Kenny Ackerman

Kenny cuts a lean, towering figure, wiry yet clearly powerful. Coarse dark hair brushes his neck, a sparse beard traces the jawline, and crow's feet age his small, piercing eyes into a permanent glare; even his jokes arrive from behind a scowl. His signature outfit rarely varies: a white shirt beneath a knee-length black overcoat, a tie left loose at the throat, and a bowler hat ringed by a white band, with the Military Police's dark trench coat added when off the hunt. Flashbacks to his younger years drop the wrinkles and beard in favor of dark sideburns and slightly longer hair.

Power is Kenny's compass. Chasing it, he murders without ceremony, children included, betrays employers, and keeps a professional deadpan that admits neither relish nor remorse. His concept of "fun" bends in strange directions: he accepts his grandfather's account of the Ackerman purges partly because believing makes life more entertaining, dismisses the idea of dying old in bed, and frees a restrained Eren in the middle of a crisis purely to see what happens.

Genuine reverence exists in him all the same, reserved for Uri Reiss, the king who bowed to his own would-be assassin, and for Traute Caven, whose bleak worldview delights him. He kills MPs who harass his dying grandfather, raises his orphaned nephew until the boy can survive alone, and pities Historia even while serving the father who exploits her. Cowards disgust him and titles mean nothing; he threatens the king of the Walls to his face. Underneath everything sits corrosive self-loathing. Calling himself garbage, he pursues the Founding Titan on the theory that a power which turned Uri compassionate might redeem a man who has never learned to care, and he abandons Levi convinced he is unfit to be anyone's parent.

Decades before Wall Maria falls, Kenny stalks the capital as a throat-slitting murderer whose tally of Military Police victims tops one hundred, a spree that gradually fades into the urban legend of Kenny the Ripper. At his grandfather's deathbed he learns why the crown hounds his family: the Ackermans, like the Asian clan, sit beyond the reach of the King's memory manipulation and were purged for rejecting his ideals, a story Kenny finds funny. He also reports finding his sister Kuchel pregnant and working in an Underground brothel. A government contact then points him toward the true royal family, and his attempt on the Reiss brothers ends with Uri catching him in a half-formed Titan's fist. Rather than execute him, Uri bows and apologizes for his clan's persecution, an act that upends Kenny's world; he becomes the king's bodyguard and closest friend.

Returning to the Underground years later, he finds Kuchel dead and her son starving. Introducing himself only as a friend of hers, Kenny raises Levi, teaches him to fight and survive, and disappears the day he judges the boy strong enough to manage alone. After Uri passes the Founding Titan to Frieda and dies, Kenny leverages his standing to found the Anti-Personnel Control Squad, staffed by soldiers who, as Traute Caven puts it, gave up on killing Titans and settled for killing humans, and he quietly plots to claim the Founder for himself. In 845 he slits Alma's throat in front of her daughter Historia, sparing the child only at Rod Reiss's order. Somewhere in these years a young Annie Leonhart shadows him posing as his illegitimate daughter; he sees through the lie at once, and she flees into the sewers rather than fight him.

During the coup, his squad seizes Eren and Historia from Dimo Reeves, whom Kenny personally executes for double-dealing. He ambushes the pursuing Survey Corps, kills Nifa in front of Levi, and duels his nephew through a Trost tavern, taking a chair-blocked gunshot and walking away wistful about a dream slipping out of reach. In the cavern beneath the Reiss chapel he stands guard while Rod works on Historia, until he overhears the detail that wrecks his plan: only Reiss blood can wield the Founder's full power. He hoists Rod by the collar, lays the man's cowardice bare for Historia's benefit, then frees Eren from his restraints and invites the two youths to fight it out, purely for the spectacle. Rod's mountainous transformation instead brings the cavern down, crushing the Anti-Personnel Squad while Kenny escapes with burns that leave him dying.

Levi finds him slumped against a tree, holding the Titan injection he stole from Rod but never used. Pressed for a reason, Kenny realizes that everyone he ever admired was carried by something that drove them, and nothing drives him anymore. With his last breaths he admits he is Levi's uncle, explains that he left because he was no one's idea of a father, and presses the stolen serum into his nephew's hands before dying under the tree.