Musing Over Manga: Attack on Titan Chapter 52--Secret Keepers

This is my new favorite image in the entire manga. Eren's facepalming, Jean looks embarrassed, and everybody else doesn't understand what the big deal is. Amazing. (A/N: The entire post deals with spoilers from the manga. Do not read unless you are caught up!)

Sorry that this post is so late! It's only my second month doing this, and I'm already falling behind... I blame finals and the holiday season. Even though I'm finally on break from school, it still feels like I don't have enough time... Which is why I'm posting this literally at the very end of the year. Hopefully next time I'll be faster at condensing my thoughts.

But enough about that! We're still in kind of a low-key setup portion as far as this chapter is concerned...or as low key as a chapter with an off-screen murder and a flashback throat-cutting can be, anyway. But I'll get to that in a little bit. The chapter is broken up into two major sections, the first dealing with Hanji and the second with Krista/Historia.


At the start of the chapter, some more fandom speculation is confirmed; the walls are literally made out of Titans, or more specifically, the same stuff that Annie used to turn herself into crystal. Logically, this means that Eren also has this power and could potentially fix the hole in the wall. However, Eren has to get his power under control first, and, well, that's basically been the entire series up to this point. This is where Hanji is expected to step in, but instead of her usual excitement, she's much more reserved and quiet. And scared.


Sometime during the time lapse between this chapter and the previous one (I'm guessing a few days at the most), Pastor Nick was murdered and Hanji is blaming herself for letting it happen. The conspiracy between the Military Police and the Wall Cult is pretty much an open secret now as far as the narrative is concerned, although there's nothing the characters can do about it because of the way the military works. It's still unclear what exactly they get out of it or what secrets they're keeping in the first place, but they were worth enough to someone to have Pastor Nick tortured and killed. The Scouting Legion is on someone's hit list, so in that way it's understandable why Hanji wants to have them lay low for a while longer.


However, that sentiment is driven by fear. I see a lot of mischaracterizations of her floating around, from people saying that she only cares about her experiments to claims that she sympathizes with the titans more than with humans. There's plenty of evidence in this chapter and the previous one to show that's not the case; her loyalty is to the cause, there's no doubt about that, and her experiments were a means to that end. But with the reveal that all Titans are human, her resolve has wavered a bit. The idea that she'd been performing human experiments all along must've been hard to take. And now she has Pastor Nick's unnecessary suffering on her conscience as well, despite the fact that he was not exactly her favorite person in the world. Hanji is afraid of the idea of possibly putting her friends and fellow soldiers in more danger, and from that she proves that she values people over science. If she really only cared about experiments, then this scene wouldn't have happened.

Basically, if you don't like Hanji, you are wrong

But right now they can't afford to wait, which is why Levi is around to snap her out of it. It's not really discussed, but these two have worked together for six years, so they know each other pretty well. We haven't really seen how they interact with each other outside of friendly banter, so it's been nice to see them supporting each other in the most recent chapters. Levi is probably one of the few people who can call her out on her change in behavior while also bringing her confidence back up again. I also ship them like FedEx, so this made me a happy camper.


Also as more of a sidebar comment, it's also interesting that Levi decides to defer to Hanji's judgement and then makes a comment about how it's similar to what Erwin would've done. It's still kind of unclear how exactly their ranks work, so if/when Erwin has to step down from his Commander position, we don't know who'd take over. While the last chapter showed that Levi and Hanji were making joint decision while Erwin was out of commission, this seems to imply that Hanji is next in line. Who knows if that'll actually come true or not, though.

 

Some fan translations have gone for harsher wording, but you get the idea

The second half of the chapter finally talks about Krista/Historia, and raises far more questions than it answers. Admittedly, her backstory feels more than just a little cliche--literally no one liked her? Her mother wanted to kill her? Why?--but it does drive home yet again how weirdly secretive the Wall Cult is, as well as why Historia acted the way she did and her decision to join the military. Whatever the heck this secret is, it must be something really important if just the existence of Historia and her mother is enough to push people towards spontaneous murder.

However, I admit that I was a little frustrated that we still don't know what the secret is. The manga has been hyping this up for a while now, so when we got into the backstory stuff I was hoping that Historia would at least drop some hints about what is so critical to the conspiracy that it requires the Military Police to send out goons to kill a pastor from their cover-up religon. Or maybe the foreshadowing has gotten crazy subtle again and the hints won't be obvious until the secret is fully revealed. Who knows.


But one thing I did love about this section was how it retroactively cemented how important Ymir is to Historia. She's spent her entire life either ignored or hated, and even when people did care about her, it was under a fake name and an assumed persona. Ymir was the first person to see through it all and like her anyway. Keeping her end of the deal and taking back her name is an even more powerful moment now. ...And hopefully the bridge chapter that was just released along with the new Japanese manga volume doesn't mean that Ymir won't be coming back. Despite Ymir's opinion, Historia still needs her.

That said, I'm still hoping that this conversation isn't over and that Historia knows the secret. This is starting to bug me as much as Eren's basement.

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