delphine

Levi rigged the Thunder Spear into Zeke’s gut (fuse looped around his neck) as a brutal failsafe after the forest ambush—he’d just been forced to slaughter his own transformed squad, so pure hatred mixed with cold logic. Cutting off Zeke’s limbs slowed regeneration and blocked an instant transform, but a living Titan shifter is still a walking bomb; the spear meant any sudden move or escape attempt would shred Zeke from the inside before he could fully regenerate and shift again. Standing close on the cart wasn’t carelessness so much as necessity: Levi needed to stay right there to keep hacking at the regrowing limbs, watch for tricks, and make sure the threat stayed real. He badly underestimated Zeke’s resolve. Levi assumed self-preservation (and the sheer pain) would keep Zeke still long enough to deliver him for the euthanasia plan’s opposite end, but Zeke had already decided the Eldian “curse” had to end even if it meant dying himself. The moment the flashbacks to Ksaver finished, Zeke simply jerked his head, yanked the pin, and chose mutual destruction over captivity. Levi’s proximity turned the detonation into the near-fatal injuries we later see, proving that even Ackerman instincts can be outplayed by someone willing to die for the plan.

Erwin carried the Survey Corps through some of the darkest stretches of the story with a mix of cold strategy and genuine conviction that few others matched. He wasn’t just a commander giving orders from the back; he invented the long-distance scouting formation, kept the Corps functional under constant political pressure and Titan losses, and repeatedly put himself on the line (losing an arm and still pressing forward) because he understood that information and momentum mattered more than any single life, including his own. That final charge against the Beast Titan remains one of the most effective leadership moments in the series precisely because he turned a hopeless situation into a calculated opening for Levi. It can feel like people sleep on him because the later arcs shift so hard toward Eren, Armin, and the larger ideological conflict that Erwin’s brand of pragmatic, human-cost leadership gets treated as a completed chapter rather than a lasting foundation. He also never got the extended personal flashbacks or power-up moments that make other characters dominate discussions, so his impact is easy to take for granted once the story moves past Shiganshina. Still, most dedicated fans rank him extremely high; the “underrated” feeling usually comes from comparing him to flashier characters rather than any real lack of recognition for what he actually accomplished.

The Attack Titan’s real function isn’t combat power—it’s the only one that receives memories from its future inheritors, which turns the entire timeline into a closed loop rather than a fixed script handed down from outside. Grisha only takes the Founding Titan (and kills the Reiss family) because a future Eren shows him those events through the Attack Titan; Eren only sees the Rumbling and his own role in it because he inherits those same memories after kissing Historia’s hand. The future isn’t “already set” in the sense of an external destiny—it’s set by the holders themselves, each one pushed forward by glimpses of what the next one will do. That relentless drive to keep advancing toward freedom, never bowing to any king, is what the Attack Titan has always embodied. It does pass trauma down, but that’s the point of the mechanism, not a side effect. Every holder is forced to carry the weight of what comes next (and what already happened), which is exactly how the cycle of violence and the Paths keep regenerating. Eren ultimately leans into it because his own nature—his refusal to accept any limit on freedom—makes any other path feel impossible to him. The Attack Titan exists so that someone will always be willing to move the story forward, even knowing the cost, which is why the series treats free will and determinism as the same thing: the future is locked in because the person who sees it is the kind of person who would choose it anyway.

The Colossal Titan is one of the Nine special Titan shifters, not a regular mindless Titan. While the Walls are roughly 50 meters tall and designed to keep out the smaller, average Titans (which usually range from about 3 to 15 meters), the Colossal is an abnormal giant around 60 meters high—tall enough to peer over the Walls and kick a hole straight through them. It was never just some random Titan that happened to grow bigger; it was a deliberate weapon sent by the Marleyan warriors to breach the outer Wall Maria. The Walls themselves weren’t ordinary stone barriers either. They were constructed using the power of the Founding Titan (and the Wall Titans sealed inside them) specifically to shield the people of Paradis from the Titans roaming outside. The problem is that the Colossal Titan’s size and strength put it in a completely different category from the ones the Walls were built to stop, which is why it was able to smash through with ease and kick off the entire invasion.

No, Annie wasn’t physically aging inside the crystal. She was in a kind of suspended animation/hibernation state where her bodily functions slowed way down, so she looked exactly the same (same height, appearance, everything) when she finally broke free roughly four years later. She was still semi-conscious the whole time and could hear people like Armin and Hitch talking to her. The Curse of Ymir still kept ticking, though. The 13-year lifespan limit is tied to a shifter’s connection to the Paths, not just ordinary physical aging, so the years continued to count down while she was crystallized. She didn’t get a free pass on the timer—if the Titan powers hadn’t been eliminated at the end, she (like the other remaining shifters) would still have died once her remaining years ran out.

The opening theme for #DexterResurrection is so peak

The interaction happens because Zeke uses his royal blood to unlock the Paths with Eren’s Founding Titan, letting them walk through Grisha’s memories like a shared dream. The key is the Attack Titan’s unique power: it lets its holders see memories from future inheritors, not just past ones. So while Eren and Zeke are watching Grisha’s past from the Paths, Grisha is simultaneously receiving those same moments as future memories. That’s why he can suddenly see adult Zeke standing there, hear Eren’s voice, and even talk to them—it’s not that Eren and Zeke traveled back in time in a physical way, but that Grisha is perceiving his own future self’s perspective in real time. This creates a closed loop where Eren can influence Grisha’s decisions. When Grisha hesitates at the Reiss chapel, Eren’s words (reminding him of the people who already died) reach him through those future memories and push him to go through with stealing the Founding Titan. Later, after the massacre, Grisha is able to hug and apologize to Zeke specifically because Eren is facing Zeke in the memory, giving Grisha a clear view. It’s less “time travel” and more the Attack Titan turning the future into something Grisha can experience and react to in the past—exactly the kind of bootstrap paradox Attack on Titan loves.