Carla Yeager

Carla gathered her long dark hair loosely so it hung over her right shoulder, with bangs framing both sides of her face and a few short strands loose at her forehead. Fair skin, large light eyes, and a slim build on a middling height completed her look. At home she dressed in a cream sweater with frilled sleeves, a long red skirt, a white apron, and small tan boots; flashbacks to her younger years show a short-sleeved dress worn with a black laced corset over it.

Warmth and stubbornness coexisted in Carla. She scolded the people she loved whenever they courted danger, most memorably in her fights with Eren over his dream of joining the Survey Corps, and she quietly assigned Mikasa the job of keeping him out of trouble. Where Keith Shadis hungered for recognition, Carla saw no need for it; to her, a child did not have to become special or outshine anyone, because being born into the world already made him great. Her protectiveness reached past her own survival. Trapped and facing a Titan, she ordered her children to run, screamed that she loved them, then pressed a hand over her mouth so they would never hear her sob that she did not want to be left behind to die.

Carla waited tables at a small Shiganshina bar that Keith Shadis frequented, and she met Grisha Yeager the day Keith brought in the stranger found wandering outside the Walls. Years afterward an epidemic swept the district; Keith rushed the ailing Carla to Grisha, by then a practicing doctor, and he cured her along with her parents. She embraced him in tears, love followed, and the two married and raised a son, Eren. When Shadis came back broken from a failed expedition and lashed out by calling her ordinary and unimaginative, she answered with the philosophy that defined her: nobody needs to be special to matter.

In the story's opening she refuses to let Eren enlist with the Survey Corps, an argument he storms away from while Grisha stays neutral. Hours later the Colossus Titan kicks open Shiganshina's gate, and debris from the impact flattens the Yeager home with Carla inside, pinning her crushed legs beneath the beams. Eren and Mikasa strain to lift the wreckage and cannot. With the Smiling Titan drawing near, she begs them to escape; Hannes arrives vowing to fight it, loses his nerve at the sight of the creature, and instead carries the children away, exactly as Carla had pleaded. The Titan then pulls her from the rubble, squeezes her body in its grip, and devours her before Eren's eyes, making her the first person in the series shown eaten by a Titan.

Her death shapes everything that follows. Eren avenges her at the close of the Clash of the Titans arc, when his awakened Coordinate power sends a horde of Titans to tear apart the Smiling Titan. Shadis later recounts her whole story to Eren and Squad Levi when they come asking about Grisha. The final chapter adds a devastating coda: Eren himself, acting from the future, steered Dina Fritz's Pure Titan away from Bertolt Hoover and toward his own mother, because it was not yet Bertolt's time to die.