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| “ | I don't trust Marley. I pray that Eldians will be freed. But I do trust those who've fought beside me! | „ |
| ~ Pieck declares her loyalties. |
Pieck Finger is a major supporting character in the Attack on Titan franchise. She is a Warrior of Marley and the holder of the Cart Titan. She serves as a supporting antagonist to the Eldian perspective of the story, while also being a supporting protagonist of the Marleyan perspective.
She is voiced by Manami Numakura in the original Japanese version and Amber Lee Connors in the English dub.
Overview
Pieck Finger is a sweet, friendly and kind young woman, who cares a lot about her friends of the Marley army. Despite looking and acting lazy and tired, she is incredibly intelligent, very observant and deductive, and quick to think and react at any situation. Her fellow Warriors and soldiers often compliment how smart she is, especially her War Chief Zeke Yeager. Pieck is also rather eccentric and easygoing, and most of the time very tired. As a result of constantly being in her Cart Titan form, Pieck developed the habit of walking on all fours when few people are around, stating that it feels more natural and even curling up on a sofa like a cat. She is still capable of walking upright, although she requires a crutch to do so when she returns human after spending several months in a row as a Titan. She spends days being unable to walk straight from being used to walking on all fours as the Cart Titan and claims it feels better and more natural crawling on the ground.
She is very loyal to Marley, and has always been that way since her early childhood and fights for the country's best interests. Despite this, she is not brainwashed by the government's propaganda telling the Eldians how they must atone for their ancestors' sins and does not believe in the slightest that Marley will ever release them from their internment zones. Like most of the Marleyan Eldians, Pieck is aware that the status of Honorary Marleyan is an empty title that does not change the reputation of her people nor does it give them any real chance to rise in social status. The main reason Pieck joined the Marleyan military and the Warrior program as a child is to get her ill father money for his medical treatment.
Pieck was born in the Liberio Internment Zone. She lost her mother during her early childhood, and since then her father has been the only living family she has left. But when her father got sick, he also was not going to survive much longer without proper medical care. Not wanting to lose her entire family, Pieck willingly joined the Warrior program in the Eldian Unit as soon as she was of the eligible age to join, which is around 7. She performed well enough in her class to be selected as a Warrior candidate, being especially known for her intelligence and superior judgement. As soon as she was chosen to inherit the Cart Titan, Pieck secured her father the medical treatment he needed and the money to pay for it. Even if Pieck was happy, she realized that her father now had a sadness that almost never left his eyes, because Pieck at this point would have only thirteen more years to live before dying from the Curse of Ymir. Ever since Pieck's new mission became showing her father that Eldia was going to have a bright future ahead. Fully loyal to Marley, she tried in any way possible to at least free all the Eldians in Liberio and in the rest of Marley before the end of her life. During her last two years of life, she eventually grew disillusioned with such hope, especially when the power of the Titans started to become useless and obsolete in war, being replaced by conventional weapons, aerial warfare and nukes. At that point, Pieck could only hope and pray for her people's survival from the wrath of the whole world and Paradis Island.
Pieck is well-loved in the Marleyan military, by all her fellow soldiers and Warriors of the Eldian Unit and by several full Marleyan soldiers. She is very close friends with Porco Galliard since childhood and grows closer to him, especially during the Marley Mid-East War, where they often fight side by side with the Panzer Unit in many battles, although Galliard is irritated by her calling him "Pock", a nickname hinted to have been created by Reiner Braun. Before his betrayal, Pieck shows great admiration and respect for Zeke, and was also close friends with him since childhood, when Zeke was in his teens and used to act like a brotherly figure to the child cadets. However, Pieck always felt that Zeke was a liar who hid many of his feelings from her and everyone else.
Pieck has the utmost respect for her Marleyan commander, Theo Magath and the feeling is mutual. Because Magath respects her opinions, heeds her advices and most of the time treats her like an equal, Pieck genuinely trusts and likes him and is loyal to him. She understands why Magath in public still acts with prejudice towards the Eldians, and later she fully supports his ascension as the General head of the Marleyan military, seeing it as a small gleam of hope for the Marleyan Eldians. Magath expresses many times how valuable Pieck is and said she has an extraordinary intellect and deductive reasoning.
