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"Mature Content Warning!" |
Grisha Yeager is a major character of the Attack on Titan franchise. He is an Eldian Marleyan and a doctor from the Liberio internment zone, who years prior the story's beginning secretely acted as one of the leaders of a reactionary terroristic rebel organization known as the Eldian Restorationists, whose overarching leader was an anonymous Marleyan official known as the Owl.
Sent by the Owl on a mission to steal the Founding Titan from the royal family of the Walls of Paradis Island, Grisha became the inheritor of the Attack Titan, receiving it from Eren Kruger, the true identity of the Owl, in order to use it to take the Founder from the King of the Walls by force. Grisha infiltrated the Walls by feigning amnesia and pretending to be a mysterious citizen from the Walls, after being taken in by the then-second leader of the Survey Corps, Keith Shadis. He settled in Shiganshina District and used his education in medicine received in Marley to work in the city as a doctor, like he did in Liberio.
While spending thirteen years living within the Walls, Grisha documented detailed information about the real world outside the Walls and its history in three books, especially background about Eldia, Marley, the situation between humanity and the people segregated in internment zones, the Titans and their origins, and some other background facts such as the existence of the oceans, of modern technology existing outside the Walls, such as better ships and airships, and similar facts, although he was not able to bring any maps of the world with himself before being banished. One of the three books documented by Grisha is his own personal diary, in which he narrates his life in Marley and his background as a child and Restorationist. He hid the books in his house's basement, in order to prevent the authorities of the Walls - especially the Military Police's First Interior Squad serving the royal family - from finding them.
Born in Marley, in the Liberio internment zone, Grisha is the son of a doctor owning his own clinic and another Eldian woman as their firstborn child, and had a younger sister named Faye, who was murdered at the age of eight. In Marley, Grisha married Dina Fritz, the last remaining member of the royal family in the mainland and the two had a son named Zeke. After being sent to Paradis Island, he re-married to Carla and had a second son, Eren.
In Japanese, he is voiced by Hiroshi Tsuchida as an adult, and by Yūto Uemura as a child. In English, he is voiced by Chris Hury as an adult, and by Justin Briner as a child.
His Evil Ranking[]
What Makes Him Heinous?[]
- Forced his six year old son Zeke to join the Marleyan military and the Warrior program for a life of war as nothing but a tool to both Marley and Eldia, to serve as a mole for the Restorationists and push their political agenda. Angrily pressured Zeke at seven to become a Titan Warrior, although it is well known in every nation and historically that Titan inheritance leaves the holder only 13 years to live before having to be eaten alive by another Titan. Grisha knowingly demanded that Zeke accept such fate and miserable life without caring how Zeke felt and what he wanted at such a young and naive age, and yelled every time Zeke expressed unwillingness to carry on, refusing to speak to him.
- Even after Zeke warned him that carrying on with the rebellion might eventually lead to all his family getting turned into Pure Titans, Grisha ignored his son's fears and got furious at him for not being an Eldia nationalist fighting for freedom. This caused Zeke to fear for his own safety and that of his grandparents and listened to Tom Ksaver's choice to turn both Grisha and Dina over to the Marleyan government, making Grisha responsible for the deaths of his wife and comrades and started the development of Zeke's nihilistic views on life from experiencing an enviroment in which not only he and other child soldiers are seen as nothing but inhuman monsters by all humanity, but even parents are willing to send their children into war and reduce their lifespans for their political beliefs.
- Led a vengeful terrorist organization that illegally carried firearms and planned to steal the Founding Titan from both Marley and Paradis Island's Walls to serve the interests of the Liberio internment zone, to have Zeke use it to control all the other Warriors, the Titan of the Tyburs, and any Pure Titans, to bring war and destruction upon Marley and anyone who would oppose their uprising, no matter the civilian casualties (Grisha at the time believed that Zeke could've used the Founder with his royal blood, unaware of Karl Fritz's brainwashing war renouncing vow).
- Tried to cause a mass insurrection of the Eldians of Liberio, but instead of planning to build a better and more fair society, he justified all the actions and atrocities of his ancestors and monarchs of Eldia. Due to his personal hatred against the world, he became in denial of all the negative history of the Eldian Empire and believed in and spread a biased historical propaganda (as one-sided as Marley's) that claimed that none of Eldia's brutal customs ever happened and that somehow Marley made it all up, despite the rest of the nations having the same historical background, including the many nations that are enemies to Marley.
