Alma

Historia remembers her mother as strikingly beautiful. Blonde hair falls to Alma's shoulders, bangs brushing just past the eyebrows, and her eyes carry a bright quality. Slender and of middling height, she dresses simply on the farm in a buttoned shirt and dark skirt, saves finer garments for her evenings in the city, and in her serving days wore the Reiss household's black dress, white apron, and cap, hair pulled back beneath it.

Timidity and self-interest govern Alma. On her parents' farm she lifts no hand to help, passing her days with books while everyone else works. Around Rod Reiss she evidently softened into warmth; he believed her the only person who understood him. Toward Historia she holds nothing but dread and resentment, refusing the girl's company, speaking to her exactly twice in her life, and both times voicing regret that the child was ever born. Fear for her own survival runs so deep that she admits she would have killed her daughter, had she possessed the nerve.

Alma begins as a beautiful maidservant in Rod Reiss's household and becomes his secret lover sometime after his marriage. Pregnancy ends her position: she is sent to a small farm her parents manage in northern Wall Sheena, on land under Reiss control, and gives birth to Historia there. Her days pass in reading while her parents and the child shoulder the farm work, and at night a carriage carries her into town in fancy dress, where she works as an escort. When young Historia, craving the mother-daughter bond she knows from books, tries to embrace her, Alma throws the girl off in shock, tearfully declares she regrets the birth, and leaves the farm for good. Historia, strangely, is happy; it is the first time her mother has ever spoken to her.

After Wall Maria falls, Alma returns in Rod's company as he meets his daughter face to face and gives her his name at last. The Military Police First Interior Squad surrounds the group; the council has decided that an illegitimate Reiss heir and the woman who bore her must both disappear. When Kenny Ackerman grabs Historia and the frightened girl cries out, Alma denies any relation to her, and Rod likewise pretends not to know either of them. Kenny forces Alma to her knees and opens her throat, her last cry one more declaration that she wishes she had never had her daughter.

Kenny later tells Historia that her mother pursued the affair hoping to become Rod's new wife. Years on, after Historia kills her Titan-transformed father, she glimpses his memory of a younger Rod weeping into Alma's clothing and calling her the sole person who ever understood him, and Kenny remarks to Levi that women like Alma were always Rod's weakness.