wirsinddieranters:
I wrote this, and I thought to myself that if I’ve gotten complaints from giving Hange female pronouns, complaints from my rant about the fandom focusing too much on AUs and ships rather than the actual story, complaints about my explanation on why Annie is not a complete sadistic psycho, and complaints about how I’ve said that Hange enjoys her experiments, I’m going to say this for all the Eruri fans who I have a feeling will tell me I’m being offensive:
You can portray things however you want. This is my opinion, drawn from the facts that I have seen.
Onto the meta:
I’ve said things on my personal and Hange roleplaying blog—and maybe on here? I can’t remember—that makes me think that people think I despise Eruri as a ship. People seem to think that I’m insulting Eruri and downplaying their relationship every time I say how Hange is more of Erwin’s right hand than Levi, and how Levi definitely does not have absolute trust in Erwin.
But really, it’s just that I personally feel that the fandom as a whole seems to misinterpret their relationship. And I blame the interviews and whatnot from the spin-off (which was NOT written by Isayama, only thumbs-upped, and I’ll get to that in a second) for their portrayal of Levi being hilariously protective of Erwin and the type to follow him to the ends of the earth.
And we’ve not been shown any of that kind of behavior in the manga.
It’s clear by how Levi talks about Erwin that he doesn’t hate him, and holds a level of respect for him. And just with how they are on a first-name basis, it proves they’re close. However, the same can be said with the relationship in between any of the four senior Scouts; Erwin, Hange, Mike, and Levi all are on a first-name basis and trust each other immensely, despite differences in personality and ranks.
However, Levi does not have the absolute trust in Erwin that the fandom seems to think he does. Whenever we see Erwin give Levi a direct order, Levi actually questions it. We’ve seen it happen multiple times already; Erwin will tell him to do something, Levi will argue against it, and only listen after Erwin tells him again. This is not ‘complete trust.’ And the fact that after he did what he was told and refilled his swords and gas, he said the words ’I’ll trust your judgement on this one,’ it implies Levi has had times where he doesn’t trust Erwin’s judgement at all and goes against what he’s told. That isn’t the behavior of someone who has complete and undying trust in another.
That portrayal stems back to the things revolving around the spin-off, A Choice With No Regrets. That is, the spin-off itself, and the things they did to promote it, including interviews. The thing is, the writer is not Isayama— it’s a man named Gan Sunaaku. The spin-off is only thumbs-upped by Isayama, and while that’s great, it’s still a manga that should be taken with a grain of salt, because they’ve already made mistakes. One of them particularly being that Erwin was not a Commander five years ago; the man who later became the one who trained the 104th was Commander. However, in the spin-off, Erwin seems to already be Commander, as he has the bolo tie that is a sign of his rank, something he did not have when he was shown five years back. It’s an continuation error, and the only explanation could be ‘Levi hadn’t joined yet,‘ which doesn’t work, because it was stated in the FTT arc that he was one of the soldiers that survived the fall of Wall Maria, along with Mike and Hange.
It serves as proof that the spin-off should be taken lightly rather than a rock-hard example of Levi and Erwin’s relationship, and that to be considered entirely canon, it should be more than just ‘thumbs-upped’ by Isayama. That Erwin and Levi’s relationship should not be described from the fandom as what happens in work that is not Isayama’s, but in the work that is his— the work that shows a relationship that is more complex than just an over-the-top protectiveness and unwavering trust.
Simply put, there is a difference between disliking a ship, and disliking what I find an inaccurate portrayal of a relationship.
EDIT: Another mistake this spin-off has, that proves Isayama is not actively involved in it and thus should be, again, taken with a grain of salt, is that Levi seems to know how to use the 3DMG, an INCREDIBLY difficult tool to use, without training.
Maybe this will be explained away later, but as of now, it asks an important question: The spin-off is thumbs-upped, sure, but just how canon should it be considered, when it goes against established canon multiple times in the single 12 pages that it has?
An analysis written with a sharp critical eye, but there are a few things that I need to elaborate on here.
