alicenutter replied to your post “The latest chapter wasn’t, like, mindblowing, but it’s certainly...”
“Ymir was capable of identifying the BT on sight, and she also had fairly clear notions of the coordinate, in that she recognized it when she saw it and appreciated its importance."
I didn't get the feeling she knew who the BT was. Just knew he was important by the look on Reiner and Bert's faces. And I always assumed that she felt the coordinate "order" when it was activated but knew nothing about it beforehand. But I could be wrong. I mean it is a bit weird that she didn't inherit ANY memories. If she knew RBA were spies, why wasn't she more on guard? I understand not saying anything about it (not really within character for her) but she was pretty laid back in her interactions with them (e.g. herring can incident) Sorry if I made a mess on the post, I have no idea how to use the comments function.
Yeah, I’m exactly in the same space as you, in that I’m unsure! Prior to the recent chapters, I had assumed that memories weren’t passed down among non-Coordinate shifters, so it didn’t even occur to me that Ymir might remember anything. I just assumed she knew things by other means, like the ones you describe. But now we are told that ALL shifters have the capability to maybe possibly get some memories (but maybe also not?? it seems random??), I’m questioning everything I thought I knew, lol.
And no worries, your comments came through perfectly fine!
Based on your gut feeling alone, do you think Eren has actually sided with Zeke? Part of me suspects Eren and Levi may have something planned. They might trust some of his information, but clearly nobody trusts Zeke's intentions.
My gut is a lying liar who lies! Like, I wouldn’t dare aim for an actual prediction or anything.
But if I were to like look in my gut of guts, and arm myself with a million disclaimers, then I guess the closest thing that I have to a headcanon is that Eren’s ultimate goal is to end this conflict in his lifetime, end it himself, without any more people having to be drawn into the cycle of titan inheritance, etc. And to that end, I do think it’s possible that Zeke came to him offering just such a solution, or what Eren saw as a solution. And Eren agreed to go along with it–to a certain extent. I don’t know if he’s fully into Zeke’s current plans, but at the very least he’s taking (or has, in the past, taken) a hitchhike with Zeke to his own goal. So like in my head there is some amount of working with Zeke involved, and some plan that lured Eren to cooperate with Zeke in the first place, but I don’t know how much Eren trusts Zeke beyond that. It could very well be that Eren is planning to turn around and stab Zeke in the back as soon as he stops being useful.
(There’s a couple of things that I find intriguing in terms of recent Eren’s actions, namely a) voluntarily staying in prison for some time, b) contradicting this apparent willingness to cooperate by refusing to answer any questions about why he went rogue. Like. If staying in prison wasn’t about explaining himself and winning the SC’s trust back–why waste that time sitting about behind bars? He and Zeke are clearly on some sort of schedule. What was Eren waiting for? Unless it literally was to let public unrest ferment in his favour, which would be some truly machiavellian plotting, and not in Eren’s usual style. It’s in Zeke’s, but… Zeke seems to be the one eager to get moving, and so this sort of slow game would be surprising on his part. I don’t know. As I said: interesting.)
Can I indulge in a conspiracy theory? They’re so fun, and such a delicious one took hold in my brain yesterday ^^
So! This is what we know of Marley’s original plans from ch86:
Like… Marley’s plan was to enter the walls covertly, without angering King Fritz into unleashing the titans the walls are made of. And yet, twenty-ish (?) years down the line, what we see is RBA literally storming the walls. That… seems to be the opposite of covert.
However! Conspiracy theory time :D Taking the fact that there’s still one Marley shifter we haven’t met + this thought of Hange’s back in the day:
I’m currently entertained by the notion that there was in fact a Marleyan shifter who entered the walls covertly, some years before RBA attacked. That shifter tried to get their hands on the coordinate… but couldn’t – possibly, because King Fritz didn’t actually have it anymore either, and the shifter had no idea who did. (Namely, the Reisses.)
So in the absence of a) the coordinate b) the threat that the Fritz King would make the wall titans walk, the Marleyan shifter spy was like, okay, let’s send in reinforcements, we need brute force, we gotta flush out this coordinate and maybe an out-and-out attack will do it.
Hence RBA attacking and not just heading directly for the King’s palace once they were inside.
