The world of Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan) is a dense tapestry of power, trauma, and the unyielding cycles of history. At its core lies the saga of the Eldians—a people whose meteoric ascent and catastrophic collapse echo some of the most disturbing chapters in real human history. By examining the Eldian narrative through a critical historical lens, educators, students, and fans can uncover profound insights into statecraft, propaganda, collective memory, and the ethical weight of inherited guilt. This article delves into the origins of Eldian power, the mechanisms of their imperial rule, the brutal machinery of their subjugation, and the fraught struggle for identity that defines their legacy.

The Mythic Foundations of Eldian Dominance

According to the foundational myths of the series and the ancient records pieced together by later scholars, Eldian history begins with Ymir Fritz. Around 2,000 years before the main story, Ymir made a pact with a mysterious entity known as the “Source of all living matter,” gaining the ability to transform into a Titan. This single event restructured the balance of power across the known world. Ymir’s strength was not merely physical; it was symbolic. She became a progenitor of a bloodline that could wield the Power of the Titans, and her descendants—the Eldians—formed a distinct ethnic group whose identity was inseparable from that ability.

The mythic narrative functions both as a religious origin story and a political weapon. Within the walls of Paradis Island, Ymir was revered as a goddess; in Marley, she was recast as a devil who had unleashed a plague of monsters. These competing interpretations were not incidental. They shaped foreign policy, justified massacres, and fueled centuries of cyclical vengeance. This manipulation of origin myths is a familiar historical pattern. As propaganda studies demonstrate, controlling a population’s understanding of its own beginnings is a foundational technique of both empire-building and resistance movements.

The Rise of the Eldian Empire

Ymir’s death and the division of her soul into the Nine Titans transformed a single miracle into a systematic engine of conquest. The Founding Titan, the Attack Titan, the Colossal Titan, the Armored Titan, and the other five became tools of statecraft, passed down through royal bloodlines and later through the inheritance rituals of the Warrior candidates. With these living weapons, the early Eldian kings forged an empire that stretched across continents. Marleyan historians, whose accounts are presented in the series with their own undeniable bias, describe the Eldian Empire as a reign of terror lasting nearly 1,700 years. They depict forced migrations, the extermination of rival tribes, and the systematic use of Titans to flatten cities. While these chronicles were later weaponized to justify the oppression of Eldians, archaeological evidence within the story—ruined civilizations, the “Devil of All Earth” epithet—suggests that the imperial era was indeed one of ruthless exploitation.

The societal structure of the Eldian Empire was rigidly hierarchical. At the apex sat the Fritz monarchy, holders of the Founding Titan’s coordinate power, capable of commanding all Subjects of Ymir and, through that, all Titans. A nobility of Titan-shifters managed the empire’s military and territorial administration, while ordinary Eldians—those who carried Ymir’s blood but lacked a shifter’s power—formed a privileged caste above subjugated peoples. This tiered system bears comparison to several historical empires, such as the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan, where a relatively small ethnic elite used superior military technology (composite bows, horse archery) to dominate vast, multicultural populations. The Eldians, like the Mongols, relied on a combination of terrifying martial prowess and a shrewd system of vassalage. Yet, as with all empires built on ethnic supremacy, the seeds of collapse were planted in the very structure of their rule.

The Titan Economy and Its Discontents

What sustained the Eldian Empire was not only military might but also an economic and cultural infrastructure built on Titan labor. Historical fragments within the series imply that Titans were used for construction, agriculture, and probably mining. A single Colossal Titan could erect a fortress in days; a team of Cart Titans could haul materials across deserts. This freed the Eldian citizenry from manual labor and allowed them to focus on governance, trade, and the arts. In short, the empire ran on the backs of both the subjugated peoples and the mindless Titans that Eldian spinal fluid could create.

This model of a “Titan-based economy” invites parallels to real-world systems of forced labor. Consider the transatlantic slave trade, where the wealth of entire European nations was built on the coerced labor of enslaved Africans. Or the Roman Empire’s reliance on slaves for agriculture mines and public works. In each case, the ruling class developed an ideology of innate superiority—often pseudo-biological—to justify the dehumanization necessary for such a system to function. The Eldian nobility, convinced of their divine mandate as descendants of Ymir, similarly viewed non-Eldians and even the mindless Titans they created as tools, not moral beings. The long-term psychological effect on Eldian society was a collective sense of entitlement and a tragic blindness to the suffering they inflicted—a blindness that would later be returned upon them with devastating symmetry.

