#i'm so tired of how hanji gets treated lol

[thanatosbananatos]

What in the heckin' heck is Hanji's backstory? -- A Meta

At this rate, Yams is never going to tell us.

I guess it may not be all that important to the story, but then again, knowing his writing style, he really enjoys leaving mysteries, and it won't surprise me in the slightest if this series ends with a lot of the mysteries being unsolved.  Hanji's backstory will likely be one of them.

As a disclaimer, I use she/her pronouns for Hanji, but Isayama specifically has stated that Hanji's gender is irrelevant, so please feel free to use whatever pronouns you'd like. If Hanji was real, I don't think she'd care, either...

Anyway, I want to start this meta laying out the facts we already know about Hanji BEFORE the year 845.

--Hanji had joined the Corps for ??? reason, and had a thirst to kill the Titans mercilessly, just like Eren at the start of the story.  She was “fueled by insecurity and hate.”  However, she kicked a Titan's head and was fascinated by how light it was, which began her obsession with the Titans from a scientific standpoint.

--Hanji does not bathe regularly and doesn't care about hygiene.  Apparently Levi has to knock her out to get her to bathe.

--Hanji doesn't care about gender.  Or at least, Isayama said it doesn't matter to the story.  In a very early interview, he stated that Hanji was female but had moments of masculinity, which means she's gender-fluid or nonbinary.

--Hanji was in the Corps before Levi, Isabel, and Farlan joined.

--Hanji has known Erwin, Mike, and others for a little while--it's a quick little thing, but in episode one of season one, Hanji is shown to be in the same squad as Erwin when Shardis was the Commander.

--Hanji has anger issues.  Isayama has stated that she is the scariest character when angered, and is also a different person with and without her glasses/goggles.

Aaaaand that's it.

Thanks, Yams.

Well, if the Wings of Counterattack game is to be believed, Hanji was also a super cute kid who was always kind of androgynous and messy-haired and had bad vision. Super cute.  I love.

But that's really it.  Hanji didn't even get a character song, despite Romi Park having the singing voice of a fallen angel that's going to drag me straight into hell where there are hot jazz musicians and Satan serves us all whiskey on the rocks.  Did y'all know she released a jazz/pop album?  It's fire and you can't stop me from thinking about Hanji being able to sing like that.

...I'm getting off track.

ANYWAY.

Compared to many other recurring characters in the series, Hanji has a very limited amount of backstory.  She's never even drawn as younger, even in the panel we get of her kicking the Titan's head--if you recall, it's just a dark scribble with a scary-looking grin.

That being said, Isayama has indeed been dropping bread crumbs here and there with clues throughout the series that can lead us to a conclusion about Hanji's past.

Where was Hanji born and raised?

I think it's fair to say that Hanji was not raised with wealth.

It's hard to draw conclusions about her exact family, but considering her being totally chill with not bathing for weeks and being a little bit of a...gremlin, she probably grew up somewhere in Maria, or in the slums of someplace in Rose. However, I tend to lean more toward Maria.  

For me, it's not really an issue of just her hygiene--it's also her social skills.  Again, we know ZILCH about her parents/guardians, so they could have been weirdos, but I think also that Hanji just didn't have the proper upbringing to gain boundaries like normal people.  She gets up in people's faces, she can be very physical/grabby, and she can be argumentative and stubborn to a fault.  I think it's fair to sometimes call her actions childish, though some of them also are symptoms of something like ADHD.

I want to argue, however, that she is just eccentric.  I think it's part of who she is and was raised to be--or perhaps it's from a lack of attention.  

She also just doesn't care about a lot of things that people raised in high-status upbringings would care about.  She literally throws on her uniform jacket over her pajamas when called out to see Pastor Nick's death scene.  Showering/bathing every day is not a priority,but it's also not something that bothers her.  For instance, I'm incredibly busy, but I shower every day because anxiety dictates it to be so, but I also just enjoy being clean.  Hanji is super busy and could make time to shower/bathe more than she doesn't, but she doesn't see it as a priority and never once is it mentioned that she pays any mind to it.  

Regarding her gender, I wonder if she was an only child.  It's possible that there were expectations put on her to be more of a “lady,” but she was much more concerned with studying and learning.  

That's just speculation, of course.  Some people just are the way that they are.

However, I think she was an only child for a couple of other reasons, too.