(Because that’s what you’d expect, right? Here, on the page, we clearly see that the Marleyans knew the king had the coordinate. But, instead of targeting the king, RBA spend years digging around for where the coordinate might be. I mean, their goal of getting into the MP might’ve meant them wanting to get closer to the king, but in that case why the hell stage that attack in Trost? If open violence was on the cards, and they believed the king had the coordinate, surely it would’ve made more sense to attack the palace directly.)
The existence of this Marleyan spy would naturally mean that there’s another shifter traitor somewhere inside the walls that we haven’t met yet.
THAT SAID, because this is a conspiracy theory, I doubt it’s actually true. The fact that the BT didn’t know about 3DMG seems to suggest that, prior to RBA’s report, the Marleyans had no clue about technology within the walls, and you’d think a spy would’ve informed them. Plus, like, the Marleyans wanted kids for the warrior experiments, so this hypothetical spy would have to be pretty young–max in their early 30s now–and I’m not sure we have a decent spy candidate for that age bracket.
But ngl, it would be kind of cool if things squared together this way :D
So Zeke was sure interesting in ch81. The dude does more than show off abs and throw rocks at people! He has feelings and daddy issues like a real boy!
... That is to say, it was really interesting to get a glimpse of his thought process.
When he sees Erwin&co charging at him, he’s almost taken aback:
He wasn’t expecting this attack, but at the same time it appears disappointingly familiar to him. And, far from valuing the bravery of their charge or the nobility of their sacrifice, he views the whole thing as a giant mistake. In fact, his words and his attitude almost convey the impression that the SC’s chosen path is an inherently flawed one. Zeke doesn’t just think they’re all going to die--he thinks they’re all fools who’re going to die.
Spoken like a person who’s seen this play out multiple times before. As such, Zeke’s words give the impression that he’s been around for a really long time... But it’s hard to believe that he’s super old, because he doesn’t look super old. Still, there’s a weight of knowledge in his eyes at that moment which is interesting. Plus, we already know that he’d met walled humans before 3DMG was invented, and wasn’t that quite a while ago?
Like. When he entered the walls for the first time on screen, during his Mike-murdering visit, Zeke was curious about the walled humans’ technological developments and uncertain whether they understood his language. So presumably he hadn’t visited the walls for quite a long time before that. The overall impression being, guy’s very aware of the history behind the walls and King Reiss and all that, but he’s been out of the loop for some time recently. It must be only since his Utgard visit that he’s done some rapid catching up on the walled people and their advancement.
(In this he was most likely aided by Reiner and Bertholt, apparently “his warriors”. What with warriors and war chief Zeke, I guess there can be no doubt that he is in fact the head of their warrior division or whatever. Especially since he knew Annie well enough to assume she might be off practicing her kicks somewhere. And then there’s this, of course:
Presumably, RBA’s infiltration of the walls and his Utgard visit were part of the same mission. Somehow. It’s true that the Beast Titan appeared within the walls right after the Female Titan expedition, so it’s quite possible that these two events are linked. Plus, it was after they saw him in Utgard that Reiner and Bertholt said they could go home now. Still, the whole thing is really murky to me. It’s like... I can see that there are tenuous strands tying this whole thing together, but the full picture of their combined goals and motivations escapes me.)
Anyway, back to ch81!
Another interesting part about Zeke’s rant at walled humanity is that he starts off pitying or disdainful (“how sad...”) and then, the longer he thinks about the walled people’s tendency to take the same actions all over and over again, the angrier he gets.
It’s like this shit is really getting to him personally.
Zeke is really angry about... what exactly? Humanity’s continued resistance? No, that doesn’t seem to be it; he’s ranting about their mode of resisting, not about the fact that they’re putting up a fight at all. It’s the suicide charge that starts off this thought spiral. So... he’s angry that they’re knowingly going to their deaths, and that those deaths are made palatable to them by the thought that they’re dying proudly, for a higher cause? He hates the martyr-like nature of it? He’s furious that they keep doing this, that this isn’t the first time?
