Write your own Attack on Titan story

Eren Yeager

The story's protagonist, whose mother is eaten in front of him during the fall of Wall Maria, igniting a childhood vow to kill every Titan on Earth. Eren inherits the Attack and (secretly) Founding Titan powers from his father, and his arc is the series' central tragedy: a boy defined by a desperate hunger for freedom who, on learning the full truth of the world's hatred for Eldians, chooses to trigger the Rumbling -- unleashing every Colossal Titan buried within the walls to trample the rest of the world -- believing genocide is the only way to guarantee his friends and island a future.

Mikasa Ackerman

Eren's adoptive sister, rescued as a child by Eren's family after her parents were murdered by human traffickers, which forges a fierce, near-singular devotion to protecting him. A member of the rare and physically extraordinary Ackerman bloodline, Mikasa is one of the most formidable close-combat fighters in the Survey Corps, and her arc becomes a study in what it means to love someone whose choices you cannot support -- culminating in the story's final, devastating act of love and grief.

Armin Arlert

Eren and Mikasa's childhood friend, physically frail but the group's sharpest strategic mind, whose dream of seeing the world beyond the walls first drew Eren toward the Survey Corps. Armin survives the story's brutal culling of its cast largely by his wits, eventually inheriting the Colossal Titan from Bertholdt in a decision that haunts him, and becomes the moral center trying to find a path that doesn't end in Eren's genocide.

Levi Ackerman

Humanity's strongest soldier, a former underground thug recruited into the Survey Corps by Erwin, whose brutal efficiency in Titan combat is matched by a near-obsessive cleanliness and a clipped, unsentimental exterior masking real grief for the soldiers he's repeatedly forced to spend as resources. His loyalty to Erwin's vision, and the impossible choice Erwin later forces on him, is one of the series' most quietly devastating threads.

Erwin Smith

Commander of the Survey Corps, a brilliant tactician who sends soldiers to their deaths in pursuit of a truth about the world he needs answered -- inherited from his father's forbidden theory about the origin of the Titans -- and carries the guilt of every life spent for it. His willingness to sacrifice anyone, including himself, for humanity's larger cause, and the moment he must choose between his personal obsession and Armin's life, defines him as the series' clearest embodiment of leadership's cost.

Historia Reiss

The illegitimate daughter of the true royal Reiss bloodline, raised believing herself worthless and disposable (as 'Krista Lenz') until she's thrust into the role of Paradis's true queen. Initially timid and eager to please, Historia's arc is defined by reclaiming her own identity and agency, ultimately choosing her own path for the island's future and her own family rather than the role others -- her father, the cult, or even her friends -- try to assign her.

Reiner Braun

A Marleyan Warrior candidate who infiltrated the walls as the Armored Titan under a false identity, participating in the destruction of Wall Maria and the deaths of countless people he later fought alongside as a trusted cadet -- carrying a guilt so total it fractures his mind into a dissociative second personality who believes he's simply an ordinary soldier. Reiner's arc, more than any other, forces the story to hold a mass murderer and a grieving, guilt-shattered young man as the same undividable person.

Annie Leonhart

A Marleyan Warrior candidate and the Female Titan, sent to infiltrate the Survey Corps and hunt Eren, whose cold, guarded exterior conceals real isolation and a father's harsh lessons that trusting no one is the only way to survive. Cornered and unwilling to face the consequences of her actions, Annie encases herself in a hardened crystal shell for years rather than surrender -- a literalized version of the emotional walls she's built her whole life.

Zeke Yeager

Eren's older half-brother, holder of the Beast Titan and a senior Marleyan Warrior, raised by his and Eren's father Grisha within the Eldian Restorationist movement before defecting to Marley out of resentment for a childhood defined by his father's fanaticism. Brilliant and manipulative, Zeke devises the 'Euthanization Plan' to end the Eldian bloodline entirely rather than perpetuate the cycle of Titan violence -- a mercy killing of an entire people that puts him in direct, personal opposition to his own brother's answer to the same problem.

Grisha Yeager

Eren's father, a former Eldian Restorationist and doctor who fled Marley carrying the Attack Titan and the royal Reiss family's secrets, settling in the walls and eventually giving Eren both the Attack and Founding Titans in a desperate, guilt-ridden act -- forcing his own unresolved war onto his son without ever fully explaining why, a decision that shapes the entire story's tragedy of inherited violence.

Shiganshina District

Eren, Mikasa, and Armin's hometown, the southernmost district of Wall Maria and the first place breached when the Colossal Titan kicks a hole in the outer gate -- the story's opening catastrophe and, years later, the site where Eren finally reaches his father's basement and learns the truth of the world.

The Three Walls (Maria, Rose, Sina)

Three concentric, superhumanly tall stone walls -- Maria (outer), Rose (middle), and Sina (inner, surrounding the royal capital) -- built roughly a century before the story by the Reiss royal family using the Founding Titan's power to end the previous war with Titans. Unknown to nearly everyone, the walls themselves are packed with dormant Colossal Titans, making them not just a barrier but a hidden weapon Eren later detonates to begin the Rumbling.

Marley

The dominant nation on the mainland continent beyond the sea, an industrialized world power with tanks, airships, and firearms far beyond anything on Paradis -- revealing, when the story's perspective finally leaves the walls, just how far behind the outside world humanity inside the walls actually is. Home to Eldian internment zones and the Warrior training program that produced Reiner, Bertholdt, Annie, and Zeke.

Paradis Island

The island the walls actually sit on, revealed partway through the story to be a real, mapped place the outside world calls the birthplace of the Titans and considers the last refuge of the 'devils' of Eldia -- rather than the whole surviving world the wall-dwellers had always assumed it to be. This single revelation reframes everything the audience thought it understood about the setting.

