Karina Braun

Short fair hair frames a face marked by middle age. Whenever Karina goes out, she covers her head with a scarf, a habit shared by many Eldian women of Liberio's internment zone. Her brief spell as a Pure Titan changes little beyond scale; the giant keeps nearly all of her human features, its face simply somewhat broader.

Family devotion defines Karina at first glance. She beams over every milestone her son and niece reach, treating selection for the Warrior Unit as the highest honor an Eldian household can claim. Beneath that warmth runs the resentment common among Marley's Eldians, who hold the islanders of Paradis responsible for their caged existence, and she repeats the grudge freely at her own dinner table.

Romantically she stays fixed on a single man, hoping for years to reunite with Reiner's Marleyan father, though he suspects her persistence doubles as payback for his rejection of them. The Rumbling strips her illusions away: watching the world burn, she recognizes that she raised Reiner as a weapon aimed at the "devils" of Paradis instead of mothering him.

Work outside the internment zone once brought a young Karina into an affair with a Marleyan man, and Reiner was born of a union that Marleyan law forbade. Abandoned by the father, she raised the boy alone and pushed him toward the Warrior program, telling him that citizenship could one day reunite their broken family. When the Warriors sailed for Paradis Island, she cheered tearfully from the crowd.

Years later she welcomes Reiner and Gabi home from the Marley Mid-East War, hosts the family dinner where Gabi's battlefield feat is retold, and delights at the idea of her niece inheriting the Armored Titan. At Willy Tybur's festival she catches up with Annie's father and passes on that Bertolt's father died peacefully, proud of his son to the end. The celebration collapses into carnage when Eren Yeager's Attack Titan erupts through the stage, and she flees the wreckage.

After Eren declares his intent to destroy the world, Karina joins Liberio's Eldians in overpowering their Marleyan guards and riding a hijacked train toward the airships at Fort Salta. The ships are already gone, thrown into a doomed strike on Eren, and the sight of a nearby mother holding her child finally breaks her; she weeps over how poorly she raised her son. She watches the distant battle convinced more than once that Reiner has died. Then gas pours from the creature that crawled out of the Founding Titan's nape, and Karina, along with every Eldian at the fort, becomes a Pure Titan hurled against Reiner as he fights to keep the monster from Eren.

Eren's death dissolves the power of the Titans and restores them all. Karina greets her freed son warmly, relieved that the Armored Titan no longer owns his future, and the surviving Eldians are spared execution when Armin persuades the Marleyan commander Muller that the threat has ended.