Grisha Yeager

In his human years Grisha cuts the figure of a respectable physician: lean and tall, gray eyes behind round spectacles, straight black hair split evenly down the middle, and a sparse beard and mustache. His usual dress pairs a gray suit and black vest with a white shirt and a plain bolo tie. A large cross carved into his own skin sits over his heart, the initiation wound of the Eldian Restorationists.

Transformed, he becomes the fifteen-meter Attack Titan, a form whose heavy torso dwarfs its arms and legs. Long dark hair frames elongated ears and sunken eyes, while flesh seals the mouth beneath a thick black beard and matted chest hair. The silhouette foreshadows the Titan Eren later inherits and echoes the broad-chested build of Zeke's Beast Titan.

Beneath a composed exterior, stubbornness and zeal steer Grisha's whole life. As a boy he ignores his mother's warnings and leads his little sister beyond Liberio's internment zone, a lapse that ends in her murder, and he scorns his parents' submission to Marley rather than recognize it as protection. Faye's death and daily humiliation harden into an obsessive loathing of Marley; he joins the Restorationists, dismisses every Marleyan account of history as hateful propaganda, and takes fierce pride in being a Subject of Ymir, chosen children of God in his telling.

The same fanaticism poisons his first family. He and Dina treat young Zeke as an instrument, drilling him in forbidden history and berating him over his marks as a Warrior candidate, blind to the wedge being driven in until the boy denounces them all.

Yet his compassion is real. He takes no satisfaction in watching Gross die, raises Eren with open affection and none of the revolutionary burden, and cannot at first bring himself to slaughter the Reiss children. In visions across the paths he embraces the adult Zeke, apologizes for failing him, and begs him to stop Eren, even as Carla's death reignites the old hatred long enough for him to hand both Titans to his second son.

Born in Liberio in 806, Grisha chases a blimp beyond the internment walls in 817 with Faye in tow. Officers of the Public Security Authorities catch them; Eren Kruger beats Grisha while Gross walks Faye away and secretly has her killed by dogs. His father answers the tragedy by reciting the state's version of Eldian guilt, which Grisha rejects outright. Grown into a doctor, he learns the truth of Faye's death from a patient named Grice and joins the Eldian Restorationists, whose contraband documents from an informant called the Owl teach him another history. He marries Dina Fritz, a woman of royal descent, and their son Zeke is placed in Marley's Warrior program as the movement's mole. The gambit destroys them: seven-year-old Zeke turns his parents in. After torture, the Restorationists are shipped to Paradis and injected into mindless Titans at the Wall's edge, Dina among them. When Gross prepares to feed Grisha to a transformed comrade for sport, Kruger shoves the sergeant major to his death, reveals himself as the Owl, and wipes out the escort with his Attack Titan. Nearing the end of his thirteen years, Kruger passes the Titan to Grisha along with a final mission: infiltrate the Walls and reclaim the Founding Titan held by the Reiss line.

Keith Shadis finds Grisha wandering outside Shiganshina, apparently amnesiac. Inside the Walls he builds a second life, curing a plague, marrying the barmaid Carla, fathering Eren, and taking in Mikasa Ackerman after her parents' murder, all while quietly locating the Reiss chapel and recording his past in three journals hidden in his basement. The night Wall Maria falls, he storms the chapel and pleads with Frieda Reiss to save Shiganshina. Bound by the First King's vow, she refuses. Unwilling to murder children, Grisha hesitates until Eren, reaching back through the paths from the year 854, invokes his dead sister and comrades to force his hand. He transforms, devours Frieda, and wipes out the Reiss family, sparing only Rod at Eren's direction. Finding Eren among the refugees and learning Carla has been eaten, he leads the boy into the woods, injects him with Titan serum, and is devoured, passing on the Attack and Founding Titans together.

His journals, unearthed when the Survey Corps finally opens the basement, prove to the Walls that humanity survives outside. In the war's final battle, his Titan is among those Ymir Fritz raises to defend Eren, but once Zeke rouses the past inheritors within the paths, Grisha turns his Attack Titan against the Founder's defenders and helps lift Armin skyward for the transformation that ends the Rumbling.