Pieck cares deeply for the Warrior candidates Colt and Falco Grice, Zofia and Udo, and is especially close to Gabi Braun, and is very protective of her. Pieck tells Gabi that she would never betray her friends under any circumstances, despite not trusting Marley. Being the two Warriors closest to Magath, both Pieck and Gabi, as well as Falco later, visibly grieved the most when he sacrificed himself. Being easy going as a person, Pieck gladly gives Colt an alcoholic beverage when he asks for a drink, and when he constantly asks her for more with "puppy dog" eyes, she leniently gives him an entire bottle, despite him not being good at handling booze, causing him to get drunk. She encourages Colt and all the other Eldian soldiers to chant in favor for Gabi and praise her as their war hero. As the soldiers drag Gabi along with their drunken partying, Pieck feels that the young girl deserves to be praised for her actions. Pieck is a childhood friend of Reiner Braun, Bertolt Hoover and Marcel Galliard, and a close friendly acquaintance of the loner Annie Leonhart, and she is distraught to learn that Bertolt was eaten by a Titan instead of being quickly executed. She also defends Reiner from Porco's attempt at bullying him for imitating Marcel.
Pieck is very loved by her comrades of the Panzer Unit, five young male Marleyan soldiers who are ethnically not Subjects of Ymir. These soldiers always fight side by side with the soldiers and Warriors of the Eldian Unit, and as a result, they lack the prejudice against Eldians that most Marleyan citizens have. The soldiers of the Panzer Unit consider Pieck, Galliard and Zeke equal comrades and friends and sometimes also call Galliard the same affectionate childhood nickname Pock. All five soldiers adore Pieck and find her attractive, becoming envious when one of them receives more love and attention from Pieck than the others. Pieck and her five unit members share a photograph together, and when Sasha Braus shoots Carlo dead during the Raid on Liberio, Pieck gets distracted and flies into a rage attempting to kill Sasha, only to get ambushed by other enemies of the Survey Corps, which results with her losing her other four comrades in the process. Upon their last moments, one of them calls for Pieck's name for his last words, while Pieck also calls for all of them in what she believes to be her last words, before she survives the enemy's attack and has to emerge from her damaged Titan to urge Falco to leave her for dead. She is instead saved by Magath, Koslow, Falco, Gabi and other soldiers, who repel the Scouts' attempts to finish her off.
Pieck still considers herself a citizen of Marley, which she views as her country, regardless of her status and how the non-Subjects of Ymir Marleyans may feel about her. Every day she wishes for her people to be released from the daily persecution they face. She is sad that her own nation does nothing to try changing the position of the Eldians, despite their repeated military service in many wars, instead only using guilt and sin to motivate them, while still discriminating upon them. In fact, Marley's policies to use Titans and Warrior Titans in battles only made the world more hateful and paranoid of the Eldians, and other nations use survivor victims of Marley's Titan attacks as spokesmen and mascots to petition for the extermination of all Subjects of Ymir in the world, instead of letting them living in the internment zones. With the age of modernization and humanity surpassing the power of the Titans, Pieck is very concerned about the future of the Eldian race as a whole, and fears for the day in which Marley may decide to slaughter all of them to please the other nations, as almost the entire world wants the Subjects of Ymir to disappear from existence.
Pieck and most of her people know Marley is actually one of the two only the countries that have shown most tolerance towards Eldians than the others, and is the only nation which has a political organization advocating for the emancipation of the Subjects of Ymir living in the internment zones, both Marleyan and foreign. The protection group view the Subjects of Ymir in Marley as Marleyans or - if they relocated to Marleyan internment zones from other nations - at least foreigners belonging to other human ethnicities. They do not consider Pieck's people to be Eldians, due to them not being actually related to the nation of Eldia at all. In truth, Eldians were never an ethnicity, but simply the name of a tribe of the continent, and Eldia itself was never purely made of Eldian members in the first place, as its subjects were always people of mixed races with Ymir's blood, including Marleyans, the Founder Ymir herself not having been Eldian, but a member of a different tribe. In fact, in the Great Titan War, the Marleyans who stole Eldia's Titans to use them against the Empire were all Subjects of Ymir. Only many years later, Marley and the other nations started to drive away all citizens found having the ability to turn into Titans through medical blood tests and forced them to join the internment zones to be labelled Eldians, regardless if their ancestors were even members of Eldia in the first place. The legal guardian of Pieck's comrade Annie, Mr. Leonhart, suffered such fate, having originally being an ordinary citizen of another nation, until he was found to be a Subject of Ymir, something he did not even know himself, and ever since he was forced to live in an internment zone with the title of Eldian.
