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.