Gloria Bernhart

Red hair swept into a high ponytail hangs to about Gloria's shoulders, and oval glasses sit above lips finished with glossy lipstick. Beyond those personal touches she dresses like any officer of her branch, in the standard Military Police uniform.

Condescension comes naturally to Gloria. Survey Corps soldiers and ordinary citizens rate as inferiors in her eyes, and she wields her rank like a blade, hinting the Corps could be permanently disbanded to force Kuklo's handover and quietly steering events in the Industrial City so they favor her uncle over his political rival. Pragmatism does not make her amoral, though. New technology fascinates her, and once she grasps what the anti-Titan device could mean, she argues on behalf of the very organization she once sneered at, because its survival would serve humanity as a whole.

Orphaned young and adopted by the Bernhart family of the capital, Gloria loses her foster parents in childhood and grows up in the custody of her uncle Bauduin, whose world of the Military Police becomes her ambition and later her career. As the captain commanding Shiganshina District, she intercepts the Survey Corps on its return from an expedition and pressures Carlo Pikale into surrendering Kuklo, the so-called Titan's Son wanted over murders, robbery, and kidnapping. She later hand-picks the talented aristocrat Xavi Inocencio for the brigade, indulges his brutality, and dispatches him to the Industrial City as her proxy; his real assignment is to infiltrate the Dissidence Movement so that its uprising wrecks Captain Jentsch Dafner's chances of becoming commander.

When the revolt erupts, Gloria arrives with a battering ram, orders anyone helping the rebels cut down, and calmly unmasks the movement's leader August, whose execution after interrogation she later mentions almost in passing. Xavi is rewarded with promotion, and Gloria takes a curious liking to his sister Sharle, even sheltering the girl after two men attempt to abduct her.

An intercepted letter changes her course: Kuklo and Cardina Baumeister, the pair she once sentenced to death, are alive and testing a device for fighting Titans with the inventor Xenophon. Recognizing its potential, she persuades her uncle to grant the Survey Corps a three month reprieve and arranges a field trial. Then a sudden summons to the capital arrives on the expedition's eve, and Gloria smells a trap. She writes down every illegal errand she ever ran for Bauduin and sends the record to Xavi with instructions should she die. The instinct proves sound. Stepping from her uncle's carriage, she is stabbed by a crazed Moritz, and her last sight is Bauduin laughing at the ambush he arranged. The letter reaches Xavi regardless, and for his schemes and his part in her death, her uncle loses his rank and lands under arrest.