat is close anyways.

• Because ballistae are even more unwieldy and difficult to use than cannons. There is also the issue of how exactly to trigger the explosives in the arrows once they are fired.
• Not to mention that the government was actively censoring anything that could give the people of Paradis an edge on the Titans in the first place so to prevent them from discovering what is actually beyond the walls. If ballistae showed promise in repelling or eliminating Titans better than cannon and ODM gear did, it's likely the Military Police silenced the inventor(s) and hid or destroyed the data.

big azz long and deep trenches

They could have used some of the refugees to build long trenches to help defend the walls. They have many options here: since titans come from the south, they can build a semi-circular trench around trost from the inner part of the wall so that frost is to be encircled by semicircle wall and semicircle trench. They also can divide the walls into sections using trenches and start doing that from the north since it's least titan dense area (titans are concentrated in the south) by using explosives, digging these trenches would supposedly be faster and easier.

• Building trenches on a scale that would impede Titans would take years that the humans clearly did not have.
• Much like the above entry in ballistae, the Paradis government kept a close watch on 'humanity's' progress against the Titans and restricted or censored anything that could turn the tide, so that they would be kept in balance and therefore ignorant of the rest of the world. An effective trench system, even if they had the time and resources to build it, would probably not make it past the Military Police.

long range scouting formation

The problem here is that this formation only works when titan density is really small for example what would the commander do if two titans are spotted on the left and the right flank at the same time? So the solution is to make detachable parts of the scouting formation move on its own when titans are sighted not the entire formation like move in groups of 10 or so together as one unit and maneuver accordingly on their own (ofc they report to the main command whenever sighting). Also, the command must actively give signal flares so that no group strays away. Since titan sightings occur at the horizon, clashing with titans will be less likely if they avoid them. The signal won't be relayed so that the commander will know which flank has more titan density and move the entire formation accordingly so that the formation won't keep avoiding titans till they all get packed together.

How did Erwin not bleed to death?

His arm was bitten off, and it doesn't appear he received significant medical attention until he got all the way back to Wall Rose. A severed limb means a major artery is also severed, which without proper treatment is going to have a lot of bleeding which is very hard to stop.

It didn't show any evidence that the Scouts had a good field medic who had time to tend to him, he just seems to have shrugged it off entirely. It looks like he somehow rode a horse for several hours with an untreated traumatic arm amputation without losing consciousness from blood loss.

• In the anime, he's shown to have a tourniquet wrapped around the stump during the time titans are being thrown by Reiner.
• Even in the manga, there's a rope tied to just above the stump and is likely cutting off at least some of the blood-flow. It's visible when Floch is carrying Erwin to Levi. As to how Erwin didn't bleed to death before Floch got to him... pure luck?

Water

Hange states that titans don't need to drink water, but if that's true, then how do they produce steam? Not to mention saliva, blood and the fluid in their stomachs. It seems implausible that they can never be subject to dehydration, given their high temperatures. Can they absorb rainwater through their skin? Or is it just A Wizard Did It?

• Wouldn't even need to rain; they could just absorb humidity from the air.
• It was established that the Titans bodies defy the laws of physics, and are created by Ymir who sent them through invisible paths. So yes, a wizard does it.

Wall cult

What happened to the wall cult? Supposedly they knew some important secrets. What were those secrets? What was the purpose of the cult to begin with? Did Isayama just forget about them?

• We never get to know their "secrets" aside from the fact that there are Titans in the walls and other few things, but then Rod tells a fair amount of details, then the party gets too busy fighting, and then they get to the basement and learn the truth of the world. So maybe the cult doesn't have more secrets, maybe we already know what they know, so their "secrets" were no longer a secret.

Annie's Survey Corps uniform

Albeit is largely inconsequential, when and how did Annie obtain a Survey Corps uniform in order to infiltrate the party at the Forest of Giant Trees? She didn't eat anyone during her attack in order to obtain the equipment, given that she had Marco's gear in the first place, but what about the uniform? Also, given her attack on the pair of Titans in custody of the Corps, that was a hit-and-run situation, so how did she procure one? Did she have Reiner/Bertolt's help?

sons of ymir

If Ymir had children and split the power into 9 Titans how can she only have 3 children with the oldest being thirteen when her mother dies without having sons? None of her daughters would live past 25 and if they did not expect to die at 26-25 at best after the loss of her mother than they would need to have at least 3 or more children (optimally more than 5 grandchildren per daughter by the time the mother dies this would still be a severe issue even with sons!

