Character · Attack on Titan
Armin Arlert
He is the worst soldier in his class and the reason most of it survives.
In Otakana the clue reads: Strategist who dreams of the ocean
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Attack on Titan
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Armin Arlert cannot beat anyone in a fight and knows it. What he can do is look at a hopeless situation and find the one move nobody else has considered, usually while apologising for taking up the time. The first season hands him that trick twice: he talks his squad out of an execution, then plans a supply raid through occupied streets that every senior officer had already written off.
The book his grandfather kept, an illegal thing describing an outside world of salt water and burning mountains, is the engine under the whole story. Armin reads it to Eren, Eren decides he wants to see it, and a hundred episodes of consequences follow from that afternoon. The ocean stops being scenery and becomes a promise two boys made each other before either could be talked out of it.
Isayama ran the manga in Bessatsu Shonen Magazine from 2009 to 2021, and the story keeps circling back to that childhood argument about the sea. When the characters finally reach a beach, the scene plays first as triumph and immediately afterwards as a problem, because the far shore has people on it. Armin gets the moment he waited his entire life for and about ninety seconds to enjoy it.
Spelling ARMIN
ARMIN is five letters and reads almost the same in both languages. Japanese writes it Arumin, slotting in a U because its syllables cannot end on that R. Drop the U and the English is exact. The game wants the given name rather than ARLERT, which is also five letters and would fit the row just as neatly, so read the clue before you type.