Attack on Titan - The Fall of Shiganshina - On Societal Cataclysms

Shingeki no Kyojin, most commonly known to viewers and readers as Attack on Titan, rose to worldwide popularity in 2013, and since then, it has only continued to become more notorious among fans of Japanese media. Like the ever popular Neon Genesis Evangelion, this series is well-known for asking more questions than it answers.

The main plot is divided into major events or battles taking place across just under ten years, with everything relating to the past or future being shrouded in mystery. Viewers of the anime tuned in just before the "Fall of Shiganshina," where a Collossal Titan (a giant humanoid over 200 feet tall), breaks into Wall Maria, allowing much smaller titans (roughly forty feet high) to enter with apparently one goal: the consumption and eradication of humans.

From the onset, we as spectators have plenty of questions. In fact, one of the greatest mysteries has to do with the title of the first anime episode: "To You, in 2000 Years." Nobody really knows why the year 2842 might be significant and nothing about the series seems to give it away. Notice how we said the year was 842, but what Calendar are we really going by?

According to series lore, the last great titan attack would have been in 742, and spectators have guessed that this series must be centuries After the End. While this could be an After the End series of events, there are real-life analogues which seem to contradict the theory.

1. The Absence of Electricity - Electrical Energy, known as Electricity, has been around for 4.8 billion years. Humans simply discovered its application, and such knowledge will certainly remain after a post-apocalyptic scenario. For example, if the American power grid were to go down from end to end, it could potentially be rebuilt in little over a year. Consider the fact that amateur electrochemical cells can be made by an individual in a matter of minutes, and that low-voltage electrical cells have been around since antiquity, and there is no excuse for Shiganshina to not have electricity after 800 years.
2. Natural Gas as a Primary Energy Source - A little known fact is that natural gas predates coal. While coal does reach back to 100 BC, natural gas has its roots in centuries prior. As the series progresses, we see natural gas in a variety of applications, from lighting to omnidirectional-gear propulsion. In all honesty, coal didn't truly peak until the Industrial Revolution, in the nineteenth century.
3. The Architecture - Buildings in-series are very reminiscent of 12th century Eurasia. They lack many of the defining features of post-16th century Europe (such as styles seen in the 19th-century Romantic Era, for example). 

The problem here is that so many background elements reflect the Crusades, a time in history in which all of these things can be explained quite easily. You could argue that the crusades happened 400 years after the plot of the story... but only if you're going by the Justinian/Gregorian Calendar.

If we look at a different calendar, such as the Armenian Calendar, the year 842 is actually the same as 1393 in the Justinian/Gregorian Calendar. This places us almost perfectly where we need to be. Additionally, Armenia was a major player in the Crusades, the architecture matches up, and their greatest threat was that of the Mongol Empire, who were considered to be a titan-like force, if you think deeply enough about what events transpired in that empire.

If we look at Attack on Titan as an Alternate Timeline, rather than an After the End plot, we get a series which is much like Full Metal Alchemist, and all sorts of new questions open themselves up. Where then, and when, did society take a serious hiccup? Furthermore, how would the changes in technological applications, or sociocultural applications for that matter, impact Armenian year 1463 (our 2014)?

Perhaps it would help us to create a more tangible model of the world Attack on Titan takes place in. Using the same resources and materials as those living in that walled city-state, under a threat similar to the overwhelming predators we see in the series, could we make predictions 25 years into the future of that world? 100 years? 500 years? Maybe even... 2000?