History Characters / AttackOnTitanMarley

* {{Foil}}: To Historia's mother, Alma. Both were involved in an illicit relationship that resulted in a child desperate to reconnect with them, but they resented that child because their relationship would get them executed. But his position as a Marleyan citizen allowed him to abandon his child, and deny any relation to avoid punishment while Alma was a servant to the royal family and killed to remove any loose ends.

* BlatantLies: Played With. As Eren Kruger argues, if actual ethnic cleansing against the Marleyans had taken place, then they should've been driven completely extinct after ''far less'' than 17 centuries. It's just too much time for the claim to be true; not only that, but also the fact that there are thousands, if not millions of Marleyans alive only one century after the supposed cleansing ended. If there was indeed an ethnic cleansing, it was ''remarkably ineffective''. And there's also the problem that none of the current Marleyans can transform into Titans, but the history says that Eldians forced them to reproduce with them to make more citizens of Ymir, which doesn't appear to be possible. But in chapter 122, the flashback does show that The Eldians really did brutalize the Marleyeans with their Titan powers. It's left ambiguous what actually happened to the Marleyeans that lived under Eldian rule, but the implication seems to be that it's all so mired in hearsay and the CycleOfRevenge that it hardly matters.

* AmbiguousSituation: Was Karina really just trying to spite her ex-lover by having “their” child become a warrior or was she really just that deluded to believe that becoming an “honorary” Marleyean would make them exempt from that law and/or that he did/would actually love her.
* BlatantLies: [[spoiler: Before seeing her son off, Karina tells him how his father will be praying for his success and promising the family will be together. Reiner had ''already'' met his father by then, and knew she was lying... but doesn't say anything. Of course Karina could just be that delusional. See ambiguous situation above.]].
* BoomerangBigot: She's incredibly vocal in her hatred of the Eldians living behind the Walls as a result of her lifetime of brainwashing by Marleys propaganda, raising her son to want to exterminate them. She also deeply resents having been born an Eldian.

* InsaneTrollLogic: She's willing to sacrifice her son and niece to the Marleyan cause and advocate for the extermination of a whole nation of people to regain what seems to have been little more than an iffy, illegal relationship. [[spoiler: In fact, Reiner's father ''has'' a family and wants nothing to do with them]].

* MisplacedRetribution: She taught her son and her niece that the Eldians of Paradise are solely responsible for the atrocities of the Eldian empire despite the fact that her ancestors were part of the empire too (likely to shift blame that Marley taught her to feel for herself). She also resents them for “abandoning” the other Eldians to suffer for “their” crimes in Marley (in reality it was solely King Fritz that made that decision and he set the walked people up to be exterminated someday anyways).
* MoralityPet: Inverted. The affection her son has for her is what drives him to continue the mission, and lash out at his comrades. Her influence brings out the worst in him.

* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: [[spoiler: Faced with the oncoming wall titans trampling everything in their path, she falls to her knees in tears, realizing and regretting her treatment of Reiner as a tool for her own advancement.]]

Marley is a massive imperialist nation from beyond the Walls which dominates most of the continent west from the island of Paradis, where the Walls are located. Formerly a kingdom, in their history they claim to have been the subjects of persecution and ethnic cleansing by the Eldian Empire, until the latter became fractured and the Eldian clans started fighting each other, which they used as an opportunity to steal seven of the Nine Titan powers from the Eldians. With those they were able to turn the tables on their oppressors and made them flee to Paradis, thus leading Marley to become the new dominant superpower through military might. After eighty years of their victory (and roughly twenty years before the start of the story) they set their sights on the island of Paradis to secure its strategic natural resources and to eradicate the Eldians of the Three Walls.

* NiceJobFixingItVillain: With his actions, he singlehandedly made Grisha Yeager rebel against the Marley establishment. By doing so, in the long run he gave the Eldians inside the Walls a fighting chance that they would not have had otherwise. Also applies to NiceJobBreakingItRivals.

* TemptingFate: During his HannibalLecture, he matter-of-factly states that he knows everyone will die someday, including him. He tells Grisha he has made peace with that fact and will face fate head on as he creates the Kawaii Titan. When he is pushed off the wall, he is screaming and struggling as his face is bitten off. "Face fate" head on indeed.

* SinsOfOurFather: They have it drilled into their heads by Marley that just being of the same racial group/descended from the same people that oppressed and supposedly tried to exterminate them means they are guilty of the same crimes and deserve their inhumane treatment. Grisha’s father told him that “it doesn’t matter if we’re not directly responsible for the sins”. Some like the Brauns redirect their shame onto the Islanders while also deeming the current inhabitants responsible for their ancestors unintentionally abandoning theirs in Marley.

* GreaterScopeVillain: They are behind all the major events that kickstarted the plot:

* GreaterScopeVillain: Is the highest-ranking Marleyan official seen so far and represents the higher powers in control of the Warriors.

* ReasonableAuthorityFigure: Is surprisingly this, holding no question to Zeke's loyalties and approving of his proposal to invade Paradis Island despite his initial failure.

* MeaningfulName: Eren Yeager's name more likely than not came from Eren Kruger himself, which makes sense given his impact on Grisha. Also, Kruger means "tavern-keeper" in German and Dutch, with a tavern being the exact place where Grisha first met Carla who is Eren's mother.

