Is it just a weird anomaly?
Summary:
- Only a couple of titans in the series could speak.
- Hajime Isayama mentions that titans aren’t supposed to speak.
- This ability was a weird glitch in titans.
- There are also some fan theories connected with speaking titans.
Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin) features a wide variety of titans, but if we wanted to divide them into certain categories, we’d see that there are just two of them: Pure Titans and Titan Shifters.
All the titans differ in some way or another, but most of them have similar features: they’re huge, they have weird appearances, they’re much stronger than humans and they can’t speak. At least, most of them.
Speaking Titans in the Series
In one of the Attack on Titan OVAs, Ilse's Notebook, there’s a Survey Corps member, Ilse, who encounters a Pure Titan. The titan surprises her with its ability to speak, since it was the first time someone had encountered such a titan.
Season 2 gives us another example of a speaking Pure Titan. When Connie came back to his village, there was a titan lying on top of what used to be his family house. The titan spoke to Connie and welcomed him home.
As it was revealed later, it was Connie’s mother who had been turned into a titan due to Zeke’s actions. And that was the last time we saw a Pure Titan speak in the series.
Just a “Glitch”?
Hajime Isayama, the author of Attack on Titan, discussed speaking titans in one of his Crunchyroll interviews. He thought it would be a great idea for the plot to have a couple of titans speak.
They’re not intended to be able to speak, but Isayama thought of this ability as a peculiar glitch that happened to the titans. Something like a device malfunction.
Fans also have their theories about that. We know that all titans used to be people before, but their humanity was forcibly taken from them. So could it be that the speaking was just the way of their humanity fighting back and trying to resurface?
The titan Ilse encountered didn’t want to kill the girl, it felt like it was fighting the urge to hurt her, but it couldn’t do anything with the instincts. That’s why the humanity theory would fit perfectly into the narrative of Attack on Titan.
Beast Titan
However, Pure Titans were not the only ones who could speak. Although Titan Shifters remained human and kept their minds even after transforming, only one of them could speak, and that was the Beast Titan, inherited by Zeke.
Isayama doesn’t explain how and why this Titan Shifter could speak, but there’s a theory that it might have something to do with Zeke’s royal blood. However, we didn’t see another royal-blood Shifter, Frieda, speak, so we can’t be certain that it goes for all such titans.
Source: Crunchyroll.com