Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from “Distances in AoT” and “How big are the districts in AoT?” Today, I’m going to show you how the maths of the Rumbling also make no sense whatsoever.
To see how the big the Rumbling would be, how much destruction it could cause and how fast, the first thin we’ll do is calculating how many titans hide in the walls and how big they are. This isn’t complicated... in theory.
THE WALL TITANS’ SIZE
Canon gives their height (60 m) and extra materials provide a nice diagram of them, so the rest of dimensions can be calculated easily by rule of 3.
So each titan is
60.0 metres tall
19.5 metres wide (at the shoulder)
10.5 metres thick (front to back)
9.0 metres foot length
First obstacle: thickness. As seen in the manga, the walls aren’t that thick. It’s true that the diagram is of Berthold’s Colossal, rather than the walls’ colossals, though, so it’s possible the Wall Titans are thinner. Or maybe they’re soft and are compressed inside the walls lol.
The other “difficulty”, as usual, is that there are a number of variables we just have to eyeball or take as face value, namely:
The actual perimeter of the walls
For simplicity’s sake I’ll use the [physically impossible but] generally accepted notion that the walls are 3 concentric, perfect circles of 250, 380 and 480 km of radius respectively.
That means the circumference of the walls is:
Wall Sina 1,572 km
Wall Rose 2,388 km
Wall Maria 3,016 km
Total circumference 6,976 km
The districts walls
To this we must add the length of the districts walls, which unlike the circumference of the wall, we don’t know and, as I’ve discussed before, the graphic evidence we have is quite poor and contradictory at best, when not simply incoherent. In our world, it would make sense if the districts were different sizes (there is a reason we always hear about the same ones, after all), but we tend to imagine them as all the same size which, if we take into account that the walls were created by ₊˚⊹ magic ₊˚⊹, isn’t without logic—In that case, Utopia residents probably enjoy larger houses at lower prices than, say, their Trost counterparts.
From the measures taken for my last essay, the curved walls of the districts that jut out from the main wall seem to be between 620 and 2,900 metres long; from all the different approximations (nine) that I was able to measure, I got an average district wall length of 1,312 metres. A bit bigger than Carcassone’s inner city. I’ll take this measure as standard size.
So 1,312 m × 12 districts = 15,744 m or 15.75 km
Putting it together
So we have a total of:
6,976 km of walls + 15.75 km of districts walls = 6,991.75 km of titans standing side by side.
I’ll round that up to 6,992 for simplicity.
6,992 km = 6,992,000 m
Each titan is 19.5 m wide
6,992,000 ÷ 19.5 = 358,564 titans.
Based on this (approximate) numbers,
There are 358,564 titans inside the walls.
A tad fewer than the “tens of millions” Willy Tybur says in Ch. 99. —This might be him [or Marley’s propaganda] blowing it up to get his way, as Eren himself speaks of “thousands” when discussing the Rumbling (sorry, lost the ch. number where he says so)
COVERAGE
Still, almost 358,600 titans are a lot of titans. How much damage can they do?
A lot, sure. Every life is precious. But in a planetary scale, the extent and seriousness of the actual destruction depend on a lot of variables, for instance:
How do they move? They advance in a tight formation, but how tight? Do they tread carefully to make sure they stomp everything evenly or do they just walk on and if they miss spots, well, good luck for those who were on that spot, I guess.
From what I can infer from the manga, the latter is true. The titans walk blindly, eyes to the front, they don’t see what they step on. We even see some tumbling and falling in some panels. They also walk close, but not grazing shoulders.
That brings up another question that doesn’t have a clear answer: what happens when they encounter an obstacle that’s too steep or tall to just step on? What if they run into, say, the 110-metres-tall White Cliffs of Dover? Do they surround it? Or do they keep bumping into them forever, like a faulty Roomba?
Fort Salta itself doesn’t look like something the advancing column could simply climb. Maybe a couple of titans could haphazardly find the road that leads to the top of the mesa, if that road was wide enough (20 m minimum) for a titan to walk on it which, by the looks of it, doesn’t seem to be the case (for reference, New York’s 5th Avenue is 16,5 m wide, not counting the sidewalks).
