Creating a General Timeline for the Demon Realm
Hey everyone. Remember me? I once made up an entire system for translating glyph combos just to have a way to create a glyph combo for whatever spell I wanted to use. I also overanalyzed the calendar system of the Boiling Isles and the floor plan of the Noceda household. If you remember those, good to see you again! Enjoy the incoming text wall.
Tl;dr, This time I return to this place to dump yet another product of my overanalysis: putting together a general timeline for the demon realm, from the time of Titan civilization, to the creation of the Isles, to the present.
With 'general' timeline here I'm talking about the big picture, and less about smaller events and details (though there will be plenty of those to come). Think more 'Big History' and less 'Conventional History.' As a heads-up, there will be quite some headcanons involved in the construction of the timeline, simply because so much is either a gap or not fully established, though I believe every headcanon presented in the sections below is at least canon-supported/hinted at.
The general structure of this little essay will consist of a brief discussion on an important general element of the timeline, followed by a description of the headcanons involved, and arguing for why they're at least probable in canon. Lastly, everything gets wrapped up in a nice big bullet point list listing my version of the full general timeline of the Demon Realm. Not sure I'll get to use it in any of my own future stuff right now, but it's good to have it all in one place at least. But that all aside, hope you enjoy the semi-structured ramble!
The Undetermined Pacing of Time
When it comes to the timeline, the most important reference point, in my opinion (besides the present day) is the confrontation between the Collector and King's dad/The (Last) Titan/Papa Titan/etc., ending in King's dad dragging his spirit and the Collector into the In-Between, trapping them there, and his body falling into the ocean, creating the Boiling Isles. I'll call this event the Fall.
Now, as the heading of this section has cryptically hinted at, an important topic that should be mentioned before diving into the real meat of things is the span of time that passes between the Fall and the present day, because it's not clear at all.
The lowest limit we have for certain is about four centuries, as that is the time of the Deadwardian era, when Luz physically traveled there. Obviously this is an extreme low-ball estimate, but it should be established (and as a note, while the Deadwardian era takes place in the 1600s Earth time, the Edwardian era of which it is a spoof is the early 20th century. Some BI weirdness going on there, I'm sure).
Expanding on that, we can take into account that 'Every myth you humans have is caused by a little of our world leaking into yours,' meaning we can safely say the Isles and its demon inhabitants have been around for at least as long as human myths have been, so on the scale of thousands of years (at least four-thousand).
Side-note, if we actually want to take 'Oh, yeah. We banished [giraffes]. Bunch of freaks,' seriously and making it adhere to Earth history, then that banishment would've happened about a million years ago, which was when modern giraffes popped up. For various reasons, mainly the idea of witches somehow being around and organized enough that even a million years later they still have a civilization and the information on the giraffes' banishment (though there'll be a big section talking about when witches came around further down), I won't consider this for the rest of the analysis. As an alternate explanation, the giraffes were only banished a couple thousand years ago, and witches (or more creepily, the giraffes) changed fossil records after the banishment to fool humans into thinking they're a natural part of Earth history.
For a better indication of the scale of time we're talking about between the creation of the Isles and the present day, there is the Hecktaceous period, dinosaur demons and all, where the decay of the Titan was much more active (though it still looks to be in an advanced decay state with most of its flesh gone) which is a spoof on the Cretaceous period, which spanned 143 to 66 million years ago. Though, as the Deadwardian-Edwardian stuff showed, being a spoof doesn't automatically mean equivalence in the timeline.
In truth, it's impossible to know if the Demon Realm is mimicking real life here or if the Hecktaceous is only a few thousand years before the Deadwardian era. Similarly, while I could cite that, since all demons arose from the Titan's decaying flesh, and these proto-demons would have to evolve into the variety of demons we see in the present day, it'd take millions of years for evolution to do the job, we also have to take magic into account, which might've just massively accelerated the entire process.
In general, it's honestly impossible to determine whether the span of time between the Fall and the present is only a couple millennia or millions of years at least. The only thing I can really give further comment on is that I personally believe the much longer time span works better generally since it mimics Earth's natural timeline (though parts of what I'll discuss later has made me biased to this).
