a tiny brief thing on hange’s history, because i kept trying to write the whole thing out months ago and never finishing:
they grew up in ehrmich district, the southernmost district of wall sina. their family was middle-class, reasonably well-off but never rich.
their mother, ailis zoë worked as an apothecary. their father, professor barnabas zoë, was a professor of mathematics at ehrmich college.
their house was absolutely covered in books, and hange delighted in reading, well, all of them. their father fostered this love of learning and took pride in it, though he was taken aback by how quickly and voraciously hange advanced through even his higher-level textbook.
they also loved to be outside, exploring, getting dirty, invariably ending up in places they shouldn’t be. their parents had to make a lot of apologies to neighbors.
for a long time, their dream, nurtured by their father, was to attend the university in mitras, the most esteemed body of learning within the walls. they hoped there to find answers to the questions they’d had about the world since childhood, or at least to be surrounded by other people also looking for the answers.
when they were fourteen, however, they visited the university with their father for the first time -- and was sorely disappointed at what they found. the scholars there either laughed at their questions or dismissed them. nobody seemed interested in studying anything outside the walls -- or, if they were, the heavy military police presence around campus kept them from talking about it. where hange had hoped to find keen minds searching for answers about the world, instead they found a group of stuffy, self-congratulatory old men in robes making a very big deal out of knowing all the same things they’d known for a hundred years.
disgusted and thoroughly disenchanted, hange returned home unsure what to do. they could go to the university anyway, try to reform it from the inside out, but they were pretty sure they’d get into trouble for punching one of their superiors before the first month was out, and besides, the military police back home already hated them enough for their multiple attempts at chipping at the walls (or, in one case, digging to see how deep they went) and various other transgressions. the mp presence on campus would keep them from doing anything useful.
they weren’t sure what to do until they overheard a few people complaining about the survey corps. apparently their most recent expedition had been a failure, but that was unimportant; what hange latched onto was one woman’s muttered, “don’t know why anyone would want to go outside the walls, anyway.”
that, of course, was the answer: they had had it backwards, thinking that they would learn anything by going farther inward. they needed to be outside, that was where the real learning could happen -- outside where everything was unknown, outside where there were no military police to stop them from taking samples. and the survey corps accepted anyone willing to join, so whether or not they cared about hange’s quest for knowledge, they wouldn’t stop them.
they next time a military recruiter came around, hange joined up. and then came telling their parents.
their mother was upset, but resigned; she seemed to have been expecting something like this. their father, however, was another matter entirely. professor zoë had always been vocally anti-military; he denounced violence of all kinds, and hated the idea of his child taking up a sword at all, much less throwing their lot in with a group of people apparently determined to get themselves killed.
there was an argument. voices raised. hange tried to explain that their goal hadn’t changed: they were joining not for the violence for the intellectual opportunities. “you think you’ll have the chance to take tissue samples while you’re being slaughtered? do you know the survival rates of the corps? you’ll die on your first expedition--” “but if you survive the first, your chances of survival go up exponentially! all i have to do is make it past the first couple of expeditions and then--”
“okay, let’s entertain, just for a moment, the fantasy that you don’t end up as titan food. is this the length you’re willing to go for knowledge? by killing your way to it?”
hange and their father parted on poor terms, and soon after they left with the rest of the recruits to join the training corps. they trained from the age of 15 to 18. from the start they were seen as eccentric -- they made no secret of the fact that they planned on joining the survey corps, and while they were skilled with the maneuver gear, they spent more time studying and experimenting than they did training properly. they got in trouble with the sergeants not infrequently and never had the highest marks despite their skills, but this was no skin off their back, as they didn’t care about being in the top ten.
when the day came that they joined the corps, they were excited. when their first expedition came, they were excited. and then came the titans, and the death. then came screaming as a third of their squad died in one fell swoop. then came limping back home with wagons full of bodies. then came reality.
for a while, their hopes of making grand discoveries fell to the wayside in the wake of the shell-shock of their first real experience with tragedy. they had thought they were prepared. they had no idea. they dealt with grief and anger, and began to nurse a true hatred of titans, hotter even than the scorn they had for many people inside the walls. for a time their existence became about revenge, about slaughtering as many titans as they could, because titans had killed their friends and titans kept them trapped behind walls and titans stood between them and their freedom.
and then, of course, they kicked the titan’s head.
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