Ackerman

Gold-tinted eyes and a trace of stubble on the chin give Mikasa's father a warm, rustic look. His blond hair is worn short, his age reads as the middle thirties, and plain clothing marks him as a man of ordinary means.

An easy humor runs through him despite a laborer's life. When his young daughter asks how babies are made, he dodges with a joke, claiming not to know and telling her to put the question to Dr. Yeager on his next visit. Nothing in his cheerful manner resembles the cold intensity of awakened Ackermans, and the ease with which he is killed suggests the clan's dormant power never surfaced in him.

Persecution shapes his entire life. The Ackerman bloodline is hounded inside the cities, and a failed family business appears to have pushed the household into poverty, so he raises his family in a forest near Shiganshina District, feeding them by hunting and tending a garden. His wife, an Asian woman whose Azumabito relatives were likewise denied a place in the cities, met him as a fellow outcast driven into the mountains, and the two married there. He never learns why his surname draws discrimination, since the Ackermans are not a separate race the way his wife's people are.

While the family waits for Dr. Grisha Yeager's routine visit, human traffickers arrive intending to sell his wife and daughter, the last Asians, on the black market. A single knife thrust at his doorway kills him before he can grasp what is happening. Grisha and young Eren discover the scene afterward, the doctor judging that the couple has been dead for hours. Years later, Levi's questions about Kenny Ackerman prompt Mikasa to recount her parents' story to the captain.