# The Day the World Changed Twice: Declaration of War and the Fall of Wall Maria

**What You'll Learn:**
- How to experience both attacks from the perspective of ordinary people whose lives were shattered in an instant
- The haunting parallels between Shiganshina and Liberio—two moments of absolute chaos
- Why Eren becoming what he once hated is the most devastating commentary on cycles of violence
- The sensory reality of what it means when monsters appear from nowhere
- How normal life ends in a single heartbeat, and nothing is ever the same

***

Let me take you somewhere.

Not to a battlefield. Not to a strategic position. Not to where heroes make decisions.

**To the crowd.**

To the people who woke up that morning thinking it was an ordinary day. Who had plans for dinner. Who were worried about small things—a bill to pay, a conversation to have, whether the weather would hold.

And then the world ended.

## Shiganshina, Year 845: A Normal Day

The morning bells had rung hours ago. Shiganshina District was alive with the mundane rhythms of existence.

Merchants called out prices. Children ran through streets playing games they'd played a thousand times before. Women hung laundry. Men argued about fishing spots and crop yields. The walls—those massive, ancient walls that had protected humanity for a hundred years—stood as they always stood: permanent, unchanging, eternal.

No one looked at the walls anymore. Not really. They were like the sky. Like the ground. They were simply *there*—the backdrop against which life happened.

In one house near the inner gate, a woman named Carla Yeager prepared the evening meal early. Her son Eren had run off somewhere with Mikasa and Armin, probably getting into trouble as boys do. She'd scold him when he returned. She'd hug him. She'd tell him dinner was ready.

**She didn't know she had less than an hour to live.**

Across the district, a Survey Corps soldier sat at a tavern, nursing a drink. He'd survived twenty expeditions beyond the walls. He'd seen friends eaten alive. He thought he understood horror.

**He didn't.**

Near the outer gate, a merchant loaded his cart for tomorrow's journey. He planned to visit relatives in Wall Rose. He'd bring gifts for his niece—she was turning seven next week.

**He would never see her again.**

This is how it was. This is how it always is. Thousands of lives, thousands of small concerns, thousands of plans that assumed tomorrow would come.

And then—

## The Sound

It wasn't like thunder. Thunder builds. Thunder warns you. Thunder rolls across the sky in stages you can process.

This was **instantaneous.** One second: silence. The next: a sound so massive it didn't register as sound at all. It registered as *pressure*—a physical force that hit your chest before your ears could interpret it.

The merchant's cart rattled. His horse screamed—a sound he'd never heard an animal make before.

The soldier's drink spilled. The tavern went silent. Every person, in the same instant, stopped whatever they were doing and turned toward the outer wall.

**Something was looking over it.**

A head. Massive. Skinless. Steam pouring from exposed muscle. Eyes that didn't seem to see anything and everything at once.

For one eternal second, no one moved. No one breathed. The human mind couldn't process what it was seeing. The scale was wrong. The biology was wrong. Reality itself had fractured.

**The Colossal Titan.**

And then it kicked the gate.

## The Breach

The outer gate—stone and iron that had stood for a century, that generations had trusted with their lives—exploded inward.

Debris flew in arcs that seemed almost slow, almost graceful, until they landed on houses. On people. A boulder the size of a wagon crushed a family sitting down to lunch. They never knew what hit them.

The sound of the breach was followed by a deeper sound—a rumbling that came from everywhere at once. The earth itself was shaking. And behind that rumbling, something else:

**Footsteps.**

Not one set. Dozens. Hundreds.

Titans poured through the hole in the wall like water through a broken dam. Some walked slowly, almost lazily, their dead eyes scanning for movement. Others ran—lurching, uncoordinated, but terrifyingly fast.

The first screams started.

Not screams of fear—those came later. These were screams of **incomprehension.** The human voice trying to express something it has no language for. The sound a person makes when their entire understanding of reality collapses in an instant.

The merchant ran. He didn't think about his cart, his horse, his niece's birthday present. He ran toward the inner gate with everyone else, part of a mass of humanity that had become a single organism with one imperative: **escape.**

The soldier drew his blades. His ODM gear activated automatically, muscle memory taking over while his conscious mind still reeled. He fired his grappling hooks and launched toward the nearest Titan.

He saw its hand coming. He couldn't dodge in time.