As one final disclaimer, the upcoming topics are all headcanons or known theories, and while I'll argue for their canonicity, or at least show how they can be hinted at by canon, they're not guaranteed fact, and people are free to choose to believe whatever they like. But with all those asides aside, let's get into it. It'll be quite the spread of disparate topics, but I hope to string it all together in one logical chain, for ease of reading.
How the Archivists Wiped Out the Titans
I think the biggest question when it comes to the Titan-Archivist conflict that led up to the Fall (or war, depending on how it happened) is how exactly the Archivists won. After all, we've only ever gotten an indication that there were four of them (plus the Collector as non-combatant), and the amount of mountain-sized titans was definitely a lot more than that. This, coupled with the fact Titan magic beats Archivist magic without fail, meaning their best hopes would be to deal deadly, physical wounds through indirect magic, shows it'd be almost impossible for the outclassed and outnumbered Archivists to achieve what they did through normal combat.
Sure, they could've used trickery and subterfuge to kill all the babies and yet to be fully grown members, or had a third party do it (though I'll get back to the topic of the Trappers later), but no subterfuge or trickery or third parties would've let them beat all the fully grown titans to the point only King's dad was left, and anyone who's not an Archivist or a Titan wouldn't even stand a chance. Some fics have tackled this as titans being able to shift down in size massively, reverting upon death, and others have used titans using avatars that can be killed outside their body (both possibly inspired by King's dad and how he changed from fluffy dad to skeleton form in the In-Between), but we can't be sure those were things Titans could do in the mortal realm (might just be an In-Between quirk and King's dad being an all-powerful ghost), and I'd rather have something that feels established and very much possible and supported in the show's canon.
So how else could they have done it?
Giant death ray from the sun.
…or something like it anyway.
Now why am I jumping straight to Death Stars instead of, I dunno, raining down meteors (or the other two methods mentioned earlier)? Well, one of the only spells/powers of Archivist origin that we know of in canon is the Draining Spell (besides general telekinesis and the Collector's puppeting spell or the scroll transformation spell, but they seem to be the same type of 'archiving' spell). And it's pretty obvious that Belos wasn't using that for its intended purpose. After all, aren't you supposed to use all the energy after you siphoned it into the nearest star?
So having an inverse of the Draining Spell, one that unleashes all stored energy within a star as a beam of planetary surface destruction (or a similar attack), with all elder titans congregated in one spot (ready to fight), seems the most practical (and maybe Belos really was intending to use all that energy to wipe out the entire planet, since a big flaw of the plan we saw in canon was that only the witches of the Isles would've been affected, rather than the entire realm. Definitely a good reason to get the hell back to the Human Realm in time). As an aside, it's my (unsupported) headcanon that the Archivists can use stars as batteries or an energy network, possibly to boost/fuel their magic.
To go a bit further with the main point, where would such a spell/attack have impacted the planet then if it was actually used? The Titan Graveyard on 'the other side of the world,' of course! We know the Isles is the only Titan skeleton on the planet that's still fully intact, while the rest are in pieces. Well, if all mountain-sized titans were hit dead-on by a death ray (or something like it) then either their bodies and skeletons would've evaporated completely, or they would've been blown to bits, their parts blasted across the planet, leaving a large graveyard around the epicenter.
The only titan who could've survived this event intact, becoming the last one left, would've been King's dad, whose final resting place just so happens to be on the other side of the world of 'the other side of the world,' shielded by the entire planet.
As an added thing, such an event would also neatly take care of any loose ends. After all, if you, as a nearly all-powerful space god just discovered a planet that gave rise to a race that could end you, then you should make sure that planet can never give rise to something like it again, right? Burn all existing vegetation and land life, boil the oceans to destroy all marine life, the works. And like the Collector's bedtime story said, 'but should they meddle in our affairs, we'll clean the planet and scorch the air.'
Literally scorched earth policy, which they've apparently employed enough in the past to warrant a piece in Archivist lore. Speaking of which…
Pre-Fall Demon Realm was Earth-like
Bit of an out-of-nowhere claim to make, right? Well, if the Demon Realm planet had all its plant life wiped out and its oceans turned boiling, then it could've looked like anything pre-Fall.
From what we've seen in the present day, the natural (non-Titan) landmasses are barren, reddish rock, no nature around, and the nature we do see on Titan corpses is red.
