Eren Yeager — Attack on Titan

Eren’s Titan power did not appear by chance. After the fall of Wall Maria, Grisha injected him with Titan serum, and Eren, transformed into a Pure Titan, ate his father. That act transferred both the Attack Titan and the Founding Titan, the latter of which Grisha had seized from Frieda Reiss. Eren’s missing memories of the event make him slow to understand the inheritance he carries.

Reiner Braun and Bertholdt Hoover, whom Eren knew as fellow cadets, reveal that they are the Armored and Colossal Titans. Their confession turns Eren’s former comrades into the enemies he has been hunting. Eren fights Reiner, but the pair take him captive, prompting a desperate Survey Corps rescue operation.

During the attempt to rescue Eren from Reiner and Bertholdt, the Titan that killed Carla reappears. Eren strikes it in desperation and unexpectedly causes nearby Titans to attack it. Much later, he learns that the Titan was Dina Fritz, a member of the royal family whose blood briefly enabled him to use the Founding Titan’s power.

Rod Reiss and Historia force Eren to confront how Grisha stole the Founding Titan from the royal family. Overwhelmed by guilt and uncertainty, Eren is willing to be sacrificed if Historia’s inheritance could save others. Historia refuses to follow her father’s demands, saving Eren and rejecting that imposed destiny.

When Rod transforms and the cavern begins to collapse, Eren uses a vial labeled “Armor” to develop hardening and help protect the escaping soldiers. The ability later becomes vital to the plan for retaking Wall Maria.

During the battle to retake Shiganshina, both Erwin Smith and Armin are left near death. Eren and Mikasa plead for Armin to receive the only available Titan serum; Levi ultimately chooses to let Erwin die and saves Armin, who inherits the Colossal Titan by consuming Bertholdt. The decision makes Eren’s loyalty to his oldest friend especially consequential.

The Survey Corps retakes Shiganshina at immense cost and reaches Grisha’s basement. His writings reveal that humanity exists outside the Walls, that Paradis is an island, and that Eldians are persecuted by Marley. Eren’s childhood dream of discovering an empty, free world becomes an agonizing question about enemies across the ocean.

At a medal ceremony, Eren kisses Historia’s hand and sees a pivotal part of Grisha’s memories, including impressions tied to the Attack Titan’s ability to transmit memories from future inheritors. When the Scouts finally reach the sea, Armin welcomes the horizon; Eren instead wonders whether freedom can exist while enemies still wait across the ocean.

Several years later Eren infiltrates Marley and arranges a meeting with Reiner in Liberio. During Willy Tybur’s declaration of war he transforms, kills Willy and launches an attack whose civilian casualties horrify many of his former allies. The Survey Corps intervenes, and Eren takes the War Hammer Titan power in the ensuing battle.

Back on Paradis, Eren’s conduct and refusal to accept military oversight deepen a split between him and his friends. The Yeagerists rally around him, while his clandestine coordination with Zeke alarms the government. His harsh treatment of Mikasa and Armin is part of the estrangement that marks this stage; later evidence does not support taking everything he says about Mikasa’s motives at face value.

Eren requires contact with a Titan of royal blood to use the Founder on an immense scale, leading him to Zeke, his older half-brother. In the Paths, Eren rejects Zeke’s scheme to make all Subjects of Ymir infertile. Their tour through Grisha’s memories reveals that Eren has influenced his father through the Attack Titan’s future-memory connection, pressing him to kill members of the Reiss family and seize the Founding Titan.

Eren confronts Ymir Fritz not as a mere source of power but as a person capable of choosing. When Ymir sides with him rather than obeying Zeke, he gains the ability to unleash the Titans within the Walls, beginning the Rumbling. The narrative reveals the fearsome extent of Eren’s agency without absolving his choices.

Eren unleashes the Rumbling, marching the Wall Titans across the world beyond Paradis. He presents the destruction of outside threats as the way to secure the island, but later glimpses also expose the darker, selfish dimension of his desire to erase a world that shattered his childhood vision of freedom. He is distressed by the suffering he knows he will cause and proceeds nonetheless.

Mikasa, Armin, the remaining Scouts and former enemies join forces to stop him. By the final confrontation, the Rumbling has killed about eighty percent of humanity. Even as Eren hopes his surviving friends will be viewed as the people who stopped him, that outcome cannot undo the destruction and immense loss of civilian life.

Eren had spoken with Armin through the Paths before his death and suppressed Armin’s memory of the conversation until the end of the battle. Armin then recalls Eren admitting that he wanted his friends to survive and be seen as the people who stopped him. Eren also reveals painful personal feelings about Mikasa and acknowledges the monstrous scale of his actions. His access to memories across time complicates his sense of agency but does not erase his responsibility.

The final conversation also brings a devastating reversal to Eren’s earliest loss: he tells Armin that, through the Founder’s tangled experience of time, he diverted Dina Fritz’s Titan away from Bertholdt on the day Shiganshina fell. Dina went on to kill Carla. The manga presents Eren’s involvement in the chain of events, not a simple account of him personally attacking his mother.

Mikasa kills Eren in the final battle. Her choice, despite her love for him, allows Ymir Fritz to release the attachment to King Fritz that had kept her bound to his will. The power of the Titans then disappears: surviving Pure Titans return to human form, and the Nine Titan powers cease to exist. Mikasa buries Eren beneath the tree associated with their childhood.

In the aftermath, surviving members of the alliance seek dialogue with Paradis, where the Yeagerists have strengthened the island’s defenses. Mikasa continues to visit Eren’s grave as years pass. His death ends Titan power, but it does not settle the political conflict between the island and the world beyond it.

The additional final pages in the collected manga look far beyond the lives of Eren’s friends. An urban area near the burial hill is devastated in a later war; long afterward, the tree above Eren’s grave has grown immense, and a child accompanied by a dog approaches its hollow. The image leaves open what might happen next. It does not establish that the Titans have already returned.