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- Dec 9, 2014
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I guess I just do not see Ymir, as portrayed so far, as interested in revenge, mind control of Eldians, or much of anything, for that matter. She is shown as submissive, blind, aloof and directionless. Her only acts that show some kind of persona are the freeing of the pigs ages ago, reviving Zeke, and not resisting Eren, if that's an act. It suggests some vague and detached yearning for a release, but without much willingness to do something for it, except occasionally and meekly. She is shown as a log dragged along by the flow of fate, no matter how much power dwells within. She had centuries for revenge and mind control, and didn't need Eren to do it. She didn't. The 145th did mind control, not Ymir. Her Norse mythology prototype is known for self-sacrifice to make the world, not megalomania. For all we were told, her self-enslavement to the royal blood was her sacrificial choice, a choice to avoid choosing really, indeed, the breaking out scene suggests it.
But if it wasn't, and instead she is vengeful and power hungry, and the royal blood is a check on her power, then Eren could not have helped her with that. If the idea was to bring in a non-royal to unlock the Coordinate and unleash Ymir, then Zeke, with his agenda, is a bad conduit. She needed somebody either sympathetic or more pliable, and there was a long royal line of that long before now. Moreover, the whole unlocking story comes from the 145th locking it for royals, not from some limitation of Ymir. If the royal blood is the key to control then Zeke would still be in control, not Eren. I am not good at mind-reading Isayama, so maybe you and SonOfDaws are right, but I just do not see how the transfer of control to Eren works or makes sense on this theory. Based on the story so far, it seems more plausible to me that a willful non-royal came along, and Ymir chose the new path of least resistance, like she always did, with some minimal effort to steer him along. It helped that he was in tune with her vague yearnings.
I am not so much concerned with Ymir's motives or the freedom of Eldians as with the two overlapping narratives that are in tension so far. On the one hand, we have the physical/technological thread that dominated most of the manga, the mechanics and biology of titans, the royal blood, the spinal fluid, the spiny parasite, etc. On the other hand, we have the more recent supernatural elements, Zeke's resurrection, the Paths, the immaterial transfer of powers through them, the mind realm. We always assumed that all titan-related elements came from the same source. But maybe not. The Spiny's recent reappearance out of Eren's beheaded body is suggestive. If the Spiny is indeed a parasite it is not in it for the mystique, it is in it to feed on something.
What if the Paths, the "spiritual" connection of all Eldians, the mind realm are not of Spiny's doing. What if Ymir was just its way in so it could corrupt it and feast on it, like the Biblical snake offering the apple to make them "gods", with a side of death. Manifesting the power physically to keep it going - the nine titans that terrorized the world, seemingly for the Eldian benefit, but sapping them of their humanity and willpower, and ultimately condemning them to a miserable fate on Paradis. The 145th was a perfect tool for the Spiny, its earthly image. It would explain why Ymir, its first and nearest victim, is the meekest of them all. And yet the most "powerful". It would explain how the blood and the fluids combine with the Paths. And it would mean that the Founding Titan is both of them, but neither. The Spiny's Founding might isn't its own, it "gives" Eldians a small fraction of what it takes from them, and in a corrupted physical form. And it can only do that while holding on to the key to its real "divine" source. This is a far-fetched theory, but Isayama once said that Ymir is the key to the whole story. Perhaps she is, literally.
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