• Considering that the events of the attainment of the Titan Powers happened 2 millennia before the events of AOT, and it borders on the fringes of mythology and even religion, it's fair to say that... who the hell knows. The only feasible answer would be that Ymir was already an adult with adult children of her own when she received the Power and that the Power not only included the Titan on its own, but also extended to unique characteristics within her immediate and extended family, like cousins or so. As such, the three sisters would have had to have spares available to pass on the Powers before the Curse of Ymir took effect. For instance, if you see Uri, who had no offspring of his own, he had the option to give the power to a member of his extended family, namely Frieda. Also consider that it's not only Ymir's family who received special aspects related to the Titans, but also the entirety of the Eldian race
• unless there were a thousand year old syringes this serum wasn't spread the same way initially and judging by how they use blood tests the "race" is probably only transmitted through one or at most a second blood type unless their circulatory system is different the method of growing numbers I may have misread from it as polygyny and not what it truly was by judging by the ability to maintain ghettos and that historical fact with the factor of time it seems it is just one bloodline, not an entire ethnicity, continent or race.
• Chapter 122 reveals that Ymir only had three daughters with the Eldian king, and she was killed 13 years after she first got her powers. The oldest daughter wasn't even 13 years old when she was killed, but that set the precedent for the time limit Titan shifters are cursed with. It's still not clear how or why there are only nine titans with special powers, but it's safe to assume that Ymir's daughters had children of their own and passed down their powers to them until the standards were set for the royal family and how Titan powers work.
• It's unknown why the number of Titans was 9. However, how they appeared in first place may be irrelevant since it's established that if one of the Nine Titans dies, their power is inherited by a random Eldian baby (chapter 88).

Hanji figures out the Armored Titan's weakness

During Eren's first fight with Reiner as the Armored Titan, Hanji correctly guesses that there have to be some spots on the titan's body that are vulnerable to blade attacks, as it wouldn't be feasible for the Armored Titan to be as fast and agile as it is if he were completely armored from head to toe. She makes a comparison to a knight's armor, which is bound to have a few open spots like the armpits, groin, and back of the knee, and there is a brief shot of a knight's armor with those weak points highlighted. Except, hold on a second. If the history of the outside world up until 100 years ago has been erased from the minds of the people of the walls, and actively suppressed and destroyed by the government since then, how does Hanji know about knights and have a mental image of what their armor looked like and what functions they served? And how does she not know anything about medieval times and wars if this were the case? This is a setting where everyone's been fed lies about how humanity has been fighting titans for hundreds of years and nothing else, where the concept of the ocean is almost completely alien to all but a few curious individuals. How can someone wrap their head around a warrior wearing heavy, full-body armor and a lance to fight other humans, when its titans that they presumably should've been trained and equipped to fight?

• I assume that there are aspects of history that weren't censored by the Royal Government, especially aspects that have little purpose in the population's contact with Titans. Medieval-styled armor would not adequately protect against Titan attacks, and it's shown that the censorship of history and new technologies, albeit greatly oppressive, it's not universal. Otherwise, the 3DM gear would not have been implemented, and not even mounted cannons would have been allowed on top of the Three Walls. Evidence of this comes from the very nature of the Walls, as it's not like they're completely sealed from the outside, as they have fault points on their doors. The King of the Walls fully intended the Eldians to be consumed/eradicated, so otherwise, the walls would have no openings whatsoever.

Zeke's plan

If Zeke has the ability (with Eren's help) to sterilize all the Eldians can't he just remove their ability to change into titans instead? sounds a lot better than genocide. Not to mention making them sterile won't make them suddenly get treated better by other nations, and if anything female Eldians in those countries will be at a greater risk for rape, since said rapist won't have to worry about her becoming pregnant from his power trip. Removing Eldians from the world won't make things better, it will make it worse since, in those racist country's minds, it proves their bigotry RIGHT! And lets them win!