* GuiltByAssociation/SinsOfTheFather: They have it drilled into their heads by Marley that just being of the same racial group/descended from the same people that oppressed and supposedly tried to exterminate them means they are guilty of the same crimes and deserve their inhumane treatment. Grisha’s father told him that “it doesn’t matter if we’re not directly responsible for the sins”. Some like the Brauns redirect their shame onto the Islanders while also deeming the current inhabitants responsible for their ancestors unintentionally abandoning theirs in Marley.

* GuiltByAssociation: They have it drilled into their heads by Marley that just being of the same racial group/descended from the same people that oppressed and supposedly tried to exterminate them means they are guilty of the same crimes and deserve their inhumane treatment. Grisha’s father told him that “it doesn’t matter if we’re not directly responsible for the sins”. Some like the Brauns redirect their shame onto the Islanders while also deeming the current inhabitants responsible for their ancestors unintentionally abandoning theirs in Marley.

** There is also a law that if just ONE member of an Eldian family commits a crime (specifically treason) then the ENTIRE family is punished.

* LastOfHisKind: He is the last member of the Marleyan military high command who survived the Eldian attack on Liberio. However, this was engineered by both himself and Willy Tybur in order to flush out the extremely conservative members of the high command.

* ItsAllAboutMe: Annie flat out tells Reiner that for all Marley's talk about greatness and Eldia being demons they (and Eldia and really everyone) only really cares about themselves and are willing to be hypocrites and stomp on the other side while deluding themselves if it benefits them.

* CripplingOverspecialization: Somewhat. Marley became the dominant world powers in its region thanks to its extensive use of Titans. However, much of its technology is outdated compared to the rest of the world, to the point that even ''with'' the Titans, they stand a good chance of eventually losing. The rest of the world is adapting to the Titans and is coming up with multiple different ways to fight them, meaning that the country's military dominance is threatened unless they can take the other Titan powers that are under the control of Paradis.

* HistoricalHeroUpgrade: As stated in CompositeCharacter, [[spoiler:he may have been based on the Marleyan general who killed Ymir Fritz two millennia before. The main difference is that said general took down Ymir while she was in human form, while Helos "killed" the Devil of All Earth in Titan form.]]

* ItsAllAboutMe: Annie flat out tells Reiner that for all Marleys talk about greatness and Eldia being demons they (and Eldia and really everyone) only really cares about themselves and are willing to be hypocrites and stomp on the other side while deluding themselves if it benefits them.

* {{Retcon}}: Originally he was depicted as living in a cabin in the woods, which alluded to some kind of special status among Eldians. But it was later clarified by the anime that he and Annie did indeed live in Liberio, just a run down part of it.

* OutlivingOnesOffspring: They've lived through this nightmare not once, but ''twice''. Their daughter was killed in a violent fashion for disobeying the law, and later they had to helplessly watch as their son and daughter-in-law were arrested for treason. [[spoiler:Then, Grisha allows Eren's Pure Titan to eat him so that the latter can inherit the Attack and Founding Titans. And that's not counting their second daughter-in-law, Carla, who was eaten by Dina's Pure Titan, and Dina herself being eaten by Pure Titans under Eren's command via coordinate — all of which happened during their lifespan]]. [[spoiler:Given that Zeke and Eren are the holders of Titan powers, had Mr. and Mrs. Yeager not perished in the Rumbling, they would probably have outlived their two grandsons as well.]] [[spoiler:The anime subverts the last statement with them perishing in the Rumbling while the Yeager brothers are still alive]].

* BlackDudeDiesFirst: [[spoiler: ''Inverted'', he's among a few named characters who managed to makes it all the way to the very end of the manga.]]

* ArchEnemy: Of the Eldians.

* TooDumbToLive: Despite the fact that the First King and his people retired on Paradis as punishment for their ancestors’ sins with the condition of releasing the Wall Titans to the world if the truce wouldn’t work, Marley keeps harassing Eldians and attacking their island both to exterminate them and to take their resources. Sure enough, a month after they declared war to Paradis, [[spoiler: Eren decides to unleash [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt The Rumbling]] to exterminate all life outside Paradis]].

* AssholeVictim: [[spoiler:Zigzagged Eren assassinates most of Marley's leaders and later orders the Wall Titans to destroy the nation, leading to the destruction of the vast majority of the Marleyan empire. However, while it was obviously reprehensible to indiscriminately massacre so many innocents and civilians, the Marleyan leadership were unrepentantly, genocidally racist against the Eldians, making it hard to feel too bad for them.]]

* AssholeVictim: [[spoiler:Eren assassinates most of Marley's leaders and later orders the Wall Titans to destroy the nation, leading to the destruction of the vast majority of the Marleyan empire. However, it's not hard to argue that the Marleyans had it coming given their atrocities and racial policies.]]

* SpellMyNameWithAnS: While his given name is officially spelled "Willy", an alternate reading is "Vili", which further adds to the Norse mythology references.

* SpellMyNameWithAnS: Is it "Nikolo" or "Niccolo"?

* LaserGuidedKarma: Yelena followed Zeke and helped him commit atrocities upon atrocities and is indirectly allowed [[spoiler:Eren to kill eighty percent of humanity, all out of a desire to be something greater than something more than just a random, forgettable citizen. Her ultimate fate is to basically perform community service helping out the remnants of humanity, forced to help those who suffered under her actions as another face in the crowd.]]