Either way, since we don’t ever see any titans going backwards to finish the job, there would totally be “pockets” of land left untouched by the Rumbling. (Funny that Yams didn’t think about this, seeing as his hometown itself is surrounded by mountains.)
Moreover, there is the question of how much terrain do they cover at a given time. If all 358,600 titans walked in a single row side by side, that line would extend for almost 9,000 km—But they would leave a lot of undamaged “pockets” behind, either because of the space there is between each individual foot and step, and because any fallen titan would create an even bigger space in between, or shrink the line. Imagine a bunch of gardeners each with a lawn mower advancing on a football field; there will be strips of unmowed lawn left behind in the spaces between them, unless you send in a second row of gardeners mowing those strips.
Therefore, it’s only logical, as canon shows, that the titans advance in a multiple rank (row) formation. Though “formation" might be a misnomer, as they don’t seem to be very evenly spaced, nor is it clear how many ranks there are. Here, I’ve calculated the rank length based on how many ranks there are. Please note that, for this, I’ve bumped the titan width to 25 m, as the titans walk close side by side but not so close that they touch shoulders.
Ranks Titans/rank Rank width in km
1 358,600 8,965
2 179,300 4,483
3 119,533 2,988
4 89,650 2,241
5 71,720 1,793
In the panoramic views from ch. 126 onwards, there seems to be between 3-5 ranks. However, in Odiha (ch. 132) and in the final battle, the column is much thicker. It is likely, too, from the looks of the final battle, that the ranks are higher in number close to the Founder Titan and they thin out to the sides; that would mean the damage is not even across the stampede. Whether the formation stays stable or they concentrate or spread out as they go, in any case, there would seem like the whole group never exceeds 2,900 km width. Which is still a lot, but not enough to destroy the whole continent in less than a week.
There was a meta post I came across while researching for this that proposed that the rumbling moved radially (for maximum coverage), but that doesn’t make sense (not that Eren had any sense to begin with) because the titans are solid objects, not a liquid, so if they were to spread radially, the more they advanced, the more and more space there’d be between them, reducing the destruction considerably.
What was their childhood like? Was it traumatizing? or the best childhood any could have and how does it affect them in the present? Did they have a great childhood and still become a villain? Why do they just like being mean?
Putting them in the most random scenarios, like scenarios they would never be in and see how they would react and interact with the world around them.
Ex: A 50 year old wizard working at a fast food chain would enjoy that or hate it?
random scenarios:
Someone confesses their love to your oc (will they reciprocate the persons love or laugh at the person)
They get to make 3 wishes: what would they wish for?
Your oc sees a loved one who passed away (are they angry, happy, sad?)
They get a million dollars (are they overjoyed? Or are they indifferent and don’t care at all)
They’re dropped into a zombie apocalypse. Do they die immediately or survive?
They somehow end up working at a fast food chain (what’s there attitude/ work ethic)
They're trying to escape a prison. How will they escape out?(charming the guards or jumping out a window hoping they'll survive
They’re forced to play in professional basketball match or volley match, any sport you want (would they play could and get along with their team or would be constantly be tripping over their own feet)
Those are just a few ideas but you get the idea just put them in any random scenario
Your oc watches a fight break out between people they know (verbal or physical choice is yours) what they will do?
Will they watch? Try to stop it, help the person who's in the wrong in the fight or did they start the fight?
There are a lot of possible outcomes that could happen here and it can help you figure out aspects of your character's personality maybe there really confrontational or in different to things like this
What's their daily routine? Do they wake up super early or late? Do they go out a lot or stay home all day
What's their biggest fear? Are they terrified of snakes or are they scared of being alone. Again this can be anything from something really silly to something really dumb
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i actually use these tricks when i wanna know more about my oc's so i know they work for me at least, everyones has their own way of working so don't expect immediate results / understanding
(sorry if something written weird my autocorrect is doing the complete opposite of its job and is changing things automatic even if it doesn't make sense tried to fix everything but might have missed something)
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