#listen i haven't had such a high off dgray man in years this is incredible

[lpwrites]

the pillar and the new world

OR

d.gray-man is my forever girl and i love a good theory post

BEFORE ANYTHING THOUGH, PLEASE BE ADVISED THIS IS A SPOILER UP TO THE MOST RECENT D.GRAY-MAN CHAPTER 235

@dw-writes and i finally caught up to dgm yesterday and spent three hours riffing on theories, and it was an experience. while the other theories were great and we’ll probably be posting them later, i wanted to focus on the one concrete one that settled in my head.

We’ve known D.Gray-Man has had a lot of anachronistic dissonance in the series -- you’ve got your turn of the 19th century victorian setting with robots,advanced science, modern-looking clothes, and so on. It happens in anime and manga sometimes, it’s nothing that can’t be brushed aside as artistic license

BUT we’ve known hoshino doesn’t do things without purpose, and with this newest chapter I think we’ve seen why.

Beginning in 234 and continuing in 235 we see Cross Marian and Road have a conversation about “The Pillar” -- the large cross shaped thing we’ve seen in Road’s flashback that, according to canon, brought about the end of the world. 

The Pillar stands above a metropolitan city -- we can see skyscrapers and tall buildings, much like we’ve seen in Allen’s memories when Nea begins to awaken. (Most notably in the Phantom Thief G arc, when Allen stabs himself, we see him surrounded by buildings and street signs and debris.)

Cross tells Road those are the memories of the Noah, not hers as someone born in “this world” (vague quotations bc i need to go back and look at the chapter again), which solidifies the theory in my head.

D.Gray-man takes place on “our” earth, in a chronological “future”.

In this age (21st century), the Pillar appeared and destroyed everything, leaving behind debris. The only people that may have survived were the original Noah, who, in biblical fashion, had to repopulate the earth. Though they remember the world as it was Before The Pillar, they don’t have enough supplies/resources/ability to bring back the world to the way it was Before. 

As we know, every person has a Noah gene, but not every person has it activated, which means that in any generation, as population increased, the number of Noah stayed the same (13), so as people grew and society marched on from Zero, less and less people were aware of the Noah Memory of the Before.

The Noah Memory didn’t become lost, necessarily, but 13 people can’t do much as populations boom and grow and expand. So in theory, life continued After the Pillar, in a cyclical nature where things repeat themselves, with slight tweaks. That’s how we get things like modern technology mixed with magic -- they come from scraps recovered from Before The Pillar. Never enough to reconstruct, surely, but it’s helped life progress for those who Know, the secret history most of humanity is unaware of. 

Assuming time began Again After The Pillar, and the Noah memories are the only thing that remember a time Before, it makes sense to have the need to destroy the world.

After Millenia struggling along, remember the way things were while trying to make do with scraps? Of course they’d want to go back to that, no matter the cost.