Leonhart family

The Leonharts live as Eldians under Marleyan rule in Liberio. The family numbers just two, the elder Leonhart and Annie, and both are alive when the series closes. Their surname fuses the Spanish word for lion with a Dutch word for heart, forming Lionheart, a byname bestowed on great warriors.

The elder Leonhart is deported to Marley after his Eldian blood comes to light in another country. Years on, he takes in an infant abandoned for the same reason and raises her as Annie Leonhart. Hoping a Warrior candidacy will raise his own social standing, he drills the girl in combat from early childhood, and the gamble pays out when Annie inherits the Female Titan. On the eve of her departure for the operation against the Walls, remorse overtakes him; he apologizes and swears that whatever the world comes to think of her, her father will stand with her. He stays behind in Marley to await her return.

Inside the Walls, Annie enters the 104th Training Corps on covert orders, fights during the battle of Trost District, and signs on with the Military Police Brigade as her fellow infiltrators, Reiner Braun and Bertolt Hoover, choose the Survey Corps. As the Female Titan she devastates the 57th Expedition Outside the Walls, but capture in Stohess District ends her mission: she seals herself inside a crystal shell and sleeps beyond the reach of interrogation. Bertolt later recalls Reiner pressing Annie during Trost to strip the maneuvering gear from Marco Bott's body, framed as proof that she and her father stood apart from the race Marley taught them to hate. Years afterward in Liberio, when Karina Braun praises Annie as a life devoted to Marley, her father flatly rejects the tribute, insisting his daughter lives because she promised to come home. Once the Rumbling begins he tries in vain to warn Liberio's gatekeepers, and the thought of Annie gives him the strength to keep fighting; Annie, freed from her crystal at last, shares the whole of her family's story with Hitch Dreyse.

Leonhart, the father, remains in Liberio as a civilian. Annie Leonhart, his adopted daughter, is the inheritor of the Female Titan, a fighter versed in advanced techniques, and a survivor of the war.