Rod Reiss

Short stature runs in the family; Rod barely rises above his daughter Historia, though unlike her he carries extra weight on a rounded face set off by cropped black hair and a slim mustache. His wardrobe announces wealth: a white shirt buttoned down the front beneath a black vest, loose dark trousers, and polished dress shoes. For the rituals surrounding the Titans he switches to white garments under a long coat, the dress Reiss men share at family ceremonies.

The Titan he becomes is an abnormal one and keeps almost nothing of the man. Stretching 120 meters from end to end and rising 40 meters at the withers, it doubles the height of the Colossus Titan, yet its build is grotesquely unbalanced: a swollen torso, a tiny head, and limbs far too thin to lift it, forcing it to drag itself forward on all fours. Scraping along the ground wears away its face faster than healing can restore it, exposing the brain, and the same friction strips skin and muscle from the skeletal body's front, so that rearing up bares the organs within. The torso compresses and extends like a worm's, hauling the creature ahead in two-stage lurches, and its bulk produces heat so ferocious that nearby trees ignite and nobody can approach without burning.

Rod presents himself with quiet, faintly anxious composure. He recounts the fates of Frieda and of his brother Uri, and how each gained and lost the Founding Titan, with striking certainty and intelligence, and he holds that level manner through his captives' ordeal beneath the chapel, regathering his poise even after Kenny Ackerman seizes him and forces a knife toward his throat.

The calm is conditional. Once Historia crushes the serum, throws him to the floor, and tears down his talk of godhood, panic takes over: he weeps, scrambles across the stone, and licks the spilled liquid from the ground rather than let his design die with the syringe.

Rod grows up as the elder son of the Reiss king who secretly holds the Founding Titan. He and his younger brother Uri repeatedly beg their father to erase the Titans, persistence that earns Rod time in a cell, and when the succession arrives Uri volunteers to inherit, asking Rod to pray. Seeing their father's spirit behind Uri's opened eyes, Rod decides his brother has become an all-knowing protector, a god, and devotes himself to guarding him. He marries and fathers five children, Urklyn, Frieda, Dirk, Abel, and Florian, then secretly conceives a sixth, Historia, with the maid Alma. When Kenny Ackerman's attempt on Uri's life ends in an apology instead of an execution, the killer becomes a devoted servant of the family. In 842 Frieda consumes Uri and takes the hidden throne, only to fall under the First King's ideology exactly as he had.

On the day Wall Maria falls, Grisha Yeager storms the chapel where the family prays. Frieda, her will chained to the First King's, refuses his plea to save the Walls' people; he transforms, defeats her inexperience despite her greater power, and slaughters nearly everyone present. Rod alone escapes by fleeing blindly, becoming king through his family's deaths. Days later he goes to collect Historia, but Kenny and the First Interior Squad corner her and her mother. Rod denies knowing either, watches Alma's throat be cut, and saves Historia only by proposing she enlist and, with luck, die in the field.

Learning that Eren carries the stolen power, Rod has Kenny's squad abduct him along with Historia and brings both to the cavern beneath the chapel. A touch of hands on Eren's back unlocks Grisha's memories in the boy and restores Historia's erased memories of Frieda. With a coup toppling the government above, Rod produces a Titan serum and urges his daughter to inject it, transform, and devour Eren, promising a reunion with Frieda's memories and a power that could cleanse the world. Kenny interrupts, enraged to learn the Founding Titan sits dormant in anyone outside the Reiss line, brands Rod a coward for never inheriting it himself, then slashes Eren's forehead to force a fight. Rod thrusts the syringe into Historia's hands; she smashes it instead, flips him to the ground, and moves to free Eren. Crawling to the wreckage, Rod laps up the serum and becomes a colossal Pure Titan in a last grab at the Founding power.

The Titan ignores every soldier in the cavern and crawls toward Orvud District, pulled by the mass of human life there. Cannon barrages tear open its back without stopping it, defenders soak themselves with water against the heat, and Squad Levi blows off its hands as it crests the Wall, toppling it backward. Eren stuffs gunpowder barrels into its mouth, the blast rips away head and nape, and Historia herself cuts the fragment holding her father, glimpsing his memories as she does, among them Rod as a boy begging his own father to release humanity from the Titans.