A celebrated war hero and the son of a powerful noble house, Leo is brave, charismatic, and not particularly thoughtful - exactly the kind of person that institutions and ambitious people find useful. His arc across the Age of Madness trilogy is about the distance between the hero he believes himself to be and the uses to which that belief gets put. He is not stupid, but he is surrounded by people who are better at thinking than he is and who know it, and his unwillingness to acknowledge this is what drives him toward the series' central catastrophe.