• The thing is that Zeke was heavily traumatized by his upbringing, and likely only sees euthanasia as the only possible solution, since even if he does remove the ability change into titans, Eldians will still likely be discriminated against since the large majority of humans will still likely mistrust them, and now this time Eldians have no recourse to protect themselves. At least with the ability to still Titanize, Eldians can still use the threat of "rumbling the earth" as a bargaining chip. Plus, it's revealed in Chapter 116 that they intend to make Historia's child take up the mantle as the final Founding Titan to oversee the final generation of Eldians.
• Even if the Eldians could no longer transform, they would still be hated. If anything, Marley would no longer have an incentive to keep any Eldian alive. Zeke's plan was to sterilize all Eldians, and to display the power of the "rumbling" to keep the last generation of Eldians safedie. It may be possible that the Founding Titan cannot "cure" the Eldians. The founding Titan has the power to turn Eldians into Titans at will, which was used to create the Wall Titans. However the Marleyans scientists discovered that they can do the same by injecting spinal fluid of one of the Nine. Basically it would be asking the Founding Titan to remove his own influence over the Eldian bodies.

The Attack Titan

So, the Attack Titan. Eren's primary Titan power. What's the deal with it? How did it evade capture by Marley from the end of the Great Titan War to the point where Grisha Yeager inherited it for all that time? Was there a secret Eldian cult or organization who ensured that it would remain within Eldian Restorationists' hands up until that point? Who did Eren Kruger inherit it from? How come it boasts its own ideology and drive to pursue freedom for Eldians when we don't know if the other Titans do so themselves? What is its unique Titan power since every other one of the Nine Titans has one? How come it didn't start having an effect on Eren's mental state until five to six years after he inherited it? How come it didn't seem to have any effect on Grisha's mind at all in the 13 years he held it? Why is this Titan so wrapped up in mystery despite it being the Titan we are most familiar with?

• Chapter 121 reveals some answers. The Attack Titan's unique ability is to access memories of its future successors. It is also revealed that Eren has been sending his memories into the past to influence all bearers of the Attack Titan to follow his ideology of freedom. In simple terms, the Attack Titan's will is actually Eren Yeager's will, which is the reason it seeks freedom in every era and does not obey anyone. Also, it is revealed that Grisha was being controlled by future Eren and he did not enjoy it.

why restrain Uri?

I mean with Eren being tied up in the chamber it makes sense ...but with Uri and later Ymir...they were WILLING to get eaten...so why tie them up? maybe in Ymir's case they did not want Ymir to panic last minute and haul it, okay fine, but Uri was under the first kings possession...meaning strapping his arms and legs makes little sense...he has no free will TO choose to run ...and he is even seen SMILING at Frieda's titan form!

• Probably just to be cautious. Just because someone is content to die doesn't mean they won't react impulsively at the last second. Self-preservation instinct will often cause the body of a person, or animal, to leap away from certain death if possible even before the mind realizes what's happening. As we saw with Mikasa after she learned Eren was dead, even she didn't know why her body was reacting and fighting to stay alive when she was ready to give up. And as Frieda later proved, she wasn't helpless in the face of death even with Karl Fritz's vow possessing her, as she fought to protect herself when Grisha tried to take her Titan from her. Though she still couldn't use the Founder's full power because of that vow.

Citizens of Paradis correctly guessing the names of the titans

The official names of Reiner's, Bertholdt's, Zeke's, and Annie's titans are the Armored, Colossal, Beast and Female titan respectively. These are the names that these titans were called for the 1,800+ years they have existed. However, the Eldians living within the walls refer to these titans with those exact names, despite knowing nothing about their true history. Do they have a magical Namedar or something?

• Save for Eren, the first four Titan Shifters encountered all have on-the-nose names. The Armored Titan is the one with armor. The Colossal Titan is the gigantic one. The Beast Titan is the one covered in fur. The Female Titan is the one with boobs. Had it been any of the others, the names they came up with likely wouldn't be as clear cut.
• It may not have been guessed. The royal family knew the secrets of the Titans, and has influence over all the military.
• In the English dub of the anime, Erwin refers to the cart titan as the quadruped titan, so they got at least that one wrong. Only later do we find out its official name.

