Diego Brando

Diego is a young man of below-average height and a slim-to-medium build, with golden blond hair, dark brows, and sharp, light eyes. He usually wears an equestrian helmet mounted with the loose letters DIO on bending pins, a turtleneck patterned in a diagonal grid, mid-forearm gloves, wide-legged jodhpurs, and tall dark riding boots. Once he fuses the Corpse's left eye with his own, that iris reads TURBO, and a temporary DIO mark appears beneath it.

As a boy Diego was good-natured and quick-witted, raised with love and taught to keep his dignity through hardship. Watching his mother sacrifice her hands so that he could eat, at only five years old, twisted that nature into bitter resentment of everyone who let it happen and a bottomless ambition to climb above them all. He regards humanity as a flock of pigeons to be controlled and blames people as a whole for his mother's death, which leaves him solitary and unwilling to truly bond with anyone. He treats human life as worthless, discarding allies such as Wekapipo the instant they stop being useful, and he nurses a grudge even against his own father, Dario. Pragmatic and vindictive, he married an elderly widow for her fortune and entered the race chiefly for the prestige.

Born in England in 1870 to poverty-stricken parents, Diego was very nearly buried alive by his father Dario, only to be washed into a river and rescued by his guilt-stricken mother, who renamed them both Brando and found work on a farm. His rare gift with horses surfaced early, but around the age of five a farmhand his mother had refused sabotaged their food bowls, and she cradled boiling stew in her bare hands to feed her son. The burns turned septic and killed her within a year, after she urged him to use his talent to escape poverty. Rising to the top of British racing, Diego enters the Steel Ball Run and is the only rider who can match Gyro Zeppeli early on, reading horses' habits to gain ground. When the bounty hunter Dr. Ferdinand uses the Stand Scary Monsters to turn him into a Utahraptor, Diego steals a Turbo eye after Ferdinand's defeat and keeps the power to transform at will, eventually making Scary Monsters fully his own. He allies with Funny Valentine and Sandman in pursuit of the Corpse, later turns against the President, and schemes with Hot Pants to kill him. His life ends when an attempt to drag Valentine beneath a moving train instead tears Diego himself in half; his severed head is later recovered by Lucy Steel and, colliding with the head of a parallel-universe Diego, kills that counterpart in turn.