**He was one of the first to die.**

## The Crush

What people don't understand about mass panic is the **physicality** of it.

When thousands of people run in the same direction at the same time, they stop being individuals. They become a fluid—a current that sweeps you along regardless of your intentions. You don't decide to move. You are *moved.*

The streets of Shiganshina weren't designed for evacuation. They were designed for commerce, for daily life, for the assumption that the walls would never fall. Narrow alleys became death traps. Intersections became crushing zones where currents of fleeing humans collided.

A mother lost her grip on her daughter's hand. She screamed the child's name. The crowd swept her forward. She never saw her daughter again.

An old man fell. He tried to rise. A hundred feet passed over him. He stopped trying.

Near the inner gate, the crowd compressed. Too many bodies, not enough space. People at the edges were crushed against walls. People in the center couldn't breathe. The gate was open, but not wide enough. Not nearly wide enough.

**And behind them, the Titans kept coming.**

You could hear them. Even over the screaming, you could hear them. Those footsteps that didn't sound like anything living should sound. That steady, relentless approach.

Some people stopped running. Not from courage—from mathematics. They looked at the gate, looked at the crowd, looked at the approaching Titans, and realized there wasn't enough time. There wasn't enough space.

They turned. They watched death come. Some prayed. Some screamed. Some went silent.

**The Titans fed.**

## Carla Yeager

In a destroyed house near the inner wall, a woman lay trapped under wooden beams. Her legs were crushed. She couldn't move.

Her son was there. Mikasa was there. They were trying to lift the beam. They were failing.

Carla knew. She could see it in Eren's eyes—the desperation, the refusal to accept the obvious. She knew what mothers always know when the worst comes: **I cannot let him die here trying to save me.**

"Take Mikasa and run," she said. "Please. Please, Eren."

He refused. He kept pulling at the beam. His hands were bleeding. His eyes were wild.

She wanted to hold him one more time. She wanted to tell him everything—every piece of wisdom she'd never gotten around to sharing, every expression of love she'd assumed she'd have time for later.

**There was no more later.**

Hannes arrived. He lifted both children. He ran. Carla watched her son being carried away, reaching back for her, screaming her name.

The last thing she saw was a Titan's hand reaching down.

The last thing she thought was: **Live, Eren. Please live.**

## The Aftermath

By nightfall, Shiganshina was gone.

Not damaged. Not occupied. **Gone.** A district that had held tens of thousands of people was now a feeding ground. The Titans wandered among the ruins, occasionally snatching survivors who'd hidden in cellars or behind rubble.

The refugees—those who'd made it through the inner gate—huddled behind Wall Rose in makeshift camps. Families searched for each other, calling names that would never be answered. Children sat alone, staring at nothing, their minds unable to process what they'd witnessed.

The official count would estimate nearly 10,000 dead. The real number was probably higher. How do you count bodies when the bodies have been eaten?

And in that mass of traumatized survivors, a boy sat with bloodied hands, staring at the wall that now represented the edge of his world.

**Eren Yeager had watched his mother die.**

He would never be the same. None of them would ever be the same.

**Year 845. The day the walls fell. The day everything changed.**

---

## Liberio, Year 854: A Night of Celebration

Nine years later. A different continent. A different people. A different wall—not of stone, but of propaganda and hate.

The Liberio Internment Zone was celebrating.

Willy Tybur, head of the Tybur family—the most prestigious Eldian bloodline in Marley—had organized a festival. Diplomats from around the world had gathered. Military brass. Journalists. The elite of Marleyan society.

And in the internment zone itself, the Eldians had been given a rare night of joy. Lanterns hung from buildings. Food stalls lined the streets. Children ran and laughed, forgetting for one evening that they wore armbands marking them as second-class citizens.

Gabi Braun, thirteen years old, walked through the festival with her friends. She'd just been congratulated for her performance in the Mid-East War. She was on track to inherit the Armored Titan. She believed—with the absolute certainty of youth—that she was going to save her people through service to Marley.

Udo adjusted his glasses and complained about the crowd. Zofia smiled at everything. Colt kept an eye on his younger brother Falco, who seemed distracted.

**They didn't know their world had less than an hour left.**

In a building adjacent to the main stage, Reiner Braun sat in a basement apartment, staring at the soldier across from him.

Eren Yeager. Here. In Liberio. In the heart of enemy territory.

How? When? Why?

