BRZRKR is built from the people who try to define B. A tribe calls him Unute. Kings call him champion. Soldiers call him an asset. Scientists call him a subject. Cults call him a sign. Diana calls him a person who has been carrying too much for too long. The characters around B are therefore not background names. Each one reveals a different way an immortal body can be loved, feared, studied, or owned.
B and the people of the origin
B's mother begins the story by asking for protection when her village cannot survive repeated raids. She receives an answer that changes the conditions of conception and birth. Her second prayer asks for release after the village turns the answer into a weapon. She dies trying to protect her son, leaving B with the first memory of a person who sees his power as a curse rather than a blessing.
B's human father is a tribal chief who names the child Unute and trains him for battle. He is a parent, leader, and first exploiter at once. His decision creates the pattern that later institutions repeat: if B can do something no ordinary person can do, then the community believes it has a right to demand that he do it. B's first love and first child show the life that might have existed outside that demand. The child is born while B is being executed, and B never receives the ordinary experience of watching the child grow.
The origin characters matter because they create B's emotional vocabulary. He learns that love can coexist with fear, that protection can become possession, and that a body can survive while a family disappears. Every later relationship is measured against those lessons.
Diana, Caldwell, and Keever
Dr. Diana Ahuja is the central modern relationship. She guides B through memory protocols, asks questions that move between science and empathy, and gradually becomes the person who can reach him after Protocol X. Her early work occurs inside a government program, so trust is never simple. Diana is both a researcher using a method and a person who understands that the method can hurt the subject. By the final arc she is B's partner and the mother of his children.
Stephen Caldwell represents the danger of knowledge without an ethical limit. He genuinely discovers connections among B's memories, biology, historical objects, and the Source. His research is valuable, which makes his betrayal more serious rather than less. Caldwell is also tied to a long cult tradition that treats B as a route to power. He wants the explanation of B's life and eventually wants the power itself.
Jim Keever is the field relationship that keeps B connected to ordinary military friendship. Keever fights beside him, is wounded during a recovery mission, and becomes the person who understands that B's body does not make him disposable. After the mortality transfer, Keever receives an order to kill B and refuses. His final recognition of B's death closes a bond built through shared danger rather than worship.
The wider program includes scientists, handlers, soldiers, and the Eagle Team. Some are named, many are not. Their collective importance is that they make the bargain around B practical. They provide missions, restraints, medical procedures, and the language of national security. Their presence shows how an institution can use a person without every individual inside it sharing the same motive.
The Source and beings derived from B
The Source, also called the Pollinator or Cosmic Father, is the intelligence associated with B's conception, lightning contact, quantum phenomena, and mortality. The Source is not a human parent in the same sense as B's mother and father. It may seed, alter, or distribute life through a process the comic never fully defines. B's contact with it expands the mystery while giving him a chance to choose mortality.
Franken-B is a constructed organism made from B-derived material and Source-linked technology. He is not another name for B and not a child in the ordinary family sense. His existence proves that institutions can assemble a body from B's biology, but it does not prove that a body assembled from B possesses B's identity. Later stories extend this question through Lugalṭur and the new being in Light Draws Breath.
Lugalṭur Dumu-Biritum is created from B-derived material in a historical alchemical branch. Theosebeia protects him, and B eventually releases him rather than turning him into a weapon or heir. Lugalṭur is important because he becomes a person whose right to choose is more important than the origin of his body. His relationship to B is derived kinship, not confirmed human parenthood.
Atlantis and the ancient courts
Zubatai is a chronicler who records B's service in Atlantis. He sees B as protector of the young King Azaes and as a figure whose presence gives the city a history larger than one reign. Azaes inherits the throne after his parents are killed in a coup attempt. B protects him, but the court's dependence on B also makes the city vulnerable to the belief that one immortal can secure a civilization.
Vizane turns that belief toward catastrophe. He gathers followers, steals the Atlantean obelisk, uses B's blood and a primordial-ore sword, and opens a gateway through which Cthulhu arrives. Cthulhu belongs to a distinct supernatural branch. The issue does not make the entity another form of the Source. Atlantean guards, courtiers, cultists, and invading warriors show the population and military systems destroyed when the gateway is opened.
Olos, Washukanni, and the desert peoples
Queen Asana is born among desert peoples whose elders use treaty marriage to end a war with Olos. Her people carry history in tattoos, mark selected soldiers' hands, and understand individual sacrifice as a political tool. As queen, Asana visits B in prison with help from handmaidens, escapes with him, and later directs him toward Washukanni through a staged abduction.
King Arnak rules Olos through palace ceremony, prison restraints, arena spectacle, and military expansion. Olos officials and soldiers make his decisions ordinary. Washukanni forces defend their city and release Asana when they realize B has come for her, but the attack continues. The narration describes the destruction of the kingdom's men, women, and children. The catastrophe makes Asana's deception one of the most consequential choices in B's ancient history.
The Acastan monks are history keepers who receive Asana's final testimony. B attacks the archive before the account becomes secure. Their presence shows that preservation is not neutral: a surviving queen can use an institution to shape the story, and a physical archive can be destroyed along with the people who maintain it.
The Lost Book and historical empires
Layo narrates the Bulgar and Mongol material. Bulgar leaders and warriors hold B under cult direction, repeatedly injuring and boiling him to keep him angry and weak. Genghis Khan then recruits B into the Mongol campaign. Advisers and soldiers turn B's survival into imperial legend, while the siege of Beijing shows the civilian cost of an army that treats bodies as materials.
