Term · Attack on Titan
Eldia
A nation that no longer exists, a people who cannot stop being it, and one word doing all of the work.
In Otakana the clue reads: The people confined behind the walls
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Attack on Titan
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Eldia was an empire. For seventeen hundred years its people held the power of the titans and used it on everyone within reach, until Marley took the mainland and the survivors were left with a walled island and a reputation. In the present day of the story, being Eldian is not a citizenship. It is an inherited accusation, enforced with armbands and internment zones and a great deal of paperwork.
The people behind the walls know none of this. Three generations have been told that the world outside is empty and that titans are a kind of weather. The distance between what an Eldian inside the walls believes about himself and what an Eldian in Marley is taught about that same man is the hinge the second half of the series turns on.
The word arrives late. For most of three seasons the story has no name for its own characters beyond humanity, and hearing them called Eldians for the first time is where the map stops being a survival horror setting and becomes a political one with two sides who each have a case. Nothing about the show is comfortable after that.
Spelling ELDIA
ELDIA is five letters and the surprise is how few of them there are. The word sounds like it should carry another syllable, and ELDIAN, the adjective, is the form the show says far more often, so the tiles come up one short of what the ear expects. Japanese writes it Erudia with the usual inserted U. Drop that U and you have the answer.