Why wait?

Might be a stupid question, but why didn't Eren and Zeke activate the Coordinate as soon as they met in Marley? Why go through all the trouble of attacking Liberio and getting Zeke to Paradis when they could just get it over with right away?

• I'm not sure why, but here are some reasons I can think of:
  • Activating the Founding Titan to euthanize the entire Eldian race would probably alert the whole populace in Liberio. Marley is after the Founding Titan and even if Zeke succeeded, there is no telling how the Marleyan authorities may respond to it. Rather than jeopardize the situation, it is relatively better to do it in Paradis.
  • If Eren wanted to activate the Rumbling, it would be difficult to remotely coordinate the Wall Titans while in Marley. So he probably convinced Zeke to come to Paradis.
  • Basically, the Founding Titan's power is immense and you cannot recklessly tap into its power without consequences. This is the best explanation I can think of.
• If they activated the Founding Titan, they would transform and become a target to all of Marleyan military. They would be all by themselves, without the Wall Titans, to defend themselves from bombs and such.
• At the time, Zeke wasn't completely sure if Eren was totally committed to his euthanization plan, and he actually did not want the Rumbling to take place. He wasn't about to make contact until he was absolutely sure he could hijack control of the Founding Titan away from Eren.

How did Gabi and Falco reach Dauper?

In chapter 106, Gabi and Falco escape from Scout custody. They were presumably held captive in Mitras, or at least somewhere within Wall Sina. One chapter later, they are found by Kaya near a river and are taken to Dauper to meet Sasha's father. Dauper is known to be in between Walls Sina and Rose. How the hell did Falco and Gabi traverse ~250 kilometres within one chapter? Even if they were being held captive somewhere closer, like Stohess, the land occupied within the Walls is not exactly small.

• Dauper is known to be north of where the scouts of the 104th were kept, placing it fairly close to Wall Sina. It's also a forested area, making it easier to hide in. It's quite conceivable for someone who's undergone some endurance training to go from Wall Sina to Dauper in a single day on foot. So assuming they were indeed held in one of the districts on the outside of Wall Sina, it wouldn't have taken them all that long to get there. Probably a few days at most. There's no strict rule saying that chapters have to come in order or that a chapter takes a certain amount of time, so, if it fits into the overall timeline to make that trek in one or two days, there aren't any issues.

Removing Titans?

So, Zeke’s plan was to use Ymir’s connection to all living Eldians to forcefully sterilize them, sealing the Eldian bloodline forever and removing Titans from the face of the world. I’m curious, if Ymir’s power can so thoroughly and subtlety affect Eldian biology (Zeke’s plan implies that the Eldians would be left alive until they perish of natural circumstances), why not simply request that Ymir remove the ability for Eldians to become Titans at all? That would remove Titans from the face of the world, remove the threat of the Wall Titans stomping over the countries of the world, and the Eldians could live as regular people, without fear of turning into giant monsters.

• Even if it was possible to erase the power of the Titans from all Subjects of Ymir, it will not solve the 2000 year old racism they bear. Also, Marley covets the resources of Paradis, and if the power of the Titans was removed, then Marley will spare no effort invading the island. At least, that is what I think.
• Twisted as he was, Zeke still wanted the best for the Eldian people, and planned to have them still be able to transform into Titans to defend themselves against the world until they finally died out.
• Zeke’s goal is reflective of his own warped mindset. To him, being born is the worst that can happen to a person. He feels life is so pointless and cruel that it’s better to simply never be born. This is what he says to Levi, when he says that he saved the children of the soldiers that he killed by ensuring they won’t be born into a cruel world. He believes that he is preventing all future generations from unbearable pain. As for taking away the Power of the Titans, the ending implies that only Ymir herself can do that and even then, we see the animosity for Eldians does not go away. Plus, the only reason Marley were keeping the remaining Eldian’s alive was for military power. With that gone, they likely would just slaughter the survivors before they could die out naturally.

