Board Thread:Manga/@comment-27321453-20191008222936/@comment-27125793-20191009120746

TKGriffiths wrote: Marco1995mega wrote: Initially, like most I imagine, I believed that when she gained the power of the Titans, she could exert her powers on all Eldians due to no other connection than ethnicity, which, honestly, I found a little weird. However, this chapter pretty much shows that Ymir could only exercise that power on herself or her blood, as we saw when the coordinate first appeared with three protruding branches after her daughters ate her corpse. All Subjects of Ymir are related to her by blood, so why does the royal family specifically have so much power over her? Easy. It gets down to two things. I think you're misinterpreting the branches of the thing in Ymir's world. My impression is it doesn't represent Ymir's family tree, but the lineage of titan inheritence. We didn't see it until her daughters had already eaten her. I think before that it would have been just a single column. All three of her daughters probably injested bits of her spinal fluid, which is the basis for Titan abilities. It is likely that, from that point forward, the ability to become Titans became genetic, and the descendants of the three daughters (and thus, Ymir) all had the capacity for Titan powers. Of course, Titan powers are still acquired via spinal fluid, but what singles out Subjects of Ymir is that they all have the biological predisposition to be able to acquire them. A Marleyan can drink Titan spinal fluid but won't transform, because he doesn't have the capacity for it embedded in his DNA. He's not Ymir's descendant.

There have been several other theories about this, but I still maintain that all Subjects of Ymir are genetically related to her, and the blood doesn't 'thin out' or anything. It's about status. Ymir acknowledges the name Fritz, she acknowledges that they're a continuation of her master, the First King, and thus, acknowledges their authority and slaves away for them. Of course, she serves other Subjects, though to a more limited capacity, giving them Titan forms if injected with Titan spinal fluid. She probably believes that, if one of her subjects has found themselves with Titan fluid in their bodies, they want to become a Titan. Shifters have more power over her, getting their injuries healed, and being able to transform whenever they want to. Their will is also more easily interpreted by her, since Reiner didn't heal when he was suicidal, and so she heeded his wishes.

The reason why only the royal family can use the Founder is because Ymir acknowledges only them as being allowed to have that ultimate power. It's pretty much proven in this chapter, that it's dependant on Ymir's will. When Eren convinces her to give him the power, he, presumably (highly likely), got all the powers of the Founder, because Ymir decided he will have them. And he wasn't royal family or anything. Zeke initially had power over her because, while he had the Yeager name, he was still a descendant of the royal family, something he was aware of and acknowledged, and Ymir could read it via the Paths.

Royalty isn't a blood thing, it's a status thing.

And yet, when Ymir decided not to go through with his orders, she didn't. It wasn't something pre-programmed like a machine.