Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-25322628-20160113011224/@comment-26932251-20160113224816

The thing is, the story keeps framing things in terms of 'humanity' but I'm gonna go there and question why it is that it's only one race, not all of humanity, but just one particular, to quote grandpa Ackerman, "blood-line" that is inside of the walls. There's two possible explanations I can see. One is that it's just a wild coincidence that the humans inside of the walls, nearly all of them, just so happen to have the genetic pridisposition to be affected by the memory manipulation, but I think the coincidence is just too perfect...

The other, more likely possibility, is that all of the people appear to be of a similar ethnic background precisely because their demographic is being imprisoned. Note that Reiner refers to the people within the wall as an 'evil race' and 'defiled race' and he could be referring to the human race but it just seems like too much of a stretch that it's only, apparently Europeans, who are the only remnants of the human race and Reiner would, referring to them, refer to them as the human race.

Furthermore, notice how the titans are all pale-skinned and look like they could've been derived from ethnic european humans and all of the homelanders also appear to be of European descent (though Zeke and Grisha appear to be of slightly different ethnicity than the more germanic ethnicity apparently represented in the walls).

Ever notice how there aren't any people of darker skin tone or, except for Mikasa, of any ethnicity elsewhere in the world? Nobody with a background from East Asia, Africa, Central or South America either among the homelanders or the titans? Presumably, if there was a titan apocalypse, which seems more and more in doubt now as time goes on, there would be some darker skinned dumb dumbs at least, right? But that doesn't appear to be the case.

My hypothesis, some number of European descended humans exist in the walls as a prison, some other european descended shifters are kind of like the last line of defense of this prison, and so long as the prison remains, it is their curse to guard it. Meanwhile, the rest of the people of the world have washed their hands of the matter and have moved on, although they haven't completely forgotten about them because they ship the homelanders coffee, which could not be grown anywhere in the climate depicted in the world within the walls.