Except the nature on King's island is green. And isn't it interesting that the one place we know for sure was built before the Fall, and was made to be protected against any and all Archivist interference, is the only place on the planet that has green, Earth-like vegetation?
It's essentially a small piece of preserved land (artificially-made with construction-like magic, based on its strange shape) from pre-Fall times, from an era where Titans evolved into existence from existing life and dominated the planet (kinda like dinosaurs did on Earth, except with human-like intelligence and magic). This, combined with the assumption that the oceans were made of magicless, regular water, means the planet was definitely a parallel to Earth (if you want to go extra shocking, maybe even an alternate history Earth where Titans evolved from prehistoric canines five million years ago?)
But since we're talking about King's Island…
King's Island was a Hatchery
I think this is a pretty popular theory that doesn't need much explanation. But essentially, the theory states that King's Island wasn't just the place where his egg was hidden, but that it was a hiding place for all the titans' eggs, no doubt created in secret when the adult titans realized their young were disappearing.
Furthermore, whether King's dad was the one who constructed the island or not, why would such a place need hundreds or thousands of stone golems for just one egg? And more importantly, in Echoes of the Past, when flying up the central tower we see a bunch of platforms leading into alcoves off the central hole. On first sight these seem on the small side, maybe the alcoves are decorative and the platforms are just handholds for the golems. Except in other shots these platforms and alcoves are shown to be way bigger. Big enough that each alcove is its own room that can fit a human. Big enough for one egg per room?
Of course, if that is the case, and King's egg was placed all the way at the top, directly under the sigil hiding the place from the Archivists, and locked behind a door only a titan could open, then it's very obvious King got to experience some early nepotism, and his dad was the architect and builder.
That does mean that the sad truth is: an entire generation of titans were saved from the Archivists, only waiting to hatch (for possibly millions of years without an adult to help incubate them naturally. I doubt any natural species would ever have hatching times on the order of millennia or longer), and all of them did, even though none of them survived after hatching for long enough to be around when King finally hatched, leaving only him.
Witches Evolved from Humans
A brief aside, though this will loop back to the Hatchery point, another well-known theory is that witches are humans that got stranded on the Isles through a natural portal and evolved to use magic through a bile sac after constant exposure to Demon Realm food and usage of the glyphs, gaining demonic traits over time from breeding with sapient demons (also giving rise to magic-wielding biped demons in the same way).
While this is not supported whatsoever, it's my personal headcanon that the first modern humans that came to the Isles were from the last ice age, about ten- to forty-thousand years ago, and emerged from Eclipse Lake on the Knee.
Truth be told, out of all the unconfirmed fan theories out there, this is the one I firmly believe is one hundred percent intended as canon, as it so strongly pairs up with what we know of the earliest witches from Eda, and how the show keeps separating witches from demons, with only demons confirmed to have come directly from the Titan, even though many demons are equally sapient and capable of using magic as witches.
But this is where that mention of Titan Trappers and 'a third party' and the very first discussion on the span of the timeline all come back into play. Because if I one hundred percent believe this theory is canon, to the point I won't budge one bit on it, while also preferring the idea of the Titan-Archivist conflict taking place millions of years in the past, when the genus homo didn't even exist yet on Earth, then that would mean…
Titan Trappers didn't Exist pre-Fall
From the moment I started writing this post I had an idea this was no doubt the point that would be the most contested. After all, don't we have murals in the Hatchery that depict Titan Trappers fighting titans (albeit suspiciously biased towards the Trappers while demonizing the Titans) and more on Titan Trapper island, and in the Archive House that the Collector creates in season 3 we have a replica of that first mural as a tapestry, plus another tapestry of an Archivist donning a Titan skull à lá Trapper, with a Trapper in the background? And didn't the Collector mention the Trappers directly '-even when those Trapper guys starting acting weird!'
To the second-to-last point, all those tapestries were created by the Collector in the present day, so not exactly relics from the past and with a not-too-reliable person as their source. As for the murals, from both islands…well, their legitimacy is extremely questionable, based on how one set got there, but that's for two subsections further down. But either way, both sets of murals were created by Titan Trappers at some point after the Fall, a group currently led by Bill. They can easily exaggerate for propaganda's sake. All in all, not many reliable or trustworthy sources available to back up the Trappers being involved in the main conflict.