The Anatomy of a Fall: Marley, Propaganda, and Internment

The Eldian Empire did not collapse from within; it was overthrown by a coalition of subjugated nations, chief among them the rising power of Marley. The Great Titan War, which erupted roughly a century before the main narrative, marked the turning point. Internal strife among the nine Titan houses, most famously the refusal of the 145th King Karl Fritz to continue the cycle of violence, allowed the Marleyans to seize seven of the Nine Titans. The King retreated to Paradis Island, raised three concentric Walls with millions of Colossal Titans, and used the Founding Titan’s power to erase the memories of the Eldians who accompanied him. He constructed a pacifist, insular paradise that was, in truth, a prison built on a lie.

What followed was not a simple defeat but a systematic campaign of dehumanization that transformed the remaining continental Eldians from oppressors into the world’s most despised minority. Marley’s strategy is a textbook example of the mechanics of genocidal hatred, and it unfolds in stages that are grimly familiar to any student of 20th-century history.

Constructing the “Devil” Race

Marleyan propaganda rewrote history, portraying Eldians as subhuman devils whose very blood carried the potential for monstrous transformation. The nine Titans were recast not as versatile assets but as cursed remnants of a diabolical past. Educational curricula, state-controlled newspapers, and public monuments all reinforced the message: Eldians were responsible for 1,700 years of global suffering, and their continued existence was a threat to peace. This narrative deliberately erased the nuance that many Eldians were themselves victims of their own monarchy and that the present generation bore no personal guilt for imperial crimes.

This pattern of propaganda is a direct echo of the Nazi propaganda machine that depicted Jews as a parasitic race responsible for Germany’s economic woes and cultural decay. The use of visual caricature—Eldians in Marleyan posters are often shown with exaggerated features and sinister expressions—mirrors the antisemitic cartoons of Der Stürmer. Similarly, the Armenian genocide was preceded by a long campaign of Ottoman propaganda that painted Armenians as a disloyal, money-grubbing minority in league with foreign enemies. In each instance, the construction of a monstrous “other” was a prerequisite for the public to accept, or at least tolerate, the atrocities that followed.

The Internment Zones of Liberio

On the continent, Eldians were stripped of citizenship rights and confined to designated internment zones, the most prominent being the Liberio ghetto. The architecture of these zones was deliberately degrading: high walls, cramped housing, inadequate sanitation, and restricted movement. Eldians were forced to wear identifying armbands—a visual marker that clearly parallels the Star of David badges in Nazi-occupied Europe and the identification tags imposed on Japanese Americans during World War II. The armband served multiple functions: it humiliated the wearer, warned the majority population of the “danger,” and made it nearly impossible for an Eldian to hide or escape.

Within Liberio, a complex social hierarchy developed. Honorary Marleyans—Eldians who served in the Warrior program—occupied a strange liminal space. They were given relative comfort and privilege, yet they remained reviled; their Titan powers were extracted for Marley’s military campaigns, but their families could be executed for any perceived disloyalty. This dynamic mirrors the experience of colonized peoples conscripted into imperial armies, such as the Sikh soldiers who served the British Empire or the North African tirailleurs in the French army. Their bravery was exploited, but their humanity was denied. The psychological toll on Warrior candidates like Reiner Braun, who internalized both the hatred of his own people and the duty to destroy them, illustrates how systems of oppression fracture individual identity.

Memory, Forgetting, and the Struggle for Identity

One of the most tragic dimensions of the Eldian experience is the deliberate manipulation of collective memory. King Karl Fritz’s erasure of Paradis Eldians’ memories was not a mercy but a profound act of violence. He removed the historical context that would have allowed his people to understand their place in the world and to prepare for the retribution that would inevitably come. The result was a fragile society living in a fabricated present, haunted by dreams and instincts they could not explain. This theme resonates powerfully with the post-colonial condition, where colonized peoples were often severed from their histories through the suppression of indigenous languages, religions, and records. The work of memory recovery in such contexts—through oral tradition, hidden archives, and political struggle—is a painful reclamation of selfhood, much like the journey Eren Yeager and the Survey Corps undertake.

