History Characters / TheMachineriesOfEmpire

* BadassInCharge: She's badass, and she's the captain of one of the hexarchate's six cindermoths.

* RaisedAsTheOppositeGender: [[Back when she had a tryst with Nirai Kujen, she was Hexarch Shendal Yang's son, Andan Nezhe. Mikodez later thinks of Nezhe with ''they/them'' pronouns, however, meaning her precise experience before transitioning is unclear.]]

* IconicItem: His FingerlessGloves.

* DramaticIrony: [[spoiler:In ''Revenant Gun'', Jedao Two intermittently wonders about his Academy best friend/lover Ruo and what he would think of various things, whereas we know from earlier books that Ruo was forced into suicide a short time after Jedao Two's conscious memories end, because of Jedao's political naivety.]]

* HumanoidAbomination: [[spoiler:Jedao Two -- a humanoid, completely inhuman entity with superhuman moth abilities such as an incredible healing factor, the ability to sense gravitational distortions created by mass, and spacewarp. When this comes out the people who were already scared and revolted by him because of who he is are even more so.]]
* IconicItem: his FingerlessGloves.
* KilledOffForReal: [[spoiler:At the end of ''Ninefox Gambit''. His actual status is ambiguous until most of the way through ''Raven Strategem''.]]

* TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized: [[spoiler:He want to bring down the oppressive, murderous hexarchate. Too bad his methods involve so much bloodshed....]]

A historian and infantry colenel, assigned to Cheris' fleet during the siege of Scattered Needles.

* HeroOfAnotherStory: [[spoiler:He survives Kel Command's attempted purge, and is now doing...something...at Scattered Needles.]]

* BadassInCharge: She's badass, and she's the captain of one of the hexarchate's six cindermoths..

* TheChainsOfCommanding: Being simultaneously ceremonial head of state and ultimate military commander of the Compact causes him a lot of stress and moral conflict.

* UndyingLoyalty: Like all Kel, [[MoreThanMindControl formation instinct]] means he must obey the orders of a higher-ranked Kel [[spoiler: except he can, because he's a [[ImmuneToMindControl crashhawk]].]]

* FourStarBadass: Under the hexarchate, achieved the practically unheard of distinction, for a living person, of having her cindermoth flagship named after her personal emblem.

* ALighterShadeOfBlack: Despite being dictator of the totalitarian Protectorate, she's a fairly reasonable and non-malicious person, and certainly preferable to Kujen.

The current Shuos hexarch. Has a (deserved) reputation as dangerous ditz.

* BunnyEarsLawyer: Has managed to remain hexarch for decades, in a faction where KlingonPromotion is the norm. Also surprisingly invested in his pet green onion.

* MoralSociopathy: He's very sociopathic, but believes intellectually that running a society with some pretensions to decency and justice, and doing your best to treat people kindly on an individual level, is more effective in the long run that tyranny and sadism.

* ObfuscatingStupidity: More like Obfuscating Eccentricity, though some of it is real.
* OnceDoneNeverForgotten: After he supposedly assassinated two of his own cadets after being promoted to Hexarch, just to keep his hand in and to keep the others sharp. [[spoiler:Actually, they were part of a heretical plot, but he thought that letting people think he did it for fun would be better for his reputation among both followers and outsiders than admitting to having had heresy in his faction.]]

The immortal inventor of the black cradle, responsible for most of the hexarchate's tech -- and therefore, its social structure.

* TheDandy: For a ghost, he pays a lot of attention to his looks, and insists on only having pretty anchors.
* DracoInLeatherPants: In universe, after a drama exposing the truth about him is produced, it's revealed that his fictional version has fans due to snarky dialogue and a sexy actor.
* DyingCurse: To Jedao: "No one else will ever love you".

* TheManBehindTheMan: Nirai Faian is nominally in charge of his faction, but he's actually the one running the show. [[spoiler: Until he unexpectedly disappears.]]
* OmnidisciplinaryScientist: Everything from math to starship design to psych surgery. He has had nearly 1,000 years to study. Subverted by the fact that several of his achievements are not as impressive as they seem: [[spoiler: his first psych surgery WentTerriblyWrong; attempting to make himself into a [[MoralSociopathy functional sociopath]] instead made him into a psychopath and he has been shown to be fallible, especially at psych surgery.]] The starship design is [[spoiler:actually just breeding FTL-capable aliens into draft animals.]]
* OurGhostsAreDifferent: He's a revenant, which means he's either in the black cradle, or has to be attached to a living anchor.

* TheUnfettered: [[spoiler:Surprisingly enough, he started out as a WellIntentionedExtremist. But then he deliberately turned himself into a sociopath because he thought that a conscience would prevent him from doing the evil things that were necessary for his benevolent objectives, not realising how severely MotiveDecay would set in.]]

* HufflepuffHouse: They are the only faction who don't have a single character who even vaguely approaches three-dimensionality. (According to WordOfGod, because Lee thought the series was dark enough without being full of graphic scenes of torture and mutilation, making them the exact opposite of the TropeNamer.)