Who are the Subjects of Ymir, the Eldians of Attack on Titan

"Subject of Ymir" describes anyone descended from Ymir Fritz. It is not a nationality or a religion but an inherited condition carried through blood. In Marley's legal system, that category appears on documents, determines where a person may live and is marked by a compulsory armband.

The biological consequence is that a Subject of Ymir can be transformed into a titan; other populations cannot. Marley's government and propaganda present that capacity as a collective threat while recruiting Eldians to inherit the Nine Titans and fight for the state.

It all begins with one person. Ymir Fritz was a slave of the Eldian people who, fleeing her captors, made contact with a spine-shaped creature lodged in the roots of a tree. From that encounter came the power of the titans, and with it the first transformation in the history of the world.

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For thirteen years Ymir used that power in service of King Fritz: she raised bridges, cut roads, levelled armies. When she died, her body split into nine powers — the Nine Titans — divided among her three daughters, Maria, Rose and Sina. Every living Eldian descends from that line, and that is why every living Eldian is still connected to it.

That number, thirteen, is not decorative: nobody who inherits one of the Nine Titans lives more than thirteen years past the transformation. It is the Curse of Ymir, and it is the clock that governs the entire second half of the story.

None of the above, however, is what the world believes. Ymir Fritz's origin is the point in the story where the most versions compete, and the gap between them is not a scholarly nuance — it is the entire justification for what is done to her people two thousand years later.

For nearly seventeen hundred years, Eldia ruled the continent with the Nine Titans. It was not a symbolic dominion: it was annexation, deportation and the extermination of entire peoples, Marley among the subjugated. The story is explicit about this, and deliberately so: the people we are about to watch being persecuted were the persecutors first.

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The reversal comes with the Great Titan War. Marley seizes seven of the Nine Titans, and the 145th king, Karl Fritz, instead of defending his empire, withdraws with part of his people to the island of Paradis, raises the walls and erases the memories of everyone living inside them. His vow renouncing war leaves Eldia defenceless and amnesiac at once. That dynasty also carries the detail that governs the endgame: only the Fritz line kept the royal blood that fully activates the Founding Titan, which is why Zeke — royal-blooded through Dina — matters so much to Eren.

The Eldians left on the mainland inherited the whole defeat. Marley did not expel them: it kept them, because a people capable of producing titans is far too useful to discard. It concentrated them in internment zones, marked them with an armband, and turned their existence into an administered military resource.

The story deliberately builds two populations of the same people who do not recognise each other. In the Liberio internment zone, Eldians know exactly what they are and live under that label every day. Behind the walls of Paradis, they do not know at all: they believe themselves to be the last humanity on the planet.

That asymmetry is the engine of the Marley arc. When Reiner and the other Warriors reach the island, they do not see countrymen: they see devils. And when Paradis' soldiers uncover the truth, they do not discover an external enemy — they discover that they themselves are what the whole world fears.

• The Liberio Internment ZoneA walled quarter on Marley's eastern coast where the Eldians who stayed behind are penned, armbanded and counted.
• LiberioA Marleyan port city on the eastern coast, and the city built around the internment zone — a fenced quarter with an ordinary town pressed up against its wire, close enough that both sides hear the same trams.
• Paradis IslandSeen from the world it was hidden from, everything inside the Walls is this: one island off the eastern coast, small enough to cover with a thumb.
• MarleyA nation on the great continent across the sea, and for a century the master of the Titan power it once feared.

The transformation is not an infection or a random mutation: it is the use of an inheritance. Every Subject of Ymir is connected to the Paths, the dimension where Ymir Fritz's power still builds titan bodies. A human body from that line can receive that matter; one that is not, cannot.

From there come two very different fates. Nine Eldians in the whole world inherit one of the Nine Titans and keep their minds; the rest, if given the spinal fluid of a titan, become pure titans and lose everything they were. Marley uses the first as a military programme and the second as capital punishment.

1. 01

   The sentence

   An Eldian is declared an enemy of the Marleyan state. No serious crime is required: belonging to a Restorationist group, practising a forbidden cult, or being denounced by someone in the community is enough.

2. 02

   The crossing to the island

   The condemned are shipped to Paradis and marched to the top of the wall. The execution is carried out in groups and in full view of the others: the procedure is designed to be witnessed.

3. 03

   The injection

   They are given titan spinal fluid. The transformation is immediate and irreversible, producing a pure titan: an enormous body with no language, no memory and no will of its own.

4. 04

   The fall

   They are thrown from the wall into the island's interior. The titans Paradis has spent generations fighting are, overwhelmingly, Eldians executed by Marley decades earlier.

Marley does not merely control Eldians: it needs the whole world — and Eldians themselves — to accept that the control is justified. The instrument is inherited guilt. An Eldian child in Liberio is taught that their ancestors committed atrocities and that they are born owing a reparation they can never pay.

It works with devastating efficiency. Gabi Braun does not defend Marley despite being Eldian: she defends it because she is Eldian, and because she has been taught that the only way to be worth anything is to prove she is one of the good ones. Willy Tybur's public address scales that logic to an international stage: he acknowledges the history, apologises for it, and uses it to declare a war.

And at the centre of that whole edifice stands Ymir Fritz: the founding villain for Marley, the sacred mother for the Restorationists and, in the Paths, a girl who kept obeying long after she died. Understanding the Subjects of Ymir is, largely, understanding that she chose none of those three versions.