Today I was rewatching episode 17 of SNK and I noticed something that I haven’t seen discussed before (but I’m pretty sure has been brought up by someone). So I decided to analyze this scene with Armin and the Female Titan a bit.
The first photo is a pretty powerful scene that I’m pretty sure most SNK fans would agree on. After the Female Titan kills Siss, Armin figures out that she is a Titan shifter who knows to protect the nape of the neck and purposefully kills people to kill them. When he is knocked off his horse and falls to the ground, the Female Titan crouches, but instead of killing him, she lifts up his hood and then leaves him there, leaving him very confused.
After this scene comes the one with Reiner and Jean. Armin explains what the Female Titan is, and asks them to pull their hoods over their face before they attack, thinking that she won’t kill them as long as she knows they aren’t Eren. When she attacks them, their hoods fall back, and Armin is flung off his horse (conveniently losing his 3DMG as well). She recognizes Jean as not being Eren, and looks ahead. She then looks at the ground again, recognizing Armin for the second time. Instead of killing, she again crouches over him, almost looking remorseful. However, she doesn’t hesitate to fight Reiner and Jean when they attack again.
At this point, I think Armin knows that she’s not just sparing him because she wanted to see if he was Eren or not; she must be sparing him because he must know her, or at least she knows him in some way.
When Jean 3DMG gets caught and it looks like the end for him, Armin yells that he should get “revenge” for “the guys that died too soon” and that it is the Female Titan who has killed them. When I originally watched this, this scene just confused me. Of course Jean knows that the soldiers who died passed away too soon, and of course he knows that it was the Female Titan’s fault. Watching it again, I now believe that those lines weren’t intended for Jean, but for the Female Titan. Armin knows that this Titan shifter recognizes him, and in a desperate measure to distract her and save Jean, he blames her for the deaths of soldiers. That causes the FT to freeze for a moment, allowing Jean to move away. What I find important about this is that we all know that Armin is smart and can sometimes be cunning, but here it feels like he genuinely is manipulating the FT because of the fact that she has an emotional connection to him. Up until this point, the only time he did this was to save Eren from being killed by the Garrison Regiment, but that was more of a persuasion tactic than genuine manipulation. Here, his intent seemed to be to at least shock the Female Titan with what he was saying.
So this scene feels important for 2 reasons: one, it is one of the first times Armin has cold-heartedly manipulated someone (possibly foreshadowing to when he confronts Annie) , and two, it adds another reason to how Armin figured out who the Female Titan was so quickly. There were several reasons, but the fact the the Female Titan chose not to kill him twice while knowing his intelligence was definitely an important one.
I have not read this scene in the manga yet and I may be reading this scene wrong, but these are just some of my thoughts
