#ragako

DISCLAIMER: this theory IS NOT MINE, but written by @mostrogobbo. Translated from Italian to English with her kind permission. 

It was a torrid summer (well, late summer) when I got into Attack on Titan.

I had been in vacation with my friends and my partner, left at home, binge-watched the first anime season.

When I returned he suggested I watch it, telling me about the binge-watching he went through: HOW STRANGE! He, who can watch hardly an episode and then gets distracted because he wants to mess about with the pc or his artistic works.

So I started watching the first episode (I’ve never been a great manga/anime fan, I’ve always preferred books, tv series and films) and I must say, what got me into it immediately was the Smiling Titan.

I remember finding her extremly disturbing, much more than the Armored and Colossal titans because those two seemed to have in their eyes the vivid perseverance of human intellect.

The Smiling Titan, instead, seemed to be driven by a superior power, she aimed directly for Jaeger’s home and ate Carla after squeezing her and brutalizing her already broken body: what a gruesome scene, all before Eren and Mikasa’s eyes.

And I remember loving immensely the choice of showing us Hannes, the good-hearted  boozer who should clumsily save everybody, but found himself before an horror the Garrison, in the end, only heard of, and that only the Scouts faced.

And Hannes, confronted with the horror of this empty gaze, of this idiotic mouth eternally hungry, escapes, managing to take away just the two children, leaving Carla to her fate.

Well, I can remember with difficulty such a touching moment in enternainment and Attack on Titan gave me tons after this.

But today’s topic starts from the Smiling Titan.

Being an enthustiast of George Romero’s zombie movies, I’ve immediately thought that all the titans, except for the Colossal, Armoured and Attacking ones, were similar to huge living dead, driven by the same primordial desire: not to do bad or destroy, but an inextinguishable hunger and, likely, consumed by the pain due to the impossibility of eating.

As of today, I’m even more sure that the resemblance with zombies is rather relevant given the evidence in the manga, especially with the investigation carried on by Hanji on the captured Mindlesses and Bertholdt’s revelation about the position of shifters in the titan’s nape, with the possibility of moving their own consciousness inside the nervous system of the titan.

Let’s analyze for a moment the mindless titans we know the most, such as the Smiling Titan, which we know is the poor Dina Fritz, and many others, last but not least the ones transformed by Zeke in Ragako.

If we try to just look at the eyes of the Smiling Titan, we’ll find all the sadness of her condition.

We know from Ymir that when transformed innto a Mindless titan, people stay awake and it’s like living trapped inside a long, endless nightmare (which, in her case, lasted sixty years).

Those sad eyes of the Smiling Titan, the eyes she looked at Grisha with for the last time, were maybe from realizing and sharing with him the horror for having a child only for the vindictiveness and, just between us, I have the belief that behind Dina and Grisha’s meeting there is Kruger, who sent the last Fritz as the female with precious blood to gain a much more precious heir.

A malleable, extraordinary child.

And so Dina gets transformed and her last thought, overwhelmed by pain, is to find Grisha, she swears to him she will find him, she wil go back to him.

And may the poor Carla rest in peace, Dina did it.

Turned into a brainless monster but still alive at her core, unable to do anything but endure in the nightmare, with the only fuel of that extraordinary engine, the Mindless, was her last, visceral desire.

Going back to Grisha.

We have another example of Mindless titan driven by something different than mere hunger and it’s the Talking Titan that devours Ilse Langnar: another woman, furthermore driven by great faith and love she felt for Ymir, that when in front of a girl who could resemble her tries to fight against that hunger, against the incapability of interacting with her as she would have done as “human” and in the end loses but before doing so she is tormented, torn apart by the pain of what she will be forced to do to her.

Here too we have the same sad eyes as Dina Fritz but an insatiable mouth, fixated in a death rictus that doesn’t suit much the expression of her face.

Let’s see Eren and Ymir’s Mindless forms too, for example.

Eren is transformed by Grisha in a moment of fear and incomprehension and what comes out is a titan not only with huge jaws, but with big, scared eyes of the child-Eren we saw just the scene before.

Ymir is another case: when she got transformed on Marley’s walls, her fear changed into disillusion and her expression gets lost while she falls, her last thoughts being the joy of having an existance even for just a short time, treated like a little queen.

Her mindless titan has a blank and absent gaze, proper of a person emptied of their brain but, in this case too, her jaws tell the same story of her insatiable hunger that will lead her to eat Marcel Galliard, stealing from him the Jaw Titan.

Then there’s the case of Grisha’s followers who get transformed successively (the Beard Titan, the one who eats Eren, and the Peering Titan, the one with Kawaii eyes): their expression changes from being absent (Beard Titan) to intent and furious (Peering Titan). What did these people think when they underwent the lethal injection and were thrown off the walls? What was their last thought, their last wish, their last fear?