Whether witches are truly evolved humans or just happen to be the Demon Realm equivalent of them, no evolutionary relation whatsoever, we know for a fact that witches only learned how to do magic after the Fall. After all, Eda said that early witches (the ones who did magic 'some other way' i.e. without the bile sac i.e. glyphs) went to the Knee to connect with nature (again, to have the glyphs revealed to them), and it's only after they discover and use the glyphs that they evolve the bile sacs, doing away with and forgetting the glyphs. So if these proto-witches truly were around pre-Fall, and just happened to coexist with titans, then they'd be completely magicless. Sure, humans have taken down big, dangerous prey in groups, but I don't think it's possible magicless witches could take down human-sized or larger young titans who wield magic and have equal intelligence to them, especially not on the scale where they're all eradicated by the time the Archivists take out the elder titans, and they don't stand a chance against the full-grown titans.
And if the Trappers did exist and had done their job by the time the Archivists finished things up (nevermind how they survived the scorching of the entire planet, since why would the Archivists care about some magicless creatures after their use is up?) then Bill, who has encountered a live Titan (one he wrongfully claimed to have been the very last) would be insanely old, way beyond anything I could believe was reasonable.
For the point that maybe the Trappers used to be demons back then instead of witches, demons arose from The Titan, obviously after the Fall, and the murals depict witch/human-like bodies under the disguises. That, and the Trappers today are curiously all witches, with not a demon in sight.
So if Titan Trappers, and witches in general, didn't exist during the Titan-Archivist conflict, let alone involved in things, then why would the Trappers be a thing post-Fall? And what would their purpose be?
The Titan Trappers' True Purpose
Let's bring back the earlier point that King's Island was a hatchery that hid the eggs of the entire Titan race, meaning all the eggs that used to be there hatched and left the island at some point in the past. Either the incubation without a parent around takes millions of years, and all the hidden eggs began hatching over the course of the last few thousands of years before canon, or it's completely variable (like magically set in a sort of stagger) and over the course of millions of years, eggs slowly hatched. Either way, that would be a significant problem to the Archivists, especially if they realized they couldn't find any eggs.
After all, now, to prevent the Titan race from resurging, they'd have to play a cosmic game of whack-a-mole with the hatching eggs over the course of millions of years (or starting millions of years in the future in the first scenario).
And what do you do with a difficult problem that forces you to keep staying near some useless planet when you have a cosmic job to do? Delegate.
In this case, by the time witches evolved into existence, they would be the perfect ones for the job. And since one of their annoying imprisoned little sibling's communication mirrors was found by one such group of witches, why not pretend to be them after they made contact, tell them a twisted history that painted the titans as the bad guys that turned the planet into the hellscape it was now, trick them into worshipping their little sibling as the one who got rid of the problem as some grand Huntsman, and then tell them they had to hunt down and kill all remaining titans as they popped up to free them from the last Titan's prison, twisting whatever the Collector had said about how a titan could free them?
Of course, the Collector, even if they barely made any contact with the Trapper tribe, would eventually notice that something was up when they started worshipping them and aiming to kill new titans when that wasn't what they wanted to have happen ('even when those Trapper guys started acting weird'), but maybe there's a reason the disk was split in half eventually, and not as an accident.
In truth, if you ignore my insistence on the timeline being millions of years in length and witches being evolved humans, then both paradigms are equally likely. The one I described above, with a separation of several million years, and the more accepted one where everything only happened a few thousand years ago and the Trappers were involved in the actual Titan-Archivist conflict.
But going with the former of the two scenarios, the Trappers would continue to do the Archivists' dirty work for many generations, even taking out some hatched titans that managed to live long enough to grow beyond the size of whales, like the skeleton the Trappers have on display in their HQ, before eventually finishing the job, since King's the only titan around by the time he hatches.
The Hatchery was Found pre-Canon
By the time 'Edge of the World' aired, in retrospect, the murals present on King's island, while a great red herring at the time, paint a depressing picture. After all, they could only be painted by Trappers. No titan or titan-related person would create what is literally Trapper propaganda. In fact, if any titans were still hatching and saw the murals, they'd think they were a Trapper, and would eventually come seek them out, only to be immediately killed (just like what almost happened with King in canon). Since there was no litany of young titan corpses or shattered eggs awaiting the crew in canon, either the malfunctioning guardians somehow cleaned up, or all the eggs there had already hatched and departed from the island long before the Trappers found the place, to be hunted and killed by Trapper ancestors (maybe the only reason they could even find the place when they did was because the presence of the eggs was powering the protections, and with only King's egg left they were too weakened).