Reiner's hands shook. The man he'd spent four years pretending to be friends with—the boy whose mother he'd helped kill—sat calmly in a chair, speaking in a voice that held no anger. No rage. Just... understanding.

"I'm the same as you," Eren said.

And Reiner knew, with horrifying clarity, what was about to happen.

## The Stage

On stage, Willy Tybur told the truth.

Not all of it. Not the parts about Ymir Fritz and the Paths and the 2,000-year imprisonment of a god. But enough.

He told the world that King Fritz had made a deal with the Tyburs. That the "hero" Helos was a fabrication. That the King had fled to Paradis willingly, making a vow to renounce war—a vow that neutered the Founding Titan's power for his descendants.

He told them that the walls were filled with Colossal Titans, ready to flatten the world if awakened.

And he told them about Eren Yeager.

"The true enemy of humanity," Willy declared, his voice carrying across the plaza where thousands of Marleyans and foreign dignitaries sat in rapt attention, "is not the King who fled. The King's ideology was peace—twisted, perhaps, but peace nonetheless."

He paused. The crowd leaned forward.

"The true enemy is the man who has stolen the Founding Titan's power and broken the vow. The man who holds the power to destroy the world and has declared his willingness to use it."

In the basement, Eren stood. Reiner flinched.

"On behalf of Marley and the world," Willy's voice rang out, "I declare—"

## The Transformation

The world exploded.

Not with sound—with **light.** A pillar of energy erupted from the building behind the stage, lightning crackling outward in all directions. The air itself seemed to scream.

And then, where the building had been, a Titan stood.

**The Attack Titan.**

Fifteen meters of muscle and fury, steam pouring from its body, eyes fixed on the stage.

For one heartbeat, no one moved. The crowd—thousands of people who had come to hear a speech, to celebrate, to enjoy a festival—stared at the monster that had materialized among them.

Then Willy Tybur's body flew through the air, crushed by a fist the size of a wagon.

**The screaming started.**

## The Reversal

Here's what the people of Liberio experienced:

One moment, they were listening to a speech. Important people in fancy clothes, discussing history and politics. The lanterns were pretty. The food was good. Life was normal.

The next moment, a demon from their nightmares stood among them.

Every Marleyan child grew up hearing about the Eldian devils. The monsters who had ruled the world with Titan power. The horror stories were abstract—things that happened to other people, in other times, in other places.

**Now it was here.**

The crowd didn't run immediately. The human mind needs a moment to shift from "normal" to "catastrophe." People stared. People tried to understand what they were seeing. People waited for someone to tell them what to do.

Then Eren moved.

He didn't speak. He didn't roar. He simply walked—each step crushing the earth beneath him—toward the crowd.

**Now they ran.**

The streets of Liberio became rivers of screaming humanity. Families were separated in seconds. Children were knocked down by adults who couldn't see them. The elegant diplomats shoved past elderly Eldians without a second glance.

Behind them, more explosions. More Titans—no, Titan *shifters.* The Jaw Titan emerged. The Cart Titan. And then, from the sky, soldiers in strange gear descended, firing weapons and blades with terrifying precision.

**The Survey Corps had come to Marley.**

## Gabi's World Shatters

Gabi grabbed Udo's hand. Zofia was beside her. They needed to get to safety. They needed to find their families.

The crowd surged. Gabi was strong for her age, trained for combat, but even she was struggling against the tide of panicked bodies.

Udo stumbled. His hand slipped from hers.

"Udo!" she screamed.

The crowd swept him away. She tried to push back toward him, but it was like fighting a river. Bodies pressed against her from all sides. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't see.

When she finally broke free, she found him on the ground.

**He wasn't moving.**

Trampled. Crushed under the feet of people who were just trying to survive. People who probably didn't even know they'd killed a child.

Gabi knelt beside him. She screamed his name. She shook him.

He didn't respond.

Above her, the Attack Titan moved through the city, demolishing buildings with casual swings of its fist. Survey Corps soldiers engaged Marleyan forces in pitched battle. Cannon fire and blade clashes and the screams of the dying filled the air.

And Gabi Braun, thirteen years old, knelt in the middle of it all, holding her friend's body, and something inside her broke.

**She had believed the Eldians of Paradis were devils.**

**Now she knew it for certain.**

## The Mirror

Here's what makes Declaration of War so devastating:

**It's the same scene.**

Different city. Different victims. Different perpetrator.

