Yeager

Faint lines already crease Yeager's brow in the year 817, when he is in his middle years. His black hair is kept short, his eyes are rounded, and he dresses formally, a tie visible beneath his outer clothing.

By the year 854 old age has caught up with him. His graying hair has receded, and he cannot walk without the support of a cane.

Reverence for his family's Eldian past coexists in Yeager with terror of what acknowledging it might cost. That fear makes him echo whatever Marleyan authorities say; when officials describe how Grisha and Faye slipped out of the internment zone to see a blimp, he goes so far as to brand his own son an idiot. Yet the humiliations he accepts and the quiet life he enforces flow from genuine devotion, a wish to keep his children alive in a world arranged against them.

Age transforms that fear into remorse. He comes to believe his severity pushed Grisha toward the choices that destroyed him, and while unknowingly talking with his grandson Eren, the old man collapses into a tearful confession, holding himself responsible for the movement his parenting helped create.

Yeager marries and raises two children in Liberio, Grisha and Faye. After Faye is killed, the soldier Gross conceals the true cause of her death, and Yeager debases himself before the man, promising to re-educate his son. He walks Grisha through the crimes attributed to their Eldian ancestors, insisting that devils' blood runs in their veins and that survival means staying inside the internment zone living small, obedient lives. Grisha protests that the soldier lied, but his father refuses to hear it.

The strategy of keeping his head down carries Yeager and his wife into old age. In 832 he watches the Public Security Authorities take Grisha away, and guardianship of his grandson Zeke falls to him. The years that follow bring mounting regret; he becomes convinced that a gentler hand would have spared Grisha banishment, and his episodes of distress grow severe enough that colleagues must keep watch over him.

In 854, with the Marley Mid-East War concluded, he and his wife greet Zeke on his return home. At the hospital he introduces himself to a patient called Kruger, unaware the man is Eren, Grisha's second son. Having overheard Kruger speaking with Falco Grice, he explains the hardships the Grice family endured because of Falco's uncle joining the Eldian Restorationists, and asks Kruger to stop leaning on the boy for favors. When Kruger remarks on his sensitivity about family, Yeager speaks of his lost children, then breaks down entirely and is led away by his coworkers.