ALL THE FOOLS SAILED AWAY .

Dio is a few inches taller than Diego (5ft3 > 4ft11), and is also built considerably wider & is generally more muscular than his counterpart. the reason for this is Diego’s injury to his midsection caused him to lose a lot of weight & muscle post-race; during the race, they’d have been built very similarly with Diego just being a touch shorter! you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart on horseback.

in their faces, they both look almost exactly the same. but again due to Diego’s weight & muscle loss, Dio’s face appears a lot more broad. his hair is slightly different, too, nowhere near as long as Diego’s is post-canon-- but he normally chooses to have it in a ponytail

As this is a canon-divergent AU where they both survived, instead of using one of Diego’s body parts to kill Dio, Lucy instead attempted to slit his throat open to kill him when he got too close to her. this attempt failed, but he has been left with a very sensitive rope-like scar which is usually covered up.

also Dio is an amputee! obviously he lost his leg to Tusk ACT 4 during the High Voltage arc. That is still acknowledged as canon to this AU! if his prosthetic is ever unavailable, he will begrudgingly use crutches (and yes, if you annoy him, he will throw them at you. lmao.)

as for his outfit; Dio’s favoured colour is green, & his jockeys outfit is usually green/light yellow/brown/white (as opposed to Diego’s teal/yellow/brown). he has partial heterochromia in his eyes, the lower half of his iris being a gold colour, and the upper half being green.

whilst his jockey’s helmet is no longer worn post-canon, he does wear a flatcap with the name ‘Dio’ embroidered onto it.

additionally, Dio will almost always prefer to be referred to as just Dio-- although he may respond to ‘Diego’, he will always introduce himself as ‘Dio’.