Eren Yeager

Eren inherited his mother's features: a longish, rounded face set with large, expressive gray eyes beneath black hair that parted naturally down the middle. Training packed muscle onto his average frame, though loose clothing usually hid it, and for years the key to his father's basement hung from his neck. By the Marley infiltration in 854 he was taller, shoulder-haired, and wearing a thin mustache and goatee; back on Paradis he shaved and tied his hair into a bun.

His Attack Titan stood fifteen meters tall, lean and combat-fit where most Titans sag, with shoulder-length hair, a hooked nose, sunken eyes, and a lipless, jagged mouth incapable of speech. The Founding Titan he finally manifested, dubbed the End Titan, discarded humanoid form altogether: a colossal cage of bare ribs and stretched spine crawling on its ribcage like a millipede, Eren's severed head strung inside on cords of sinew.

Stubbornness, passion, and a hair-trigger temper drove Eren from childhood. Armin's forbidden book planted a hunger for the world outside, and he came to scorn anyone content to live and die penned in like livestock while idolizing the Survey Corps as heroes. His compassion ran deep but narrow; he would kill for the people he loved, as Mikasa's kidnappers learned, yet he saw everything in black and white and blamed himself bitterly whenever comrades died for him. Behind the bravado lived genuine insecurity, alongside a charisma that could sway a courtroom with a single speech.

The basement's truth, and the future memories that followed, remade him. The Eren of 854 was unnervingly calm and analytically sharp, willing to deceive a child, bury civilians as collateral, and finally trample most of humanity, all while privately weeping over an atrocity he felt unable to refuse. The Founder's power collapsed past, present, and future into one stream in his head. In his last talk with Armin the mask fell away: he admitted he did not want to die, could not bear the thought of Mikasa loving another man, and had no clean answer for why he flattened the world beyond his own hunger for freedom.

Born in Shiganshina in 835, Eren lost everything at ten when the Colossus and Armored Titans breached Wall Maria and his mother was eaten in front of him. His father Grisha found him among the refugees, injected him with a Titan serum, and was devoured by his son's mindless form, secretly passing on the Attack and Founding Titans along with the basement key. Eren enlisted in the 104th Training Corps beside Mikasa and Armin, graduated fifth, and discovered his power at Trost by erupting from the belly of the Titan that swallowed him. His Titan hauled the boulder that sealed Trost's gate, and a tribunal placed him in the Survey Corps under Levi's watch.

His years as humanity's weapon were paid for in blood. The Special Operations Squad died shielding him from the Female Titan, Reiner and Bertolt abducted him after revealing themselves, and the touch of a royal-blooded Titan awakened the Founding Titan's control for one desperate scream. In the Reiss cavern he learned the family could have erased the Titans generations earlier and chose not to. He sealed Wall Maria at Shiganshina, watched Erwin and most of the Corps perish there, and opened the basement at last: humanity thrived across the ocean and hated his island as a nest of devils. At the medal ceremony, a kiss on Historia's hand flooded him with his own future memories, including the Rumbling he would one day set loose.

From then on Eren moved alone. He infiltrated Marley as a maimed veteran, routed letters through Falco, killed Willy Tybur and the gathered world leadership at the festival, and ate the War Hammer Titan. On Paradis he broke with the military, gathered the Yeagerists around Floch, and faked loyalty to Zeke's euthanasia plan just long enough to reach the Coordinate, where he persuaded Ymir Fritz herself, after two thousand years, to hand him her strength. The Walls crumbled and Eren marched the Colossus Titans across the earth, erasing roughly eighty percent of humanity while quietly leaving his old friends free to stop him. At Fort Salta they did: Mikasa entered his Titan's mouth and severed his head, ending the power of the Titans forever. She buried him beneath the tree where he napped as a boy and visited the grave for the rest of her life.