Eren Kruger

Kruger cut an imposing figure among Marleyan officers: broad, sturdily built, and older than most colleagues, with shaggy dark hair swept to one side. Hollow cheeks and pronounced cheekbones sharpened his narrow face. He dressed in the standard officer's uniform and put on its cap only when civilians were watching.

His Attack Titan foreshadowed the forms Grisha and Eren Yeager would later take: heavily muscled and sunken-eyed, framed by long dark hair, though his was kept noticeably tidier, and the strong cheekbones of his human face carried over into the Titan's.

Years of living as a mole flattened Kruger's outward emotions into permanent calm. He kneed a child in the stomach without blinking and watched the Yeager family grieve their daughter stone-faced, yet privately he carried the weight of every Eldian he had condemned, thousands sent into Titan transformation to protect his cover. He judged that suffering worthwhile only if it bought Eldia's rebirth as a nation.

Kruger rejected the notion of objective truth altogether, arguing that anyone can be made a god or a devil the moment enough people declare it so, and pointed to how Ymir Fritz swung from worshipped founder to national demon depending on who held power. Unlike his fellow Restorationists, who insisted every Marleyan account of Eldian atrocity was fabricated propaganda, he conceded that the old empire really had wielded Titans as cheap weapons of mass destruction across generations. Freedom, he believed, would come only when Eldians stopped repeating the mistakes of their history.

Kruger grew up an Eldian in Marley. His father belonged to a doomed revolutionary army organized by mainland remnants of the royal Fritz line, and when the Public Security Authorities burned its members alive, the boy survived by hiding in a closet. Friends of his father later helped him infiltrate the very organization that had killed him, an Eldian doctor faking the blood tests that let him pass as Marleyan. Writing as the Owl, he fed the Eldian Restorationists information for decades, preserving his disguise by personally consigning countless Eldians to the Titan curse.

He first crossed paths with Grisha Yeager as a boy who had chased a blimp beyond the Liberio internment zone with his sister Faye, delivering the beating Grisha accepted for them both while his colleague Gross secretly murdered the girl. Kruger read the hatred burning in the child's eyes that day. Two years afterward he inherited the Attack Titan from an unrecorded predecessor, and thirteen years into his term, with the curse eroding his health, he oversaw the captured Restorationists' exile to Paradis Island.

Atop the island's wall, as the prisoners were injected one by one into mindless Titans, Kruger made his move: he hurled Gross down to be devoured, revealed himself to Grisha as the Owl, and unleashed his Attack Titan to split the Marleyan steamboat and slaughter the remaining escort. He then laid out the history of the Founding Titan and King Fritz's renunciation of war, urging Grisha to find a family inside the Walls and to complete the mission for the sake of Mikasa and Armin, names drawn from memories of successors he could not yet explain. He let Grisha devour him, handing the Attack Titan forward. Decades later, Ymir Fritz briefly restores his Titan during the final battle, where he fights alongside the other past inheritors to help bring down Eren Yeager.