#( which is why i'll sometimes call them obfuscating or manipulative )

[prodigialis-blog1]

a meta on hange’s personality, anger, and conscious use of personas.

     note: as you see in the title, i’m going to use the word “personas” in this meta to refer to the different aspects of hange’s personality and how they consciously emphasis some aspects over others to the point where sets of traits can be given their own names. note that this is not similar to alters and does not imply any kind of dissociative disorder. hange is not dissociative, and they don’t have “alternate personalities” -- instead, they consciously choose to act a certain way in some situations over others, and will switch between different dominant personality traits as suits them. so yeah, just know that when i use the term “persona,” i’m not implying any kind of dissociation or other related pathologies.

okay, so. the purpose of this meta isn’t so much to explore hange’s personality itself (though that will happen by necessity), but rather to discuss how, why, and to what extent they manipulate their personality, both as a leading strategy and as a personal coping mechanism.

the first thing i want to make clear is that hange is not oblivious. now, this isn’t a universal statement -- they can be oblivious to many things, especially if they’re in what i’ll call full-on “science mode”; when they get carried away, they somewhat lose their ability to empathize with others, and they don’t fully process other people’s reactions. their tunnel vision when it comes to experimentation and discovery does make them oblivious to more than it should. but. what i mean here, for the purpose of this discussion, is that hange is self-aware. they know exactly what kind of personality they present to the world, and they know how others perceive it. their enthusiastic, eccentric personality isn’t the result of an absent mind that doesn’t comprehend the effect it has on others. they are fully aware of most of their different personality traits, and of the capacity for those traits to shift or overwhelm one another.

that’s an important preface to this conversation, because i don’t want people assuming that hange doesn’t understand how they affect others or to what extent their mood swings take them. they do. in fact, for this headcanon to have any traction, they have to.

so here’s the thing.

hange is an angry person. we know this. they admit to eren that they used to be fueled by hatred and resentment. and that anger still comes out, sometimes dangerously so -- threatening pastor nick, torturing sannes, yelling at roy. the anger isn’t gone. it will never be gone. they will always be an angry person. 

but they’ve decided that anger and hatred and resentment isn’t the right way to live.

it was a conscious choice. they were fueled by hatred for a long time. then, when they kicked the titan’s head, when they began thinking about how it didn’t make sense for titans to be so lightweight, when they remembered how little anyone knew about the titans, and how little anyone cared to find out, they realized that hatred wouldn’t teach them anything. hatred just led to death. doing nothing but killing titans would never help them learn, and hange became increasingly certain that they could never defeat the titans until they understood them. 

if anger and hatred didn’t work, what would?

curiosity. fascination. energy. excitement.

and the thing is, hange had and has the capacity for all of those things. their enthusiasm is not an act. they genuinely are a friendly and energetic person -- or, at least, they have the strong capacity to be, and they choose to act on that capacity. none of their personality traits are faked. none of their personas are false. that’s a really important thing to understand. hange is never faking their personality. but they are choosing to portray certain aspects of who they are above others, and choosing to keep other thoughts and emotions to themself. 

they work hard to be curious, fascinated, energetic, excited. they make an effort to hold on to that portion of their personality, and to let it take the reins, above the anger, above the hatred, above the coldness.

i’m going to posit four “base personalities” for hange here -- and what i mean by that is, four combinations of personality traits that can be expressed by them, and have been to varying degrees throughout their life. (we all have these, by the way -- to you guys, i might be “friendly writer who likes to analyze characters,” to my professors i might be “intellectual who speaks up in class,” to someone else i might be “awkward quiet one who keeps to themself with their nose in a book,” you get the idea. i’m referring to the different sides of your personality that others might pick up on in different situations -- all genuine, but all distinct.)

the four are these: angry soldier, collected leader, enthusiastic eccentric, and ruthless scientist.

angry soldier and ruthless scientist are what they try the hardest not to be, though those parts of their personality always come through to certain degrees in some situation or another. collected leader is the level, focused hange the corps tends to see during crises and battles. enthusiastic eccentric is the persona they project most commonly, the personality they determinedly cling to to avoid falling into anger or ruthlessness.

