Character · Attack on Titan
Reiner Braun
The big reliable one, the shoulder everybody leans on, and the most exhausted liar in the series.
In Otakana the clue reads: Armored soldier carrying an impossible double life
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Attack on Titan
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Reiner Braun trained with the 104th, finished second in the class, and made himself the older brother a group of frightened teenagers badly needed. He carries the wounded, breaks up the fights, gives the speech before the drop. All of that is real. None of it is the assignment he was sent to carry out, and holding the two at once starts, visibly, to come apart at the seams.
The strain shows up as a habit of slipping. He talks about himself in two registers, soldier and warrior, and at his worst he loses track of which one is currently speaking. It reads as a breakdown because it is one. Attack on Titan spends a season and a half establishing him as reliable scenery and then makes the audience live inside his head for a while.
The fourth season goes further and follows him home to Marley, showing the machine that talked a twelve-year-old into volunteering for this. By then the character who arrived as an obstacle is carrying most of the moral weight of the show. Very few long-running series manage to move a reader that far without cheating somewhere along the way.
Spelling REINER
REINER is six letters and the vowel pair is the entire battle. It is EI, as in the German name, and not IE, so REINER rather than RIENER. The Japanese reads Rainaa, which is exactly how that EI is meant to sound and exactly why the written form looks wrong to an English eye. The game wants the given name; BRAUN is the family name.