Seeing The Future

The Attack Titan can see past and future memories of its holders. So, Eren basically had four years and a bit more of time to know what would happen. And he did nothing to think of changing it? He can influence the past, which he has done with his father and even the previous Krueger, to ensure he gets the Attack Titan and they all strive for Eren's desire of freedom. He had knowledge of what went down, likely even seeing how bad it would be, and he chose to do nothing in hopes of getting the desired freedom in a different matter? His sole action being to ensure that Mikasa and Armin cut ties with him, to protect them, but otherwise just sat on his ass and hoped the military and Hange would think up new ways? And, when they inevitably didn't, he yelled at them? Or are we supposed to see the world of Attack on Titan to be the type where the future is 100% set in stone, so you cannot Screw Destiny?

• Eren only saw glimpses of his father's future memories of his son through a casual loop. Not his own. This makes Eren the Shingeki no Kyojin's endpoint and its paradoxical beginning. Therefore, everything is already determined but it was still the future Grisha and all their predecessors had decided on. The fact that we only ever have one path does not invalidate free will. It was only when the Attack Titan reunited with a Founder's full power (with no vow to renounce war) that Zeke and Eren closed the casual loop by taking that jaunt down memory lane. In summary, Eren was not omniscient and likely would have been sectioned by the military if he'd shared such knowledge. From the end of chapter 122 and onwards though... who knows what mental time-travel mind-screwery has been occurring behind the scenes.

Eating A Titan Shifter While Already Being One

If a pure Titan eats a Titan Shifter, they regain their human form and the powers of the Titan Shifter, their memories, and are now limited to having 13 years left to live. But what happens if a Titan Shifter eats another one? Like with Grisha eating the Founding Titan or Eren eating the War Hammer Titan? Is it just an addition of powers and memories, but no difference to lifespan? Wouldn't eating a Titan Shifter add another 13 years? Or is the Curse of Ymir based only on the 'original' moment of becoming a Shifter?

• I believe they simply steal their powers and that's that. Eren never mentioned being weaker or that he'd perish quicker as a result of eating Lady Tybur.

Memories From Titan Shifters

Eating a Titan Shifter leads one to gain their memories. Is it only that of the latest Shifter that gets transferred to the new one or that of every previous Shifter? We know that the Attack Titan can sorta access the memories of its past and future holders, so that's a case in itself. But the other Titan types — Armin getting Bertholdt's memories, Gabi getting Reiner's, if she were to become the new Armored Titan. Would they also gain the memories of the Titan Shifters before them?

• Memories are dependent on many factors, bloodlines being the biggest. If you inherit your powers from, say, your brother or cousin, chances are you'll have all his memories. But if it's a friend with whom you share essentially no blood connection, you MIGHT inherit his memories. Beyond power, it's a big reason why the Reiss family kept the Coordinate with them all those years, as it only can work if somebody of their bloodline has it.
• They inherit the memories of all previous owners. The Reiss family always inherited the ideology of the Karl Fritz, preventing them from using the Coordinate powers.

Ymir and Marley

There is one thing I don't get: why feed Ymir to Porco, when they could have simply let her join instead? Is there something they know but we don't that makes it absolutely essential for her to be eaten by another soldier rather than being recruited as a soldier herself? Especially since she is an Eldian born in Marley and thus eligible to be recruited...

• Porco is loyal to Marley and the government can trust that he has their best interests in mind. Ymir, on the other hand, is a wild card. They have no idea what her true motivations are, thus have no reason to trust that she'll remain loyal to their cause. Allowing Ymir to keep the Jaws Titan would've been a gamble that the Marleyan government wasn't willing to make, especially since they lost the Female Titan during the mission.
• There is also the fact that Ymir was already well into her "term". Better that Marley get a fresh and loyal Titan with the full Shifter lifespan rather than bank on Ymir's remaining years.

What is the Beast Titan's power?

Each of the Nine has a power that makes them unique to the other eight. Founder can control and alter the minds and bodies of most Eldians. Attack can see the memories of future wielders. Female can summon titans and, apparently, take on the attributes of the other eight by consuming parts of them. Colossus is immensely tall and can weaponize its steam output. Armored is covered in nigh-impenetrable plating. Jaws is small, agile, and has teeth that can bite through anything. Cart is quadrupedal and has more stamina than the others, able to remain transformed for months at a time. War Hammer is operated remotely and can use its hardening to manifest weapons. And Beast... looks animalistic? What's supposed to be unique about Beast compared to the others?