Like Pieck's junior comrade Udo, many relocate to Marley's internment zones for better life conditions, as life for Eldians in other countries is much worse. Pieck acknowledges that in Marley Eldians might still be allowed to live, but even so she knows that Marley will forever keep them confined in their internment zones without any chance for improvement, also because people are too uncomfortable to live around humans who might transform into giant monsters at any moment. Both Pieck and Udo fear they will soon not be of use to the Marleyan government anymore, with the growing increase of technological advancements and the age of Titan domination finally coming to an end. Like Udo and Galliard, Pieck also criticizes some of the poor strategies made by her superiors, like sending Warrior children alone to Paradis Island to reclaim the Founding Titan, instead of carrying out a full military invasion or sending any adult to help. In 854 both Pieck and Commander Magath express discontent with their senior military officers, finding them foolish for their lackluster plans, and Pieck wonders about the Eldians' future in the world as she observes her successors competing to carry their future.
Despite her good-natured personality, in war Pieck acts like a fully trained soldier ready to kill any of her war enemies without hesitation, especially if the lives of the people she knows and loves are threatened. She does not hold too much grudge towards the inhabitants of Paradis Island, knowing their reasons to fight. Nonetheless, on the battlefield she shows animosity against them as any soldier does in a war against another nation, especially resenting them for terrorizing her hometown Liberio. She is flies into a rage when she sees Sasha killing Carlo, and attempts to kill her in return, and angrily promises Mikasa Ackerman that Paradis is done for during Marley's surprise invasion of Paradis Island, shortly after Falco is turned into a Pure Titan and Colt is killed. Pieck does not have any trust in Eren Yeager and the Yeagerists, his faction hating on all the people outside the Walls. Like the rest of Marley, she fully believes Eren's true intention is to destroy the world with the Rumbling, and to avoid that she is fully willing to exterminate all her enemies from the island. Especially after seeing Paradis' military forces mainly attacking the Liberio Internment Zone of all the city's places, causing the deaths of her friends Udo, Zofia, and the Marleyan soldiers of the Panzer Unit, Pieck has zero trust in the island's military and government and least of all, Eren. After infiltrating the Yeagerists, she is even more convinced that the island's people, while not all necessarily evil, are still enemies of the world, although she is aware things turned out this way solely because of Marley's stubborn warmongering.
Pieck mixes her lies with the truth when she tells Eren her wish to free the Eldians around the world's ghettos, pretending to trust that Eren has any plan to liberate them all, not just the people living on Paradis Island. In reality, Pieck has no faith in the Yeagerists, who have shown open hostility and discrimination towards the Eldians of Marley. The people of Paradis actually consider Pieck's people to be full Marleyans, which ironically is what they have been wishing for a century to be seen as by their country. With most of Paradis also hating on them like most of the world, Pieck is convinced that the Eldians of the internment zones could only be free by securing their right to live with their own hands, without looking for help to any side. She does not care about factions and instead only fights for the sake of the individual people she loves, both "Marleyan" and "Eldian" by ethnicity. Thus, she prioritizes the fate of her fellow Eldian people over that of the ones on Paradis, whose situation is their own issue in her eyes, as all Subjects of Ymir in the world have to deal with the world's threat of genocide at the end of the day, and there is no luxury to worry about the distant side. That is also why Pieck does not hold any personal hate for the Yeagerists, as she fights for similar reasons as them.
Along with all her Warrior comrades, Pieck in her younger years helped crush Marley's enemies in war during the years 843 and 844. By order of the Marleyan military government, Pieck was kept in Marley along with Zeke as a deterrent to enemy nations whilst the other Warriors were all sent to Paradis Island's Walls to retrieve the Coordinate in 845. She and Zeke are sent to Paradis in 850 with a small contingent of Marleyan soldiers as backup for the other Warriors, while Porco stayed in Marley and inherited the Jaw Titan. She is forced to leave her friend Bertolt for dead, when her side loses the Battle of Shiganshina District, the last engagement of the Paradis Island Operation.
