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In the old days of empire, Eldians gorged themselves on fish.
Their ancestral homeland was landlocked, admittedly, but the empire exploded beyond that frontier almost immediately. Their talents in riverine fishing were supplemented by the lacustrine and oceanic fishing talents of the many peoples they subjugated.
The table of the imperial family was typically filled with the largest fish that could be found in the entire empire, specimens that were to normal fish as Titans were to average men. As the empire expanded, fish of that caliber were served on the tables of viceroys and governors, affluent men almost always of Eldian blood.
(All too swiftly, the empire was too large for the finest fish to go to the capital and royalty alone. They'd rot before they arrived, even when some Titans were used as porters for great loads of living fish. The capital moved many times, but it usually stayed on rivers or the coast – for reasons of logistics. The fish were a happy, prestigious side benefit.)
Eldia had initial difficulties at sea. Titans could wade in shallow water, where they terrorized ships, but in deeper water, they struggled. A Titan could float, sure, but if they were too deformed, they simply couldn't swim. Many an enemy warship had been brought to the bottom by a Titan thrashing about like a dying man, but this was no navy. As Eldia's frontiers expanded and more of her commerce flowed across the sea, she grew anxious to ensure that her lifelines weren't dependent on mercurial, disloyal captains picked from subjugated peoples.
And so, Eldia made a navy, and furthermore, she made her people fish. What's the connection, you might reasonably ask? Fishery was quickly seen as a nursery for sailors and officers, a place where Eldia's naval tradition could grow strong. Special tax breaks on fishing done by Eldian crews provided sufficient motive, and so the seed for the navy was planted.
Despite the issues Titans faced at sea, they proved tremendously useful in supporting Eldian maritime ambitions. They piled up boulders for harbors and breakwaters, dug canals and drydocks, portaged Eldian ships through every imaginable clime, excavated tremendous salt-pans to sate an imperial appetite for salt, and carried cargoes further inland once ships could go no further. Under a ruler – a Founding titan – with the mind to juggle it all, it was a magnificent feat of logistics that would be unrivalled until railroads. Railroads that were patronized by Marley specifically to make up for the loss of mindless Titans as brute labor.
Titanic labor also saw the creation of tremendous ponds for fish farming in the periphery of imperial estates and manor houses, although they were never too close. Raising carp for eating was all well and good, but the health consequences of tremendous strings of large, still-water lakes were better left to the hoi polloi.
When Eldian soldiery marched to do those jobs that Titans couldn't, they marched on fish. Stockfish from the furthest, coldest reaches of the empire, and then salted herring and cod collected by increasingly adventurous fishermen sailing further and further to sea to avoid depleted stocks. Of course, just because the Fritz family and the common man were eating fish from the sea did not mean that the meals were in any way comparable: while royalty savored fresh fish slathered in sauces, the urban poor and soldiers ate dessicated sticks that had to be soaked in water to be even somewhat palatable.
When it came to fishing, the people of the walls had to practice careful husbandry just as they did in almost every other part of their lives. Land was limited. Game was limited. Water was limited. Were there acres of savage wilderness inside the Walls? Yes. Did that mean you could treat it like it was infinite? No.
Even when the fish flowed upstream from beyond the walls to spawn, fishermen had to control themselves. It was easy to imagine that there was infinite bounty beyond the Walls, sufficient for everything they would ever need, but when the fish had their run, they came back to where they were born. Catch all the fish, and none would ever return. Simple logic.
There had always been a touch of the pastoral to Paradis, even before the royal retreat to the isle and annihilation of the people's memories. She had commerce ports, certainly, but her hinterlands remained rough and largely unsettled, hosting herders and subsistence farmers who lived far from the worst abuses of the Eldian government. When the war tore the Empire apart, Paradis remained staunchly royalist and reactionary in its own stodgy, parochial way.