Of course, if Trappers were on the island, to the point they were painting their own murals in the central chamber, then something would've had to happen to prevent them from discovering King's chamber and to make them abandon the place, wrongfully concluding all titans had been accounted for and hunted into extinction. There's one easy way for that to have happened, one that neatly takes care of another Titan-related thing coming from the Trappers and probably caused the rubble at the entrance.
At Least One Titan Was Alive pre-Canon
Remember Bill saying he encountered a live titan in his youth? One that was definitely not King at the time? Even if we entertain the idea that the Titan-Archivist conflict was only a few thousand years ago, and Bill is somehow immortal/extremely old and was around back then, then 'the last Titan, the one that got away/disappeared' couldn't have been King's dad, who was the last to fall during the conflict, and Bill wouldn't still be searching for his last titan when he's already well aware of the last titan's fate of becoming the Boiling Isles, and thus definitely did not 'disappear.' (This is also another reason why I believe there were more eggs hidden along with King's that hatched and were hunted down prior to canon. How else could Bill have encountered a living titan long before King had even hatched but after the Isles were created?)
So if he's just an old dude with a regular lifespan of around a century at most, then the titan he encountered in his youth would've been the one that hatched second-to-last, the one before King. And if the Trappers found the Hatchery after every other titan had hatched and been hunted down, then an encounter with this second-to-last titan, one that ended terribly for the Trappers (with the titan escaping and Bill's eardrums shattered) would've been enough to make the Trappers abandon the Hatchery (under the false assumption that all eggs had hatched, given that all but King's hidden egg were gone).
Am I saying this titan could feasibly still be alive during the present day? I am. And this entire scenario of Trappers finding the Hatchery is something I explored in this one-shot I wrote a while back (while the linked chapter below is part of a multi-chapter fanfic which is part of a series, the chapter functions as a stand-alone, minus two or three sentences near the very start that you can ignore).
https://archiveofourown.org/works/50837365/chapters/130773595
Of course, it's also likely that someone hunted down this other titan without the Trappers knowing (like the Huntsman Archivist), leaving only King as the last of his race by the time he hatches. We in fact know an Archivist did visit the planet relatively recently, since the Owl Beast was 'archived' by one, long after the Titan Graveyard was created, and things adrift in the ocean can travel thousands of kilometers in months, so the scroll would probably reach the Boiling Isles a few years to a decade or two later, comfortably in time for Lilith to buy it off the night market, leaving enough time for all of it to have taken place within Bill's lifetime.
So with all those things laid out, here's my (canon-supported) headcanon flavored general timeline of the Demon Realm (with additional, completely unsupported headcanons interspersed in italics inside brackets).
Millions of years ago: on an Earth-like prehistoric Demon Realm, canine-like creatures evolve into the Titan race (probably by evolving the ability to stockpile raw magic in their blood and wield it)
With the advantage of magic, Titans quickly grow intelligent and become the dominant species on the planet (since titans eventually grow to become mountain-sized, or at least too big to interact with babies and young titans, the younglings would be mostly disconnected from their elders)
The Archivists find the planet and discover the Titans and the threat their magic poses. They send in the Collector to lower their guard, with the elder titans eventually inviting him to play with titans 'his own size'
The Archivists use the Collector as their unwitting Trojan Horse, donning disguises like skulls and methodically getting rid of all the communities of young titans the Collector visits, until none are left
The elder titans eventually catch on to what is going on, though far too late, and task one of their own (King's dad) to secretly build a hatchery to hide all their eggs in.
