Character · Attack on Titan
Ymir
One name, two characters, and the entire mythology of the series folded into four letters.
In Otakana the clue reads: Name shared by a founder and a freckled soldier
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Attack on Titan
- Letters
- 4 · Hard
The first Ymir is Ymir Fritz, the girl who came into contact with something in a tree two thousand years ago and became the source of every titan since. Everything the story later explains about power, inheritance and Eldia runs back to her. She is a founder in the way that myths have founders, which is to say the surviving accounts of her flatly contradict each other.
The second Ymir is a freckled cadet in the 104th, sardonic, evasive and interested in exactly one person in the regiment. She was handed that name as a child by a cult which needed a figurehead, and she has been paying the bill ever since. When the moment arrives to keep hiding or tell the truth, she tells the truth, at the worst conceivable time and for reasons nobody thanks her for.
Isayama took the name from Norse myth, where Ymir is the primordial giant the gods dismember to build the world out of. For a series about giants, inheritance and a world made quite literally from a body, that is a well-chosen loan. The doubling is deliberate too. Which Ymir a line of dialogue means is frequently the whole point of the scene.
Spelling YMIR
YMIR is four letters and opens on a Y doing the work of a vowel, which is the entire difficulty. There is no A, no E and no leading I, so the row looks wrong right up until it is right. Japanese writes it Yumiru, adding the vowel English leaves out and a U on the end English never uses. Norse myth spells it YMIR too, which is your check.