Board Thread:Manga/@comment-34196931-20200608155101/@comment-2140232-20200609154315

RuneLai wrote: Razzylada wrote:

- Why would Annie still thinks she still might see her father in Liberio ? It is already destroyed ! It's not yet. Hange says "Even if we stopped Eren using the best methods possible, it would already be too late for Liberio." Since she uses "would," this means at the point she's saying it, Liberio still exists. It won't exist for much longer given the half of a day delay Kiyomi was talking about, but judging from Hange's reaction the original plan did not account for that. They expected to get out in time.

Notably, Annie is not around to hear this conversation, and Mikasa doesn't exactly elaborate about the change on plans, so Annie has no idea what's going on other than she needs to provide cover. It's reasonable for her to still think about going back to Liberio and finding her dad.

Anyway, my thoughts on the chapter:

I really don't like Isayama's sense of geographic scale. As in, I don't think he has any. Hange says the Titans will cover 600km in the half day it would take the engineers to prep the plane. Being generous and assuming the engineers only talking about waking hours, let's give the Titans a walking speed of 100km/hr (62 mph for American folks).

The state of California is about 1300km (or 800 miles) long. This is going north to south. So the Wall Titans could cover the entire state in a little over half a day. We can be generous and assume that there are enough Titans that they can stand shoulder to shoulder and cover the state west-east as they march from the southern border to the north. This means we have a line of Titans 400km (250 mi) wide. That's a long line of Titans!

However California is not the entire west coast of the North American continent. There's another 1100km (700 miles) to get to Canada. So that's a full day just to get from Mexico to Canada and we're only covering the United States. If we keep the 400km wide line of Titans, and assuming repositioning them takes no additional time, it would take them roughly ten sweeps going north to south, or ten full days, to wipe out just the United States (ignoring Alaska and Hawaii).

In a nutshell, Marley has to be on a small continent, roughly the size of Australia for them to be flattened in four days. It would still be a tragedy, but most of the world's population would still be intact. And I don't think this is the scale Isayama is picturing.

Ever since Hange started predicting Titan arrival times last chapter I can't help feeling that Isayama is playing fast and lose with time and distance because he actually doesn't have a good concept of how far away or how big anything is, which is why it keeps tripping my BS-detector. I agree with you that Isayama has no sense of geographic distances. After all, the world of AoT is identical to ours but backwards (our north is their south, and viceversa), with Madagascar being the island of Paradis.

However, Madagascar has an extension of about 587,000 square kilometers and the territory within the walls (based on the distances between the Walls (the Maria Wall is about 100 km from the Rose Wall, the Rose Wall is about 130 km from the Sina Wall, and the Sina Wall has a radius of 250 km), and knowing that the Walls are not perfect circles), at a minimum, the territory within the Maria wall must exceed 700,000 square kilometers.

And we still have the distance between the Maria Wall and the coast, which must be similar to the 2 thirds of the distance between the Maria and Rose Walls, at a minimum, because otherwise, some expedition outside the Walls would have already discovered the sea before the chapter 90.