But, like, he can’t seriously be pissed off that Erwin’s group are risking--nay, dooming--their lives. He doesn’t care about their lives. He was just throwing rocks at them and trying to kill them. Erwin’s group would’ve died had they charged him or not. But it’s the fact that they choose to die in this manner, choose to charge at him while just about singing, “let others riiiise to take our place until the earth is freeeee!” that really gets to him.
So, like, he’s either pissed off about some events in the past rather than the current situation, or he’s outright projecting. And all of it is still more interesting in light of Zeke’s goals as stated in ch77:
This emphasis on history, history repeating itself, the First King wiping people’s minds and trapping them in some sort of a cursed cycle... I don’t know, it’s curious.
As soon as Zeke has this outburst, he blinks back to himself and realizes that he got so mad he forgot to throw rocks at his enemies and instead crushed those rocks in his fist. Because feelings. But Zeke doesn’t want to do feelings, much less those particular ones.
A wild father appears! Now, this can be read in many ways. So many ways. All of them so speculative. Maybe his father was an uptight individual and took everything in life seriously, and Zeke was like, to hell with that attitude. Or maybe his father had a lot of intense feelings about humanity, their behaviour, their future and their past--and Zeke is taken aback with himself when he echoes those sentiments, because he’d previously chosen not to engage in the same way. Maybe his father was the leader of the warriors and now Zeke’s inherited his mantle and wants to do shit differently. Or, if we want to enter wild theories land, maybe Zeke’s family has the same thing going on as the Reisses did in terms of inheriting abilities via consumption of relatives, and there’s some emotional bleedover from his father or some other ancestor at the back of his brain. Whatever! He’s such an unknown at this point, we can speculate until the cows come home. But the mention of a father is sure interesting.
Anyway, this chapter provides a few more pieces for the puzzle that is Zeke. The grand total of what we know about him at the end of all this:
he’s the apparent chief of warriors
he’s been around for a long time, in one way or another
he knew walled humans before 3DMG was invented
until recently, he’d gone quite a while without any contact with them
he has (had?) a father with strong feelings about subjects possibly including this world’s history
he doesn’t want to resemble this father
he disapproves of the First King wiping people’s memories
he also has issues with groups of people mounting suicide attacks in the name of dying a worthy death
however he seems cool with pressuring his young soldiers warriors into doing stuff for the sake of their mission
he wants to regain the coordinate
his areas of knowledge are: this world’s history (or some version of it); creating & commanding titans; baseball
Jean trying to communicate with his co-leader, to hash out what to do, and Armin is just like, nope, communication systems offline, busy thinking :D Poor Jean must’ve wondered if Armin had completely lost it. Jean has had a trying day all around.
But then Armin comes up with a plan--not exactly surprising, that--and I really wonder what this plan is. Because, like, everything Armin says about the Colossal Titan running out of steam (or, as it happens, of muscle mass) isn’t exactly news. Armin had said the exact same thing, more or less, a couple of chapters ago:
Like, Armin knew prior to now that the Colossal Titan couldn’t keep on going forever and that the way to defeat him was to exhaust him. Possibly, watching him fight now has made Armin realize how quickly the Colossal Titan is running out of power--he’s already skinnier and the battle hasn’t gone on for very long.
Either way, I gotta question exactly how Armin and Eren will be able to take care of him between the two of them. Armin’s confident assertion that they will implies a plan beyond just a vague “we’ll exhaust him somehow.” Well, and this is teeming with implications too:
Several people have already suggested that Armin wants to use himself as bait. That’s definitely an option. He seems to be planning something self-sacrificing, in any case, and I’m really curious about how exactly it’s going to play out... especially given that he’s made the strategic decision not to tell the others exactly what his plan is. They wouldn’t approve of the whole self-sacrifice thing, presumably.
Like, I loved this moment between Armin and Jean:
But I doubt Jean would’ve let Armin go with that sweet smile if he’d known Armin was planning something deliberately self-sacrificing.
(On the other hand, maybe he isn’t planning it? Maybe we’re all overthinking that one line. But it did sound ominous, for all that I’m sure Armin will survive the experience. I’m just really curious how it’s going to go.)
