A rant regarding levihan
Hello there, remnants of the levihan ship fandom! I have recently rewatched AOT, which inadvertently reignited my passion for this ship. This post shall primarily serve as my scream into the void to vent my feelings about this pairing. I hope to bring up some fresh perspectives I haven't yet noticed much in discussions surrounding this topic.
tl;dr: 1) Levi and Hange are adult characters and thus act like it; 2) Hajime Isayama is a talented writer and has put great care into his work.
An in-character reasoning for the cryptic nature of the hints supporting this pairing
A common criticism I've seen of this ship is how indirect the main dialogues brought up in support of it are. The argument that other pairings received much more direct confessions (namely eremika and aruani), even though many of the characters involved were also not really the romantic types, seems strong at first, however I would like to point out a key difference - the age of the characters. Overall, I think the author does a great job portraying the differences in mentality between age groups - from the simplistic thinking and desire for recognition in child characters, to the jaded, rigid views of older characters. Whilst most of the main cast were teenagers throughout the series, both levi and hanji were adult characters. In real life, this corresponds to a fully developed prefrontal cortex, which is mainly responsible for things like the consideration of long-term effects and consequences of actions.
Therefore, I believe that levi and hanji were simply more aware that not only ignoring their duties in favor of feelings is a very bad idea (a well accepted plausible thought process within the levihan community, and applicable to the other pairings as well), even the very act of bringing this up will have a similar negative effect. A sensible adult when faced with a situation where they love a comrade at a time where either one of them could die at any moment could predict that expressing these feelings would make it much harder for the other person to move on in case they die and the other survives. Even if you stay dedicated to your goals and duties, the mere prospect of a happy future together if you both manage to make it would cause extra pain if this does not end up occuring. In fact, we see this exact scenario play out with eremika - Eren indulges in the fantasy of living a peaceful life together before dying, and at the end just verbally asks Mikasa to forget him. Which is an expected pattern of behaviour for a teenager, however it obviously doesn't work-Mikasa clearly has lingering feelings for a long time afterwards because she knew that, had things turned out differently, they could've been together happily. Therefore, a better course of action, if you want the person you love to live peacefully after your death and not be too hung up on what could've been, would be to entirely hide any indication of your feelings. Make it so that they can convince themselves that their own feelings (if the love was actually reciprocal) were actually unrequited, and therefore nothing would've happened even if you had survived.
In the case of Levi and Hanji, I believe this was the plan for both of them. However, Hanji's slip-up in the forest (the infamous ifkk line) caused a crack in the Pandora's box. Acknowledging this suggestion directly would inevitably lead back to the problem of causing additional pain in case of death, as described previously. Yet, Levi could not bring himself to outright reject her (which would presumably be disingenuous of him), so he instead opted for a very indirect response (the とは contingency), which could be ignored if needed - this has actually proved to be very effective due to the amount of fans who deny any possible romantic subtext to their relationship.
2. A meta analysis of the writing process
Another criticism I've seen is that the levihan pairing is too far-fetched, the shippers are digging for/seeing something that isn't there and the author didn't intend any of these hints we've found. However, I have faith in Hajime Isayama. He has demonstrated time and time again a meticulous attention to detail and clearly enjoys adding foreshadowing and nuance to his work. In my limited attempts to write stories, I too experienced the joy of adding small tidbits that I didn't necessarily expect any reader to catch, but nevertheless rejoiced at the thought that someone someday may find them. And I believe this is a universal artist experience, regardless of medium.
The fact that he apparently revisited and edited Levi's line about Hanji's unrequited love for titans when compiling the manga into volumes itself shows that this wasn't just a trivial piece of dialogue. He may have wanted to refine it on his own, or he could have seen the fan discussions, but either way, he could've easily removed the perceived implications, but instead he doubled down and made the subtext lean even more towards the romantic interpretation.
So, yeah, that's my scream into the void. If anyone makes it this far, sorry if my language comes off as dry and a bit convoluted. Pretty much the only literature I've read and written the past 8 years or so have been scientific articles, and I don't know if I'm capable of removing these stylistic influences at this point.