- Grisha also pretended that the reign of the first known Fritz was all peaceful and fair and that helped all the other human cultures and that whatever massacre and oppression Eldia might have done to the Marleyans and other cultures was always the latters' fault no matter what, because in Grisha's eyes Eldia and the "goddess" Ymir Fritz were always good and in the right, despite all the historical evidence, the hatred of humanity, and how an empire with so much power being "benevolent" and then somehow being defeated by normal humans sounds very fantastic, as well as the fact that Eldia's monarchs carried the power to alter and manipulate the memories of their subjects to make them forget things or remember them in other ways, meaning Eldia had more means to spread lies and a false brainwashed history than Marley and the rest of the nations ever did. The Restorationists believed the Subjects of Ymir to be the "superior race chosen by God", and even considered their own people from the mainland's internment zones to be the "true Eldians with the true royal family", in comparison to those on Paradis Island and their royal branch who fled, a similar sentiment to Eldians who despise the Eldian Empire.
- He massacred all the Reiss family and stole the Founding Titan on Eren’s orders, which included brutally murdering children, leaving only the patriarch Rod on Eren's instructions.
- He passed the Attack Titan to his second son Eren knowing he would use it to start the Rumbling, which he did completely of his own free will, even if he could have tried to avoid a future in which humaniy gets massacred and Eren become a mass murderer with a short life ahead. Grisha's mission was originally to restore Eldia, and later to save the Subjects of Ymir, but his original priority was especially to protect and liberate his people from Liberio, yet he realized that Eren manipulated him and found out that Eren planned to kill all Grisha's people from the internment zones, including Grisha's parents and old friends. Despite regretting listenting to Eren and even begging Zeke to stop him, Grisha still passed the Founder to Eren and entrusted everything to Zeke, believing it was necessary to prevent the genocide of all the Eldian people and that no other way to save the world from its hatred was found.
- While he doesn’t stand out for killing the Reiss family due to Eren being mostly responsible for that act, he did give Eren the Attack Titan knowing he would start the Rumbling, which makes an enabler to his son's crime of genocide.
What Makes Him Inconsistent?[]
- He’s too tragic and not really evil at heart. He genuinely loved his whole family, both in Marley and within the Walls of Paradis. He was an Eldian forced to live in segregation within an internment zone so he was persecuted and despised by most of humanity and the world because of his ethnicity; his younger sister Faye was fed to the dogs by an out-of-line officer simply because she wanted to see a new blimp (a pretext for the abusing officer to kill and torture a person for fun). He and his parents found and had to watch Faye's mauled corpse, and Grisha's father initially gave the impression that he did not care enough and that he preferred to suck up to his daughter's killer.
- However, over the time growing up, Grisha understood that there was nothing his father could have done against such abuse of power and that he wanted to protect the family, and kept blaming only himself and the world's irrational hate for Faye's death. Nontheless, the tragedy caused Grisha's father to become a lot harsher to Grisha; while he initially did not want to teach his son to be self-hating for the crimes of their ancestors, after the officer Gross showed suspicions, he started to indoctrinate Grisha with Marley's propaganda about the "blood of devils" from Subjects of Ymir and forced Grisha to study to become a doctor just like himself, to inherit his clinic in Liberio's zone in the future, all to stay safe and live a long life, never to meet a similar fate as Faye while rebelling against the world.
- However, inside his heart Grisha still loved his parents, and maintained a close, friendly and stable relationship with them throughout his life, always leaving Zeke to their house, although him never sharing his grief and anger with them led to the parents thinking that Grisha was finally happy and at peace with his beloved Dina. Grisha's parents did not understood why Grisha and Dina allowed Zeke to become a Warrior, and apparently, the two told them that Zeke volunteered to join. However, when they personally asked Zeke if he truly wished to become a Warrior, Zeke did not look convinced nor enthusiastic at all, and Zeke's grandparents could only look at him sympathetically and notice that he was rather lonely and miserable.
- After Grisha followed similar forceful parenting ways as his father's, and Zeke ended up betraying him to save himself and Grisha's parents, Grisha realized how it felt to lose family and admitted to his leader Eren Kruger that if he had realized about the consequences, he never would've chose to pay such a price for freedom, finally understanding why his father refused to rebel. Both Grisha and Kruger understood that Dr. Yeager's main goal was to keep his family alive after being traumatized by Faye's death, although by going with extreme and misguided ways about it.
- He was already punished for his crimes, bad parenting, and fanaticism, he got tortured both physically and mentally, got his fingers cut off, got exiled from his homeland, parents and friends forever, his own son deeply despised him, and watched his wife and comrades be turned into Pure Titans forever, while Kruger forced him to become the sole survivor and receive the mission that Grisha wanted to force on his son so badly. At that point finally understanding his father and his son, Grisha lost his will to fight and initially refused to carry on with the Restorationist mission, telling Kruger to find someone else and admitting that all he has left now are regrets, calling himself a failure of a man, a husband, and a father, and saying that he lost all his old hate for Marley and the world. What pushed Grisha to carry on were Kruger's words, telling him that it will be his sins that will make Grisha carry on, as Grisha must keep "moving forward" with his agenda, until the price of his heinous actions will be paid, because in Kruger's belief, awful people like himself and Grisha should never back down, and continue their actions until they finally get "what is coming to them".
