Grandfather Arlert

The manga never lets him speak, yet his defining act says plenty. Owning literature about the outside world is a crime inside the royal government's borders, and this man not only holds onto such a book but places it in the hands of a child, trusting Armin with knowledge dangerous enough to ruin the family. The choice suggests someone who prized truth over obedience and recognized a mind worth feeding in his grandson. Armin's name is his gift as well, a fact the boy states plainly when his instructor mocks it.

A resident of Wall Maria's territory who once worked the fields, the elder Arlert possesses an illegal book cataloging the world outside the Walls. He entrusts the volume to Armin, whose secret readings with his best friend Eren Yeager kindle their shared longing to see that world with their own eyes. In the wake of Wall Maria's fall, he dies at the hands of the Titans.

During Keith Shadis's intimidation ritual at the training camp, Armin answers the instructor's jab about his name by crediting it to his grandfather. The old man is invoked once more beneath the Reiss chapel, where Eren, anguished over Grisha's theft of the Founding Titan, counts Armin's grandfather among the many people who might have lived had his father never interfered with the Reiss family.