Rean Schwarzer

"We stand before a great darkness, but remember, darkness can't exist where light is. Let's be that light!"

- Rean Schwarzer Rean Schwarzer is the main protagonist of the video game tetralogy Trails of Cold Steel, the eighth saga in the long-running The Legend of Heroes series, and the third of the Trails sub-series. He is introduced as a new student at Thors Military Academy and is the adopted son of the Schwarzer family, a small but respected family of nobles. After the Erebonian civil war, he graduates and becomes an instructor at the same academy.

He is voiced by Kouki Uchiyama in the Japanese version and Sean Chiplock in the English version, the latter of whom also voices Yuuki Mishima and Kiyotaka Ishimaru.

Appearance
Rean is a young man with unkempt black (usually has a blue tint) hair and light fuchsia eyes. His hair remains the same style for the duration of the trilogy. Despite appearing slightly different, the developers stated that it is the clothes which make him appear that way. In his summer uniform, he wear a right-handed fingerless glove said to be bought by Alisa[1].

In Trails of Cold Steel, he wears the standard special Thors Military Academy crimson uniform for his class, consisting of the blazer style as differentiated from Elliot and Gaius.

In Trails of Cold Steel II, Rean wears some casual clothes as his civil war outfit. It consists of a red jacket with a black shirt underneath, blue jeans with a belt, and brown boots.

In Trails of Cold Steel III, Rean wears the Leeves instructor's uniform in the style of a long white overcoat while sporting some black clothing underneath, possibly in honour of his late rival and friend Crow Armbrust.

Personality
Although he was adopted into the Schwarzer family when he was five, Rean lacks most, if not all, of the aristocratic mannerisms commonly associated with nobles, a fact he notes himself. This is due to the fact that both of his adopted parents are fairly easy-going people and don't behave like typical nobles at all e.g. his father is an avid hunter and believes a lord should live like their people rather than above them. He has a positive, friendly attitude and a tendency to help people in need, a trait that is only encouraged by his instructor, Sara. He always puts others before himself, often at the cost of his own well-being, a prime example being when he protects Machias and Jusis from a monster, which results in him getting injured and unable to fight for a while. Jusis describes this behaviour as "abnormal", stating that few people are as selfless as he is.

Rean's classmates and friends often describe him as a leader, but he constantly rejects those claims. Sara in particular calls him the 'centre' of Class VII, due to his unique background and tendency to act as the voice of reason, and so he is generally depended on to convince other members of the class to get along and settle their differences. Despite this, he has a habit of saying or doing insensitive things that end up putting him at odds with one of his friends, most notably Alisa during his first month at Thors and Machias during the second. He also has a rather large guilt complex; after the incident with Alisa in the old schoolhouse, he spends much of the preceding month trying to apologise for it despite the situation being out of his control, believing he should have known that the trapdoor was designed so they wouldn't get hurt from the fall and that the whole thing wouldn't have happened if he hadn't tried to play the hero. He also feels bad about leaving Machias in the dark about his social class, even though Machias put him on the spot with his outburst about nobles and he technically didn't even lie, since he really doesn't have any noble blood in him.

Despite seemingly putting on a happy front and being very level-headed during combat, Rean is initially very insecure; he doesn't have a lot of confidence in his swordsmanship, even describing himself as as a "dropout who's never even been able to progress past beginner level", which initially dismays Laura. However, he quickly realises how disrespectful this was, and describes the 'way of the sword' as an inseparable part of who he is. Laura then tells him that he shouldn't make light of his own abilities and be more proud of the path he's chosen. Rean seems to take this to heart, as he later uses one of his skills to cut a lock to Lunaria Nature Park and soon after perfects an S-Craft skill he had been working on for a while in the fight against Grunoja. However, it is later noted by Laura's father, Victor, that he is constantly holding back when fighting. This complex stems from his ogre form, which Rean initially struggles to control but eventually comes to grip with.