Roy

A heavy mustache and thick, bushy eyebrows dominate Roy's aging face. His professional dress runs to a white long-sleeved shirt, a tie, and over them a sweater vest. Out on the street he tops his short, backswept hair with a newsboy cap.

Years of publishing under a censoring government have taught Roy to bend. He entered journalism dreaming of a life spent telling the public the truth, but a family gave him something to lose, and the ideals quietly went away. Fear of retaliation governs his editorial choices, and the accumulated compromises have soured his opinion of himself, leaving behind a realist with a cynical edge.

Roy first appears picking through the wreckage of the Stohess clash pitting the Survey Corps against the First Interior Squad, working beside the inexperienced reporter Peaure. Though he pieces together what actually happened, Nile Dok's instruction keeps the Interior Branch out of his copy, and the printed story casts the Military Police as saviors while painting the Survey Corps as a criminal menace. Hange Zoë later corners the two journalists at the Berg office with evidence of the Military Police's corruption and presses them to run it. Peaure wants to publish; Roy, terrified of what will happen to his family, flatly refuses, demanding to know whether Hange has the right to get his household killed. He relents only after Peaure grabs him and shouts that the monarchy cares nothing for the people and would abandon them all if the Titans broke through.

Once Wall Maria is retaken, Roy and Peaure sit down with Hange and Levi in Trost to discuss the Titans' newly uncovered origin and how the Walls came to be built. Asked how citizens are reacting, he answers that responses vary and confusion is everywhere. Hange replies that the taxpayers will decide what to do with the information, a step above the old king, and Roy says the Survey Corps has made him proud; his paper will help where it can, even as he worries about the future of everyone living inside the Walls.

When word leaks that the military has arrested Eren Yeager over the attack on Marley, Roy joins the mob hounding Hange for answers and asks whether they have abandoned the principle that the public deserves to know what those in power are up to. Three years on from the Rumbling and Eren's death, he attends a ceremony honoring the Yeagerists, taking notes alongside Peaure and Flegel Reeves.