Children

In the ruins of Ragako, Moblit confirms the reports: buildings smashed, horses still stabled, and not one drop of blood or human remains. Then a recovered portrait turns his stomach. The immobile Titan sprawled across Conny's childhood home has the face of Conny's mother.

The Warriors, still deep among the giant trees, prepare to move. Bertholdt doubts Reiner's faith in Ymir, the woman who ate their friend Marcel five years earlier, but her self-serving streak makes her predictable. Reiner spells out Christa's value: her family sits close to the Order of the Walls, insurance in case Eren proves not to be the Coordinate they seek. Eren, given the chance to come quietly, attacks Reiner anyway and is choked unconscious. When signal flares announce the Scouts' early arrival, Ymir digs in. Convinced she will never see Christa again if they flee now, she threatens to defect with Eren or fight to the death unless they wait.

Her reasons unfold in flashback. A nameless street orphan was plucked up by a cult leader, renamed Ymir, and paraded as a royal-blooded goddess until the authorities came. Blamed by the man who invented the lie, she chose to keep playing the role that had made people happy, was stoned through the streets, injected at the empire's edge, and thrown from a wall as a Titan. For roughly sixty years she wandered mindlessly until the night she seized Marcel, ate him, and woke up human beneath the stars, vowing to live only for herself. Hearing of a girl called Christa whose birth others resented drew her to the Cadet Corps, and she recognized her own borrowed life in Christa's. In the present, the Scouts find Ymir's Titan waiting in the forest. She scans the arriving faces until Christa appears, snaps her up in her jaws, and bolts, with Reiner transforming at the tree line to carry the fugitives away as Hannes rallies the pursuit.

Moblit's investigation of Ragako plants the horrifying implication that the villagers themselves became the Titans inside Wall Rose. Reiner and Bertholdt discuss bringing Christa, Annie, and the Coordinate home, with Reiner urging Bertholdt to confess his feelings for Annie when it is over. Eren's failed resistance ends in a chokehold, and Bertholdt learns Ymir spent about sixty years as a mindless Titan.

The flashback establishes Ymir's origin among a cult beyond the Walls, her transformation by injection, and her awakening after eating Marcel. Her ultimatum forces the Warriors to linger, she abducts Christa in front of the assembled soldiers, and the episode hands off to the climactic chase with Reiner's Armored Titan fleeing across open ground.

Episode 35 overall and the tenth of season 2, a Wit Studio and Production I.G production directed by Kenji Imura and scripted by Hiroshi Seko, drawing on the chapters Opening, Children, and Meeting. The Japanese premiere fell on June 3, 2017.

Ymir's reflection on waking to a world of freedom, laughing at how fickle fate can be, provides the episode's epigraph. The lore segment admits only that her hometown lies somewhere outside the Walls, its true location unknown at this stage.