#plotworthy speculation

“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.

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. 

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.

... That is to say, it was really interesting to get a glimpse of his thought process.

I mean, this interlude was amusing:

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.

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. 

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. 

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.