Hange
Zoë

Hange hated the Titans until the day a kick sent a severed Titan head flying and its impossible lightness rewrote the question. From then on Hange studied what everyone else only killed: capturing Sawney and Beane and grieving when they were destroyed, testing Eren's transformations, working out that the walls were made of hardened Titans, and prying the truth about the Reiss family out of a torture cell alongside Levi. The mania was real, and so was the mind behind it. Most of what humanity learned about its enemy ran through Hange's hands.

Erwin handed Hange the Scout Regiment before his arrest, and Shiganshina made it permanent. Moblit, the aide who had spent years pulling Hange back from ledges, died shoving them into a well ahead of Bertholdt's blast, and Hange came out of that battle half-blind and one of nine survivors. As commander, Hange navigated the flood of the outside world, the Jaegerist takeover, and the collapse of everything the Scouts had built, hauling a maimed Levi through the woods while hunted by their own former subordinates.

Hange never accepted the Rumbling. Genocide was the one line, argued against Floch's fanatics, against Yelena, and against the numbers themselves. At the hangar in Odiha, with the Wall Titans minutes away and the flying boat still fueling, Hange claimed the rear guard as a commander's responsibility, named Armin successor, and went out alone into the heat. The Titans burned Hange alive, but the boat got off the water.