ARC TIMELINE

For a hundred years, three concentric walls kept humanity alive. Eren Jaeger, ten years old and already tired of rules, sits on a hillside outside Shiganshina District telling his best friend Armin that there has to be something beyond the walls worth seeing. Then the wall moves. A hand bigger than a cathedral appears over the top of Wall Maria, and a sixty-meter Colossal Titan kicks the outer gate of Shiganshina into dust.

What follows is the opening image of the whole series: Titans streaming through the breach, civilians trampled in the panic, and Eren's mother Carla pinned under the rubble of her own house. The Smiling Titan arrives, plucks her out of the wreckage, and eats her in front of her children while Hannes carries them away. Hours later, as refugees flood toward Wall Rose, the Armored Titan smashes through the inner gate, and the last defensive line of Wall Maria collapses. A fifth of humanity dies in the first week. Eren, Mikasa and Armin end up in a relief column eating bread from strangers' hands, and Eren swears that he will kill every last Titan on earth.

A year later, the Wall Maria Reclamation campaign sends 250,000 refugees back across the breached wall as a human shield so the survivors don't starve. Roughly a hundred come home. That is the world the 104th Cadet Corps signs up to defend.

The Battle of Trost is humanity's first honest look at what an entire generation of cadets can do against Titans. The answer, for most of them, is die. Eren watches Thomas Wagner get bitten in half beside him and launches a suicidal charge that ends with his own leg in a Titan's teeth. He saves Armin by shoving him out of a Titan's mouth at the cost of his own arm, and then (as far as anyone outside the Garrison knows) he dies as well.

Except a rogue Titan appears in the middle of the Trost bloodbath, fighting only other Titans, and a survivor of Squad 34 realizes it's moving like a person. When the rogue Titan finishes clearing the district's northern half, it collapses, and Eren Jaeger climbs out of the back of its neck. Commander Dot Pyxis of the Garrison, eccentric and slightly drunk, decides on the spot that Eren is humanity's best hope and gambles the entire Battle of Trost on him: they will use Eren's Titan form to lift a one-ton boulder and plug the breach in the wall.

Mikasa, Armin and Jean lead the elite squad that keeps Titans off Eren during the gate-sealing. Mitabi Jarnach and Ian Dietrich die holding the line. Eren, barely conscious and missing his human hand, carries the boulder across the district and seals the gate, the first real victory humanity has ever scored against the Titans. Then the Military Police arrest him as a monster.

The 57th Expedition forms up outside Calaneth District in the Long-Distance Scouting Formation, a diamond of mounted soldiers covering the maximum possible area with the fewest possible eyes. Within minutes a Female Titan appears on the right flank, slaughters the scouts stationed there, and makes straight for the center where Eren is riding with Levi Squad. Erwin diverts her into the Forest of Giant Trees and sets an ambush using a hidden cache of wire-launched harpoons. The Female Titan is pinned, but Levi Squad's orders are to stay on the ground and leave the fight to the veterans, regardless of what Eren's instincts are telling him to do.

He obeys. The Female Titan's pilot breaks out of the trap anyway. What follows is the bleakest sequence in the series to date: the Female Titan overtakes Levi Squad in the forest canopy and kills Gunther, Eld, Petra and Oluo in the span of two minutes, Petra crushed against a tree trunk, Oluo's neck snapped by a kick. Eren transforms and challenges her himself, loses the fight, and is bitten out of his own Titan's neck.

Levi and Mikasa catch up, force the Female Titan to flee, and rescue Eren from her stomach. The expedition limps home with the highest casualty rate of any Scout mission since Wall Maria. In the ruins of Ehrmich District, Armin looks at a handful of survivors and points out a detail nobody else noticed: the Female Titan deliberately spared one specific face in the ODM forest battle. She recognized him. She's a cadet.

Titans have somehow appeared inside Wall Rose, which should be impossible, the wall is unbroken. The Scouts scatter to evacuate villages across the southern territory. Mike Zacharius, humanity's second-strongest soldier, is ambushed by a Beast Titan with the face of an ape and the ability to speak. The Beast Titan takes Mike's ODM gear as a trophy and orders his underlings to eat him alive.

