hanszoe

[hanszoe]

i'm so confused about if hansi has a bay (as the anime and various illustrations depict them with) or a black horse (like levi's) because shouldn't this color distinction extend to section commanders having black horses if it's that erwin's is white because he's the commander?

[hanszoe]

hansi sees another gender nonconforming person who is read as and not refuted to be female. if this is relatable, the fact that she's a woman is inherently part of who she is, not something to emphasize, because people don't see their own gender identity as being separate from them. instead "woman" has a particular significance held at distance from themself, because hansi is not a gender nonconforming woman

[hanszoe]

getting into that germanic lesbian androgyny yeah that's hansi

[hanszoe]

kate moennig. finally a good fancast that isn't just "queer person"

her side profile also reminds me of this dedra meero cosplayer

this photo reminds me of hange so much i am unwell. are you guys seeing what i’m seeing….

[hanszoe]

i've said it before but i just cannot understand the "but i want representation" angle because the parts of myself i identify as being butch, not necessarily "masculine" even though strangers gender me as male because that's how society sees masculinity (which is a term i don't even really like to use to describe my own traits, but i don't get to decide the oppressive framework i exist in and am described with) are things that i just do not recognize in hansi at all. so i am seriously critical of what people are reading in hansi as "masculinity" (because it's definitely not classical butch identity), which seem to be things like... they're intelligent. they're in a position of leadership. they're expressive and driven. which i hope you can understand why to read this as inherently masculine or "butch" is questionable. especially when classical butchfemme identities were subversive to the point this is more of the femme archetype, not butch.

"representation" to me i guess i identify with and overlay my own queerness on stories of men (if it's snk, kenny for example) actual butches and butch-adjacent people, or just find real damn community. it's so hard for me to imagine seeing a character that doesn't really read as butch, researching to find out the exact intention for their identity by their author which is "gender neutral or he/she equally", "cannot be categorized", "free from [gender norms]", and then going no i'm going to erase them in preference of what i want. especially seeing how they are so erased already. like literally it is part of my own identity as a butch to not want to do this. to have the strong imperative to respect the identities of all queer people whether real or fictional depictions of queer people. i just don't get it

[hanszoe]

what else i want to write about butch hange is i guess

"'woman' and 'man' don't look like anything" ok so feminists and queer theorists didn't invent gender attribution and this is a fundamentally transphobic argument that i seriously doubt you have done the necessary unpacking your own lifelong social conditioning of associating certain traits with femininity and masculinity to be able to make

and if you did, the only valid conclusion of it is pro self-id. that means not misgendering queer people. that means not masculinizing or feminizing queer people. that means not participating in needless gender attribution.

and you all being so god damn obstinante on "hange isn't feminine, that means they're masculine!! hange is canonically masc!! they are NOT fem" proves it itself because "male and female don't look like anything" but what exactly is making you decide to assign hansi "butch" and masculinize them when you don't speak the language they do and when their canon personality is absolutely not a consideration? when people in my own inbox are justifying it by sending "they look masc" this is obviously not about them being spiritually butch or something it's literally you seeing something you interpret as physical masculinity and then absolutely needing to categorize them that way, despite their author's very clear statements that they cannot be categorized.

if they were a white cis woman who really cares. but you guys cannot be going "all queerness is immune to criticism" when it comes to exorsexism, erasure of and misgendering a nonbinary person, which is what you are doing.

[hanszoe]

i wish there was anyone into hansi's character to consult if it's a plot hole they didn't drink the wine. the most confusing thing to me. did they suspect so early they themself didn't trust to drink it and yet allowed levi and everyone else to out of false hope they were just being foolish? does hansi have some kind of alcohol trauma? do they just not like drinking, so much so that they would not even consider having some during the most lonely and difficult period of their life, especially to resist its presentation as a fancy and nice unfamiliar gift from the volunteers? they didn't even want to taste it, that's how much they dislike alcohol?