The Survey Corps

The military branch that ventures beyond the walls to fight Titans directly and map the outside world, sustaining catastrophic casualty rates for minimal territorial gain until Erwin Smith's leadership and later Eren's Titan power turn its expeditions from suicidal gestures into real progress. Its wings-of-freedom insignia symbolizes the Corps' core belief -- that humanity must reclaim the world outside the walls, whatever the cost -- making it both the story's most idealistic faction and the one that pays the highest price for that idealism.

Marley

The dominant world power on the mainland continent, which conquered the former Eldian Empire generations ago and now rules much of the known world. Marley confines its own Eldian population to internment zones, forcibly conscripts Eldian children as disposable 'Warrior' candidates to inherit Titan powers in Marley's service, and propagandizes its people to see Eldians as subhuman 'devils' -- a mirror of the wall-dwellers' own ignorance about the outside world, revealing the war as one atrocity answering another rather than a simple conflict of good versus evil.

The Yeagerists

A militant movement of young soldiers who idolize Eren Yeager after his attack on Liberio, staging a coup against Paradis's civilian government to seize control of the military and clear the way for Eren's plan -- convinced that only overwhelming force can guarantee Eldian survival against a world that wants them dead. Their rise splits Eren's former comrades, many of whom must decide whether stopping Eren means becoming traitors to the island that raised them.

Omni-Directional Mobility (ODM) Gear

The Survey Corps' signature equipment: a harness-mounted gas-propulsion system firing grappling hooks that lets soldiers swing and rocket through the air at speed, the only technology that lets ordinary humans consistently strike a Titan's nape. Mastery of ODM gear is what separates elite soldiers like Levi and Mikasa from the rest, and its balletic, high-speed combat style is one of the series' defining visual signatures.

The Basement Key

A small key Grisha Yeager leaves Eren with instructions to find the basement of their old home in Shiganshina, hidden for years under the assumption it holds simple answers about the outside world. When Eren finally reaches it, the basement instead reveals the full truth of the walls, the Titans, Marley, and his own father's history -- making the key one of the series' most important slow-burn narrative devices.

World Overview

Humanity's last survivors live behind three concentric walls -- Maria (outermost), Rose, and Sina (innermost) -- on what they believe is the entire remaining world, hiding from Titans: towering, mindless humanoid creatures with an insatiable, purposeless hunger to eat people. For a hundred years the walls held. The story begins when a never-before-seen Colossal Titan kicks a hole in Wall Maria, ending a century of false peace and setting Eren Yeager, Mikasa Ackerman, and Armin Arlert on a path from the Survey Corps' desperate exploration missions to the discovery that the walls, the Titans, and the world outside are all part of a much larger, deliberately hidden history involving a real continent, a nation called Marley, and an oppressed ethnic group -- the Eldians -- to which the wall-dwellers themselves belong.

Titans

Titans are colossal humanoids, typically 3 to 15 meters tall (with rare Titans over 50m), with an overpowering, seemingly aimless compulsion to devour humans -- though eating provides no nutritional benefit and most Titans cannot even digest what they eat. Their bodies regenerate from almost any wound, can only be killed by destroying a fist-sized weak point (usually the nape of the neck), and turn to steam/vapor and rapidly decompose on death. What the wall-dwellers don't know for most of the story: 'pure' mindless Titans are actually transformed Eldians who have lost their human will, and the intelligent 'Nine Titans' are inherited powers passed between Eldians who ingest the spinal fluid of a dying Titan holder -- meaning the monsters devouring humanity are, tragically, other people.

The Nine Titans & the Founding Titan

Nine intelligent Titan powers exist, each with a unique ability and its own name and history (Attack, Colossal, Armored, Female, Beast, Cart, Jaw, War Hammer, and the Founding Titan), passed down through history whenever a holder dies and a new Eldian eats their remains. The Founding Titan is the most powerful of all -- capable of controlling every pure Titan and, in the hands of a royal-blooded Eldian, even rewriting Eldian memories and biology through the mysterious dimension known as the Paths. Whoever holds the Founding Titan and is of Ymir Fritz's royal bloodline can, in theory, command every Titan on Earth at once -- the power behind both Eren's Rumbling and the century of enforced peace the Reiss royal family maintained before him.

The Paths & Ymir Fritz

Nearly 2,000 years ago, an enslaved girl named Ymir Fritz encountered a mysterious source in the earth and became the first Titan, later called 'the origin of all Titans.' After her death her power splintered into the Nine Titans and passed down her bloodline. The Paths is the dimension connecting every Eldian who carries her blood or subject Ymir's curse across all of time -- the mechanism by which Founding Titan holders can speak to past and future holders, rewrite memories, and (in Eren's case) act across timelines to set his own plan in motion from both the past and the future simultaneously.

Pure Titans

Mindless Titans with no discernible intelligence beyond an overwhelming compulsion to eat humans, ranging from small aberrant types to the towering Colossal-class giants. Revealed midway through the story to be transformed Eldians -- people who lost control of their own transformation and never regained their human mind -- turning what looked like an alien monster threat into a horror rooted entirely in human suffering.

Key Dates (relative to the story's present)

~2,000 years before present: Ymir Fritz becomes the first Titan; the Nine Titans and the Eldian Empire are born. ~100 years before present: the Reiss royal family flees to Paradis and raises the three Walls using the Founding Titan, ending an earlier war. Present, start of the story: the Colossal and Armored Titans breach Wall Maria; Eren's mother is killed. ~5 years later: the Uprising; Wall Maria's territory is reclaimed; Historia becomes queen. Shortly after: the story's perspective expands to Marley and the wider world; Eren attacks Liberio. Final year: the Yeagerist coup; Eren triggers the Rumbling; Mikasa kills Eren to end it.