Along with the rest of the Eldian Unit, Pieck participates in the Marley Mid-East War for four years and the Raid on Liberio, mostly fighting with her Panzer Unit alongside Galliard. Pieck and Magath appear to be the sole survivors of Marley's Revenge for Liberio in 854, having left any other comrade at Shiganshina District for dead once again like Bertolt. Some hours later, the two join forces with the Survey Corps commander Hange Zoe and Captain Levi Ackerman to fight against Eren Yeager's Founding Titan to stop the Rumbling and save humanity, later recovering and bringing their closest comrades from their respective sides.
After General Magath's sacrifice to ensure a future for humanity, Pieck takes his last order at heart and promises to fulfill Magath's final order at any cost. She insists to continue fighting Eren, even while believing her father and all the people she knows in Liberio already died from the Rumbling. After departing with a flying boat from the Marleyan city Odiha, Pieck and her allies reach the Founding Titan at Fort Salta, where masses of Marleyans and other people are fleeing from the Rumbling, and the Marleyan military still tries to kill the Founder. As soon as they reach the Founder's body, Pieck tries to blow up its nape, telling Mikasa and the others that she never cared to try to let Eren live, because to her he is nothing and not a friend, but just a mass murderer. Pieck is almost killed by Lara Tybur's resurrected War Hammer Titan, forced to protect the Founder. The Marley-Survey Corps alliance is attacked by many deceased Intelligent Titans of the past, including Lara and Bertolt.
In the final battle, Pieck uses her Cart Titan's power to face the ghost Titans, and then Falco's flying form of the Jaw Titan, carrying Gabi and Annie, rescues the whole group. Finally Zeke Yeager helps them by managing to free a group of Marleyan Titans, being Marcel and Porco Galliard, Bertolt, Ymir, Tom Ksaver, Grisha Yeager, and Eren Kruger, who aid the group against Eren and Ymir Fritz's Titans. Zeke halts the Rumbling by sacrificing himself, saving humanity and all the Marleyans at Fort Salta. While Reiner and Armin Arlert try to finish what remains of Eren's human form off, the surprised Pieck, Gabi, Annie and Falco find masses of their fellow Eldians from Liberio at Fort Salta, including their family members and Marcel and Porco's parents.
While Pieck reunites with her father, however, the "source of all living matters", the ancient parasite that gave Ymir Fritz the power of the Titans, transforms all the Subjects of Ymir present at Fort Salta into Abnormal Titans, including Pieck's father, Gabi, Connie Springer and Jean Kirschtein. The Titans ignore Onyankopon and all the Marleyan civilians and soldiers present to assault Reiner and Armin and protect Eren's "Doomsday Titan". After Mikasa enters the Titan and cuts off Eren's bodiless human head, previously severed by Gabi's shot, all the Liberio Titans return human, and Pieck reunites with her father for a second time, while Armin tries to negotiate peace with the Marleyan soldiers getting ready to execute them.
In 857, three years after the Rumbling, the Battle of Heaven and Earth and the deaths of Eren and Zeke, Pieck and her allies who stopped the Rumbling are made peace ambassadors by Marley and the Global Alliance, with the exception of Gabi, Levi, Falco, Mikasa, and Onyankopon, who went on living their own lives. Pieck and her fellow ambassadors sail on a boat to Paradis, which still lives under military rule and has POW Volunteers and Marleyan soldiers, to begin peace talks. After reading Queen Historia's letter to the ambassadors, Annie points out that the odds of them successfully negotiating with Paradis are low, and also the rest of the world remains unforgiving for the Rumbling, but Armin is more optimistic and confident that the sight of the Marleyan Warriors and the Survey Corps, former enemies, working together will be enough to get the Eldians of Paradis to listen.
Trivia
- During Pieck's debut appearance, Hajime Isayama was considering designing Pieck as a middle-aged man, presumably the last of the previous generation of Warriors like Tom Ksaver. A working name for him was Oliver Pieck. However, he later decided to design Pieck as a young adult woman. Oliver Pieck's Cart Titan's original design still appears in the manga chapters 74 and 75 in 2016, as they were released before Isayama changed Pieck into a girl. The Cart suddenly changes its appearance into its known current design the following chapters. In the anime adaptation, the Cart Titan already has its final design from its introduction.
- Along with Zeke, Pieck is one of the two only Warriors who are mostly addressed by Marleyan officials by their first name instead of their last name, mainly by Magath, who also always addresses Colt by his first name, and during the second half of the final arc always addresses all the Warriors by their first name.
 Heroes
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Shiganshina trio Paradis Island Marley Hizuru | ||