Watching the first episode of the new season reminded me how Isayama loves the scenes where Hange is grabbed by her collar. Chapter 52: Sannes grabs her because he doesn’t want to let her into Nick’s room and glorious Moblit protects his Squad Leader.
Nick’s death hits Hange like a truck and she blames herself.
But here we have our awkward Levi who helps her to believe in herself again (scene unfortunately cut in the anime because they messed with the timeline but I really hope that their talk will happen eventually, maybe later in other circumstances).
Levi compares Hange to Erwin (he just gave her the best compliment he’s capable of) and thinks that she can be as good as him.
It is very interesting that in the recent chapters this little, secondary scene is repeating itself with much bigger and important consequences:
Unfortunately, Moblit is not here to help her (I need a fan art with Moblit in this scene, pls!).
Again she’s blaming herself.
And here again our beloved Erwin, again compared to Hange, but now it is Hange who implicitly makes a comparison with him. Unfortunately she gets to the opposite opinion Levi had: she’s not as good as Erwin, she goes as far as saying that Erwin made a mistake (I think that here Levi would disagree completely with her: he trusts her and he’s always trusted Erwin’s decisions so I think that for Levi the sentence “Erwin made a mistake” is wrong in any possible way, grammatically, syntactically, morphologically etc.)
I don’t think that this time a nice talk will solve her problems, but it would be helpful, at least, to clear her head and to gain some confidence. In this moment, unfortunately everyone seems to be away (Levi is in the forest, most of the kids are at Sasha’s funeral, Armin was with Annie) and, on top of that, if Gabi and Falco were in the same prison as Eren, she will surely know very soon that those two escaped and killed a soldier.
In the Uprising Arc, after that moment of discouragement she showed us how brilliant she is and she saved everyone’s ass with her intelligence.
I hope that in this arc too we will have the opportunity to see her amazing mind working and see again her passionate and strong personality. Isayama owes this not just to Hange’s character but to Erwin’s too. I’m sure that his mention wasn’t by chance and that he will prove us, once again, that Erwin never makes mistakes.
