Quote Originally Posted by MFauli View Post
Could the difference between royal and non-royal Eldians be that royals are direct descendants of Ymirs, while non-royals are Eldians who ate Ymirs flesh?

I can't think of any other meaningful difference. Like, maybe the king had children with various women, and he ordered all of them to eat Ymir's corpse, whether they were her own offspring or not.
From the looks of the family images only the daughters ate the flesh and the translation implies the continued... incestual cannibalism? The issue there is that those are daughters so barring some kind of Titan interbreeding, it couldn't exactly be kept in the family.
Unless maybe it's implying that someone would need to have the blood of all three daughters to be a "Royal" and the rest are branch family members. So Royal would only reappear a number of generations later. Or it could simply be you need to have a certain purity of blood and not have gone through too many outsiders.
Or maybe there's just an essence of Ymir that travels down one path, in which case her appearance and the "seed" situation basically mirroring Historia's has giant significance. Ymir herself may have just reappeared and is being given a chance to go a different way.