Legit question, since this has been bugging me forever and I could use someone explaining it to me: I'm nb, right? Isayama announced that Hanji was to be referred to with NO gender pronouns or BOTH male and female pronouns, right? Because hanji's gender is ambiguous as a whole. Now of course I was elated but immediately people began assuming that hanji's gender was 'up for interpretation'. I honestly can't see how this is accurate. Would you be able to explain why people are thinking this?
Well hello there, fellow nb person~
Let me tell you upfront that this is an amazingly interesting question that made me lots of joy to research and think about, so thank you very very much!
In fact it wasn’t the fandom “assuming” Hanji’s gender was up for interpretation it was the American Kodansha branch. As you probably know they were ordered by Isayama to use either no gendered pronouns or both gendered pronouns in the same frequency, which lead to a lot of confusion inside the fandom. As you can read here it was basically Kodansha saying that it was up to the reader. Now the question is what makes them say this.
A footnote on the Article about Hanji on the SnK Wiki page gives further clarification:
“The author, Hajime Isayama, has left Hange’s gender open to interpretation as he told his editor that ‘either one is fine’ and instructed Kodansha USA not to confirm any gender in their translation. Since then, Kodansha has removed gendered pronouns for Hange in their translation, and clarified that indeed, Hange’s gender is up to the reader’s interpretation.”
I don’t really know how much this all is true for the canon character and how much it’s just encouraged by the English language. As you might know Japanese barely genders people anyway and assumes gender a construct.
So you can now see this whole case as closed by Kodansha confirming Hanji’s gender is up to us or you can argue that this whole thing wouldn’t even be a topic if the English language didn’t gender everything and therefore Hanji is non binary.
As a personal opinion I gotta admit that I think the fact Isayama said “Either one is fine” doesn’t make leave it up for interpretation at all and even made it more obvious to me that Hanji might identify with just more than one gender. Even though it also made me wonder how much thought Isayama actually puts into this whole topic. Maybe he just doesn’t care. orz
Again thank you very much for your question!