First, I think that economically, if she did grow up in Maria, one child was all that her parents could afford. There are also just not a lot of people in the walled world with siblings; it's just not very convenient to add to an already-starving population, I suppose.  

But also, I think her love for studying might be connected to this.  I know that, as a kid growing up with older brothers MUCH older than me and not a lot of friends, I loved to read to the point that I owned my own encyclopedias and actually read them. A lot of kids who grow up lonely/isolated tend to do the same.  

Especially if she was already such an extroverted kid, I think she'd need the stimulation.

Why did Hanji hate the Titans?

It's possible to think about this from a couple of different angles, but there's one that I prefer over the other.

First, we could consider that Hanji perhaps lost someone she cared about to the Titans.  Maybe her parents joined the military and were killed.  Maybe her sibling, or aunt or uncle, or grandparents.  

Second, we could consider that she valued freedom and independence, and that she considered the Titans to be something that stood in the way of that.

Personally, I think the second one is more likely.  Of course, it's possible that both happened!  We really don't know.  

However, I lean toward the second option because of Hanji's personality, and the little we know about her when she joined the Corps.  She was a bit unhinged (as all interesting characters are), and she was very violent.  This tends to be a characteristic of people who are forced to keep everything in for a long amount of time.

In psychology, there are two categories of people:  externalizers and internalizers.  For instance, if a child endures trauma, and their reaction is to lash out violently (physically or verbally), or to become selfish and attention-seeking, that is considered externalizing.  On the other hand, if the child endures the trauma and then keeps it locked up, considers the abuser to be the “real” victim, learns self-blame, etc., then that is internalizing.  

For instance, Erwin is probably an internalizer, when we take into account his father's death and the trauma he endured because of it.  Armin is also an internalizer.

Hanji, however, is probably an externalizer.  She shows a lot of the signs of someone who has perhaps undergone something traumatic/repeated traumatic events and has lashed out as a sign of “dealing with it.”  It's a sign of emotional immaturity, so it makes sense that that's what Hanji was doing as a young'n.  She's also quite empathetic, which could add fuel to any flames, and she's also proven to be a skilled manipulator.

What was the trauma?  I think it was the feeling of isolation.

One thing that really is evident to me is how goddamned EXTROVERTED Hanji is.  If we have the scale E to I, Hanji is probably one of the farthest if not THE farthest over on the E side of ALL of the characters in this story.  She likes to talk, she verbalizes everything, she enjoys people, and she clearly gains energy from social situations.

I have a feeling that Hanji has always been a bright kid, and that perhaps she was understimulated as a result of growing up not only in a poor community, but being surrounded by this big-ass walls and constantly being told, “No, you can't go outside.  You'll be eaten alive by Titans.”

She would very naturally turn into this teenager/young adult with a thirst for absolutely destroying the things that kept her locked up in the first place.

Again, I think either situation is likely, but I have the feeling that it goes deeper than just getting revenge for someone's death. Something tells me that Hanji has been looking for answers to deep questions for a long time.

So, Hanji joins the military.  Then what?

Well, from the hints that Yams has dropped, Hanji met Erwin, Mike, Nile, and perhaps others at some point.  I don't think that Hanji was in the same class as them, save for maybe Moblit, but I think she probably knew them. This part is a bit hazy, considering that we don't know what age Erwin and company were when they joined the military.  Mike is canonically older than them all, pushing 40 years old (like a fine wine) at around 850.  Erwin is supposedly in his late 30's, and I believe even Levi is older than Hanji, which would put her around 30 at in the year 850.  

Now, if we think about when Levi entered the Survey Corps, which I believe was in the year 846...

Hanji was not a new recruit that year, and she already seemed to have a pretty close friendship with Moblit.  She was also more emotionally mature.

In other words, Hanji had probably already kicked the head of that Titan by the time Maria fell.

That means, it had to have been before Shiganshina/Maria fell that she had a change of heart.  

During all of this, Mike and Erwin were also in the Corps, and they probably witnessed this change.

However, despite it being explicitly mentioned in the manga, this is the hardest part to flesh out about Hanji's backstory.

We at least know the details of her becoming a Squad Leader specifically focused on the science of Titans, thanks to the OVA for Ilse's Journal.  It was thanks to her curiosity, emotional maturity, and a bit of dumb luck that it happened.  