angry soldier is what they were once, killing titans without remorse or objective beyond revenge and hatred. this anger is what tends to come through whenever someone stands in their way, whenever someone blatantly destroys or obstructs knowledge, whenever someone hurts someone they care about, whenever someone refuses to fight for what is right. this anger is never quite gone from them, and they know this. sometimes they allow themself to express it behind closed doors. sometimes they actively allow themself to use it -- as with pastor nick, before they controlled themself and threw him back onto the wall. but they try to be careful with it, because they know how all-encompassing anger can be, and they’ve lost themself to it before.

collected leader is much less of an act than enthusiastic eccentric is; it’s the businesslike personality they fall into when they need to focus on something serious. granted, sometimes they have to work to maintain this mindset -- when they become commander, for example, commander becomes something of a persona in itself, because they actively restrain their scientific tendencies in order to focus on leading. but this seriousness, this calm ability to assess and respond to situations, is an intrinsic part of their personality, and often what you’d find if you stripped away their bubbly enthusiasm.

enthusiastic eccentric is also a natural part of their personality, but it’s also a part they’ve chosen to emphasize and magnify in order to block out their tendency for anger. they think it’s important for their sanity to be cheerful whenever they can (and also good for their subordinates to have a superior who can remain optimistic). they want to be friendly and energetic. and most of all they want to hold onto and cultivate their curiosity, their fascination, their drive for knowledge. allowing themself to fully embrace this part of their personality keeps them from sinking into resentment and melancholy, keeps them thinking, helps them retain their ability to make connections with other people, and, perhaps most importantly, keeps them open-minded.

a small digression here, while we’re talking about this persona: hange hates titans. they will always hate titans for the friends titans have killed, the lives titans have destroyed, the way titans keep them trapped and stagnant. but they try not to. hating titans got them nowhere. they need to try something else. understanding titans, pitying titans, being fascinated by titans, even trying to see if titans can learn or be befriended. they make themself view titans with as open a mind as they can, and because of this they’re often branded a “titan lover,” a “titan-loving freak,” what have you, by other soldiers and civilians alike. they’re okay with this. it’s worth it if it means they can learn from the titans. it’s all part of this persona. but underneath it all, they still hate titans. never think that they don’t.

ruthless scientist is, perhaps, the part of hange that they fear the most, especially when coupled with angry soldier. it is also, unfortunately, the one that blends most easily with enthusiastic eccentric -- the persona that hange uses the most. sometimes it’s hard for them to notice when they’re slipping from one to the other. sometimes they don’t realize until it’s too late. this is where they’re willing to do anything, hurt anyone, go to any lengths to gain knowledge. this is where they lose their empathy, lose their ability to see anything but their end goal. at its most extreme, this hange would let someone die just to record information about the manner of their death. this hange would torture a person into insanity to get the knowledge they need. this hange is dangerous.

this hange obviously plays a part in the torturing sannes and dangling pastor nick over the wall scenes, though in those it’s heavily mixed with their anger. that’s the thing: ruthless scientist hange can be prompted by and mingle with angry hange, but they aren’t inherently related. ruthless scientist hange acts not because they’re angry, but because they’re fascinated. ruthless scientist hange is the hange who wanted to let eren fuse completely with his titan just so they could see if he’d be able to come back. ruthless scientist hange had moblit sketch a picture of eren’s gruesome, skeletal face, completely caught up in scientific interest, with no thought to either eren’s own suffering or to mikasa’s horror. 

notice that, above, i said that hange fears this persona. i’m going to talk more about that in another meta, where i analyze the whole sannes scene, but just be aware that, yes, hange is frightened of their capacity for cruelty, and part of the reason they project their enthusiastic eccentric persona so adamantly is because they’re always wary of what they could become if they lose their capacity for joy, friendliness, excitement.

 we can see moments in the manga where hange makes conscious efforts to redirect their personality. isayama tends to indicate it by having hange raise and lower their goggles: raised goggles indicates that hange’s unleashing their anger, generally. my favorite example of this is when eren comes upon them after they’ve just kicked over a table after the sannes ordeal, and there’s a pause where they freeze, collect themself, very deliberately lower their goggles, and then quite clearly put on their eccentric persona for eren’s benefit, to hide the fact that they’ve just given over to their anger for a moment. it’s such a deliberate moment, and it really shows how much thought and effort goes into hange’s moderation of their personality:

anyway. i could certainly write more, but i’m going to cut it sort for now, and just offer this last thought: this isn’t always going to come up in the way i portray hange. sometimes they will show a deliberate change or reining in of their personality in posts -- but often they won’t. often they’ll be their general, cheerful, eccentric self, and the narrative won’t question that, because that’s just who they are at the moment -- but even if it doesn’t appear explicitly, this habit of theirs, of moderating their own personality and how they allow themselves to be perceived by others, always exists.

