Hannes

A thin, dark mustache offsets Hannes's short blond hair. Tall and powerfully built, he typically appears in the uniform of the Garrison Regiment with a v-neck shirt showing underneath.

Good nature and bad drinking habits define the early Hannes, a warm, joking man rarely far from a bottle even on watch. Cowardice is his private shame: frozen by the sight of the Titan closing in on Carla Yeager, he runs with her children instead of dying beside her, and the failure gnaws at him for five years while he waits for a second meeting with that same Titan. His devotion to Eren and Mikasa never wavers. He looks out for the pair like family after Shiganshina falls, insists to a despairing Armin and Mikasa that Eren always claws his way through, and in the end spends his life without hesitation to shield the two children he once carried out of the ruins.

Hannes first brushes against the Yeagers while guarding the cell of a strange amnesiac found beyond the Walls, drunkenly guessing the man simply wandered out while intoxicated. That prisoner, Grisha Yeager, later stops a plague sweeping Shiganshina, and Hannes's wife is among the cured; he attends Grisha and Carla's wedding carrying a debt he means to repay. In 845, Eren berates his card-playing squad for complacency mere hours before the Colossus Titan proves the boy right. Racing to the Yeager house, Hannes finds Carla pinned under the wreckage, moves to fight the approaching Titan, and freezes at the sight of it, fleeing with Eren and Mikasa at her plea. When Eren pummels him afterward, Hannes throws the boy down, then tearfully confesses that a lack of courage, not obedience, decided everything.

Five years of diligent service lift him to unit captain. He trades insults with the trio on their graduation night before apologizing once more for Carla, and during the Trost campaign he mans the lookout atop Wall Rose, calmly assuring his subordinate Phil that the three friends are too capable to die. When a breach of Wall Rose is reported, his unit patrols through the night without finding a gap, a puzzle Hannes flags since every previous breach drew swarms of Titans to its source.

The reappearance of the Colossus Titan pulls him back into battle. After its collapsing body scatters the defenders and Reiner and Bertolt escape with Eren, Hannes shares rations with Mikasa and Armin, reminisces about the boy who never conceded a fight, and vows to join the rescue, saying the peaceful days can never return without Eren. Riding with the joint military operation, he chases the kidnappers from the Titan Forest and joins the assault on the Armored Titan. In the chaos of the retreat, he saves Eren and Mikasa from a Titan they cannot outrun, recognizes it as the one that ate Carla, and attacks it single-handed, thrilled at his chance for redemption. The Titan catches him, bites him in two, and devours him while the two children he saved look on. Eren later counts Hannes among the casualties of his family's stolen power, and years afterward the mere sight of an aging Garrison soldier sends the trio back into their shared memories of him.