The Titans are at the heart of Attack on Titan and the ambitious narrative it has woven together over the past decade, but do we know from where these gargantuan creatures of immense power originated?
In those early days, the Titans were an existential threat to humanity and their lives inside the three walls. The government told people that the circular barriers were originally erected as a measure against these man-eating monsters, but thanks to the efforts of the Scout Regiment, spearheaded by the visionary Erwin Smith and his elite, the world uncovered the truth that the king’s inner ring had been trying so hard to bury.
The human civilization living inside the three walls are refugees from a war on the mainland, and the place where they created this safe haven is actually an island. These people, known to the rest of the world as Eldians, had the innate ability to inherit the power of the Titans, and after a war with a powerful nation known as Marley, the last king of the Eldians decided to break the cycle of violence and retreat to the island of Paradis.
Marleyans kept the remaining Eldians inside concentration centers, and they punished the insubordinate ones by turning them into mindless Titans and letting them loose inside the island. But the question remains: Do we know where the Titans originally came from?
What is the origin of Titans in Attack on Titan?
The final season of Attack on Titan explains the origins of Titans by depicting the story of Ymir, a girl who accidentally comes across an anomaly known as “the source of all living matter.” While it’s unclear whether this transparent centipede was indeed the origin of life on Earth, we do know that it can change organic matter and bestow it with great powers.
Ymir inherited the power of the Titans after coming into contact with the being, and she passed it on to her children when she died. The Power of the Titans gave the Eldian Empire an edge over their enemies, a power they used to subjugate the rest of the world for many hundreds of years.
In the time of King Fritz, and at the height of the Titan wars, the monarch decided to vie for peace and take the rest of his people to a place where they’d no longer terrorize the rest of the world. After 100 years, some remaining Eldians from the outside infiltrated the king’s paradise and initiated a sequence of events that led to Eren Yeager inheriting the powers of the Founding Titan and destroying the world with the Rumbling.
The story then ends on an ambiguous note in so far as the Titans are concerned, seemingly implying that they might one day return and make history repeat itself all over again.