• The Female Titan has no outwardly unique power either, Annie claimed that she can just share qualities of the other Nine when fed their serums◊. (Just like Eren and Zeke have the hardening ability bestowed later) She is probably a connector of sorts. Able to combine the powers with greater efficiency than the others. War Hammer for crystal stasis cocoon, Armour for hardened skin, Cart for endurance, Beast for attraction scream and Jaw for unhinging her, well, jaw! The Beast is probably the primordial aspect of the Founding Titan; able to manifest different animalistic qualities: Eren's avian/saurian nictitating membrane, Porco's leonine and simian agility, Pieck's unflagging mule-like stamina and of course, Zeke's missing-link between man and orangutan. The Beast is unique in that it can be blessed with the most potent manifestation of varying and unique animal features. They just might not be suited for war as well as others. It's the luck of the draw, that or your spirit animal propensity that determines the abilities. In the few generations the Beast remained with Marley, it apparently stayed in the Hominoidea family◊.
• The Beast Titan has long arms that allow him to launch projectiles at a long distance with great power.
• While the Female Titan is said to b a Jack of All Stats, the Beast Titan's abilities were purely on what specific animal it was based on. A crocodile would be a combination of Armor and Jaw Titans while a bird could fly. On the other hand, if you got a sheep or a pig? You were just a slightly larger intelligent titan.

How was Eren able to transform after being eaten?

It is emphasized that a person missing even a fragment of a limb cannot transform into a titan, yet Eren was able to do so after being eaten despite missing an arm and a leg.

• Where was it ever stated that missing a limb prevents you from shifting? In addition to this scene, we later see Reiner turn into a titan with no issue after having his arm cut off by Mikasa when he and Bertolt revealed their identities to Eren.
  • Not being able to transform for this reason was a huge plot point when Eren and Ymir were captured by Bertolt and Reiner, so which is it?
    • Reiner and Bertoldt seemed specifically trained in durability (what with Reiner having been decapitated), so it doesn't break suspension of disbelief that badly to believe they could transform mostly intact. Eren couldn't transform missing four limbs, Reiner could missing part of an arm. It seems consistent.
    • Then let me repeat my question, how was Eren able to transform for the first time, after a titan ate him, despite having no training whatsoever and missing two limbs?
    • You missed the vital caveat in your assumption. You can't transform again if you lose enough of your body after an initial transformation. Eren had never used his powers until that day in Trost. He could have lost all his limbs and vital organs and as long as his spinal column was still intact; he'd transform into a 15m-class just fine.
• We know being too physically injured prevents one from transforming, but I think the body focusing on healing plays a part as well. Eren couldn’t transform when Reiner and Bertholdt kidnapped him not only because he lost his limbs, but because his body was busy healing those injuries and he couldn’t turn it off yet. I haven’t studied every injury a Titan shifter ever received in the series, but it’s possible losing an arm and a leg is mild enough for a Titan shifter that they can still transform if they’re not healing, even without dedicated training.

Why didn't Eren tell anyone his secret?

Why didn't Eren tell anyone that his Attack Titan granted access to future memories and that he saw himself commence the Rumbling? Eren's problem with the Survey Corps during the timeskip was that they did not find a way to solve problems with Marley and the rest of the world diplomatically and that they also didn't have any back up plans aside from Zeke's to protect the Rumbling. Eren believes that the Survey Corps, Armin and Hange in particular, have gotten too soft and that they weren't taking the existential threat they faced seriously enough. So why didn't Eren just tell any of them that he could see the future, and saw that if they didn't step up their game, THE ENTIRE WORLD would have to be destroyed just to keep the island safe? That might have made them more motivated and willing to embrace cold-hearted solutions to protect Paradis.