Apologies if everyone’s already talked about this and I’m arriving a week late with Starbucks, but this seem to clear up one thing at least? Or, like, maybe I’m reading too much into this panel, but it seems to imply that the Colossal Titan form is accepted among the shifters as the strongest one there is, which in turn sheds light on the bottles of “strongest” titan serum that have cropped up in the plot so far.
Like, as per @gnipswanderlust’s translation, the serum bottle Rod tried to give to Historia and then ended up ingesting himself said “strongest”. And, after licking up that serum, he turned into a weird-ass colossal titan... which quite a of us at the time thought was a mistake of some kind, because Rod had also said that the titan would be great for battle, which the Colossal Titan hadn’t been up to that point. But: given the label on the bottle and what Reiner says to Bertholt here, maybe Rod really did try to turn Historia into a version of the Colossal Titan. Like, on purpose. Maybe “strongest” serum just means this, “colossal” serum.
Where do you think is Ymir? - Maybe it got already asked, but after the last Chapter, where we saw Reiner & Bertl again (after a fricking year omg!) Im now concerned abt Ymir. I hear ppl mumble shes dead & I even though I dont believe that, Im really concerned abt her. What are your thoughts abt that? Where is she? Did she even go with Reiner & Bertl? What is she doing? (Im really excited abt your answer, I love how you answer your anons. *sits down on the floor with an anticipating grin*)
Aww, thank you, I’m glad you enjoy my replies! But I’m afraid this one is going to be anticlimatic, haha, given that there’s not that much to say about Ymir. The options for where she might be right now boil down to:
She went with Reiner and Bert to the warrior village, and that’s where she is right now
She changed her mind about going with them, broke away and hightailed it into the wilderness
Something came up during their travels to separate RB and Ymir, either forcibly or because one of the parties came across information that completely changed their game plan.
This is painting with very broad strokes, of course. I do think Ymir went with Reiner and Bert initially, because, last we saw them, they specifically offered her an escape route and she refused it. So the story set us up to think that she’d go. As such, options one and three seem more likely to me. Admittedly, some of it is because I do also think that, in ch70, we see RB freshly returning to the walls, as opposed to having hung out in Shiganshina all this time. So I assume that, in the intervening time, RB/Y have moved around and had adventures.
The only thing I’m sure of right now, regarding Ymir, is that she’s still alive. I hope that she’s also well, wherever she is.
Hello ! I saw something while re-reading the manga that I didn't remembered when i first read it : the first page of chapter 39 shows us a titan attacking another titan and i'm surprised I didn't see anybody talking about it. So why would he do that ? Was it because it had recently been transformed so the human inside didn't completely fused and that titan saw him as a shifter ? Or the Beast ordered him to do so, but if it's the case, why would he order that ? Do you have any speculation ?
Hi! You’re right, it is interesting. I’ve never thought on it before either, but there’s a whole couple of pages in the middle of the Castle Utgard arc devoted to one Ragako titan mauling another. This is in the context of RB/Y having just spotted the Beast Titan, the dude himself leaving by way of climbing a wall, and these Ragako titans storming Utgard Castle at night.
One more thing for the “bizarre shit Ragako titans do” column: they are nocturnal, they occasionally talk, and then there’s this titan cheerfully launching himself at another. It’s unclear to me if this page is in there to demonstrate this one outlier titan, or to show that this kind of thing happens with the Ragako bunch more generally.
The obvious temptation is, yeah, to attribute this to them being freshly titanified. If they’re still not that far removed from a human, it could be that these behaviours are holdovers from their not-so-recent human days, in one way or another. momtaku, discussing this scene in this post, suggests that the aggressor titan’s attitude wasn’t meant to be belligerent–that the titan intended to “play fight” in a creepy facsimile of a childlike manner. It’s true that, if it was straight-up aggression, it’s a strange way for a titan to express it: with the fists instead of with the teeth, so to speak. The titans’ instinct is to eat their prey–so why go for the ear-pulling first?
My current guess is that, if the peculiarities of these titans don’t have something to do with the newness of their titanhood, they’re down to the method of their turning. We don’t know how the BT managed the rapid transformation of Ragako and whether his titan creations are different from the serum-made ones. So there’s room for wondering there.
This speculation is obviously getting nowhere until we get concrete answers, haha, but it’s an interesting moment to consider, anyway.
