Karl Fritz in Attack on Titan

Complete record

1. Profile

   The hundred and forty-fifth king of Eldia, who lost a war, took his people to an island and then took their memory of ever having had a country. Every wall on Paradis is his, and so is the silence inside them.

2. Revealed by S3·E21

   The King Who Lost the Continent

   Karl Fritz is the hundred and forty-fifth of his line and the last to rule from the continent. When Marley breaks the empire from the inside and takes seven of the Nine Titans, he crosses to an island off the eastern coast with as many Subjects of Ymir as will follow, and leaves the rest of them where they stand. Marley teaches that as cowardice. It is the only part of him both sides agree happened.

3. Revealed by S3·E21

   He Built the Walls Out of Titans

   The three Walls go up inside a single generation, which is possible because they are not built: they are grown. Tens of thousands of colossal Wall Titans are hardened shoulder to shoulder into three rings of stone fifty metres high, and every soul inside spends a century living against a surface that is looking back at them. The history taught in there has no mason's name in it because there was never a mason.

4. Revealed by S3·E21

   The Vow Renouncing War

   Behind the Walls he makes a promise with the Founding Titan itself: Eldia will never fight again. Not a treaty and not a policy — a vow bound into the power, so that every royal heir who inherits the Founder inherits the promise and physically cannot break it. If Eldia sins again, he decides in advance, his people will be allowed to die for it. Kruger's judgement on that is short: such a man is not a king.

5. Revealed by S3·E21

   He Took Their Memory

   Then he turns the Founder on his own subjects and takes the world off them: the war, the continent, Marley, the name Eldia. They wake believing Titans devoured all of humanity and that three rings of stone are what is left of it. Two bloodlines are out of his reach — the Ackermans and the Orientals — which is the only reason anyone inside the Walls will ever be able to stand slightly outside the story he wrote for them.

6. Revealed by S3·E21

   The Threat He Left Standing

   Before the door closes he tells the world what is in the stone. Come for the island and the Walls will walk: every Titan in them will step off and flatten the earth. It is a deterrent held by a man who has sworn never to use it, over a people who no longer know it exists — and it has kept every fleet in harbour for a hundred years.

7. Revealed by S3·E21

   The Will That Outlived Him

   He has been dead a century when the story starts and he is still deciding things. His ideology travels down the bloodline inside the power, so Uri and Frieda both hold the one weapon that could clear the earth of Titans and neither can raise it — the family calls that a decision left to those who know the truth. It is not a decision. It is his, taken in 738, and nobody has been able to overrule it since.

8. Revealed by S4·E5

   The Hero He Invented

   A hundred years of Marleyan schoolchildren have been taught that a warrior called Helos slew the Devil of All Earth. In front of the world's press a Tybur admits there was no Helos: the 145th king took pity on Marley, walked away on purpose, and let the family write a hero into the gap so nobody would look at what actually happened.

9. Titan identity

   Founding Titan

10. Final fate

All linked characters

• Founding Titan — The 145th king carried the Founding Titan to Paradis and swore it off
• Krista Lenz — His line, still on the throne he abandoned the continent for
• Willy Tybur — His family's pact with the 145th king is the lie he takes apart in public
• King Fritz I — The head of the Fritz line; the 145th king inherits both his blood and his hold on the Founder