Annie Leonhart

Annie Leonhart (アニ・レオンハート Ani Reonhāto?) is a graduate of the 104th Training Corps and former member of the Military Police Brigade. Her exceptional skills with swords and unarmed combat earned her the 4th rank, but she is also noted to be a lone wolf who struggles to work with others.

She possessed the ability to transform into a Titan known as the Female Titan. Trained from an early age by her father, she is selected as one of Marley's Warriors. In the year 845, she is sent on a mission to retrieve the Founding Titan, along with fellow Warriors Reiner Braun, Bertolt Hoover, and Marcel Galliard. As the Female Titan, she serves as a major antagonist prior to her defeat, at which point she crystallizes herself and is left in a comatose state. She was held underground in the custody of the Survey Corps for approximately four years before escaping during a battle between the Military, the Yeagerists, and the forces of Marley.

Appearance: Annie is a teenage girl of considerably short height with a small, yet very muscular build and physique. She has moderately short hair that is often tied at the back with her right fringe mainly draping over the right side of her face (though she tends to push it to the side on occasion; possibly for better visibility). She has an oval-shaped face, blonde hair, blue eyes, a roman nose and pale complexion. Her hair color is noticeably paler than most other blonde-haired characters and when untied, her hair reaches down the nape of her neck. Her eyes, although of considerable size and proportion, often have a sullen vibe to their appearance. Annie's casual attire mainly consists of a hooded sweatshirt underneath a jacket accompanied by dark gray pants. She is often seen in the Cadet Corps uniform and then the Military Police Regiment uniform after graduation. Though Annie often wears hooded sweatshirts as part of her standard attire, she also wears her signature white hooded sweatshirt as part of her standard military attire. During her missions as the Female Titan, it is implied that she always wears her ring which has a small, folding blade on her right index finger; using it as her primary source of causing self-injury in order to transform into her Female Titan form at any time.

Four years later after being freed from her crystalized stasis, Annie no longer keeps her hair up and lets it hang loose. She still wears her Military Police uniform and gains a brown cloak. Later, she maintains her white hooded sweatshirt with a shoulder holster and a revamped black pants worn by the 104th Cadet Corps when she sided with the others to stop Eren.

Personality: Due to her harsh upbringing, Annie has become an isolated, exclusionary person; friendships do not come to her easily. She is rarely seen smiling and often has an emotionless expression. She is apathetic and somnolent, with little desire to put in any effort into meaningless disciplines or activities, and instead claims to focus exclusively on making it into the Military Police Brigade to obtain an easy life. While Annie tends to have a realistic outlook on life, she holds a fascination and even feelings of respect towards people who have a deep sense of duty and righteousness—people who devote their lives to and even die for causes they believe in.

Annie's sense of humor tends to be mocking, sarcastic, deadpan, and surprising. It also sometimes expresses a partial truth, and it happens mostly in intense situations. For example, when she was cornered by the Survey Corps in front of an underground passage, she claimed that she was a feeble maiden and mocked Eren as a suicidal blockhead. Despite Annie's usually cold and calm demeanor, she is capable of expressing her feelings in various ways. At the times she does lose her composure, she usually reacts with violence. She beats up Reiner Braun for his cowardice after Marcel was eaten and for trying to manipulate her to continue a mission that had, in her view, already failed. Also, while exhausted by her spy work and constantly avoiding hand-to-hand combat training, Annie is angered when he pushes her to take the training seriously, to the point she uses her fighting style on him, despite his protests and her already having demonstrated it on Eren at Reiner's bidding. While outwardly callous, Annie has expressed levels of guilt and shock, most notably when apologizing to a certain corpse after the battle of Trost and when Reiner emotionally manipulated her to help him kill Marco.

Annie is highly intelligent, able to think deeply about situations, and has shown considerable problem-solving ability and a quick wit. These personality traits, in conjunction with her calm attitude and analytical skills, make her a good tactician. While undercover as a refugee, and later as a trainee, she does most of the spy work for the Warriors. Annie also realizes the contradictions of the military training system within the Walls and is not fooled by the Marleyan propaganda. However, she is a bad liar, being called out on this by both Eren and Kenny, the former regarding her apathy towards her martial arts prowess, and the latter when she lies about being his daughter, even sarcastically insisting further. On the other hand, she is very good at spotting the lies of other people, seen when she realizes Armin Arlert's dishonesty far before they had even reached the underground tunnel, as well as Reiner's lie about befriending their fellow trainees as being nothing more than a pragmatic attempt to gain their trust.

She is extremely practical and self-aware, being honest about her strengths and weaknesses, and is rarely ever prone to self-deception or emotional mistakes. A notable example is when she recognizes her lack of skill in seduction and charm when thinking about possibly seducing a member of the Fritz family, causing her to readily dismiss the idea. Furthermore, she had a casual acceptance of her negative personality traits, freely admitting her faults even to almost-complete strangers such as Marlowe Freudenberg, calling herself worthless and evil with no hint of self-loathing. She is nevertheless capable of self-loathing. For example, she proposed to Reiner Braun and Bertolt Hoover to get close to one of the men in the Fritz family and marry into it for the sake of her mission. She also claimed to be as selfish as the Marleyan government.

Annie is very concentrated on her mission as a Warrior, to the point that she is willing to kill to reach her goal, although she is somewhat hesitant to kill former comrades and sheds tears when she fails to capture Eren. Though she is seemingly indifferent towards her capability as a hand-to-hand combat fighter, she remains proud of her skills and seems to enjoy the notion of fighting. The only time that she is seen genuinely smiling is when she expresses a curious interest in teaching Eren how to fight in her unique fighting style.

Nonetheless, what drives Annie more than anything is her desire for a normal life. Though she has no love for Marley itself, the only reason she is so concentrated on her mission is that it because it would allow her to go back home to her father, and she had urged Reiner several times before her eventual capture to return to Marley with the information they had gathered so far; despite her otherwise cynical and realist worldview, Annie managed to convince herself of the false notion that it would be enough to avoid punishment. When she lost Eren due to the actions of both Mikasa and Levi in the Titan Forest, Annie saw the easiest chance to return to her father was gone and she began visibly crying in her Titan form.

After escaping her confinement, Annie undergoes a significant change in character, becoming more open about working with her former friends to stop the actions of Eren and the Yeagerists. She also freely acknowledges to Hitch that she has committed unforgivable acts, something Annie normally would have kept to herself. Later, as the Wall Titans ravage through Marley, she admits to Armin that she genuinely appreciated him visiting her for the four years she was enclosed inside her crystal. Annie also tells him she sees herself as nothing more than a monster.