Gross

Menace hides in an unimposing body. Gross is squat and heavyset, a middle-aged man gone bald across the crown with black hair clinging to the sides. Pale eyes sit above a mustache, and mild wrinkles line his forehead and the corners of his eyes. On duty he wears the standard issue of the Public Security Authorities.

Cruelty is recreation for Gross. He reserves what sympathy he has for his own family and treats Eldians as vermin, openly arguing that the world should be scrubbed clean of them, and he dresses his atrocities up as revenge for Marley's ancient suffering under the Eldian Empire. Killing an innocent child costs him nothing. He speaks impulsively, considers peace an unnatural state when taken for granted, and holds that struggle and dying are humanity's default condition, a worldview that shades into racial social darwinism. What he frames as justice plays out as entertainment: watching people be devoured, by his own admission, is what makes him feel alive.

Slacking off on watch with Eren Kruger, Gross spots two Eldian children outside Liberio's internment zone. While Kruger administers a beating to the boy, Gross leads the girl away with a promise to see her home; instead he has his dogs maul Faye Yeager to death as an educational spectacle for his sons. The next day he stands in the Yeager household, denies any knowledge of how she died, and blames the children for wandering out without permission.

Fifteen years on, he helps escort the captured Eldian Restorationists to Paradis Island for conversion into mindless Titans. Irritated by Grice's shouting, he kicks the man off the Wall alive, then oversees the injections while Kruger holds Grisha back for questioning. Confronted by Grisha about Faye, Gross recognizes him and withholds the serum, preferring to throw the doctor to a freshly transformed comrade and watch him die fighting in some interesting way. He injects the last Restorationist first, lecturing that the Eldian capacity to become giant monsters is precisely why the world wants the race erased. As he begins forcing Grisha toward the drop, Kruger shoves him over the edge instead, and the newly formed Titan devours him on the spot.