But before this, we don't know much else about her time in the military, and it's hard to discern anything without knowing details about the others, too.  

I know that there are snippets of details in smartpasses (is that what they're called?) that reveal that she, Mike, and Erwin were friends, etc., but that really doesn't give us much to go on. Much of it, unfortunately, remains a mystery.

However, there is one last thing I want to point out:

In the first episode of season two, after Hanji lets Nick down instead of yeeting him off of the wall, she mentions “I haven't felt this way since I first went outside of the walls.  Talk about scary.”

There are many people who interpret this line as her fear of the Titans, but I think it's fear of her own anger.  She was ready to brutally kill someone who could have otherwise provided valuable information, just because of her pure rage.  

I think this moment, along with a couple of others (kicking down the table and saying “it was a roach,” for instance), drive home some of the assumptions from earlier in this meta.  Consider the torture scene and her actions compared to Levi's.  Levi grew up in an environment where violence was used as a form of communication.  You don't see him saying a lot as he punches Sannes over and over.  He doesn't stick around to talk to the men once they're returned to their jail cells.  

Hanji is, however, a bit too eager to rip the nails and teeth out of this guy (partially as revenge for Pastor Nick's death, I'm certain).  She rips into them verbally as well, as they sit defeated in their jail cell.  Her anger is a terrifying force.

So what's the point?

Well, there's not really one.

I just would like to know more about one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.

Is it important to the story?  Well, not necessarily.

But what if this backstory is more than I wrote here?  What if it's something quite wild or disturbing?  What if it digs further into the fundamentals of humanity?  Was she abused?  Was she bullied?  Is she just psychologically disturbed?  

Like I said, we may never know, and at this point (2019/09), the series seems to be coming to an end.

I personally think it's really too bad.  The story is a character-driven one, so to leave so much mystery around Hanji's past is very curious.  Hanji tends to get shoved to the side a lot (though not as much as some other MCs), so it’s pretty frustrating to see that even the creator isn’t divulging more information...

Then again, I guess it does make writing fics easier, right...?

[hanjo-love]

Now I became selfish and I hope the shard is showing Hanji being saved by Kiyomi or something. She go the worst treatment and if Isayama was afraid of the backslash like you said why make it even worse with those parallels with eremika? Is he preparing the Fandom for another levihan moment? I'm tired of EVERYONE surviving but her, Kiyomi's kindness really??? And Onyankopon, while I don't hate him, he survived a plane crash and he doesn't add much yet he is there for being the editor's favorite, Yelena is there after all she did and she adds even less, and the people titanized will revert to human (or at the very least Isayama's favorites will).

Oh anonie, you and me both my friend, you and me both 😔 Beware, a long rant-ish meta is ahead of you lol

I have absolutely no fucking idea why Yams decided to treat Hanjo like shit. You know, after a long time of denying her death, I was starting to accept it, because she was finally free, free of the burden and pain and finally reunited with the people she missed and longed for the most. But then Yams decided to slap us all in the faces saying there's no happy & peaceful afterlife in snk and Hanjo was probs only hallucinating because of her 4 years long depression? Well then, fuck you Yams! What was that even for? Isayama never backed off of showing us the horrors of death in snk, no matter how important the characters and how brutal their deaths really were. Still, he never showed us Hanji's actual death or dead body. He kept it misterious and his vague answers only made it worse. So it's only natural for us to expect a plot twist, right? That's the reason all of us gathered various hints in the manga, anime and his interviews. And lemme tell you, these theories are far more logical, better explained and have less plot holes than the entire final arc smh (yes I'm salty, fight me lol)

I hate to admit it, my inner self is still in denial and fighting, but Hanjo ain't coming back folks. We won't get any background story and the misterious shard will never be explained to us either. Yams had more than enough time to bring Hanjo back, if he truly wanted to. But he didn't. And now with only one chapter and so many unanswered questions left, there's no time for Hange's return. Why would he even do that anyways? Hanjo isn't important to him or to the story anymore. To us she is, always was and always will be ❤️ You know, I'm so fucking desperate to see her again, I'll even take one last panel of Levi remembering her, just like in ch136. Yams just let us see Hanjo one more fucking time 🙏🏻 I need to say my proper goodbyes to my one&only comfort character, who's influenced my life like no one else ever did ❤️

Back to Levihan (I don't think I can answer an ask without my biased and trashy shipper ass butting in lmfao): the question why Yams confirmed Levihan as canon if he didn't intend to bring Hange back and reunite her with Levi to make us him happy again? Well, isn't it obvious? This man is the devil incarnate. THIS MAN HAS NO FUCKING CHILLS lmfao JK y'all before someone declares war on me and my blog haha Well anonie, I feel like Yams really wanted to confirm his initially planned ships as canon, before the manga ends. And he chose the safest way possible. Easy as that. Also he said he is going for a bittersweet ending and what's more tragic (in this literal hell) than separating lovers, ergo Eremika and Levihan.

