Darius Zackly

Gray hair in full retreat, a scruffy beard and mustache, and deep facial creases give Zackly the look of a man long past his prime. Spectacles sit over sunken, weary eyes. He is surprisingly short, a stature at odds with the weight of his office.

Day to day he favors a plain white shirt with dark trousers. Formal occasions add a bolo tie, matching the three commanders who answer to him, plus a brown trench coat carrying a black shield emblem edged in white and marked with a cross.

The public Zackly is all cold procedure. Introduced as a strict leader devoted to humanity's collective interest, he runs Eren Yeager's tribunal without theatrics, pardons the boy only once the logic favors it, and later topples the monarchy with the same unbothered calm. Armin Arlert counts him among the rare people able to throw away their own humanity, and everything dear to them, for the sake of changing the world.

The revolution exposes the man underneath. Zackly confesses to Erwin Smith that decades of loathing for the ruling class, not concern for humanity, drove his participation, and that watching the powerful grovel delighted him. He builds a torture device he praises as art, forcing a captive official to ingest his own waste while laughing, a demented streak that sits beside his frank admission that his own life matters more to him than mankind does.

Zackly first appears holding sole authority over Eren Yeager's fate, weighing the Military Police's demand for execution against Erwin Smith's plan to use the boy's power to retake Wall Maria. Levi's brutal courtroom intervention and Erwin's proposal sway him, and he releases Eren into Survey Corps custody pending an assessment of his usefulness.

During the coup he storms Erwin's sham trial to reveal that the supposed hole in Wall Rose never existed, a staged crisis designed to expose the government's rotten priorities, then has the officials arrested for valuing their wealth over their people's lives. With the old regime gone he crowns Historia Reiss queen, though in private he admits to Erwin that revenge, not principle, animated him, and he amuses himself degrading a captured minister with his prized torture machine.

He salutes the Survey Corps as it departs for Shiganshina, sits in on the debriefings that follow, and in 851 observes that Zeke Yeager's proposed alliance fits the man's long-standing aim of securing the Founding Titan, merely a change of tactics after defeat. When Hizuru's delegation arrives he welcomes Kiyomi Azumabito and learns of the flying boat gifted to the island.

His last act is refusing Armin and Mikasa access to the imprisoned Eren, judging him too dangerous after his secret meetings with Yelena. The infamous torture chair sits in his office that day, tucked into a corner. Yeagerist rebels have packed it with explosives, and the blast tears Zackly apart, dropping his remains in front of the protesters outside. Dot Pixis remarks that dying to a revolution would have satisfied him.