Erwin
Smith

Erwin's father was a teacher who privately told his son that the government's history books were full of holes, and that the memories of everyone inside the walls might have been rewritten. The boy repeated the theory to friends, the Military Police came asking, and his father died in a convenient accident. Everything Erwin did afterward, the career, the rank, the mountains of dead, was in service of one private need: to find out whether his father was right.

As commander he remade the Scout Regiment into an instrument that spent lives deliberately instead of wasting them. His long-distance scouting formation cut casualties in the open field, and his trap in the giant forest caught the Female Titan at the cost of soldiers he sacrificed without telling them the plan, because he already knew there was a spy in the ranks. He lost his right arm to a Titan's jaws mid-charge and kept shouting the order to advance while being dragged away. When the government chose its own survival over humanity's, he put his neck in the noose as bait and let Pyxis and Zachary overthrow the monarchy, then put Historia on the throne.

Shiganshina was the bill for all of it. With the recruits broken and the Beast Titan shelling them from beyond reach, Erwin admitted to Levi that his dream was in reach, that he wanted to see the basement more than he wanted humanity's victory, and then gave the dream up. He led the recruits in a suicide charge into the rock barrage so Levi could reach Zeke, and took a stone through the abdomen before the charge was fully underway. Levi, holding the serum that would have brought him back, chose to release him instead. Erwin died on a rooftop in the town where the answers were, one street short of the basement.