The Reiss family’s secret maintenance of the Founding Titan’s power and their refusal to use it to free the Eldians encapsulate a profound moral dilemma. They chose a “peaceful” stagnation over a messy, violent liberation. This can be compared to the collaborationist governments that emerged under occupation, claiming to protect their people by accepting subjugation. The series invites us to question whether such a peace is sustainable or even ethical when it is built on a foundation of lies and requires the constant sacrifice of future generations, including the offering of children to a mindless Titan ritual.

Recovering History as a Political Act

The narrative of Attack on Titan presents historical recovery not as a benign academic pursuit but as a revolutionary act with catastrophic consequences. When Eren’s basement is finally opened and Grisha Yeager’s journals reveal the truth of the world, the walls of ignorance crumble. The Paradis Eldians learn that they are not the last remnants of humanity but a cursed race hated by the entire world. This revelation shatters their collective identity and sets the stage for the radicalization of the main characters. Historical memory here becomes a bomb, and the story forces us to ask: When a people discovers that they are the victims of a global conspiracy of hatred, what is the morally justifiable response? The answers given by the series—ranging from Armin’s diplomacy to Eren’s omnicide—map directly onto real-world debates about reparations, restorative justice, and the right to self-defense in the face of existential threat.

Resistance, Rebellion, and the Cycle of Vengeance

Faced with extermination, the Eldians of Paradis and the oppressed Eldians of the continent pursue various paths of resistance. The Eldian Restorationists, led by Grice and Grisha Yeager, represent a pre-emptive revolutionary movement that sought to overthrow Marley from within. Their methods were clandestine, their ideology nationalist. They dreamed of a restored Eldian Empire that would reclaim the Founding Titan and forge a new golden age. The Marleyan government’s response—turning the Restorationists into mindless Titans on the shores of Paradis—is a chilling example of state-sanctioned torture and extrajudicial execution, reminiscent of the enforced disappearances in Argentina’s Dirty War or the gulags of the Soviet Union, where dissidents were erased from society.

On Paradis, resistance takes a different form. The Survey Corps initially fight for survival, then for knowledge, and finally for a future. Their evolution from monster-slayers to freedom fighters is mirrored by the hardening of their moral stances. By the final arcs, the conflict has spiraled into a full-blown war of annihilation, with Eren’s Rumbling representing the ultimate response to a world that refuses to see Eldians as human. This destructive choice parallels the logic of mutually assured destruction that dominated the Cold War, but it also speaks to the psychological endpoint of unrelenting oppression: the belief that only total victory—even at the cost of global devastation—can ensure the survival of one’s people. The tragedy, as Hange and others realize too late, is that such a victory poisons the soul of the survivor, perpetuating the very cycle of hatred that created the crisis.

The Legacy of the Eldians: Lessons for the Present

Legacy is a word heavy with contradiction in the Eldian context. The Eldian Empire bequeathed to the world a legacy of terror, and the descendants of its victims hold that memory as a sacred duty. The Eldians of Paradis inherit a legacy of victimhood and a forgotten history of tyranny. Marley inherits the legacy of the oppressor who became the avenger-turned-oppressor, now committing atrocities in the name of preventing future atrocities. The series offers no clean resolution, no messianic figure who can wash away the blood and reset the clock. Instead, it leaves us with the uncomfortable truth that history is never truly past. It lives on in the policies that segregate, in the textbooks that lie, and in the hearts of those who remember.

The Eldian saga is a masterclass in the analysis of power because it refuses to let any faction claim pure moral ground. It shows that victimhood can become a weapon, that righteous anger can curdle into genocidal rage, and that the only way out of the labyrinth of historical trauma is the difficult, often failed, work of empathy. For educators, the series can serve as a powerful analogy for discussing the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the legacy of colonialism—not as direct allegories, but as narrative provocations that force students to confront the complexity of justice. It reminds us that to call a group “devils” is always a choice, and that such choices have consequences that ripple across millennia.

The fall of the Eldians was not an event but a process—a long, manufactured catastrophe built on propaganda, selective memory, and the refusal to acknowledge a common humanity. Their story is a warning: unless we learn to dismantle the narratives that dehumanize others, we too are doomed to repeat the rise and fall of yet another empire, whether it is made of walls, Titans, or the stories we tell ourselves.