・”I’ll trust your judgment on this one”
The first one is a correction: as the result of off-the-mark translation, Levi’s “I’ll trust your judgment on this one” cannot be used as evidence in this argument. The original line, as far as I know, only indicated that he said “I’ll trust your judgment” [お前の判断を信じよう]. The “on this one” is likely added to smoothen the sentence, since I don’t see any trace of it in the actual thing.
・”Complete Trust”
The other thing is a counterargument to the concept of ‘absolute trust’ that is presented in this meta. I will not deny that the fandom, and the shippers in particular, do tend to stress the aspects of loyalty and trust very very much in this ship, and do not shy away from outright skewing it far beyond what the canon presented. But then again, which fandom doesn’t do that? Ships in particular suffer from this problem a lot—exaggeration is more the rule than the exception there. But that’s beside the point—what I want to bring up here is the problem with the OP’s definition of the concept. Apparently ‘absolute trust’ means blindly following whatever the other guy said while killing your own sense of reason. While I can’t say that this isn’t what people sometimes refer to to as absolute trust, I beg to disagree—calling this behaviour ‘absolute obedience’ would have been more appropriate.
This is where the mistake occurred. The example given by the OP is a perfect demonstration of how Levi doesn’t always just mindlessly take orders from Erwin. In fact I think he never does—he’s not the type to do so. Taking this one instance, Levi initially questions Erwin’s order—why do you think he did that? Now, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Levi isn’t stupid; he’s got his own brain, he can think well enough for himself. If he doesn’t find Erwin’s order sensible, of course he’s going to want an explanation. Trust or not, that’s what people naturally do when they don’t understand something. But as is already mentioned, Erwin just tells him to obey, after which Levi agrees to do as he’s told.
Now focus on this section really closely. Erwin gives an order. Levi doesn’t understand why he had to follow it when there’s no need for it; he asks. Erwin tells him to go and do it anyway—now hold it right there. Look at the Commander. What was going on in his head? He just figured out that the Female Titan might still be around. This is likely why he told Levi to go resupply his gear. If he explained all that (and notice that he has no reason not to), Levi will definitely understand why that order was given and go do as he’s told. But how long is that going to take? Say he starts explaining the whole theory, right there—do they have that much time? No, they don’t. Levi said so himself. So he chose to keep quiet, gave Levi the command and left it at that.
Now here’s where this anecdote starts working against the initial proposition that it proves Levi doesn’t trust Erwin. How about we see it like this—they know each other well enough. Erwin knows Levi isn’t the type to blindly do things without knowing why. If he just told Levi to do something without telling him the reason, it’s not going to work. But despite that, he went ahead and dropped the order. Now what you need to notice here is that he’s making a bet—if Levi somehow found the lack of explanation too bothersome and started an argument right there, he would probably never have gotten to the escaping Female Titan in time. In short, Erwin counted on the chance that he’s not going to start fussing even if he didn’t tell him why he had to go refill his blades. In other words, he trusts Levi to obey him.
Right on this one’s tail, Levi chooses to settle for the lack of answers and listen to Erwin’s command. Now this again reinforces the same idea—Levi doesn’t know what Erwin’s up to, and he’d much prefer that he does, but as you can see, he still decides to play along even if he’s totally clueless. Now that’s trust. Not one hour before that scene, Levi said that while they can’t control what will happen around them, they can at least decide their own actions and make the choices they won’t regret. In this scene, it’s pretty clear that he’s consciously decided to obey Erwin despite not knowing what’s going on—if you ask me, I think he does that because he’s felt he won’t regret it, whatever the results may turn out to be. If that’s not trust, I don’t know what is.
・Spinoff Problems
These are some very legit continuity errors pointed out about A Choice With No Regrets. Indeed it’s up to every individual’s choice whether or not these should be considered canon material, though I feel that there’s too much animosity here to consider the post neutral. It’s hard to take something supposedly official seriously if it has mistakes, granted, but one error doesn’t doom a whole work. And while the OP’s suspicions are reasonable, it may still be too early to throw the towel in on this one yet.
On another note, though, saying that the Eruri shippers only got more hardcore about the issue of trust once word of the spinoff came out is a bit of an insult—contest my observations if I’m mistaken, but spinoff or no spinoff, that part of the ship dynamic seems to have always been there. Though perhaps the announcement of an official coverage of their thing may have turned them louder.
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Procrastination Station 