George Romero’s zombies are driven by the same instinct and they too, especially the “newest” dead, don’t seem to be aware of their being dead and of their desire to go back to do what they were doing before, in the exact moment of death or in life. They’re driven by something of very strong or very near, like Stephen in the film “Dawn of the Dead” who, once dead and “reawoken”, goes back to search his wife by pure instinct, surely not to eat her...but we know what would have happened if he’d found her.

And the famous “Bub”, the good zombie from “Day of the Dead” who is taught by doctor Logan and prompted to make work what is left of his brain, the part that isn’t rotten (not yet), to remember how to use a razor, to feel while listening to music, to call at the phone “Say hello to aunt Alicia, Bub!”.

Let’s see Ragako titans, transformed by Zeke.

These titans seem to have a different expression, less furious than the titans created by Marley, as if they were caught by the transformation in the middle of their normal activities.  

An example? Connie’s parents. The mother, even, can talk and tell her son “welcome home”, as if she’s not fully aware of being turned into a genetic aberration. Her titan is so deformed it’s useless, perhaps because the woman’s will has been so strong it obstructed the transformation at some point.

The father is even a “small” titan, almost human size, staid and calm-looking, the same he had in the portrait with the rest of the family.

The infamous Glottonous Titan too has big and meaningful eyes and an almost happy expression (some say it could be one of Connie’s little siblings, how sad!).

Therefore we can suppose that some part of the person stays inside the Mindless, think of Rod Reiss who, even in his monstrous form, ignores Eren and SC’s little group to go straight for the city, without hesitation.

But what is left inside them?

Officially, we don’t know.

I think it’s the spinal cord which we know is a very important engine for the creation of titans (Zeke, for example, seems to use his own, together with the infamous “screaming” to turn on the transformation and then to control them).

In particular, the spinal cord placed at level of the Mindless nape, the point that, if hit, “turns off” the titan, and the same point that in Shifters protects them, that from Berthodlt’s story we know it’s partially melted at the vertebral spine of the titan with the double nervous system. 

Let’s examinate lastly, what happens to the brain during and in the immediately next moments to the death of the body.

After the death, the brain indeed keeps working for about ten minutes.

When is the death of an organism decreed? When the heart stops beating, when respiratory and circulatory systems stop working: the body is breaking down and life ceases. 

However, we can say brain is the last organ that “surrenders” when the rest of the body has no more breath of life already.

(Stephen, Karen and Bub: even after death they could remember, love and learn but they kept being slaves to their current state of existence and for them there is only one impulse: to eat human meat.)

Indeed, in the moment before death it seems the brain receives a remarkable amount of electric impulses and nobody hasn’t managed yet to explain exactly how this happens while, at the same times, oxygen starts decreasing.

After the heart has stopped beating and the breath has ceased, the individual can remain conscious between two and twenty seconds; this is due to the fact the cerebral cortex can survive without oxygen for a while.

This part of brain is responsible of “thinking” and making decisions, besides converting in actions the data gathered by all our senses.

At this point, the brain begins to undergo its last minute of life: cerebral cells activate a chemical connection which starts leading the whole organism towards its end.

Only a pump of oxigen separates us from our last moment.

If somebody tried to make our heart restart thrugh a stimulation or CPR, the brain would still receive enough oxygen to reawaken: completely deprived of oxygen, the brain couldn’t do anything but start to surrender.

A great part of the brain is now dead but there is one last zone that doesn’t seem to be willing to surrender so easily: the centre of memory, where the most touching memories we experienced are being held.

This part of brain isn’t damaged too heavily by blood loss even after quite serious injuries: it’s the last part of the brain to die.

Before ceasing its activity, the centre of memory sends “ flashes” of memories of life as if they were really flowing before our eyes.

When doctors turn off vital support from terminal patients declared as clinically dead, the brain seems to remain active for more than ten minutes.

Checking with electroencephalogram, doctors have observed cerebral activities very different from patient to patient. This is because everyone seems to live a different experience, just like their lives had been different.

Two days after death, about one thousands genes are still working within our body.

Some of these genes are highly reactives and have a very important activitiy: how to activate the immune system and oppose stress.

Though they are in part genes whose activity has been documented only during embryonic development, is it possible that the organism tries to defend from death by beginning a “cellular inversion”?

In some cases it’s been possible to verify a growth of tumorous cells even after two days later the death of the organism: what is the chemical purpose of producing tumorous cells after that the organism has ceased to live? Another question which has received no answer yet.

It’s difficult to define the death of an organism when some of its basic functions, like cerebral ones, are still active.

Therefore my question is: could there be a possibility to make the Mindless titans turn back into “people” without necessarily get involved in the endless cycle of mindless > eats shifter > becomes shifter > eaten by mindless?

Behind the titans of Shingeki no Kyojin there is something of enormous, a monumental science which designed them just like this. But whose initial hand was it? Ymir Fritz’s? The Devil of all the Earth’s?

What is the source of the power which, like the Tree of Science of Good and of Bad, can hold all the knowledge of the creation, so much to make you omniscent like God, and could turn into a curse?