#I can’t see the actual text of posts they’re invisible so I’m assuming I spelled that right?

[cashewally-sarcastic]

Timbld why id my wods invigle

[broken-endings]

theresa predicts attack on titan ?/?

Okay, catching up with Shingeki no Kyojin starting with chapter 87-88

might as well make this all the way through chp 92

i apologize in advance for my SERIOUS inconsistency with capitalizing proper nouns. Everything written here is me experiencing the story in real time, stream of consciousness, stopping to write and reading some more. i hope it's at least a little coherent. there’s some good theories and conjectures in here

MANGA SPOILERS

tl;dr i have a MOTHER UPON MOTHER of theories that’s at the very end of this post that I thought of while formatting all this text.

seeing the owl's titan form, and i'm just like "it looks like eren's"

then when the man was coming out of the nape i was like "he looks like grisha"

or "he looks like EREN"

man, i don't even know how that would work but what if eren was the OWL and is older than grisha or something.

though owl guy DOES have lighter hair, but other than that i'm like "damn man"

AND LITERALLY THE NEXT PAGE THE GUY SAYS HIS NAME IS EREN WHAT IS HAPPENING

and damn man, why does old eren look so much like erwin with darker hair too? i mean i suppose everyone being eldian in the walls, they're all at least distantly related. but like what if in some weird twist of all this erwin was eren's son or something???

~~~

alright i've got some better sense of all this after the information settled and i read on

I know our eren is not "that eren" or he didn't ever start out being that owl eren he’s only both erens after he gained the coordinate

because grisha ate owl eren and eren ate grisha, he's become both of them, and the first king. Just like Armin has Bertholdt in him, eren has both of them in him. and grisha must have, out of honor and respect, and maybe a reminder of his mission, named his son after the owl.

but there's STILL something bothering me about all this. before eren ever got truly involved in this, no titan power or anything, in the first chapter he had that dream of mikasa with shorter hair

like that's still the oddball of all the details we know. how do you dream about the future?? so far everything has been about memory and the past.

and the fact that the scene where eren woke up dreaming grisha's flashback and said almost the exact same thing he said in chapter one. "this feeling i was dreaming for a very long time" and he was crying after both too.

just WHAT IS THIS ALLUDING TO??

~~~

one other possibility i wonder is. if a person inherited titan powers by eating someone has a child, can any aspect of that eaten person be inherited through blood? Like memories for example.

Because grisha's blood would've had first eren's blood, which went on to run in second eren's veins

but owl eren wouldn't have just had his own memories, he'd have had all the ones who had his power before him, and have given them all to grisha.

so maybe without eating anyone, our eren had some kind of memories from birth? IF this is true it would COMPLETELY explain his ability to kill grown men as a young child and also fool them in order to gain an upperhand. he mercilessly stabbed them to save mikasa, and encouraged her to do the same.

even if that is true then that still doesn't explain the "future" dream thing from chapter 1.

i'm writing all this before grisha has even eaten owl eren. i'm assuming nothing unexpected happens. but maybe i better continue reading.

~~~~

whomever inherits the power of the nine titans WILL DIE IN THIRTEEN YEARS (why thirteen. that’s awfully...specific. nine titans, thirteen years...idk where this is leading)

barring a miracle eren won't reach his 24th? birthday? armin will but will barely reach his 28th birthday. UGH this sucks.

and OH MY GOSH THAT’S why grisha did it when he did. eren was 10? when grisha gave him the power, wasn't he?? if we consider that it probably took a couple years between coming to paradise and the birth of his son... ...grisha was literally out of time. that's why he left to get the coordinate. he couldn't have known the marley controlled titans would attack in that time. When he left to get it he never thought he'd have to involve his son, but between the wall falling and the 13 year time limit, even though he finally got the coordinate, if he wanted to save his people, his son, he had to give eren the power.

i know i'm missing some kind of detail that makes it "have to be eren" cuz grisha wasn't royal blood, his first wife was and his son with her was. But he did know eren's disposition. His hardcore determination to see the outside world, join the scouts and kill titans. It wasn't like eren was his only option, but he was his best option with what little time he had left.