(Once the Hatchery is completed, the elder titans decide to bait out their enemy, tasking King's dad with keeping an eye on it and congregating on the exact opposite side of the world)
The Archivists appear, but rather than engage in combat, they annihilate the entire congregation with one massive spell in an ambush (possibly powered by them kidnapping and branding some of the young titans in the past and using the Draining Spell to drain them to death for their energy). The epicenter of the attack becomes the Titan Graveyard, with bits of detonated titans getting blasted across the planet, all the while the attack burns all life on land and permanently boils the oceans, killing everything else
King's dad, now the only survivor after having been shielded by the planet, is approached by a wandering Collector, who no doubt says something unintentionally sinister like 'hey, do you know where all the baby titans are? I wanna keep playing with 'em,' realizes they must be the enemy and are way too close to the hidden hatchery, and attacks them
He roars one last goodbye to his son and forcefully ejects his own soul into the In-Between, dragging the Collector with him and trapping them, before his now soulless body falls into the ocean just a few (Titan's) steps away from the hatchery, becoming the Boiling Isles
With their job done, the Archivists realize they can't find any of the eggs, but eventually leave, deciding no life could ever form again on the barren planet
(Eventually, King's dad realizes the Collector wasn't the culprit, and creates and sends the communication disks into the Demon Realm to atone, where only a future Titan from the Hatchery could decide to release the Collector from the In-Between)
Over millions of years, however, the parasites and other animals that lived inside the Titan's body (like whatever Hooty is) survived and continued to evolve, the ones adaptable enough to survive the new outside world becoming the first proto-demons. (HC: The basilisks are the most preserved descendants of these proto-demons. After all, complete shapeshifting ability would be the most adaptable in that world and an easy explanation for rapid diversification of demon races, and raw magic would be the most abundant source of energy on a freshly decaying Titan corpse. That, and the general shape of basilisks makes them look like corpse maggots from afar, which seems very fitting for early-Isles)
(Around the time of the Hecktaceous period, most proto-demons had lost their shapeshifting ability in favor of adapting to more niche environments, with only minor shifting abilities like the Stonesleeper's ability to morph to stone remaining)
Tens of thousands of years ago: Stone age humans are transported to the Boiling Isles through natural portals and discover the Titan's glyphs, giving them the edge to survive. They eventually mingle with sapient demons to create bipeds, and evolve bile sacs, phasing out the glyphs and forgetting about them, becoming witches
At some point, witches or demons discover the main communication disk from the show and seal it away in a temple in the Titan's head (either for worship or because they decided the Collector was too dangerous. The legends Philip heard must've started from somewhere)
A tribe of witches discovers a second communication disk and make contact with the Collector. At some point, one of the Archivists checks up on the planet and sees several growing titans wandering the oceans (they'd eventually leave the Hatchery, especially if only one hatches every century or more). They decide to tackle the problem of the missing eggs and their annoying trapped little sibling in one go, and pretend to communicate through the disk as 'the Grand Huntsman,' instructing the tribe to trap and kill all titans that pop up, to 'free' them from their prison. The Trappers do exactly this over the millennia, until only two titan eggs remain unhatched
Four hundred years ago: The story of Caleb and Philip Wittebane occurs. Luz travels to the Deadwardian era
A century ago: The Titan Trappers, including a young Bill, discover the Hatchery, painting their murals within to revel in their victory when they realize there are no eggs left. An incident occurs that forces them to abandon the place (possibly with the second-to-last hatched titan Bill talked about being involved), with Bill's titan fleeing. Though they believe all other titans have been successfully hunted
A short time later the Huntsman returns, deciding to take care of this last titan on their own in secret to avoid their annoying sibling from actually being freed by the Trappers if they ever catch it. While they're at it, they also hunt down some unique Titan-born creatures, like an Owl Demon, though they end up losing the demon-turned-scroll, which drifts along the ocean current for years before washing ashore on the Isles, where Lilith eventually uses it to curse Eda decades later
Eight–nine years ago: King is the last egg to hatch in the Hatchery, eventually being picked up by Eda on the run
Present day: The Collector is released from their prison by King and King's dad finally passes on after helping Luz defeat Belos. Glyphs no longer work
Wew that's a lot of stuff. I know this turned out to be part-overanalysis, part-headcanon time, but I hope you at least enjoyed the general timeline of events I laid out above, and that it may give anyone a clear picture or framework they can use in their own stories and world building, or at least as a valid alternative scenario to whatever timeline you believe in. But let me know what you think, or in what ways your interpretation differs from mine. With that said, I'm heading out. I actually have an Owl House fic to write again (nowhere near as big as my last one, thankfully, but definitely fun).
