And a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone reading this! (A/N: Spoilers for the entire show are discussed in this post.)
I'm going to be completely honest; I could've done the whole 12 Days on just Attack on Titan alone. There are a lot of great singular moments in the show, and it's not my anime of the year for nothing. I knew that my top moment would be something from this show, but I had a really hard time deciding what to talk about. Then I remembered that a lot of the characters have canon birthdays now, so I'm using the last day as an excuse to ramble about my favorite character, Levi.
Yeah, I know, me and every other fangirl, right? Honestly, it took me a long time to warm up to his character. People started freaking out on Tumblr at his first appearance, and I was very confused. A short guy with a terrible attitude and a worse vocabulary was the new big fangirl obsession? What the hell was the appeal? I was told to "wait and see," but then the courtroom scene happened and I got even more confused. Was this just another Draco in Leather Pants scenario? Was the fanbase reading something into him that wasn't there?
And then we met his squad, who I really liked. Their deaths were the most shocking in the show for me, despite Attack on Titan making it extremely clear by that point that any character could die. And in the aftermath of that event, I finally realized why so many people liked Levi's character.
In an admittedly melodramatic add-on, two soldiers head back to try to retrieve the body of their dead friend, and end up bringing Titans with them. They have to dump some of the bodies to escape, including Petra's, if not the rest of Levi's squad. Afterwards, Levi approaches one of the soldiers and gives him a patch that he claims was from his dead friend, saying that it was proof that he was alive. The kick to heart here is that the episode heavily implies that it was actually Petra's patch, and he gave away his last reminder of her.
And then there's this:
Why watch Attack on Titan when you could eat broken glass
And then I remembered how Levi took a soldier's bloody hand when he was dying and told him that his death wouldn't be in vain. I remembered when he told Eren to make whatever choice he wanted, without regrets. And I realized that I'd misjudged him all along. He actually cares a lot about his fellow soldiers, and is incredibly loyal. The hints had been there all along, I'd just completely missed them because of a bad first impression.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that he's a completely unrepentant jerk, but I've ended up liking that part as well, since it cuts through a lot of the BS. I also find it interesting that the scene that triggered my realization is anime-original and not in the manga at all, so I'm not sure what my impression of him would be if I'd gone through the manga first. In any case, Levi joins the list of characters who I ended up loving despite really disliking them at first.
So Happy Birthday, Levi. You better not die, you glorious bastard.
Images from Crunchyroll.com.
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