The manga series Attack on Titan has blown fans away with its intricate storytelling, phenomenal character development, and non-stop action scenes, though the original idea for the series was much more simplistic especially in the explanation as to how Titans were created. In the prototype story that would later evolve into the Attack on Titan fans know and love today, the Titans were created by a cult who mutated humans into the blood-thirsty giants, all with the goal of protecting the environment. While the main idea of humans becoming Titans remained, the circumstances were very different between the original idea and the manga series.
Attack on Titan by Hajime Isayama was molded from the protoype’s original outline and deepened the lore of the Titans’ creation. Titans were originally created by a divine intervention of sorts that allowed nine chosen Eldians to wield the power of Titans to save their race. Stemming from the Titans’ re-written origins, the Eldians’ Nazi-reminiscent enemies used the power of turning humans into Titans against the Eldians, and transformed many of them into mindless, murderous giants who roam the Earth feasting on human flesh. The forced transformations were made possible by extracting the spinal fluid from a preexisting Titan and injecting it into an Eldian, with the original nine Titans brought to life through divine power.
In the prototype one-shot now named Attack on Titan Chapter 0, the story opens with an explanation of the alternate world that exists within the Attack on Titan universe. Years ago, religious and scientific minds alike joined forces into something of a cult, as the Earth faced imminent destruction by way of humanity’s indifference to the climate crisis. Cult leaders came to the conclusion that the only solution to saving the world would be to initiate the ‘Mankind Destruction-Operation’. The key to carrying out the operation was to turn some humans into Titans and whether everything went as planned or went terribly wrong, most of humanity was wiped out as a result with the remainder of the population surviving in a walled off city in the forest.
Many key elements from the prototype one-shot made their way into the canonical storyline. The specifics of how the Titans were created and the inclusion of an entire society outside of the Walls were later added, but the meat of the story was present in the original idea, including a few main characters. Two of Attack on Titans’ main characters are Eren Jaeger and Levi Ackerman, and the creator of the series must have had them in his mind from the start because both characters were seemingly present within one character in the original manga. Murakumo was the main character in the one-shot, a soldier who very much acted like Levi both in personality and Titan-killing ability. But then, when Murakumo was up against a wall (as in half of his body had been eaten by a Titan) he transformed into a Titan that looked almost exactly like Eren in his Titan form.
While some differences are clearly present, Attack on Titan Chapter 0 laid the groundwork for the hit series that would be to come. Both Eren and Levi were explored within the character Murakumo who blossomed into the iconic Titan-killing protagonists fans can’t get enough of. Similarly to the character expansion, the origins of the Titans grew from the insane environmental solution by an extremist cult to a divine gift stolen by a fascist government to be used in systematic genocide. Given the expansions in the story, it is clear that the Attack on Titan prototype changed quite a bit from its original idea, including the fact that Titans were originally created by a cult.