Cadet Corps
“Forge soldiers”
The Cadet Corps is where the recruits of Attack on Titan are forged over three years before they choose a regiment.
Here they learn the vertical manoeuvring gear, discipline and combat. Eren, Mikasa and Armin belong to the 104th class, whose emblem is the crossed swords.
Also known as Training Corps · 104th Training Corps · 104th Cadet Corps
- Base
- Training grounds
- Role
- Recruit instruction
- Type
- Cadet corps
The record
Role in the story
What the Cadet Corps is
The Cadet Corps is not a branch you serve in — it is the three years everyone spends before choosing one. Recruits enter as civilians, most of them young teenagers, and leave as soldiers assigned to the Garrison, the Military Police or the Survey Corps.
Each intake is known by its number, and a class keeps that number for the rest of its members' lives. It is the closest thing the walls have to a shared origin: every soldier begins beside classmates facing the same training and the same choice of regiment.
What the training is
The core of it is the vertical manoeuvring gear: paired grapples, pressurised gas and a body learning to treat a wall as a floor. The first test is simply hanging upright in the harness, and a recruit who cannot do that is sent to the fields instead.
Around the gear sit blade work, hand-to-hand combat, horsemanship and endurance marches, all of it graded continuously. The instruction is deliberately brutal, on the reasoning that a cadet who breaks here breaks somewhere much more expensive later.
The top ten
Every class is ranked, and the ten best cadets earn the right to enter the Military Police. Everyone knows the list, everyone knows roughly where they sit on it, and the list decides whether a recruit's life after graduation happens in the interior or on the wall.
That single mechanism does most of the corps' dramatic work. It turns three years of training into a competition between friends, and it means that on the night a class picks its branch, the cadets who earned the safest posting available are the ones with the most to give up.
Why it matters in the story
The Cadet Corps is where the story assembles its cast. Almost every soldier the reader will come to care about passes through the same barracks at the same time, and their friendships, rivalries and rankings are all established before any of them has faced anything.
Everything that happens afterwards is measured against those three years. When these characters end up on opposite sides of something, the reason it lands is that the reader watched them learn to fly together first.
The regiment
Hierarchy and members
0 revealed · 13 sealed
Turning points
Key events
0 revealed · 3 sealed
On the map
Headquarters and key places
0 revealed · 2 sealed
Standing
Relations with other factions
0 revealed · 3 sealed
Across the story
How the faction changes
0 revealed · 4 sealed
Common questions
Frequently asked
What is the Cadet Corps in Attack on Titan?
It is the three-year military training programme every recruit completes before choosing a branch. Cadets learn the vertical manoeuvring gear, blade combat and horsemanship, and are ranked continuously until graduation.
What is the 104th Cadet Corps?
It is the intake the story follows — the class that begins training two years after the fall of Wall Maria and produces most of the series' main cast. Classes are numbered, and this is the 104th.
Is the Cadet Corps the same as the Training Corps?
Yes — "Cadet Corps" and "Training Corps" are two translations of the same body, and both appear in official English releases. In Spanish it turns up as "Cuerpo de Cadetes", "Cuerpo de Entrenamiento" and "Tropas de Reclutas".
What are the top ten cadets?
The ten highest-ranked members of a graduating class. They are the only cadets permitted to join the Military Police, which makes the ranking the single most consequential number in a recruit's life.
How long does Cadet Corps training last?
Three years, ending in a graduation ceremony where each cadet chooses which of the three branches to enter — subject to the ranking, in the case of the Military Police.
What is the Cadet Corps emblem?
Two crossed swords, worn on the back of the cadet jacket until graduation replaces them with the emblem of whichever branch the recruit has chosen.
Other factions
All 16 members of Cadet Corps — spoilers
Complete spoiler archive
Complete roster: Cadet Corps
This index lists every member of Cadet Corps, including those who haven't appeared at your episode yet. Open a dossier only when you're ready to cross that spoiler boundary.
Complete arc
The 104th assembles
The 104th enters training as a room full of strangers with incompatible reasons for being there — some running towards something, most running away from the year the wall fell.
Cadets in a real battle
Trost happens to a class that has not graduated. The corps' whole premise — that training ends before the fighting starts — collapses, and the survivors finish their education in a single day at a cost the syllabus never priced in.
The night they choose
Graduation forces every cadet to put a number on what they are willing to spend their life on. The class scatters into three branches that want opposite things, and the friendships formed in the barracks become bonds that now cross institutional lines.
The class turns on itself
Whatever the 104th thought it was, it turns out to have contained something else the whole time. The corps' central promise — that these three years made you family — becomes the exact thing that hurts, because it was true for both sides.
Relations with other factions
- Military Police — The ten highest-ranked cadets of each class earn the right to enter it — the prize the whole ranking system exists to award.
- Garrison — It takes the largest share of every class, and most cadets who had no strong preference end up serving on the walls they grew up behind.
- Survey Corps — Anyone may choose it and almost nobody does; the recruits who raise their hand on graduation night are choosing the branch with the worst odds in the army.
