Leonhart

Dark hair combed straight back over a receding hairline marks Leonhart's aging face. Though short, he keeps the solid build of a man who once trained fighters, and his usual outfit layers a pale jacket atop a white shirt and dark trousers. By the Liberio festival he walks with a cane and wears a beret; an old injury from Annie has left him unable to walk straight.

When briefly turned into a Pure Titan, his transformed body keeps his human features, most visibly the oversized round nose and wide eyes.

Selfishness rules the younger Leonhart. He adopts Annie not out of love but as an investment, drilling her mercilessly toward Warrior selection so that her success might buy him a comfortable life, denying her rest and screaming through her training sessions. Before she ships out to Paradis, something in him breaks. He apologizes, tells her that honorary Marleyan status means nothing to him anymore, and swears that even if every living thing turns against her, her father never will. From that day forward, seeing Annie again becomes the engine that drives everything he does.

After his Eldian blood is exposed, Leonhart is forced from his home country into the Liberio internment zone, where he finds a baby girl abandoned for the same reason, takes her in, and names her Annie. He teaches her a kick-heavy fighting style built on turning an opponent's weight against them, and his brutality eventually provokes an outburst from her that cripples him for life. Only her impending departure for the Paradis operation brings his change of heart and his one request: that she promise to come back.

Years later he attends Willy Tybur's festival production among the honorary Marleyan guests, seated beside Karina Braun. He flatly rejects any suggestion that Annie died with honor; she made a promise, so she must be alive. Willy's grand revelations about the Great Titan War leave him visibly indifferent, and when the Attack Titan tears the stage apart he escapes the wreckage and helps Karina flee.

Eren's worldwide broadcast during the Rumbling drops him to his knees in the street. He soon lashes out at Liberio's guards when they dismiss the Eldians' warnings as an escape plot, then breaks out of the zone entirely, forcing a Marleyan soldier at gunpoint to drive a train full of survivors to Fort Salta. They arrive to find the airships gone and the Rumbling's steam already on the horizon. At the fort he consoles a grieving Karina, helps drag Onyankopon from the downed flying boat while asking whether the man knows his daughter, and tries to keep the peace when armed Marleyans confront the Eldian refugees. Annie finally reaches him, but before they can embrace, a gas released over the fort turns him and the other Eldians into Pure Titans that rally around the source of all living matter. Eren's death undoes the transformation, and father and daughter at last reunite. When Marley's secretary Muller threatens executions unless the Eldians prove the Titan curse is truly gone, Leonhart proposes blood testing, and Armin Arlert's intervention finally spares them.