But the same chaos. The same crush of panicked bodies. The same families torn apart. The same children watching their world end. The same screams, the same blood, the same indiscriminate destruction.

In Shiganshina, Reiner and Bertholdt emerged from the crowd as Titans and destroyed everything.

In Liberio, Eren emerges from a building as a Titan and destroys everything.

In Shiganshina, Eren watched helplessly as his mother was eaten.

In Liberio, children watch helplessly as their friends are trampled.

**The cycle completes itself.**

Eren said it himself, in that basement, before the transformation: "I'm the same as you."

He wasn't speaking metaphorically. He was stating a fact. He had become the thing he hated most. He had done to Marley what Marley did to Paradis. He had turned ordinary people's ordinary days into nightmares they would never wake from.

Not because he was evil. Not because he enjoyed it. But because he believed it was necessary.

**Just like Reiner believed.**

## The Experience of Apocalypse

Let's be present in both moments simultaneously.

**In Shiganshina:**
- The merchant runs, his cart forgotten
- The soldier dies in the first wave
- Carla begs her son to leave her
- A mother loses her daughter's hand forever
- An old man is trampled under a hundred feet
- The walls, eternal and unchanging, have holes in them

**In Liberio:**
- The diplomat runs, his dignity forgotten
- The Marleyan soldier dies in the first wave
- Udo falls, his glasses cracking
- Gabi loses Udo's hand forever
- A child is trampled under a hundred feet
- The sky, clear and festive, fills with lightning

The same horror. The same incomprehension. The same sudden transformation of "normal" into "impossible."

**This is what Attack on Titan is really about.**

Not which side is right. Not who the good guys are. But this—this experience of having your world ripped apart by forces you can't understand, can't fight, can't negotiate with.

The people of Shiganshina didn't understand why the Titans attacked. The people of Liberio didn't understand why the Eldians attacked. Both groups were just living their lives. Both groups were guilty only of being born on the wrong side of a conflict they didn't start.

**Both groups died screaming.**

## What It Means

When we watch Declaration of War—when we see Eren emerge from that building and crush Willy Tybur—we're supposed to feel conflicted.

Part of us cheers. We've watched Marley oppress Eldians for a season now. We've seen the internment zones, the armbands, the propaganda. We've watched Reiner break down from guilt. We know Marley sent child soldiers to destroy Eren's home, kill his mother, eat his friends.

**Revenge feels righteous.**

But Attack on Titan refuses to let us stay in that feeling.

It shows us Udo trampled on the ground.
It shows us Gabi's face as her world collapses.
It shows us the Marleyan civilians—not soldiers, not oppressors, just people—running for their lives.

And it reminds us: **This is what Eren looked like in Episode 1.**

A child, watching monsters destroy everything, unable to understand why.

The cycle of violence doesn't care about justice. It doesn't care about who started it. It just keeps turning, creating new Erens, new Gabis, new children who will grow up with hatred in their hearts and the power to act on it.

**Year 845: Shiganshina falls. A boy vows revenge.**
**Year 854: Liberio falls. A girl vows revenge.**

**Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. Not through violence.**

## The Final Parallel

Both attacks share something else—something the survivors remember forever:

**The moment before.**

Every survivor of Shiganshina remembers what they were doing when the Colossal Titan appeared. The mundane details become sacred: "I was eating lunch." "I was arguing with my brother." "I was thinking about nothing at all."

Every survivor of Liberio remembers what they were doing when the Attack Titan emerged. "I was listening to the speech." "I was holding my friend's hand." "I was watching the lanterns."

These moments become dividing lines. Before and After. The last second of normalcy, preserved in memory like an insect in amber.

**The world changed twice.**

Once when the walls fell.
Once when the island struck back.

And both times, for the people living through it, the experience was identical:

One moment, life.
The next moment, chaos.
And nothing ever the same again.

***

### The Two Attacks Compared:

| Element | Fall of Wall Maria (845) | Declaration of War (854) |
|---------|-------------------------|-------------------------|
| **Location** | Shiganshina, Paradis | Liberio, Marley |
| **Perpetrators** | Reiner & Bertholdt | Eren & Survey Corps |
| **Initial breach** | Colossal Titan kicks wall | Attack Titan emerges from building |
| **Secondary attac