Idk if anyone has more information on this, but I’m trying to figure out the threshold of pain needed to transform in the Attack on Titan world. Here is what I know:
- the threshold has a lower cap of >0. All titans need to cause themselves pain in some way in order to transform. Annie cuts her finger, Armin bites his cheek/tongue, Eren gnaws on his hand like an animal and later uses a knife. Cutting the palm of the hand seems most common. Is blood necessary though?
- When Eren is still learning control, he accidentally transforms when he picks up a spoon and his hand twinges. I don’t know if he was still bleeding beneath the injury, though.
- There is an upper threshold on the pain, though. If a Titan Shifter is too injured, they are unable to transform until they heal. You see this with the way Reiner and Bertholt subdued Ymir and Eren in season 2, by cutting off their limbs.
- BUT! It isn’t as simple as “little cuts are fine, limbs chopped off is not.” The first time Eren transforms, he does so in a Titan’s stomach with his arm being bit off. If it was the loss of a limb that denied transformation and instead kickstarted healing, Eren wouldn’t have transformed then. Relatedly, in S4, Eren takes out his eye and cuts off his leg to go undercover in Marley, and has no issue transforming when talking to Reiner. So we can surmise that the line is above that, but below getting hands cut off???
If anyone has any information from the creator or the manga that maybe goes into more detail, I’m curious on how exactly titan shifters shift and the pain scale involved.
