Eren Yeager
Eren Yeager is the protagonist of the Attack on Titan manga series created by Hajime Isayama. Eren is a teenager who swears revenge on enormous man-eating humanoid creatures known as Titans, who have forced what remains of the human race to live in walled-off cities and devoured his mother while destroying his hometown in the Shiganshina district of Wall Maria. In order to defeat the Titans, Eren enlists in the Military and joins the Survey Corps - an elite group of soldiers who fight Titans outside the walls, whilst studying the physiology of Titans so as to better understand and defend themselves against these creatures. As the story progresses, Eren gains the power of becoming a Titan later identified as "Attack Titan".
Isayama created Eren with the idea of a character whose fears and dreams were relatable but often clashed with his own darkness, resulting in multiple changes to his characterization. In the anime adaptation of the series, his name is spelled as Eren Jaeger. Eren's voice was provided by Yūki Kaji in Japanese and Bryce Papenbrook in English. Both of these actors found difficulties in employing different types of voices based on how Eren grows up across the narrative. In the live-action film adaptations, he is portrayed by Haruma Miura.
Critical reception to Eren was initially polarized, finding him too antagonistic and harsh for his age. Positive comments focused on the character's ideals and newfound powers as a Titan as well as his character arc. Reception has become more positive in later arcs of the manga and anime as he becomes a more ambiguous rather than heroic character, evidenced in the 6th Crunchyroll Anime Awards where Eren was nominated for "Best Protagonist" and "Best Antagonist" simultaneously, and went on to win in the latter category. The character has proven popular within the Attack on Titan fanbase, while his voice actors Kaji and Papenbrook received praise for their portrayals of the character.
Creation and design
Author Hajime Isayama created Eren to be "an ordinary youngster who gets paralyzed with fear" when seeing a titan. As a result, he was not given unit warrior talent in comparison to other members from the series. Isayama has stated that part of the reason he chose the name "Eren" for the character is because it sounds feminine, which would make it easier to remember. Isayama has stated that he has struggled in the past to make Eren feel "alive" when writing and has called the character "a slave to the story".Isayama stated that Eren's wish to go outside the city's walls is similar to his own. When he was a child, he lived in a rural Japanese town surrounded by mountains. One day, he wanted to go beyond the mountains, which reflected in the town surrounded by walls in the manga where Eren lived in the series' beginning. In retrospect, Isayama believes Eren fits the type of narrative he wrote for Attack on Titan, something that Isayama managed to relate with.
Isayama has stated he paid particular attention to Eren's eyes when designing him, in order to make him stand out from the rest of the cast. He specifically chose to give Eren thin eyebrows instead of thick ones because he felt it would be "artificial" to try to use thicker eyebrows to accent Eren's angry personality. Because Eren is an energetic character, Isayama chose to give him black hair so that it would be easier to draw speed lines around him when he is moving. The character's Titan form's physique was modeled after middleweight mixed martial artist Yushin Okami. Isayama has also identified Takanori Gomi's southpaw fighting style as a model used for Eren's Titan and the way it fights. Isayama originally intended for Eren to have known all along that he was a Titan. As he looked over previous chapters of the manga, Isayama stated that Eren's fight against the Warhammer was one of his favorite scenes.
Actors
Japanese actor Yūki Kaji commented on how it was important that he should voice Eren's Titan form because he believes it is an extension of the character. He had a meal with Isayama after he visited the recording studio and the manga artist told him he found Eren quite a difficult character but complimented Kaji by saying "You know Eren already", which gave him confidence. Eren's characterization was briefly altered for the English dub of the series making him self-reflective and eloquent in some scenes. Kaji described Eren for the second season as a person who never changes despite his growth, finding this trait important for the drama. The staff and him did not want to change the way Kaji changed Eren's portrayal in the making of the second season. Upon seeing Kaji's portayal of Eren, Yukimura believes he was more heroic than the Eren he originally wrote in the manga.English voice actor Bryce Papenbrook got excited when he got the role of Eren as he was a fan of the show before it was announced that it would be dubbed into English. As a result, he viewed this as an advantage as he managed to understand the character beforehand. For example, he could understand the delivery of several lines because he already knew of the anime's series of twists. Additionally, he saw himself prepared for the role's pressure due to his previous works in popular anime.
