Dina Fritz

Petite in frame and modest in height, Dina wears her blonde hair parted down the center, falling past her cheekbones but stopping short of her shoulders, slightly longer behind than in front. Her skin is fair and her large eyes are light in color. A white blouse over an ankle-length skirt makes up her typical dress, sometimes layered with a cloak, a black coat, or a scarf wrapped over her hair, along with the armband Marley forces on every Eldian in the Liberio internment zone. For the family photograph she pins her hair up and wears a pale, frilled formal gown.

Her Pure Titan form could hardly be more different: a towering, masculine body, gaunt enough that its ribs show, topped by an abnormally long neck. Its defining trait is a frozen smile, lips locked apart so that teeth and gums stay permanently exposed beneath small, dark, deep-set eyes and light hair reaching its neck.

Little of Dina's inner life reaches the page, but her loyalties are unmistakable. She commits herself fully to the Eldian Restorationists, carrying a generally gentle expression that worry often clouds. Though she concedes that Zeke was conceived to serve the movement and admits to neglecting him, her love for the boy runs deep, and learning that he reported his own parents leaves her horrified.

Her devotion to Grisha Yeager is unconditional. She beams on their wedding day, and even at the edge of the Wall, moments before the injection, she promises that whatever she becomes, she will find her way back to him.

In 824 the Owl, the Restorationists' hidden ally inside the Marleyan government, sends Dina to the movement. She introduces herself as royalty: when Karl Fritz withdrew to Paradis at the close of the Great Titan War, one branch of his family stayed behind in hiding, and Dina is its last survivor. Her revelations, that the Founding Titan sits on Paradis holding the key to controlling all Titans and that the king retreated out of refusal to fight, galvanize the group. She marries Grisha a year later and bears their son Zeke, whom the couple plant in Marley's Warrior program as a mole once they learn the government intends to seize the Founding Titan for itself. The mission consumes them. They leave Zeke with his grandparents night after night, pressure him over his weak marks, and quarrel over his future, with Dina defending her son. When Zeke urges them at dinner to abandon the cause, she insists the Restorationist movement is the only road to peace for Eldians.

In 832 the seven-year-old Zeke denounces his parents. The captured Restorationists are shipped to Paradis Island to live out eternity as mindless man-eating Titans, and Dina, after a final promise to Grisha, receives Sergeant Major Gross's injection and is cast down from the border wall while her husband watches in horror. Eren Kruger later admits he concealed her royal blood, knowing Marley would otherwise have forced her to bear children.

Thirteen years on, her Titan is among those drawn toward the Walls during the Warriors' attack. She walks past a vulnerable Bertolt Hoover without a glance, enters Shiganshina, and pulls Carla Yeager from the wreckage of her home, devouring her while Carla's son Eren looks on. Five years afterward she appears again outside the Titan Forest, kills Hannes as he defends Eren and Mikasa, and reaches for Eren, whose bare-fisted strike against her hand awakens the Founding Titan's control. The surrounding Titans converge on Dina and rip her to shreds.

The truth surfaces slowly. Grisha's recovered journals show the Survey Corps the family photograph, and dreams of his father's memories reveal to Eren that the Titan that ate his mother was Dina. In the story's final stretch, Armin recalls Eren confessing that he himself, acting through the Founding Titan across time, ordered Dina to spare Bertolt that day, sending her toward his own mother instead.