[hologramblue]

unreviewed, untested theorizing:

a lot of misunderstandings/misinterpretation of tone of voice in conversation is the same, like, functional thing that is called "context collapse" when people are explaining why twitter sucks so much.

tone conveys information. what information tone conveys is extremely contextual, not in the sense of "when you use that tone with This word it means This and with That word it means That", but in a dialect sense, a "every social cluster has its own tonal lexicon" sense. obviously all of language is like this, this is what language is, but some parts are more like this than others.

when people misinterpret information from tone, the mistake (or not, i'll get back to this in a moment) they're making is "taking their native context and using it to judge the communication of someone who isn't part of that context".

the other person might not be part of that context because of cultural differences; the people they hang around with just don't talk that way, so neither do they. or maybe they're not part of that context because they can't do the tonal things involved.

on the other end, if it is an honest misinterpretation, then the listener for some reason does not realize that they are using the wrong dictionary to interpret the speaker's communication. IME this is often kinda wrapped up with a lack of awareness that there are lots of different ways of speaking, ie an insular background with very little casual exposure to people who don't talk more or less like they do.

now, like pretty much any quirk of social behavior that generates friction, this can happen because of honest misunderstandings but can also be weaponized by people who want to create friction.

on the listener's side, if they occupy a position of power over the speaker—particularly if they are part of the majority context in the room and the speaker isn't—they can refuse to accommodate the speaker's context by insisting that their speech be interpreted in the listener's context (ie insisting "you did this, you meant this" instead of "i thought you did/meant this"). this basically forces the speaker to either conform or leave; if they can't conform and thus have to just leave at some point, or if they recognize that this is bullshit and have the ability to leave to stop putting up with it, this is how someone can bully them out of a space.

on the speaker's side, if they're a bad actor in a space of people who are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for whatever combination of reasons, they can "get away with" sparking friction without it flaring up into all-out conflict they would have to answer for. this is basically what passive-aggression is i think?

and all of this is completely dependent on context whether it's good-faith or bad-faith; honest mistakes come from confusion about who's privy to what "secret languages", manipulation comes from intentional obfuscation of what tonal lexicons are in play and where/how.

and this is all basically how twitter/social media "context collapse" is described: an epidemic of people who aren't routinely misunderstood, because they're good at navigating their own real-world communication environments (and sometimes bc those environments are curated to have very little friction to begin with), diving into the social chipper-shredder of a site (twitter) that is designed on purpose to maximize interactions with people who have no idea what the hell you're talking about but will assume they do and project accordingly (whether in bad or good faith)

which is not something that has to be contentious, it is good and important to talk to people outside of your circles, but unless you go into such conversations in a spirit of good faith—conscious that you don't know everything, willing to revise your assumptions and take what they say at face value, and in turn willing to try to express yourself honestly and in ways you might not be familiar with—then you can end up with more projections and assumptions than actual information. and a lot of people, online and offline, don't do this (if they did then neurotypicals would not be so notoriously aggravating about it all!), and it's only aggravated by the social media thing where a blog/timeline/etc is simultaneously a personal space and also potentially a universal public forum.

but like, functionally, it's the same process.

I feel like this is one of those sentiments that could be controversial in ways I can't predict but I think the concept of "tone" in social interaction is bad and useless altogether. Maybe it makes sense to people who only know like-minded neurotypicals but it should not be possible for the same words in the same situation to feel either friendly or aggressive. Sometimes someone is clearly angry or sad by their tone but the degree to which people interpret nothing but the pitch of someone's voice during a statement feels arbitrary and a little freaky to me. And sometimes someone sounds angry only because their comfortable conversational tone is that different anyway.

The fact that people apply this to typing in judgmental ways can be even more fucked up. How can just the wordiness of text suddenly sound mean ??!