- Although he plotted terroristic attacks on the people of Marley, the-then young and still rash Grisha realized he was not made to be a cruel killer when he realized he could not even bare to watch, not even hear, at the death of Sergeant Major Gross, the man who had killed Faye when he was a street officer. This showed that Grisha was never heinous enough to do any killing himself and his personality was always too empathetic, which is also why as a child he could never fully hate his father. Nonetheless he could have been willing to let other Restorationists and Zeke getting their hands dirty, not knowing that Zeke would have inherited Karl Fritz's ideology, had he actually succeeded the mission to steal the Founding Titan.
- Grisha maintained his ideology to fight to freedom, approving of the Survey Corps' mission to discover the truth and calling them the "wisest people within the Walls", while abandoning the extreme and hateful support of Eldia and its history, after becoming a victim himself and talking to Gross, another race supremacist, and realizing how cruel it is to kill innocent people for their titles and not caring if they truly deserved or not. Grisha received his own hatred reflected back at him by Gross and was confronted with death in person. After personally discussing with Kruger about the origins of the Eldian Empire, Kruger told him that Ymir building a peaceful and benevolent nation with so much power in her hands does not sound like any human being with authority and stated that history is always grey, making it clear that no side was every purely "good", ending Grisha's previous biases.
- After losing his first family and starting a new life within Paradis Island's Walls, Grisha continued his job as a doctor on Shiganshina District, the southernmost city within the Walls and the place closer to the southern island, from where Grisha could hope to receive any news of Marley's then-postponed mission to invade the Walls (due to other wars that occured then). During his life in Shiganshina, Grisha gave support to Keith Shadis and used his better knowledge of medicine from the modern outside world to save Shiganshina from a mass epidemic that was killing the population, directly saving the lives of Hannes' wife, Carla, and Carla's parents. He also healed other people outside the city, such as nobles from the Interior, although he used those occasion to discover the true identity of the royal family in hiding.
- While his younger-self would have approved of the reckless determination of his second son Eren, the more mature Grisha was furious and shocked upon learning that at the age of nine, Eren murdered two bandits in cold blood and encouraged one of Grisha's patients, nine-year-old Mikasa Ackerman, to do the same to a third bandit. Regardless how evil the three men were, Grisha was angry and reprimanded Eren for not understanding the gravity of his actions and his lack of trauma and remorse over it, and most importantly for throwing his life away like that, since he only won against those grown men by sheer luck (a contrast to how young Grisha in Marley was throwing Zeke's life away and was pushing him to fight against grown armed men of the entire world and Paradis, and even kill innocents).
- He adopted Mikasa, who had no living family members (any relatives of Mikasa's mother were dead, Kenny estranged himself and Levi did not know his parentage) and gladly accepted her in his household with no hesitation nor demands. He was always kind to Mikasa, who also brought him food and drinks during his work. Grisha considered Mikasa his own daughter. He also knew that Mikasa was going to be close to Eren from Kruger's memories from the future that Eren himself had sent him.
- He learned from all his past mistakes made with his family and knew how selfish he was back then, even if he wished for a better future and the freedom of the Eldians from their internment zones. When he started a new family in the Walls, this time he tried to raise Eren right, and prioritized protecting him and his second wife Carla. Because of this he postponed his mission to steal the Founding Titan from the royal family, knowing it would have resulted with the Royal Government sending the Interior Military Police to hunt down the Yeager family, and Grisha avoided a repeat of what happened between his family and Marley's Public Security Authorities. However, this eventually backfired as well, as Grisha waited too long until his term as a Titan expired, and he chose to pass his own responsibility to his 10 year old son Eren, who unlike Grisha did not even have any attachment to the Eldians of Marley or the rest of the world, and only grew up with his mother's people. The real reason why Grisha waited to pass the Founder to Eren, is because the latter's future-self manipulated him to do so and to believe that Eren himself would have been the one to secure a better future for Eldia, never even showing him Carla and Mikasa's fate and only revealing visions of the Rumbling to Grisha after the massacre of the Reiss family.
- Throughout his 13 years living within the Walls, he was constantly tormented by his past actions and behavior, feeling regret for how horribly he treated, abused and neglected his son Zeke and wishing he could see him again, often dreaming about his past in Marley and seeing Zeke, and sleeping with the photograph of himself with Dina and Zeke (that Kruger had personally picked from Grisha's home in Liberio to give it to him) until the day he had to put it into his diary in his house's basement during his last year left in his term as the Attack Titan.
