Mikasa's mother

Gray eyes beneath a calm, faintly weary expression give Mikasa's mother a quiet presence. Of Asian descent and seemingly in her mid-thirties, she wears black hair past her shoulders with bangs split at the center, occasionally gathering it into a small bun. Plain clothes, a white buttoned shirt over dark trousers, mark her as a commoner.

Warmth and tradition anchor her. She raised Mikasa with obvious love, treating the painful clan-marking ritual as a legacy worth preserving and telling her daughter she would one day pass the symbol to children of her own. The gentleness had a limit: the instant intruders threatened her family, she turned ferocious, throwing herself between the men and her daughter and fighting with everything she had.

On the day of her death she was bandaging Mikasa's freshly marked arm while awaiting a visit from Dr. Grisha Yeager, explaining the meaning of the Azumabito symbol she had cut into her daughter's skin. A knock at the door proved to be not the doctor but human traffickers who planned to sell mother and daughter on the Underground's black market; the last survivors of their race made valuable merchandise. Her husband died at the threshold. She shielded Mikasa and fought back, and one of the men killed her without meaning to, ruining half the prize. The kidnappers took Mikasa, only to die soon after at the hands of Eren Yeager and Mikasa herself.

Years later, when Levi asks Mikasa about the Ackerman name, she recounts what her parents told her: her father's bloodline was persecuted within the cities, her mother's Asian family likewise lost any place to live inside them, and the two met as outcasts driven into the mountains, where they married and built their simple life. Grisha found the couple's bodies when he finally arrived, and the loss defined the daughter they left behind.