~~~~~~~

chp 89

it only just occurred to me seeing levi say it:

there are nine titans nine scouts remain from reclaiming wall maria and 2 of them are titans

maybe it's just for story symmetry and nothing else but it feels ominous just realizing that eren, armin, mikasa, levi, hanji, jean, sasha, connie, and...the one guy whose name i don't know, but almost saved erwin? though he might be a red shirt.

~~~

WHAAAAAAAAT?????

old eren instructing grisha mentions mikasa and armin whom he DOESNT KNOW who they are or whose memories they are from when grisha asks

WHAT MUST GRISHA have thought when his son befriended mikasa and armin. though grisha knew mikasa before eren did.

WHAT THE HELL DOES ALL THIS MEAN why does old eren know future things???? why has current eren seen personal future things????

my mind is so oversaturated with new information. I haven't read this many chapters in a row since I finished the anime and caught up to the current chapter which was right around eren and historia being abducted.

~~~

all this stuff and we still don't entirely know the mystery surrounding the ackerman family and how it fits in the outside world.

~~~

so eren could use the coordinate because he was touching a member of the royal family when he did whatever needed to be done to activate it: dina, his dad's first wife and the titan who ate his mom.

so then, doesn't that mean he doesn't have to eat a royal family member but merely have one by his side aka historia, like skin contact for something

i can't see historia remaining the motionless figurehead inside the walls for the rest of the story. She would want to fight and DO something. this is something she could do

~~~

they mentioned "magic" for the first time: grisha to owl!eren. which feels really out of place after 80+ chapters. which is ironic since what about normal humans growing into giant titans doesn't scream magic? i guess the word magic has connotations tightly bound to traditional fairy tales and witches and wizards and wands and spells. in other genres it's usually called something else: bending, mutation, etc.

~~~

and this thing about all the eldian people being connected by an invisible thread which is how the coordinate controls the titans. i wonder if that kind of information could lead to de-titanizing people without them having to eat anyone.

I wonder if the connections between the people, the invisible threads, could transcend time? Since they already transcend space when it comes to the coordinate.

If the connections CAN transcend time then that could mean owl eren could have experienced eren-who-wasn't-born-yet's memories because in the future their memories possess the same body in our present day eren.

bertholdt had a better handle on armin's strategy than anyone and armin was the one who would eat bertholdt. could it be he was tapping into "future" memories of being armin?

and if they can tap into "future" memories that would also imply there is fate in this world. Since before grisha knew he'd have a son, the owl had eren's memories cuz, no matter what, grisha was going to eat the owl and eren was going to eat grisha. If that was a changeable outcome then the "future memory" wouldn't be there

and if fate exists

maybe there's a prophesy associated with titans.

OH OH OH

but if fate exists then choice is meaningless. This whole time has been about making a choice because you don't know what the future holds.

i never thought that that could mean anything other than being a lesson and wise words, but there's still "future related things" we don't know about. the owl knowing mikasa and armin. eren seeing his own future, in an older mikasa.

what would it mean if isayama makes this a fate driven world? I suppose it'd enforce "there's no way of knowing which is the right or better choice"

but it'd also mean that the choice you make would have always been the only way things could turn out. but i guess that could be nice. there'd be none of this "if only you'd chosen the other thing" in all these situations and "you made the wrong choice" it'd enforce that there is no right or wrong choice, there is just the choice that happens, and it can't be changed or rewritten, like the king did with people's memories.

would it make the characters feel worse if they learn they're controlled by fate and their choices don't matter?

or even if they are controlled by fate, who knows, maybe there's an even more outer layer of this story onion and beyond eldians and marley, fate is in charge, and they have to ultimately "escape predestined fate" beyond the conflict with marley.

though if fate is escapable that'd also imply someone or something tangible is controlling everything we've seen so far. isayama wouldn't do that would he? he rendered the war against the titans moot by revealing what's outside the walls, would he render the conflict outside the walls moot by putting something greater?

it all depends on how long this manga is gonna be. cuz damn if that ended up being true it'd have to probably be 150-175 chapters long.