He was excited because Eren was different from his previous characters despite sharing a similar age and vocal range, he commented "It's a very raw sound. Some of the noises he pulled out of me were just disgusting. I loved it. I loved every second of it." Papenbrook noted how different was Eren from his previous role as noted in the delivery of emotions and notable screams. There were three different kinds of voices he used for Eren: One for his kid persona, another deeper for his young adult self and a third "which was different from anything else." He recorded all three of those, and "there were noises that were required that were just disgusting and nasty." While he saw Eren's screams as challenging, he believes it was not the most difficult he ever had.
Haruma Miura stated he was proud of portraying Eren in the live-action film, adding that he was surprised by being cast for the role. Due to the appeal of the series, Miura tried to stay true to Eren's characterization when working in the movie and hoped Asian viewers would enjoy his work. Miura found the shooting of the movie challenging including the training to move like the character. Miura aimed to show Eren's naivety traits when working in the movie.
Characterization and themes
Isayama describes Eren's personality as that of a child who uses rage as his motivation as a result of his weakness and failure to save his mother from the Titans. His retaliation against such pressures triggered all this fury, which led to a major introduction to the core of his traits. Many illustrations of him were brutal in nature due to his constant struggle against unforgiving surroundings. However, this hatred often combined with inexperience, causing him to act dangerously and recklessly charge ahead. Early in the series when Eren is revealed to be a Titan shifter, Isayama thinks he wrote him calmer than his original depiction. He did that in order to give fellow character Armin more determination as Eren relied on him in order to clear him of the military's accusation that he was an enemy to mankind.Originally, Isayama was asked by his editor, who Eren's rival in the manga was. Although initially he said it was Annie, Isayama noted that there was no such rivalry between them and instead thought that Eren needed to overcome something to become stronger. Despite initial issues in understanding Eren, Isayama noted that the character reminded him more and more of himself afterwards, though he still found Eren hard to write. In later chapters when confronting Annie, Isayama wanted to give Eren more responsibility by making him suffer the powerlessness of his allies being killed by the traitor. Another major scene for Eren's arc involved how he realized his powers are not good due to how he was manipulated by his father Grisha and thought he should not live due to this guilt, especially when realizing he killed his own father as a child. Talking more about Eren's rivalries, Isayama instead compared him with Luke Skywalker from Star Wars as he finds fitting how both characters have an inner conflict with their darker personas. Isayama describes Eren's personality as an emotional complex; as his existing beliefs are gradually destroyed, Eren starts thinking about simply preserving himself as a new standard, and consequently acts on that way of thinking.
By the manga's 22nd volume, Isayama drew an image of Eren looking at the sea, something that motivated him during his childhood. Comparing the trio of Eren, Mikasa and Armin to high school students who grow across childhood until graduating, he viewed the scene of the trio seeing the sea as an alternate ending to the manga. However, Isayama stated that starting this moment, Eren and his friends began to mature and fill positions left behind by military superiors. Isayama said that viewing Eren as "dragged along by the story" had become the essence of his character, and that Mikasa and Armin had developed a habitual mindset of revolving around him and wishing to help him. According to Isayama, at first their mindset was favoritism, comparing Eren's relationships with Mikasa and Armin to that of helping one's relatives or siblings who are encountering hardship, even if onlookers question it. He stated that despite their similar ages, Eren, Mikasa and Armin had different states of mind and that their growth might involve their possible separation and even opposing one another. Stating that he did not see Armin and Eren being best friends forever, he further explored a personal writing style rejecting the concept of a fated soulmate between Eren and Mikasa. He often wrote about how the two would become estranged and go through character development and independence, though he did not view their drifting apart as necessarily a good thing to portray.
Isayama noted Eren's characterization is different of what it was originally viewed by the fans; while originally wishing to see the sea as a dream shared with Armin, the truth was that Eren was never that interested in the sea itself. While Armin possessed a global-oriented curiosity and dreamed of the natural world outside the walls, Eren instead held only self-focused indignation towards the lack of freedom that mankind had to seeing it, causing an inner part of him to wonder if he was empty-headed. This resulted in gradual clarity to their diverging perspectives as Eren's grasp on the sea subsequently fades.