• Eren believes that if he tells them about his plan, even if they were willing to accept it as a possible outcome, there is no way they would go through with it. In fact, the ending chapters reveal that he did at one point inform them of his plan, and promptly erased their memories of having spoken to them. They were barely willing to kill him even as he was committing global genocide - if they had known it was all a Thanatos Gambit, they might not have had the resolve to go through with it.
• Also, if they had known about his plan in advance, he wouldn't have been able to enact it. Eren only manages to make contact with Zeke to access the Paths within an inch of dying. Even when he is ready to enact the Rumbling, the Survey Corps is hot on his heels to stop him, and might have made it in time if not for Floch. The element of surprise is a necessary part of his plan.
• Basically, to tell his friends in advance and let them remain aware of his plan, he would have been effectively surrendering the one option he felt certain would result in an opportunity for peace, without any guarantee that Hange and Armin were capable of finding or pursuing alternatives.

World rebuilding so fast?

The Rumbling wiped out 80% of humanity along with all infrastructure, animals, forests, etc along the way. How have they seemingly rebuilt in only three years? The surviving clusters of humanity should be struggling to survive for years, if not decades.

• Considering the mechanics of The Rumbling (namely the titans all seemed to be following Eren instead of rampaging freely) and the fact it was stopped before being ``complete`` by Zeke´s death, it´s not a stretch to assume there were at least some pockets of land that were unaffected, and thus can be used as rallyng points for rebuilding and resettling.
• There were panels showing that the Colossal Titans were going all over the world. Hence why Eren was still on the Marleyen continent (given Annie's and Reiner's families were present) even though he killed 80% of the world.
• The Titans start at Paradis and spread outward, destroying everything in their path as they move. It makes sense that the the lands farthest from Paradis are still mostly intact by the time the Rumbling ends because the Titans haven't reached them yet. Also, we don't know how much they've rebuilt. We see just one intact city after the timeskip, it's entirely possible, probable even, that most of the remnants are struggling to survive.

Level of Apocalypse How that The Rumbling would realistically be capable of?

Sorry if I missed something while reading through these pages, but there's just no way that a bunch of giant dudes stomping around, even ones with Super-Speed, could cause a Class 4 Apocalypse How, let alone a class 5 (all multicellular life? From a bunch of big dudes stomping around? Seriously?), Though I could definitely see it causing a class 1, maybe even a class 2 if given a very generous amount of time (more on that at the end). Even ignoring for a moment the fact that Eren really has no reason to be going after nonhuman life that wasn't simply in the way at the time, imagine if a bunch of dudes tried to fumigate a lawn crawling with zillions of ants simply by stomping around. It's a great way to crush all the anthills, sure, but the thing about tiny critters about to be stepped on by giant critters is that they can move out of the way. Or dig underground. Or fly over you (if they have wings). Or even pull a Buster Keaton and simply stand in the right spot at the right time through sheer dumb luck.

Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that an army merely "faster than a horse" could "level a continent in four days." Assuming these figures are literal instead of hyperbolic, let's do some math. A galloping horse clocks in at 54.7mph. Australia, the smallest continent, is 4,000 miles long West-to-East. 4,000/54.7=~73.12, giving us the minimum number of hours it would take these beasts to simply cross a continent. While that still holds up if they had enough members to simply march east to west in a single file formation like a drawing curtain, keep in mind that that's exactly how they were standing while in the walls, which looked to have only been one giant thick, and which could fit on the Island of Madagascar when wrapped into three circles.

Royal family's powers

Why is the royal family the only bloodline that can use the Founding Titan? Isn't it established in the story that ALL subjects of Ymir descend from her? I am aware that Ymir was not the first Eldian, but Annie discovers that the puppet government of Paradis were Eldians but not subjects of Ymir, establishing that Eldians and subjects of Ymir are not the same thing. And it makes no sense that Ymir's entire tribe would gain the ability to become Titans along with her. And it makes no sense whatsoever for the Reiss family and Zeke to be her only descendants after 2000 years. Someone who lived 2000 years ago would usually have either zero or millions of descendants living today. The author seems to be telling us that the Fritz/Reiss family are the only descendants of Ymir, while simultaneously telling us that all subjects of Ymir are descended from her.