~~~

i doubt the fate thing but it’s cool to imagine. The thing with war and history repeating itself is a theme through the manga and “who’s the real enemy” could actually be “ourselves.” Because no matter how much you learn you’re never as free as you want to be, and you make someone an enemy cuz you need someone to fight other than yourself. And you rewrite history to control others and see things your way because history is what you write, not necessarily what happened. That’s actually pretty profound, and part of why i like this story so much

~~~

EREN HAS LONG HAIR LOOOONGGG HAIR

and they finally see the ocean that is the ONE wish i had for the trio to see the ocean but now any fuckery could happen cuz they won a battle but not the war.

a YEAR

the time skips just take me by surprise. they're all sixteen, some seventeen or almost seventeen.

WHAT HAS ZEKE been doing all this time??? REINER?? maybe Marley imprisoned them for failure?

Ymir??

~~~~

i seriously can't wait for this, but i'm assuming at some point we may see a flashback of what began the conflict between marley and the eldians

we briefly heard what i think may be the true history from the owl about how ymir got the power. i hope we get more information.

~~~

whoa whoa whoa

time is flying.

when the eldians say they've been fighting for four years

that doesn't mean another timeskip does it?? cuz reiner has FACIAL HAIR

though i think he was an older recruit maybe 16 or 17 when they graduated. (do we know his age?). then a year kind of passed between then and the retaking of wall maria. and we had a year time skip after that, so he could be 18/19 which i guess facial hair is allowed, but it makes him seem much older and i'm like "shit, is he in his twenties or something??" it can't be

~~~

is this gabi gonna be a foil for eren. a young girl on the enemy's side despite being blood related will see everyone that's her enemy be destroyed.

that's eren when this story started. cuz the titans are related to him by blood, but he didn't know that. and he wanted to see them all destroyed.

she even looks like eren, is drawn like him

IT WAS A TIME SKIP

that marley general says when they tried to take back the original titan power NINE YEARS AGO

what's been happening on paradise island the last FOUR years

or maybe i should say three years. this conflict could've started during the first year time skip we saw. but so eren and them should be 19ish, reiner would be 20/21

and annie, in that stone would she age? or would she stay the same? frozen in time. but her times almost up just like reiner's right?

~~~~~~~~~

and while EDITING and formatting in the text box cuz copy and paste didn’t work.

I THOUGHT OF A BRILLIANT UPON BRILLIANT THEORY THAT BRINGS EVERYTHING TOGETHER

So we know everyone is “descended from Ymir who got the power of the titans. She split her power into nine parts. blahblahblah”

Something that was once whole was split into pieces from one being. everyone is connected via “invisible thread” and the original titan power controls all the titans because THEY WERE ALL MEANT TO BE WHOLE. They are literally mere pieces of something larger.

They are shards of something that was once a whole being, and are trying to return to that. If one of the titans were to consume the other 8 powers, then they’d be closer to whole again

mindless titans are like echoes of the original because they’re made from fluids of a true titan’s body. So they eat people because they’re trying to become whole again, an instinctual nature to eat someone who’s a real titan so they can be part of that whole again that is titan ymir.

to return to being whole, the theoretical titan who gains all the titans’ abilities would also need to consume all the mindless titans because they literally possess part of that whole, running through their bodies, the fluid that was taken. I don’t think that WILL happen. But many parts of this puzzle WANT that to happen. I think that’s possibly the only reason mindless titans eat people. to become whole again.

but all this begs the question

the walls are FULL of colossal titans. are they mindless titans too? how are they so big? and if they’re NOT mindless titans then WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?? there’s only nine titan powers, one being colossal. STILL LOTS OF IMPORTANT INFORMATION MISSING

~~~

i caught up on attack on titan and my head hurts. should try not to miss six chapters in a row. it’s a fuck ton