Eldia

On modern maps Eldia occupies only Paradis Island, a landmass off the eastern coast of the continent Marley now dominates. Three concentric ring fortifications, Wall Maria, Wall Rose, and Wall Sheena, enclose its population; Karl Fritz formed them a century ago from hardened Wall Titans, and until the year 850 everything Eldian exists inside those circles. The ancient empire told a different story, sprawling across the continental mainland and far beyond after centuries of conquest. Eldia's emblem is a star with nine points, matching the count of the Nine Titans, and it marks the armbands Marley forces onto its Eldian residents: white for civilians, yellow for Warrior candidates, and red for Warriors and their families.

Two identities tangle inside the word Eldian. Strictly it names anyone belonging to the old empire, but because the Subjects of Ymir, the race capable of becoming Titans, account for nearly all of that population, the terms blur together, and the outside world wields both as slurs. On the mainland, generations of confinement in ghettos like Liberio's teach many Eldians to despise their own blood; families push children into Marley's Warrior program chasing honorary citizenship, while a minority join doomed Restorationist plots or the secret cult that worshiped Ymir Fritz as a goddess. The Tybur family alone keeps wealth and status, spared for betraying the empire.

Inside the Walls the culture is different but no freer. The Royal Government throttles technology through the First Interior Squad, keeps firearms stuck at the flintlock stage even as the vertical maneuvering equipment reaches remarkable sophistication, censors the press, and lets its subjects believe they are humanity's final remnant; most citizens embrace the isolation and mock the Survey Corps for dying beyond the gates. The basement revelations of 850 shatter that innocence. Paradis absorbs its true history with startling speed, and grief curdles into revanchism: Eren Yeager becomes a national idol, talk of a New Eldian Empire spreads, and after the Rumbling the Yeagerists convert the population's dread of retaliation into unchecked power.

Eldia's roots are small and ugly: a warlike tribe under the chieftain Fritz that torched neighboring villages and mutilated its slaves. Around 2,000 years before the main story, one of those slaves, the girl Ymir, acquires the power of the Titans. Thirteen years of her labor and warfare turn the tribe into a kingdom that humbles mighty Marley. When Ymir dies shielding her king, her daughters Maria, Rose, and Sheena consume her body on his orders, seeding the Subjects of Ymir and eventually the Nine Titans, the engines of a world-spanning empire. Marleyan chronicles blame the empire for atrocities like the Fall of Lago and put its victims at triple the later world population, though how much of that record is propaganda stays disputed. Around the year 240, a reigning king even altered his subjects' biology through the Founding Titan, shielding them from a global plague.

Seventeen centuries of feuding between the Titan-holding houses follow, checked only by the Founding Titan, until the 145th king, Karl Fritz, concludes his nation deserves no future. Conspiring with the Tybur family, he steps back from the balance of power, lets the Great Titan War tear the empire apart, and gifts the world the legend of the hero Helos while Marley claims seven of the Nine Titans. Fritz withdraws to Paradis Island with every Eldian he can gather, seals them behind the Walls, and erases their memories; the mainland Eldians left behind become Marley's caged underclass.

A century on, the truth stored in Grisha Yeager's basement reaches Paradis. The island reclaims the name Eldia, modernizes with help from the Anti-Marleyan Volunteers and the nation of Hizuru, and slides toward open war. The raid on Liberio in 854 provokes a global coalition, and Eren Yeager answers with the Rumbling, marching the Wall Titans across the planet until roughly 80 percent of humanity is dead and Mikasa Ackerman ends his life. The paranoid, Yeagerist-ruled state that follows rearms even while reopening diplomacy. Eldia endures for centuries afterward, growing a futuristic skyline over Shiganshina, before a final war reduces the nation to overgrown ruins scavenged by its distant descendants.