‘Attack on Titan’: Did Annie Leonhart age while inside the crystal?

Warning: Spoilers for Season 1 and 4 of Attack on Titan

There are many mysteries to unpick in Attack on Titan. They keep on coming right until the end of the series, and even beyond that you may still have question marks lingering in your brain.

For the longest time in the series’ run, specifically after the first season’s finale, we couldn’t help but wonder: What’s going on with Annie Leonhart? Is she just taking a really long nap inside that crystal? Is she ever coming back as a key player in the larger narrative?

Those answers eventually came – though it took years if you began keeping up with Attack on Titan early on – but even then some trivial but intriguing questions remain.

Wake me up before you go-go commit global genocide

About 40 episodes after the season 1 finale we finally see Annie again. And, go figure, she’s still stuck inside that God-forsaken crystal. Four years later in the series’ timeline, she’s still down in some basement without contributing in any active way to the story. Not discounting, of course, how Hitch and Armin kept paying her visits to monologue about life, without even knowing whether the Female Titan’s host could hear them at all.

Annie is broken out of the crystal at the start of the end of the world, or episode 81 overall, titled “Thaw”. This refers not only to the crumbling of every Titan’s hardening material but also to the abrupt thawing of the Female Titan‘s ice-like crystal. Soon after, the answer as to whether she was fully asleep or conscious while encased gets answered: she was in a sort of semi-conscious coma in which she could hear the things Armin and Hitch spoke to her about without being able to react in any way.

What Annie went through was something akin to cryosleep, a trope that has long been explored in science fiction but never successfully executed on real-life humans, if such a procedure also allowed her to retain some consciousness during her state of comatose. Like in cryosleep, her body did not physically change, hence, she did not physically grow older. As one fan noted on Reddit: “Annie didn’t age at all because when she got out of the crystal she was way shorter than Hitch, and before the time skip they were at a similar height.”

However, that doesn’t mean she found a loophole in the curse of Ymir. It stands to logic that, if things had run their course without Eren changing everything for everyone, Annie, like the other hosts of the Nine Titans, would’ve died after the 13-year time limit.