I love how beautiful the animation is for AoT’s anime, don’t get me wrong. It’s beautiful to watch. But the fact of the matter is, they make too many changes that change the characters and foreshadowing too much. And one of the best (or rather, worst) examples of this, is the anime’s version of Zoe Hange.
In the manga, she can be silly, but she takes battle seriously and doesn’t goof around when people’s lives are on the line. She thinks critically, and when one of her squad members wastes his time stabbing Annie’s crystal, she immediately stops him and tells him how they have absolutely no time to be fooling around like that. She’s shown to be a brilliant tactician and a more-than-capable leader, and someone that the Commander himself listens to for advice on what to do next.
However, in the anime, the small things they change makes her almost a completely different character. She’s shown either fooling around and giggling in battle, or going psychotic in a way that she has only implied to have been in her past in the manga(oh, but in the anime, they took that out!). She’s never shown to be a capable leader, and is downplayed by other characters to force her into a terrible square of only being comic relief. They even add scenes like her walking into closed doors to imply she’s clumsy and dumb, and change her scene where she yells at Keiji about wasting his time trying to stab the crystal to make it a scene about Jean and Levi.
She goes from being an incredibly important leader in the series who’s theories and love of her work are part of why the Scouting Legion is learning more and more about titans than ever before, to simple comic relief with occasional psychotic tendencies. In other words, she becomes something that isn’t Zoe Hange at all.
I actually had a lot of enthusiasm for the anime’s interpretation of her at first. I enjoyed extra scenes, but as the season went on, she became less and less like I thought of the character with the changes they made. And by the season finale, I was, needless to say, incredibly disappointed. They had nearly completely erased her as a key figure in helping capture Annie, in favor of Levi, who was supposed to still be injured and only watching from the sidelines.
I’d been waiting all season to see her first examples of her true leadership skills and how serious she is, only to see it be erased. She didn’t even get the luxury of her scene staring up at the titan in the wall, wondering what she should do and how it could happen. Not one of her scenes that had the focus on her was included; the only time she did appear that it was focused on her, they had changed her from someone who takes battle seriously, to someone who’s simply psychotic.
When anime-onlies say 'but the anime only made small, insignificant changes,' I almost feel sad for them that they don’t realize how much is actually changed, and how much they’re actually missing, especially for characters like Hange, who were cast aside and treated as less important.
And now, I’m scared we won’t even see her threaten Pastor Nick. We can only hope that the anime stops trying to force her into a role of comic relief, especially when the things they now have to cover only make her more and more serious a character.
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