Now to something else, that's been bothering me for a while now and I'll use your ask anonie to share my thoughts with the world even though nobody asked lmao tbh I'm a bit disappointed with Armin. I love him, I really do. He's my precious cinnamon roll and my fave 104th kiddo. But honestly, I was expecting a bit more of the alleged "hero who will safe humanity". In fact, I'm sure Hanjo only died for Armin to become the new commander. That's it. That was the reason she had to die. Yams glossed over her to make Armin shine. But in fact, Levi's the one who's giving orders ever since Hange has left them. I might me salty, but I really hope the talk with Zeke (and probs Ymir as well, we still might have a chance to see the dialog that made Ymir change her mind) and his titan nuke weren't the only things he did as "humanity's hero" in this final arc. For some people this might me enough, for me it isn't. It wasn't worth Hange's sacrifice. Also what made me really sad was Armin himself glossing over Hanjo when he remembered Erwin Danchou, but not her. Like she didn't just pass away an hour ago to save their pathetic asses. Ugh this is making me hella mad, ngl. Hanjo didn't deserve this treatment! She gave her all for this! To save the alliance, to "pay the price" for her "sins" as the SC commander and to save humanity. I can't deal with how all of them and the fandom apparently forgot about that.

Now on to "Kiyomi's kindness" lol I wasn't really mad at Gabi for saying this as most of the fandom was. I won't go into detail why she isn't really a rationally thinking character (yo guys, you do remember she's a 12 year old kid, right?), but it's a fact that she didn't care for Hange enough to mention her. I mean, why would she? She barely even knew her. Also we don't really know what's gonna happen with Yelena, Kiyomi and her delegation. I don't know if I'm reading too much into it, but I feel like Kiyomi accepted her death with saying "that's not enough atonement for what I did anyway". I mean they don't know if the alliance will win (they probably think they won't) and they're in the middle of literally nowhere. So I feel like Gabi said that because Kiyomi sacrificed herself (and the others on that ship) willingly, for Gabi, Falco and Annie getting a little chance of surviving and helping the alliance. But I get the rage of the fandom. Especially because no one, except for Levi, remembered Hange after her noble sacrifice.

As for Yelena and Onyankopon, there obviously has to be someone from outside of Paradis to survive the rumbling, otherwise it wouldn't make a lot of sense, I guess. I like Onyankopon a hecking lot ❤️ precious boi was literally crying for Hanjo 😭 Yelena on the other hand deserves what she got. Death would be too easy and kind for her tbh. She has to live with the consequences, just like Kiyomi, so I'm actually glad they survived. So my guess is, it's not really about who's Yams' favorite and what these people are contributing to the story, but it's rather about a logical ending and a good conclusion of the story.

I agree with you about the ones who have been titanized. They'll for sure revert back to humans. It's not really Yams' style to kill of an important character like Gabi, whose character development he's been forcing on us for quite a while now lol. I'm pretty positive about an ending with the titan curse being broken and bringing the titanized people back to human beings (probs also the millions of colossal titans?). It's only natural for Yams to end the story with the titan curse being lifted. Otherwise it wouldn't make sense to end his story at this point. But let's not forget what a big ass troll Yams is lmao you never really know what he's up to, so let's prepare for the unimaginable lmfao

I'll probably never forgive Isayama for what he did to Hange, his best written character, how he completely ruined her and threw her away as disposable, just to make other characters "shine". HER DEATH WAS POINTLESS AND IT DID NOT FUCKING CHANGE ANYTHING! That's the harsh truth y'all. Yams betrayed Hanjo and us AND FOR WHAT?

Thanks for the ask anonie and sorry I turned this into my personal rant lmao hope you still enjoy reading my thoughts on this ❤️