Zeke Yeager

Platinum blond hair worn shaggy, plus a mustache flowing into a full beard, marks Zeke out among the Warriors, along with round spectacles inherited from his mentor and gray eyes set in a tall, powerfully built frame. On Paradis he fights bare-chested in loose trousers and combat boots; after four years back in Marley he adopts a groomed look, the hair cropped away from his eyes and the beard trimmed thin.

His Beast Titan breaks every mold. Seventeen meters tall and walking upright like a man, it resembles a great ape, dark fur blanketing the torso, shoulders, limbs, scalp, and jaw while the face, ears, hands, and belly stay bare. Pointed ears and teeth, a chest so broad it dwarfs the head, and elongated arms ending in nimble fingers complete the silhouette, and its dark sclera make it nearly impossible to tell where the creature is looking.

Zeke pairs a sharp, inquisitive mind with unsettling detachment. He interrupts a Titan mid-meal to question Mike Zacharias about his gear, then strolls off musing about shared language while the man is eaten alive. Command comes naturally to him, and disobedience is answered with force, whether crushing a rogue Titan's skull or beating Reiner into line when the Warriors argue about rescuing Annie. He kills without ceremony, yet nothing in him reads as sadism; toward the people of the Walls he feels a condescending pity, calling their memory-wiped sacrifices a tragedy, and the thought can enrage him enough that he has to talk himself back into finding life's enjoyment mid-battle.

At the root sits a nihilism formed by neglectful Restorationist parents and Marleyan abuse: he concludes as a teenager that the Subjects of Ymir would have suffered nothing had they never existed. His grand design, sterilizing them all through the Founding Titan so the race fades within a century, is genocide dressed as mercy. Away from the battlefield he is affable, modest, and quick with a joke, though Pieck senses the secrecy underneath. Only Eren truly matters to him, a fellow victim of their father in his eyes, and he delays his plan waiting for his brother's agreement, until learning how Eren manipulated Grisha curdles that affection into horror.

Born in Liberio to Dina Fritz and Grisha Yeager, Zeke is planted in Marley's Warrior program at his father's insistence to spy for the Eldian Restorationists. His parents' obsession with the cause leaves the boy starved of attention, and he lags behind the other candidates until a lonely researcher named Tom Ksaver invites him into a game of catch. Ksaver becomes the father figure Grisha never was. When Zeke overhears that the authorities are closing in on the Restorationists, his parents refuse to stop, and on Ksaver's urging he reports them, saving himself and his grandparents while Grisha and Dina are shipped to Paradis. Ksaver later shares that the Founding Titan can rewrite Eldian bodies, and Zeke conceives the euthanasia plan: seize the Founder, pair it with royal blood, and end the race through sterility. The Beast Titan passes from Ksaver to him in 842, when he is seventeen, and he keeps the man's glasses, and Marley soon discovers his scream can transform anyone dosed with his spinal fluid, a royal-blood gift the researchers cannot explain. His battlefield record, including toppling an enemy capital with hundreds of controlled Titans, earns him the nickname Boy Wonder.

In 850 he lands on Paradis, gasses the village of Ragako into Titans, kills Mike Zacharias, and rains stones on the soldiers trapped at Utgard. Learning from Reiner and Bertolt that the Founding Titan sits inside his own half-brother, he makes capturing Eren the mission's core, thrashing Reiner's Armored Titan when the Warrior objects. At Shiganshina his pitching arm vaporizes Erwin Smith's charge, but Levi Ackerman carves his Titan apart and nearly kills him before Pieck drags him away; he leaves Eren with a promise to return and save him. Back in Marley he plays every side at once, dispatching Yelena's Volunteers to Paradis, courting Kiyomi Azumabito with Mike's stolen gear and talk of iceburst stone, smuggling spinal-fluid wine to the island's officers, and winning the Mid-East War at Fort Slava by turning parachuting captives into Titans and shattering the enemy fleet with thrown shells. Meeting Eren in Liberio, he lays out the euthanasia plan and hands over a baseball to seal what he believes is his brother's agreement.

After defecting during the Raid on Liberio, he is quarantined in a Titan Forest on Paradis, where his scream transforms the wine-drinking guards. Levi answers by blasting Thunder Spears through his hardened nape, then hauls him off on a cart; Zeke pulls the pin on the spear lodged in his gut rather than submit. A wandering Titan stuffs his ruined body into its stomach, and he wakes in the paths to find Ymir Fritz rebuilding him from sand. Restored, he reaches Shiganshina, shields Eren from Reiner and Galliard, and screams despite Colt Grice's plea, condemning Falco to a Pure Titan's body. Magath's artillery brings him down twice, but when Gabi's rifle takes Eren's head, it falls into Zeke's outstretched hand and the Founder activates. In the Coordinate he chains Eren, having already unlearned Karl Fritz's vow, and walks him through Grisha's memories to cure his supposed brainwashing, only to discover Eren steered their father toward the Reiss massacre all along. Zeke orders the sterilization, but Eren reaches Ymir first and unleashes the Rumbling.

Swallowed into the paths, Zeke drifts in fatalism until Armin Arlert's memories of small, meaningless joys remind him of playing catch with Ksaver. He rallies the past inheritors to fight Eren's Titan, then climbs from its flesh calling Levi's name. Remarking that he never noticed how beautiful a day could be, he accepts the captain's blades and is decapitated.