Anti-Marleyan Volunteers

Every Volunteer carries a grudge born of occupation: Marley swallowed their homelands and then forced them into its own army. Yelena assembled the earliest cells from these embittered draftees, though the movement floundered at first, short on victories and shorter on hope. That changed when Zeke Yeager saved them from annihilation on a battlefield, an act Yelena describes in almost divine terms. From that moment the soldiers attached themselves to him with fierce devotion, and morale within the group transformed.

Their ideology sets them apart from most of the world. Raised amid universal hatred of Eldians, the Volunteers nonetheless concluded that Eldia's people deserved freedom, and they willingly fought beside the so-called island devils of Paradis. Internal cohesion came at a price; Yelena executed wavering comrades to keep the group unified, a brutality her followers accepted as necessary.

The group surfaces in 851, when a Marleyan survey vessel reaches Paradis and Eren Yeager's Titan beaches it. Rather than resist, Yelena shoots her own commanding officer and, joined by Onyankopon, opens negotiations with Hange Zoë and Levi Ackerman. She reveals that she and her comrades are conscripts loyal to Zeke, not Marley, and an alliance forms: the Volunteers hand Paradis their technology and help the island prepare for war.

Their most decisive contribution comes during the raid on Liberio. Posing as a soldier from the Lakua base, Yelena lures Pieck and Porco Galliard into a pit trap and steers Zeke toward his rendezvous, then escapes aboard the Scouts' airship. Back on Paradis, the Volunteers surrender stolen Titan serums to the Garrison, only for Dot Pixis to order their arrest; the island's leadership does not yet trust Zeke's followers. House arrest ends when the Yeagerists seize power, and Yelena, freed, openly berates Pixis for antagonizing Zeke. Visiting the imprisoned Scouts, she executes the mocking soldier Griez mid-sentence, insists the Volunteers never sought revenge, and lays out Zeke's euthanasia plan, the sterilization of all Subjects of Ymir, as their true aim of ending the cycle of hatred.

Zeke Yeager served as the movement's symbolic figurehead while Yelena held actual command, having built the organization and enforced its discipline. Onyankopon, a fellow conscript, piloted the Scouts' airship out of Liberio and later broke with Yelena's faction rather than abandon his friends among the Scouts. Griez died at Yelena's hand for insulting the memory of Sasha Blouse.

The organization's end came swiftly. After Marley's retaliatory assault on Shiganshina, Floch Forster rounded up the Volunteers, wounded and then executed a defiant member in front of the rest, and offered survival only to those who would serve the new Eldian Empire. Yelena and Onyankopon, condemned for refusing, were rescued from execution by the Cart Titan and folded into the alliance Magath and Hange formed against the Rumbling. The group is considered inactive.