[hanszoe]

i think what i really want to critique with the whole butch hange thing is people who have not unpacked the societal definitions of masculinity/maleness and femininity/femaleness and do not understand that yes this can be subversive but subversiveness takes consciousness and if you do not have an education and are simply repeating bias that is not subversion.

this is also to consider that male and masculinity-centeredness is the default. within a culture where men are constantly centered i do not think we should be uncritical about depictions of masculinity especially superficial depictions when there is often little meaningful difference between the appearances of cis men and mspec people, that's kind of how transness works. just throwing the word "butch" or "t masc" around when people already do this for cis men who in absolutely no way reflect a subversive masculine identity, when the people doing this do not appear to care about the parts of these identities that actually make them queer, especially if that someone's preferences are otherwise entirely cis male centered, i do think this is deserving of questioning.

but it often doesn't even need going that far, because these same misogynists speak for themselves, elaborating in hansi's case that "they're a butch because they aren't feminine", that "butch" is being used as shorthand to mean the "male" association of masculinity, that rather than being a self-expressed identity it's something that someone categorically is judged on the original misogynistic grounds of whether they're "feminine enough". introduce the fact that this is being done irrefutably on appearance alone: i have never seen any queer japanese people read hansi as butch-adjacent, the anglophones saying this stuff cannot understand their speech in original language and thus don't understand it's not categorically masculine, and their personality is wholly erased in the equation because they clearly are not depicting the same hansi.

the same misogynistic circuits are being used to justify a superficial masculine aesthetic depiction for near exclusively sex appeal (which is also a huge problem, butches being reduced to a porn category). not so much that they're seen as "internally male", rather because they have been assigned this "masculine" uncritically male role instead of having their characterization as it is in canon depicted, they are then given the same "male ideal" traits by these people, making them a smooth talking service top dom who exists to please their of course definitionally feminine partner, who must wear lipstick and a dress because hansi is "the masc one". they are not seen as "internally male" from a vilifying angle, but from a male-centering one.

[hanszoe]

off the top of my head i can remember

about their physical design references or similarities

-one similar drawing from an early exhibit

-commentary about their glasses in the character encyclopedia

-that obscure "based on his older sister" comment i can find no corroborative evidence of aside from the fact that the sister likely being referenced is intelligent, wears glasses, has a similar hairstyle, and a similar-sounding name to them

-commentary about their name in the character encyclopedia

about their character inspirations

-two references to his childhood friend he based their mannerisms on (at shingeki homecoming, at anime nyc 2022)

-at least one reference to tomohiro machiyama who he based their personality on (in the shingeki gekkan figure interview, but it feels like to me there should be way more than just this one reference)

-one reference to matsuko deluxe (shingeki gekkan figure)

-three references to noko (one implicitly on his blog answering a question about their gender, another mention on his blog about their character song, and their school castes design) and one unanswered/ignored/brushed over interview question about hansi and noko

times he has brushed over questions about their backstory/past: 2 (a press interview at anime nyc 22, a public interview at anime nyc 22)

about their canon characterization and past

-that joke about their vision that at least implies it's poor, but a limit is proven textually that they're able to make out pieck at quite a distance without their glasses in rts (bessatsu)

-about their time being even more disliked in training (bessatsu, one of the above noko comments related)

-about them being estranged from their family (bessatsu)

-and the two age comments from those two fansigns, the final being that they're in the first half of their 30s

[hanszoe]

like the situation is

isayama said he wanted to address their gender identity in the work, this never happened. we have my conspiracy about 123 but that's it

he was asked at that convention in ny about their backstory and he literally deflected the question and repeated something he'd already said at shingeki homecoming about them being based on a childhood friend

likewise he was asked about hange backstory in addition to "levi backstory" and he completely ignored the hange mention and talked only about bad boy

he is actively deflecting and avoiding talking about them and their backstory and somehow i think this is not about "upsetting fans" because he said he not only likes doing that but did that multiple times over and over with so many other characters

[hanszoe]

every so often some english "anime news" account will post something so outdated or out of context like "new attack on titan anime" and the hange stans will be like "hange backstory" i would rather die. even if isayama himself boarded the whole thing the two options are it erases them or it's explicitly everything i hc for their past and it causes an immense backlash and a legacy of explicit queerphobic hatred forever

[hanszoe]

in japan they're drinking and looking at pretty hansi. right in front of them. served with the drink

[hanszoe]

lhs will be like "omg 132 sooo meaningful because levi touched them despite how disgusting they are 🥺 how dare you discredit their bond"

[hanszoe]

what i struggle with is that if these words were not made for us, if these words came from places from which we were excluded, does identifying with them only validate the framework which originally excluded us? does trying to understand one's experiences as a victim of them only prove an attachment to them? i know that only women are accused of constructing their oppression when they identify it, i know that. but another part of me, the one faced with endless retributive justice, feels then that the only place where we can be truly us is in those final moments, 浮世離れ, disappearing over the horizon.

[hanszoe]

it makes me really uncomfortable that the butch flag is used way more for hansi than the nonbinary flag especially when the people using it repeat talking points trying to justify the erasure of them being canonically nonbinary

[hanszoe]

mappa knew