Board Thread:Manga/@comment-37224578-20190720011315

So I was thinking, what if The Owl had access to more than one survivor of the royal family?

First, that would double his potential to strike back against Marley, but what would be the most effective way to use these chess pieces? One option would be to keep them together and rally the restorationests around a pure royal line. But the Owl was running a resistance group and that isn't how a successful resistance group should opperate. Grant it, the success of The Owl is debatable, but the common sense move would be to split up all members of the royal family on Marley so it would be harder for the government to catch them all.

That is where Annie comes in. I am sure we have all kept her in the back of our minds, especially since Armin has been having conversations with her crystalized self, bringing her back into the narative. One of the most notable characteristics of Annie's Female Titan is its ability to draw massive numbers of titans to it from long distances, using its scream. If you remember the battle for Tross district, Eren was roaring like a T-rex the whole time and, although titans in the immediate area would attack him, he did not have anywhere near the effect of Annie's screem, which drew titans from the edge of the woods who were previously targetting humans. You could even argue that Annie's screem is more powerful than Zeke's screem, since it seems to have power over titans which were not created with her spinal fluid, but again, debatable.

So incase you didn't guess, I am suggesting that, like Zeke, Anne is a product of the Owls restorationest movement. From our perspective, the flashback scene with her father has always seemed very self explanetory. Given what she was going to become, and going to be asked to do, that was a very understandable reaction from any parent in our world. But it wasn't the reaction of a brainwashed Eldian slave. I think that Annie and her father were part of a seporate cell of the restorationest movement which was not discovered. Dispite not being discovered, once zeke betrayed the restorationests and the Owl went missing, Annie's father couldn't complete the plan on his own, but Annie was already in the Warrior program, so there was no pulling out. That would add a lot more context to that conversation and would largely explain why she was so distant from her supposed allies in the Warrior unit.

One last piece of food for thought. The ring given to Annie by her father is escentially a piece of spy equipment for a titan shifter. That suggests a certain psychology and forthought on her fathers part. 