Episode One: The Original Sketches

The draft opens on the day a Colossus Titan appears over the 40-meter Wall as Eren, Mikasa, and Armin stare up in horror. Five years later, an instructor closes out the 104th Training Corps by recounting how the Titans nearly ended humanity 120 years earlier, how three Walls bought over a century of peace, and how the breach of the outermost Wall Rose forced a retreat behind Wall Maria. He names the ten recruits eligible for the Military Police, among them Mikasa, Eren, Reiner, Annie, Jean, and Krista Lenz, then dismisses the class.

At the disbanding dinner, Jean's dream of a cushy Interior posting grates on the room. Eren argues that humanity ought to study the Titans and hunt for weaknesses rather than hide, Reiner sides with him, and Jean sneers that Eren only outranked him thanks to his father's money. The brawl that follows ends with Mikasa hauling Eren out over her shoulder. Outside, she tells him she will follow him into the Survey Corps because she refuses to lose any more family. A flashback shows robbers murdering her parents to sell her, a girl of partial Asian descent, on the capital's underground market; a young Eren tracked their cabin, killed two of the captors, and urged Mikasa to fight when the third began strangling him, awakening a surge of power within her. Grisha then adopted her into the Yeager household, and Eren wrapped her in his scarf.

Armin joins the pair, set on the Survey Corps himself, and a drunken Hannes apologizes once more for failing to save Carla during the attack. When Hannes wonders where Grisha has gone, Eren states flatly that he ate his father, and that night he dreams of Grisha frantically pressing a syringe on him. The next day, while the class works atop the Wall, Connie and Sasha reveal their own Survey Corps ambitions and Armin marvels at how many people Eren's words have moved. Then the Colossus Titan reappears and, despite Eren's protest that the fortifications are now seven times stronger, kicks a hole clean through Wall Maria.

The story begins at the 104th's graduation, delivering character backstory through scattered flashbacks instead of the manga's chronological telling.

Eren retains full awareness of his past, telling Hannes he devoured his own father, a memory the serialized manga keeps buried until chapter 62.

The Colossus Titan breaches Wall Maria at the cliffhanger ending, setting up the draft's second chapter.

The pitch diverges from the finished series in striking ways: Wall Rose and Wall Maria trade positions, the Titans first appeared 120 years prior rather than 107, the Walls stand 40 meters tall instead of roughly 50, Titans top out at 20 meters, the Armored Titan does not exist, the Colossus can apparently breach any stretch of Wall rather than only the gates, and Ymir, called "Beer" here, already appears at the graduation dinner. Most of the draft's content was reworked into chapters 3 and 6 once Isayama chose to start the story earlier.

When the 54-page draft first ran in the Attack on Titan: OUTSIDE Kou guidebook, Eren's admission about eating his father was censored, since Grisha's fate had not yet been revealed in the manga; the Attack on Titan ANSWERS guidebook later disclosed the hidden line, and the printing in Attack on Titan: Beginning keeps it intact. English readers can find the draft in the Attack on Titan Guidebook and in the first volume of The Best of Attack on Titan: In Color.