Reiner and Bertholdt (returning with the rest of the Scouts from a scouting run) casually confess to Eren atop the ruins of Wall Rose that they are the Armored and Colossal Titans, and that they're here to take him home with them. What follows is a mid-forest chase, a brutal Titan-on-Titan battle, and the discovery that Ymir is the long-lost Jaw Titan. Christa Lenz is revealed to be Historia Reiss, a daughter of the real royal family that rules the walls from the shadows.

Reiner captures Eren and runs for Wall Maria, believing he has enough of a head start to get across. Erwin catches up with every Scout he can muster. The rescue column collides with the Armored Titan on the plains outside the wall, and in a burst of desperate rage Eren lands a punch that sends out a shockwave, and every Titan in sight turns, obeys, and swarms Reiner and Bertholdt. Eren has the Coordinate. The power the royal family was supposed to have. Hannes, the garrison soldier who carried Eren away from his dying mother in Shiganshina, dies fighting the Smiling Titan the moment it tries to devour Eren again. Dina Fritz, the Smiling Titan herself, is torn apart by the same Titans Eren just ordered to kill her. The Scouts escape with Eren. Reiner and Bertholdt escape with Ymir. Nobody gets what they came for.

One year later, Erwin gathers every Scout in service for the final push to reclaim Wall Maria and reach the basement of Grisha Jaeger's old house in Shiganshina, the place Eren's father promised held 'the truth of this world.' Reiner, Bertholdt and the Beast Titan are waiting for them. What follows is the single most devastating battle in Attack on Titan: Erwin's suicide charge into the Beast Titan's artillery line, Levi's duel with Zeke Jaeger, Armin's near-death sacrifice against the Colossal Titan, and the Serumbowl, Levi's impossible choice between injecting the last dose of Titan serum into Erwin to bring him back, or into a dying Armin instead.

Levi gives the serum to Armin. Erwin dies believing humanity has lost. Armin wakes up as the Colossal Titan. The Scouts hold Shiganshina District by a thread, Reiner is left for dead in the wall, and Zeke extracts Bertholdt's body before escaping. Eren, Mikasa, Armin, Levi and Hange finally descend into Grisha's basement, and what they find reshapes the entire series. Three leather-bound books in Grisha's handwriting. The world outside the walls is not uninhabited. There are nations, oceans, and a civilization called Marley that invented the Titans as a weapon generations ago. The people inside the walls (Eldians on Paradis Island) are enemies of the world, not the last of humanity. Every assumption the 104th Cadet Corps grew up with is a lie.

The Raid on Liberio is the moment the final season becomes a tragedy. Eren fights Reiner and Porco in the rubble of the internment zone while Levi, Jean, Connie, Armin and Mikasa extract Eldian volunteers and civilians onto the Scouts' airship. Eren consumes the War Hammer Titan by crushing Lara Tybur's crystal with his Jaw Titan's teeth. Sasha Braus, the hungriest and most loyal Scout on the regiment, is shot by a twelve-year-old Gabi Braun during the retreat, her last word is 'meat.'

Back on Paradis, Eren has changed. He takes political control of the Scout Regiment away from Hange, allies openly with the Jaegerists under Floch Forster, imprisons his own friends, and begins preparing the Rumbling, the Founding Titan's ability to unleash every Colossal Titan encased inside the walls and march them across the planet. Zeke Jaeger reveals his counter-plan, the euthanization of all Eldians, which he believes is the only way to break the cycle of hatred. Eren pretends to go along with it, convinces Zeke to touch him inside Paths, and in the Founding Titan's memory space finally meets Ymir Fritz, the original slave girl who became the first Titan two thousand years ago. Eren frees her from her bondage to the royal family, takes the full Founding Titan power, and brings down every wall on Paradis at once.

The Rumbling kills roughly 80 percent of humanity outside the walls. The Alliance (Mikasa, Armin, Levi, Jean, Connie, Reiner, Annie, Pieck, Gabi, Falco and the Marleyan volunteers) chase Eren across the continent in a desperate attempt to stop him. Hange holds the Wall Titans at Odiha so the Alliance can reach Eren's mainland flying boat, and burns to death alone against a wave of them. Levi beheads Zeke inside the Founding Titan, ending the Beast Titan line. Armin eats Eren's memories through the Paths and learns that Eren orchestrated his own mother's death, saw the entire future from the day he ate Grisha, and chose this ending anyway because it was the only one where the friends he loved survived. Mikasa climbs into the mouth of the Founding Titan and kisses Eren's severed head goodbye. The Titans disappear from the world. Humanity survives. Nothing else does.