Perhaps their hospitality was tried – if not pushed to the breaking point – by the sudden arrival of the King and his swarms of refugees, but that didn't matter. The King had resolved to remake Paradis into a hospice for the Empire, and any objections were swiftly annihilated by the power of the Founding Titan.
Those first years in Paradis were hungry ones. The herds and farmlands of the island weren't sufficient for the sudden flood of hungry mouths, especially when the Walls separated the people from well-developed farms near the coast and destroyed the possibility of sea fishing to supplement their diets. There were times when the King had to exercise his power to stop food riots from spiraling out of control or to prevent the people from eating their herds out of existence.
Once the people of the Walls had their feet back under them, they reverted to something like Eldia's past, just without Titans doing labor. In some portions of Paradis, it was still possible to pay one's taxes in eels, although whether it was possible to get that many eels that far inland was another matter. (That law, along with many other vestiges of the byzantine Eldian jurisprudence, would remain until reforms were put in place by Her Majesty Historia's government.)
Except on the shores of the largest lakes inside the Walls, few people made their living by fishing full time, but that was a rarity even before the retreat inside the Walls. People tended to hop between farming and fishing, trying to eke out as much of a living as the laws and the land allowed them to.
(Large fish, typically farm-raised in reservoirs formed by dams, would gain a prestige to rival meat, especially when Maria fell and miles of spawning grounds became completely inaccessible. Fish as the soldier's food was no longer a thing, barring the occasional case of Scouts attempting to live off the land.)
More could be written on the living people made for themselves inside the Walls: the great mining complexes that allowed them to survive without salt pans, the government's struggle against poaching, and the struggle between state-enforced technological stagnation and genuinely necessary agricultural advancements, but for now we turn outward, to the land beyond the Walls.
The world dared not breach the Walls, for fear of the Rumbling, and that, paired with the Marleyan policy of turning Eldian dissidents into Titans, essentially ruined the prospect of settlement on Paradis by any outside power. Even if a means to defeat the Titans lurking outside the Walls could be contrived, pushing too far inland would inevitably lead to confrontation, and, possibly, the end of days.
Marley sent out frequent patrols to ensure that no one was attempting to sneak onto the island, but as these sailors made the same tiresome loop around the island again and again, they noticed something: the waters teemed with fish, so numerous that the water looked like a coffer filled with silver. The great rivers of Paradis emptied into the sea, pouring nutrients into some of the largest shallows in the world… and not a man was there to fish them. It was a shame.
The booming population of Marley's industrial centers was hungry, and the people of Paradis weren't using it… and so fishing fleets descended upon the coast in such awful numbers one might just think an invasion was happening. A few straggling Titans were even lured to the coasts by the sudden mass of humanity offshore – this caused quite a panic, at least before Marleyan torpedo boat destroyers pounded those Titans out of existence with their guns.
Unfathomable numbers of herring and cod were caught and canned in those days, and just as Eldia once did, Marley fed her urban poor and her armies with the incredible bounty of the sea. Temporary harbors and settlements were fish processing were occasionally founded on the shore, but they were perennial, always one Titan away from complete abandonment.
(All the fishing off the coast of Paradis gave Marley a very convenient excuse when they wished to launch covert operations into the heart of Paradis. The Eldians that Zeke used to hem the Survey Corp in at the Battle of Shiganshina were brought over as a 'fishing crew'.)
The Battle of Shiganshina marked the end of Marleyan fishing off the coast of Paradis, and naval activity around the island reverted to Marleyan patrols (and the occasional blockade runner). Even stories of these Marleyan patrol boats being caught by Eldian Shifters weren't sufficient to scare away the boldest of the Marleyan fishermen – there were only two enemy Shifters, right? That seemed like an acceptable risk, especially when the banks off of Paradis remained relatively undepleted while fisheries all around the world were being exhausted by the insatiable demand of armies on the move.
Fortunately for the fish of the world, demand for seafood was about to drop suddenly. It helped when eighty percent of consumers died.
The Rumbling was indescribable terror for the people of the world, but for the fish… it was a welcome reprieve.