- He was manipulated by Eren into leaving his second family in their house at Shiganshina, knowing that Marley's warships dock from the south. Eren refused to show him when the much-anticipated attack on the Walls would ever take place and if Carla was ever going to survive, while he had no choice to push on with his old Restorationist mission, despite hesitating to continue a life of violence at that point and prioritzing his family like his father did. When Grisha was traveling to the north of the Walls on carriage, he learned that Shiganshina was attacked by the Colossal Titan, which Grisha identified as an invasion from the Marley Army's Warrior Unit.
- He tried to reason with the Reiss family, instead of stealing the Founder right away. With stress and fear for his family in his mind, Grisha had to carry on and plead to Frieda Reiss to go to Wall Maria and use the power of the Founder to stop the Warriors and kill all the Titans invading the Walls, only receiving a refusal from Karl's brainwashing and beliefs and the rest of the Reiss family blindly supporting Frieda's choice. Unlike his younger self, Grisha no longer denied the sins and atrocities of Eldia, but argued that modern Eldians are clueless and ignorant of their history, which makes them completely innocent and unrelated to the fallen empire from a century ago. Grisha tried to convince "King Karl" in Frieda's mind that punishing indiscriminately people for others' sins is not true atonement, although Frieda countered the argument by stating that to protect the world from suffering again, only Subjects of Ymir need to die in the conflict, as this is only fair to Karl, due to the fact that Eldia will never being able to return all the stolen and ruined lives throughout 1,900 years. Despite his attempt to solve everything diplomatically, Grisha was still forced to choose violence.
- His own son Eren manipulates him from the future into killing the Reiss family, lying that it is for the sake of his fallen sister, first wife and comrades from Liberio, which reduces him to being absolutely scared of him and suffer a breakdown for murdering innocent people for their beliefs, including children. For his actions, he was absolutely disgusted with himself. And right after, he is shown future glimpses of the world suffering the Rumbling, which Grisha admits he never imagined such a drastic and terrible solution, just to save the Eldians.
- While grieving over his actions and the entire conflict, through Eren's future control of the Coordinate, Grisha is allowed to sense and see Zeke, then a grown young man in his late twenties, finally receiving a chance to apologize to him. Grisha cries upon meeting the adult Zeke, finally being able to show his remorse for his abusive and self-serving parenting and directly apologize to Zeke for it, correctly assuming that Zeke must hate him and telling him how he regrets not having spent more time with him, like he did with Eren. Grisha embraces Zeke and he is finally able to tell him that he loves him.
- Although Grisha had been exiled knowing only that Zeke had exposed himself as a mole in the military, and that was still considered a failure to inherit a Titan anyway, it is clear that Grisha knew at this point, from Eren's future memories, that Zeke made it as a Titan Warrior and that he is the one who brought Eren to the Paths. With this knowledge, a desperate Grisha begged Zeke to stop Eren, in a final attempt to save humanity and the people of Liberio. Not knowing what to do and believing that Eren was going to force the events no matter what, and that he might doom the Eldians if he does not pass the Founder on to Eren, Grisha willingly chose to let Eren inherit the Founder and maintain the future, trusting everything to Zeke.
- On his way back to the south, he learns that the Titans also invaded all the lands of Wall Maria beyond Shiganshina, forcing him to stop at Trost District and search for his family among the refugess with Keith Shadis' help. They find Eren, Mikasa, Armin, and Armin's grandfather, but learn that Carla was killed and devoured by a Pure Titan, Grisha not even knowing that the Titan was his first wife Dina, sent by Eren himself to kill Carla and manipulate the events. Grisha still used Carla's death as a way to push the clueless child Eren to start his own mission, like Faye's death had originally instilled hate in Grisha and started his own mission, continuing a cycle.
- He ultimately redeems himself after his soul is liberated from the Founder's control by Zeke, along with his old childhood acquaintance Tom Ksaver and his former leader Eren Kruger (who had also been manipulated by Eren), as well as other fellow Eldian Marleyans Bertolt Hoover, Marcel and Porco Galliard, and Ymir, who all helping Armin, Zeke, and the alliance between the Marleyans and the Survey Corps to stop the Rumbling by regaining control of their resurrected Titan forms via Paths. Grisha helps to save 20% humanity, including citizens of Marley and his own people from Liberio, allowing his Mikasa to kill Eren, after Zeke sacrificed himself for humanity.
External Links[]
- Grisha Yeager on the Villains Wiki
- Grisha Yeager on the Attack on Titan Wiki
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 Inconsistently Heinous
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Canon Marley Eldian Empire Eldian Restorationists | ||