My problem with "Marley treats Eldians better than the rest of the world."
The Eldians vs. the rest of the world dynamic in AOT has always seemed less believable to me than a lot of people are willing to admit.
The Titan curse really does prevent any direct equivalence with real-world racism. Eldians are not simply a minority that had monstrous traits invented about them. They belong to a population that can literally be turned into Titans. There is, therefore, a material threat involved that has no direct equivalent in our world.
The problem is that this does not automatically make any level of hatred plausible.
The existence of worldwide racism against Eldians makes sense. What makes less sense is its intensity, its uniformity, and especially the idea that Eldians would be treated even worse outside Marley.
Udo explicitly states that Eldians have it worse in other countries than they do in Marley. But Marley is probably the country with the strongest historical conditions for developing the most extreme anti-Eldian sentiment possible.
The Marleyan state built its legitimacy around the defeat of the old Eldian Empire, segregated Eldians into internment zones, reduced them to second-class citizens, created an entire ideological system based on inherited guilt, and at the same time continued using those same people as weapons.
After Eldia, Marley also became the major imperial power of recent history.
If there is any place where it would make sense for hatred of Eldians to become structural, survive across generations, and become part of the national identity itself, that place is Marley.
The rest of the world also has contemporary reasons to hate Eldians. During the last century, Marley continued using them as weapons of war. For someone from a country invaded by Marley, the first Eldian they ever saw could literally have been a Titan destroying their city.
The disappearance of the Eldian Empire did not mean the disappearance of the Titans.
But that should produce enormous differences between societies, not an almost homogeneous international hostility.
Marley is the one turning Eldians into Titans and unleashing them against other peoples. Marley controls the Warriors, uses Eldians in its military, and built its hegemony precisely on that power. Foreign populations could obviously come to hate the weapon being used against them as well, but there is still a huge leap from that to practically every place in the world being worse for Eldians than Marley itself.
There is also no reason to assume that every country had exactly the same historical relationship with Eldia.
The Eldian Empire existed for centuries and dominated large parts of the world, but it was not a politically static mass for almost two thousand years. Territories were conquered, lost, and contested, and the Great Titan War itself happened during a period of internal conflict and disintegration before Karl Fritz withdrew to Paradis.
Different regions probably stopped being under direct Eldian influence at different points in history. For Marley, the fall of Eldia happened around a hundred years ago and is directly tied to the birth of its current political order. For other peoples, their last concrete experience of Eldian rule could have happened much earlier.
Even if everyone had been freed at exactly the same time, different societies would still preserve that memory in different ways.
Historical memory survives across generations, but its emotional intensity does not remain frozen in time. Propaganda, education, religion, nationalism, and institutions can keep old hatred alive, but that hatred has to be continuously reproduced.
There is also desensitization.
Constant hatred takes energy. Obsession takes energy. People have immediate problems, local conflicts, family, work, hunger, religion, political disputes, recent wars. Crimes committed against their ancestors can remain important without an entire population staying emotionally mobilized as if they had personally witnessed those crimes themselves.
At certain points, the world's hatred of Eldians in AOT feels almost metaphysical. Entire generations, across completely different societies, seem emotionally organized around hatred of a single group.
The problem becomes even more obvious after the timeskip.
A genuinely large world should have countries that hate Eldians for different reasons, countries that simply tolerate them, regions where they have been partially assimilated, states that expelled them, others that use them militarily, societies where the Eldian question has lost importance, and places where the historical trauma remains extremely alive.
That would give the outside world a history of its own.
Instead, AOT compresses almost everything into a very convenient idea: outside Paradis, practically everyone hates Eldians, and many places apparently treat them even worse than Marley.
The Titan threat also does not fully explain this level of dehumanization.
The fear is justified, but Titan power was not a completely incomprehensible force to these societies. Eldians do not spontaneously transform in the middle of the street. Pure Titans normally have to be created through spinal fluid. The Nine are specific individuals. The very fact that Marley can keep enormous Eldian populations inside internment zones shows that an ordinary Eldian is not a bomb waiting to randomly explode.
There is a huge difference between believing that a particular group can be turned into a weapon and regarding every individual member of that group as a monster who deserves to be exterminated.
Societies can cross that distance through propaganda, fear, and dehumanization. The problem is that AOT develops that process very well inside Marley while barely developing anything equivalent in the rest of the world.
The relationship between Ymir, the Paths, the Founder, and the Hallucigenia still leaves some things deliberately ambiguous, but the Titan power known to the world has observable rules and limitations. It operates through the Subjects of Ymir, the Paths, the Nine Titans, and especially the Founder. It is not simply a random force whose manifestations nobody understands.
In the end, I think this is one of those parts where AOT's thematic needs start overriding its worldbuilding.
The story needed Paradis to reach the other side of the sea and discover a world that feared them. It needed Paradis itself to become an international problem with no simple solution. That is necessary for practically everything that comes afterward.
But in order to create that deadlock, Isayama made the outside world too uniform.
Hatred of Eldians is plausible. Very plausible, actually. Centuries of Eldian imperialism, historical memory, propaganda, and especially Marley's recent use of Eldians as weapons provide more than enough reasons.
The problem is that almost all of these societies seem to have reached such similar levels of dehumanization, with so few exceptions, and several of them apparently became even worse than the very state whose modern identity was born directly out of its conflict with Eldia.
The question was never why the world would hate Eldians.
There are more than enough reasons.
The question is why almost the entire world hates them this much, and in such similar ways.
And AOT simply did not develop the outside world enough to make that completely convincing.