Dreams and Curses

Kenny recounts a memory from his youth for Eren, Rod, and Historia. At his dying grandfather's bedside, after mentioning the Military Police snoops he turned into field fertilizer, he shares family news: his sister Kuchel works in a brothel in the underground city and means to keep her unborn child against his advice, while relatives near Shiganshina have been harassed into poverty. He presses the old man on why a warrior family once close to the crown is now despised. His grandfather, amused that the capital's monster called Kenny the Ripper wants a story, finally relents. The monarchy fears the Ackermans rather than hating them, because the King's power cannot reach them. Nearly everyone inside the Walls descends from one bloodline, but a handful of lineages, among them the Ackermans and the Asian clan, fall outside it, and the memory manipulation wielded by generations of monarchs, the same power that raised the Walls and erased all record of the outside world, slides off them. When the two immune families objected to this engineered order, they lost their standing and faced persecution. The old man hid the truth to shield his descendants and offered his own life for the family's survival. Young Kenny accepts the story simply because believing it promises more fun.

Story finished, Kenny hoists Rod up by the collar with a pistol at his eye, accusing the lord of years of manipulation and naming the cavern gathering for what it is, a Reiss succession ritual. When Historia shoves the gun aside and demands her father's release, Kenny turns the cruelty on her: Rod wants her Titanized so she can devour Eren, her conception amounted to a lord amusing himself with an ambitious servant, and the Assembly ordered mother and daughter killed. Forcing a knife down Rod's throat, Kenny snarls that the man hid her birth and pushed her into the military to preserve her blood, not out of love; he foisted Titanhood onto his family rather than carry it himself, buried the loss of the Founder's power to keep his influence, and only acted after Eren's defense of Trost had already cost countless lives. Historia holds firm anyway, declaring she will eat Eren, restore Frieda, inherit the world's history, and wipe out every Titan.

Rod drags the blade from his own mouth with bleeding hands, insisting Kenny is mistaken and that a real reason bars him from becoming a Titan himself. He releases Kenny from his service and tells him to find something worth living for, a suggestion Kenny privately dismisses as joyless. Climbing up to Eren, Kenny strips off the gag, slices his forehead to prime a transformation, and proposes a duel between the two shifters: peace if Historia's Titan wins, nothing if Eren's does. Rod hands Historia the injection, clarifying that she needs only Eren's spinal fluid rather than his entire body, and urges her to hurry.

Eren never transforms. Blood and tears streaming down his face, he tells Historia that Grisha's theft of Frieda's power ruined her chance to save humanity and set off every death that followed, naming the lost one by one, from Armin's grandfather and his trainee friends through Levi's slain squad and Hannes. Concluding that he should never have existed, he asks Historia to eat him and carry humanity forward. She answers quietly that the day he called her a normal girl made her happy, then sets the needle against her arm. Deeper in the cave, Levi, Mikasa, and the others spot the flash of a transformation, and an enormous Titan begins to swell against the cavern roof as Levi warns that time has run out.

Kenny's grandfather reveals that the Ackermans and the Asian clan sit outside the majority bloodline, immune to royal memory manipulation, and were persecuted for defying the King's engineered order.

Kenny brutalizes Rod Reiss and lays out Historia's true history: an unwanted child spared only for her blood, groomed to claim the Founding Titan by devouring Eren.

Freed and bleeding, Eren refuses to fight and begs Historia to eat him, while Levi's squad witnesses a massive transformation beginning elsewhere in the cavern.

Eren's tearful roll call of the dead stretches from Thomas Wagner, Mina Carolina, and Marco through Petra, Oluo, Eld, Gunther, and Hannes, anchoring his conviction that his father's theft of the Founding Titan lies behind all of it. His plea for Historia to consume him supplies the chapter's defining line.

Dreams and Curses runs third in volume 16 and 65th overall, published in January 2015 during the Royal Government arc. The anime spreads its material across the episodes Sin and Wish.