• When Ymir died, Fritz had his daughters eat her corpse and spine so that they could inherit her power. In the Paths, we can see three branches form from the Coordinate, showing Ymir’s daughters now had Titan power as well, which would imply they did not inherit Ymir’s power by blood. Fritz then ordered his daughters to have many children and also to feed their spines to eat each other to keep inheriting Ymir’s power. So, it’s a combination of blood and spinal fluid. It’s likely there was a great deal of experimentation and variations in how the power of the Titans was passed on, e.g. one of Ymir’s daughters may not have had children and was instead eaten by another a non-royal Eldian, creating a new branch. In any case, it likely got messy over 2000 years of genealogy, creating many aberrations, which would explain the Nine Titan Powers. The Royal Family that we see, may simply be the only branch that can use the Founding Titans power, thus many them royal blood.

Ymir Fritz

• If Ymir Fritz molded all of the Titans' bodies, then who and/or what molded her Titan form?
  • She did. Time doesn't exist inside the Coordinate. She created every Titan form that has existed, does exist, or will exist.

Telling Historia

• Why does Eren share his plan with Historia? The only other person he told was Floch, who helped Eren to set things up, but why does Eren need to tell Historia? We see that it was Historia's own suggestion to get pregnant in order to delay the transfer of Zeke's power to her, to buy Eren more time. So was Eren planning to ask Historia to get pregnant himself? He needs her to get pregnant for his plan to work but the scene plays out as though it was Historia's idea to do this. What was Eren's plan otherwise?
  • He could've enacted the plan with Zeke at any time he was in Marley. Presumably, that's what he would've done if he thought they didn't have much time. Besides, the reason Historia went and got herself a baby was to give Eren a chance to find an alternative to the rumbling (the real, genocidal version.) Eren was never interested in any alternative. He probably saw this as nothing more than a nifty side-benefit.
  • There wasn't any strict need for him to tell Historia. But remember that Historia previously, when disobeying her father, told Eren that she was starting to hate humanity and didn't care if they'd all get wiped out by Titans. She'd throw humanity's chance at a future away just to save Eren back then. How prophetic her words turned out to be is almost certainly not a coincidence; it's to draw a parallel between the situation back then and when Eren decides on his plan. Not to mention, she's probably the person he trusts the most, even more than Armin and Mikasa. If he's going to tell anyone, it would almost have to include her, just because of that defining character moment they shared. Considering telling Historia did little for the plot, there would have been no reason to include it if not to draw further attention to this connection and the thematic implications. I'd even go so far as to call it Fridge Brilliance.

"The source of all organic matter"

• In the final climax of the series, "The source of all organic matter" tried to reattach itself to the Attack Titan after being severed from it. It fails to do so because of the heroes's actions and it dies when Eren is killed. Why didn't it died 2000 years ago when Ymir Fritz was killed by a spear?
  • Ymir's body was devoured by her children and Ymir keeps the power on.The creature is connected whoever has the founding titan's power. Eren isn't devoured and removed the power of titans from Eldians.

How is Historia still Queen after the Rumbling?

• I guess it's never really established how much authority she has next to the military junta, but I don't see her remaining in power whatsoever unless she publicly supported the actions of the Jägerists, which included political purges, and full-scale genocide. Option one: she actually did support these things, sided with Eren and got pregnant to help him accomplish this goal. Option two: she was actually horrified by Eren and his followers' actions, but supported them to stay in power against her own conscience (I think this is the least likely one). Option three: she didn't support them or oppose them, she simply stayed out of the conflict. Whichever one it is, I really wish she'd gotten more focus, because I honestly don't know what her motivations were.
  • My understanding of events is that Historia is officially powerless next to the military government, but has a good deal of informal influence through her popularity with the people. It was not too long ago that she became queen in spectacular fashion, and she was quite popular after that. Though I imagine her star somewhat faded as Eren became Paradis’ new idol, she probably has enough love from the common people that the Jaegerists don’t consider it worthwhile to spend the political power needed to get rid of her. We know Eren told Historia about the Rumbling and that she was horrified, but we don’t exactly know if he used the Founding Titan to erase her memories of the conversation from the future like he said he would or if she was cowed into silence in some way. My interpretation is that she opposes and has always opposed the Jaegerists and believes preserving her role as monarch after the Rumbling, where she can temper their goals and prevent them from taking total control, is more useful than going all out against them and likely losing any and all influence.