The historical members of Caldwell's cult manipulate this chain without commanding every army directly. They use prophecy, timing, and selective information to make rulers believe that their own ambition is destiny. Genghis, the Bulgars, and the Mongol forces remain historical participants in B's story rather than automatic members of the modern cult.
The maritime and Western branches
The Captain of The Bleeding Tide finds B's reconfiguring body in a chained box beneath the ocean. Her crew, Myu, the Sorceress, church hunters, and supernatural forces create a maritime branch distinct from the Source and Protocol X. The Captain's relationship to B begins as rescue and becomes a question of whether a ship can make room for a body no one can safely control.
In A Faceful of Bullets, B enters 1800s America and becomes involved in a conflict between a land baron and his runaway daughter. The Western setting changes the weapons and social structures but not the central moral problem. B can act as a guardian or allow another person's desire for vengeance to turn him into a private army.
The Book of Elsewhere characters
The novel branch contains its own versions of B, Diana, Caldwell, and Keever alongside novel-exclusive figures such as Alam, Dr. Shur, Stonier, Thakka, Jon Ulafson, Vayn, Millie Jackson, and others. Their stories belong to The Book of Elsewhere continuity. A shared name or role does not place a novel character in BRZRKR #1-12. The novel's Caldwell, its government personnel, and its remembered victims must be read within the prose branch.
The branch is valuable because it explores the same questions through a different narrative voice. The comic often shows B's body and memories in compressed visual sequences. The novel can stay longer with an individual witness, a conversation, or a moral consequence. The continuities can illuminate one another without being merged.
What the characters reveal together
Across every era, people approach B through one of four desires: protection, power, knowledge, or belonging. His mother asks for protection. Arnak and Genghis want power. Diana and Caldwell pursue knowledge for different reasons. Asana wants belonging and revenge at once. Keever offers friendship without demanding that B become a symbol. Lugalṭur and the new being in Light Draws Breath ask what it means to inherit a body without inheriting its owner's purpose.
The character history is therefore the history of B's choices. He fights, escapes, loves, protects, refuses, and finally accepts mortality. The people around him do not simply move the plot from one era to the next. They make visible the competing definitions of what a life is worth when the body seems impossible to destroy.
The people who change B's direction
B's story is not a straight line because each relationship changes what he believes is possible. His mother gives him the idea that power can be refused. Keever gives him a friendship that survives military orders. Diana gives him a way to speak about memories without turning them into a performance. Lugalṭur gives him the chance to let a derived person go. The twins give him a future that continues after his death. These characters are important because they change B's decisions, not because they fill a category.
The antagonists also have distinct effects. Arnak turns B into spectacle. Genghis turns him into an imperial instrument. Vizane turns his blood into a key. Caldwell turns his history into a route toward the Source. The land baron and the Captain place him inside more local forms of power. Each encounter asks B whether he will accept another role or find a way to act without it.
Named people and unnamed lives
BRZRKR often gives a name to the person whose decision shapes B and leaves the surrounding population unnamed. Azaes, Asana, Layo, Genghis, Caldwell, Diana, and Keever can carry a chapter because their choices are shown in detail. The Acastan monks, Washukanni defenders, Beijing civilians, Mongol soldiers, and Olos guards remain collective because the stories focus on what happens to a group rather than on one biography.
The unnamed lives are not less important. They are the human scale of the catastrophe. A city is more than its ruler, and an army is more than its commander. When the comic says that Washukanni's men, women, and children are destroyed, the collective wording is a moral emphasis. It tells the reader that the event exceeds the named characters.
Characters who exist in memory
Many people appear only in B's recollections or in another character's account. The first love, first child, B's parents, Zubatai, and the Acastan monks are all shaped by memory. Their limited appearances do not make them unreal. They show that B's life is carried forward through fragments and that a person can have enormous impact without receiving a complete chronology.
The novel adds another kind of remembered character. Jon Peters, Josh Barrientes, and Weatherly Knighton are part of Caldwell's history in The Book of Elsewhere. Their deaths and relationships matter to the novel's treatment of hidden knowledge, but their presence does not move backward into the comic. The prose branch gives them room to be themselves while preserving the boundary between continuities.
What the full cast reveals
Taken together, the characters describe the cost of making one body carry a civilization's hopes. Some people want B to protect them. Some want his power. Some want to understand him. A few want him to be free. The tension among those desires creates the series' emotional plot.
B's final mortality is meaningful because the cast has shown what immortality prevents. His mother cannot see him grow. His first child is born while he is absent. Keever has to decide whether friendship can survive an order. Diana has to choose whether love can exist without turning into rescue. Lugalṭur has to be allowed to leave. The characters give the ending its weight by showing what each version of B has cost.
References
[1] BRZRKR #1-12, B, Diana, Caldwell, Keever, the government program, origin, Protocol X, Source contact, mortality, and family.
[2] BRZRKR: Poetry of Madness #1, Atlantis, Zubatai, Azaes, Vizane, Cthulhu, and the fall of the city.
[3] BRZRKR: Fallen Empire #1 and The Lost Book of B. #1, Asana, Olos, Washukanni, Layo, Genghis Khan, Lugalṭur, Theosebeia, and historical cult material.
[4] BRZRKR: A Faceful of Bullets #1, The Bleeding Tide #1, Light Draws Breath #1, and The Book of Elsewhere, later historical and novel branches.