Characters
Founding Titan in Attack on Titan
The original Titan power guarded by the Reiss bloodline, said to command all Titans and human memory.
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Complete record: Founding Titan
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The Founding Titan is the original and most revered of the Titan powers, guarded for generations by the Reiss royal bloodline. Bound to the founder's will, it is said to hold sway over all Titans and over the very memories of the people within the Walls.
Divided from Ymir Fritz
Marley's history and the Restorationists' forbidden texts dispute how Ymir Fritz first gained the power of the Titans and what Eldia did with it. Both accounts agree that after her death the power divided into nine, with the Founding Titan at the head of the line that ruled the Subjects of Ymir.
The 145th King's Vow
At the end of the Great Titan War, Karl Fritz carries the Founding Titan to Paradis. He uses it to raise the three Walls from countless colossal Titans, erases his subjects' memories and binds his renunciation of war into the power itself. Every royal heir after him inherits that will and is prevented from using the Founder to resist the outside world.
The Power Behind the Throne
In the Reiss chapel, Rod Reiss reveals that his family has secretly guarded the Founding Titan, the source of the royal line's hidden authority over the Walls.
Command Over Titans and Memory
The Founding Titan is described as able to command the countless Titans and to reshape the memories of the people living within the Walls — the true reason the Reiss dynasty ruled from the shadows.
Grisha Attacks and Takes the Founding Titan
On the night Wall Maria fell, Grisha Yeager transformed into a Titan inside the Reiss Chapel, defeated Frieda Reiss, and seized the Founding Titan. With the power of the royal family taken away, the balance that had endured for generations collapsed.
Power Locked behind Royal Blood
Because Eren lacks royal blood, the Founder remains dormant inside him. He concludes that its command surfaced only when he touched the Smiling Titan, who had once been Dina Fritz, and keeps the theory secret rather than expose Historia to the military as a possible key to the power.
It Can Rewrite a Body
Memory alteration is only half of it. It can change the physical composition of every Subject of Ymir at once — six hundred years ago an Eldian king used it to make his whole people immune to a plague. Tom Xaver found that in the research, and Zeke immediately found the other use: make them all sterile and the Titans end in a century.
The Hand That Reached the Controls
The condition on it is met at last, and not in a throne room: a severed head, a brother with royal blood, and the two of them in the Paths at the same time. Zeke explains what the place is — the room the royal family gave its orders in — and then stops asking Eren to agree and reaches for the power directly, to go through his brother until he does.
The Voice in Every Head
Through the Paths it can speak to every Subject of Ymir alive at the same moment, wherever they are standing. It is used exactly once that way, and what it says is a declaration: everything outside the island is going to be trampled flat. Eldians in a Marleyan street go down on their knees; the Marleyans beside them hear nothing at all.
The Body With No Limit
Every one of the Nine comes in a fixed size except this one. Once Ymir gives Eren everything she has, the thing that assembles itself in Shiganshina is a spine with a head that stands taller than the Walls it is knocking down, and the Colossal Titans inside them come out and start walking.
It Was a Person All Along
The reason only royal blood could use it was never a rule of the power. It was the girl on the other side of the Paths doing as she was told by the family that owned her, for two thousand years. The Founder is not a weapon anyone inherits — it is a request, made to someone who had never once been allowed to refuse.
It Undid Every Hardened Thing
When it took the Armored Titan's hardening away, it did not do it to one Titan. Hardened flesh stopped existing everywhere on earth at once — which is how the crust came off the Walls all at once, and why a crystal under Trost that had held for four years with Annie Leonhart inside it is not holding anything any more. Nobody asked it for that second part.
The Place It Can Take You Into
It does not only speak to Subjects of Ymir, it can take them out of the world. The people hunting him are lying in the hull of an aircraft and a moment later standing on sand under a sky with no sun, brought there without being asked and put back when the conversation is over. Every one of them is connected to it, and the connection is a door only one side can open.
It Ended With the Girl Who Held It
It is not destroyed by the people cutting at it. When Mikasa carries Eren's head out into the light, Ymir Fritz watches a woman kill the person she loves, is thanked for the first time in twenty centuries, and goes back to the throne room to stand aside. She leaves — and every Titan on earth becomes a person again in the same instant.
Final fate
Titan succession
Ymir Fritz
The chain begins before the Nine exist. Ymir Fritz held the whole power for thirteen years, and how she came by it is the one thing Marley and the restorationists never tell the same way. When she died it broke into nine, and the Founder is the piece that kept command of the other eight.
Karl Fritz
Karl Fritz is the head of this chain and the reason the rest of it does nothing. He carried the Founder off the continent after Marley won the war, raised the three Walls with it, took his own people's memory with it — and then bound a vow into it that no heir after him could break.
Uri Reiss
Uri Reiss received the power as the family had passed it for generations: quietly, within the bloodline, from one Reiss to the next. He carried it as a burden rather than a weapon, kneeling before the man he had wronged, and he taught Frieda to hold it the same gentle way before his time ran out.
Frieda Reiss
Frieda inherited from her uncle Uri and spent her years trying to be worthy of a power she was forbidden to use. She visited a small girl in the Reiss household and read to her, never saying what she carried. She held it for barely a handful of years before Grisha Yeager came through the chapel door.
Grisha Yeager
This is the only link in the chain that was taken rather than given. Grisha forced his way into the Reiss chapel, killed Frieda and her family, and devoured the power the bloodline had guarded for a century. He held it for one night and never used what it could really do.
Eren Yeager
Hours after the chapel, Grisha handed both powers to his son in the woods and let him finish it. Eren remembered none of it — only a basement key and a duty nobody had explained. Everything he later fought for rests on a theft he did not commit and cannot give back.
All linked characters
- Frieda Reiss — Frieda bore the Founding Titan until it was torn away
- Karl Fritz — The 145th king carried the Founding Titan to Paradis and swore it off
- Uri Reiss — The gentle king who held the Founding Titan before Frieda
- Grisha Yeager — Grisha tore the Founding Titan from Frieda in the Reiss chapel
- Eren Yeager — Passed to Eren the night he devoured his father
- Ymir Fritz — Her power, divided into nine — the Founder is the one that commands the rest
