What is Zeke's euthanasia plan?

The euthanasia plan is not an extermination: it is a subtraction. It consists of using the Founder to alter the bodies of every Subject of Ymir at once and leave them sterile. Nobody dies that day. There is simply nobody born afterwards, and in roughly a century the last person capable of becoming a titan dies of old age, taking with them the problem that has been eating the world for two thousand years.

Carrying it out requires one very specific thing: the Founder and royal blood have to touch. Zeke carries the blood; Eren carries the power. Everything else — the deal with Hizuru, the Volunteers, the half-century schedule — is the corridor through which Zeke gets into the same room as his brother without anyone stopping him.

And there is a third thing worth saying out loud, because the story does not hide it: the plan is never put to a vote in any room. One man decides that his entire people should stop existing for their own good, and the consent of the people affected appears nowhere in the arithmetic.

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The idea is not Zeke's. It belongs to Tom Xaver, the Eldian researcher who carried the Beast Titan before him. Xaver fell in love with a Marleyan woman, which was forbidden, and took his armband off every time he went to see her. They married and had a son. When she found out what her husband was, she killed the boy and then herself. Xaver went on studying titans because it was all he had left.

In Marley he was the only adult who treated Zeke as a child rather than as a candidate. He taught him to throw in an alley, and when he found him crying because Public Security was closing in on the Restorationist movement, he gave him the one piece of advice that kept him alive: turn your parents in. Zeke did. His grandparents were spared because of it, and that debt explains a good deal of what he does afterwards.

What Xaver never wrote down are the two findings this whole article rests on: that the Founder does not only edit memories but can rewrite the bodies of every Subject of Ymir at once; and that Karl Fritz's vow renouncing war can be broken, but only through royal blood. Zeke saw the end of the sentence before Xaver had finished saying it.

The plan has an access problem: the Founder sits on an island across the sea, guarded by an army that does not trust him. Zeke's solution is to make the entire world push Eren towards him.

After the defeat at Shiganshina in 850, Zeke and Reiner file their reports. Only Zeke knows what actually happened when Eren touched that mindless titan: it was Dina Fritz, his own mother, royal blood, and the contact gave Eren a few seconds of the Founder's power. Reiner cannot contradict what he does not understand, so the report that reaches Marley says what suits Zeke: Paradis can already trigger the Rumbling.

From there all he needs is the right herald. Willy Tybur belongs to the family that has ruled Marley from the shadows for a century and claimed credit for ending the Great Titan War; his word is the only one capable of aligning every nation at once. Willy declares war from a stage in Liberio in front of ambassadors and press — and dies mid-sentence, exactly as planned.

1. 01

   1. A report nobody can disprove

   Zeke inflates the threat from Paradis using the one thing only he knows: that the Founder answered his mother's touch. Marley believes it because the alternative witness does not understand what he saw.

2. 02

   2. A borrowed herald

   Marley's response is placed in Willy Tybur's mouth, the one man whose family name can summon the entire world to the same square and have it sign the same war.

3. 03

   3. An attack with witnesses

   Eren kills Willy in front of the assembled nations. The declaration of war is ratified by the blood of the man delivering it.

4. 04

   4. A capture that is an escape

   The Scouts defeat the Beast Titan and capture Zeke. His defection is disguised as a defeat, the only thing that can stop Marley executing his grandparents for treason.

5. 05

   5. An island with no way out

   Paradis wakes up with every nation against it and one card left to play: the cooperation of the man who just put them there. From now on, no plan works without Zeke.

In 851, every survey ship the Volunteers bring to the island is loaded with more Marleyan wine than any crew could drink. The wine carries Zeke's spinal fluid, and the order is to serve the senior officers first.

What Yelena does over the next three years does not look like an attack, which is exactly why it works. She argues before the command that Marleyan prisoners who have proved they are not hostile should be allowed to work rather than rot in a cell, and many of them end up placed in restaurants. Nobody suspects kindness. The wine reaches the tables where Paradis's policy is decided.

When it surfaces — in Nicolo's dining room, far too late — the island's army discovers that its entire senior staff is titan material one scream away. Pixis surrenders rather than risk finding out, and orders everyone who drank to move to evacuated Shiganshina, so the disaster fits inside a single district.

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This conspiracy's signature is that nobody is on his side: everybody is positioned. Zeke locates the Azumabito family thanks to the intelligence Reiner gathered across five years undercover on the island — the crest Mikasa wears on her wrist — and takes advantage of a clan that is broke and out of favour to impose his terms: a monopoly on Paradis's resources and, above all, that they never negotiate on the island's behalf with any other nation.

That second clause closes the only diplomatic door Paradis had. The island can ask for help talking to the world, but its sole intermediary is contractually bound not to deliver it. When Hange concludes that someone will have to go and see the world in person, she is responding to a restriction Zeke put in place before she knew it existed.

The arrangement ultimately harms every party involved. The Volunteers signed up to free their own nations by helping Eldians, and end up delivering a sterilisation. The prisoners who poured the wine become the target of the reprisal. Hizuru spends decades modernising a country whose people will have no children. And Willy Tybur gives his life for a cause built on a lie he had just dismantled in public himself.

• ZZeke YeagerWarriors
• YYelenaAnti-Marleyan Volunteers
• WWilly TyburTybur Family
• KKiyomi AzumabitoHizuru

The first to find out is Eren, shortly before the regiment crosses to Marley: Floch arranges the meeting and Yelena explains the whole plan to him. Eren cannot refuse. If he rebels, hundreds of officers become titans; if he reports it, Zeke hands the island to Marley by pointing at the wine. So he pretends — and takes the one thing the blackmail gives him: a direct route to the Founder's power.

The others are playing both sides too. Historia refuses to inherit the Beast Titan and chooses to become pregnant instead, which forces the succession to be postponed and keeps Zeke alive for the month everything else needs. Floch, who knows Eren's real plan, cooperates with Yelena while organising the dissidents: he leaks Liberio, Premier Zackly is blown up and the Yeagerists take the island using Zeke's own wine as their threat.

And then the plan collapses in a single sentence. In the Paths Zeke finally has what he has been chasing for thirteen years: royal blood, the Founder in front of him and Eren in chains. He gives Ymir the order, and Ymir does not obey him.

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