Armin Arlert (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
abrilliantmind) wrote2013-10-07 02:58 am
abrilliantmind) wrote2013-10-07 02:58 am
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asgardeventide Application
OOC Information;
Name; Natalie
Personal Journal;
Contact;![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
thesouldilates
Other Characters; No one
Activity proof; None
IC Information;
Character Name; Armin Arlert
Canon; Shingeki no Kyojin/Attack on Titan
(http://shingekinokyojin.wikia.com/wiki/Shingeki_no_Kyojin)
(http://shingekinokyojin.wikia.com/wiki/Armin_Arlert)
Canon Point; Chapter 49: Charge
Age; 15
House; House Odin
Power; Ice
Personality;
Amidst the rampant gore and human misery, there is this wispy dandelion of a boy and his fringe bangs. The unconverted readers that have never seen the series will just have to take my word for it that this is not a Miyazaki character or the criminally young love interest in a BL manga (which might feature a different sort of flesh-eating than what Shingeki no Kyojin truly has to offer). This is Armin Arlert, and he’s here to save humanity from giant monsters. He shares this motivation with his two childhood friends and their military peers; however Armin lacks much of the brawn and the honed fighting ability that they possess. What he lacks in size and muscle he makes up for in loyalty, determination, and being a guile hero. Not the one to unhinge someone’s mandible with a single punch, but instead utilizes wit and strategy to carve a notch for himself in the totem pole of usefulness.
Ten-year old Armin would be that kid you would babysit that would quietly eat his vegetables, wash his own dishes and then watch the news for an hour. And then comment on it while you internally question your intelligence when a prepubescent has informed opinions about healthcare and foreign relations. This is also the kind of kid you automatically assume is getting his little ass kicked on the regular. And he did get his ass kicked—so frequently that’s how we’re introduced to his character. Armin had told three bullies that humans would have to go outside someday, which freaked the other kids out, and they started beating him up.
Armin was bullied a lot during his childhood: he was timid, not to mention physically slight and unlikely to throw a punch. He tells the aforementioned group of bullies that he wouldn’t fight back because that would be stooping down to their level—“You’re beating me up because you know I’m right and you can’t prove me wrong.” He blatantly tells them they’re too stupid to argue with him reasonably, so that’s why they’re resorting to violence. If anything, his ability to articulate himself is the one advantage he has that he can rely on, since he’s not packing on the action hero muscles; even if it takes him a while to fully harness it.
He will sooner tell it like it is than mince his words or sugarcoats things. He’ll be very frank about a situation, even if it’s something that is difficult to hear (perhaps one example to use here is the morning before Eren’s trial, where he explains to Mikasa that they are trying to decide whether to keep Eren alive or kill him, despite the incredible touchiness of the subject). However brutal this honesty may sometimes be, it’s not meant to harm. Excluding the people that Armin is being sarcastic towards, he doesn’t tell people cold-hard truths to make them feel bad; more likely than not, he just doesn’t see the point in lying or omitting things from people that aren’t his enemies. He tells one of his comrades after a particularly bloody incident that someone has to become a monster in order to reach their goal—no matter what happens, some choice has to be made, and the ones willing to take extreme action (like Erwin Smith or Dot Pixis) are the only ones capable of change in the long run.
His approach tends to be very fair and mediated: he does not lean towards one extreme bias in a situation, but rather makes an effort to understand where others are coming from. He doesn’t just blindly support Eren’s decision to become a Scout Troop when Eren mentions it, acknowledging that it was a dangerous choice, but he also admits that he sees where Eren is coming from. There is another scene where he is at the mercy of the army alongside Mikasa and Eren and every rifle and canon they could find to properly spaz about Eren coming out of a titan body for the first time. And Armin still empathizes with their fear and lack of understanding, despite the danger he’s in with his friends. Armin has been overcome by nerves several times, but he’s never been shown to lose his temper or be overcome by vengeance in a profound, emotional way. Though he should never be mistaken as a pushover either, he can be quite the unexpected source of sass (there is a scene where Eren and Jean switch places, leading Eren to raise qualms that they could ever be mistaken for one another, to which Armin replies that they have the same “nasty, criminal look in their eyes.” And this is his BFF we’re talking about).
He’s also not what you would call an impulsive personality. He needs to think about his actions and be absolutely certain before he speaks about a topic. Even before he goes to vouch for Eren, he acknowledges to himself that his thoughts are “an unholy mess” but he’d have to make it up as he goes. This is probably one of the few times that he has gone into a situation without thoroughly thinking it through first.
For the most part, the people living inside the walls are content to be there and do not harbor any free-spirited desires to explore titan-infested waters. But Armin wasn’t satisfied with the small life of growing up within a glorified fish bowl and expressed interest in the bigger picture. The one problem with this was the Central Government had declared it illegal to own any materials pertaining to the outside world, let alone discuss it (justifying this stringent thought control with the paranoia that talking about the outside world would “invite” the titans inside). Armin and Eren were both agitated about being closed off from the greater portion of the world they had been born into, and dreamed of getting out one day to see the ocean and the deserts and all the other things from Armin’s books. Later on, Armin remembers this aspiration as he’s trying to bring Eren back from nearly losing himself to his titan form, asking Eren why he wanted to go outside in the first place, and it’s strong enough of a mental image to succeed.
Armin’s parents had also planned to go outside, but after Wall Maria was destroyed, they were sent alongside thousands of others on a “recovery mission” that in reality was designed by the Central Government for population control, to improve the strain on their resources. This hypocrisy is largely responsible for Armin joining the cadets alongside Eren and Mikasa, despite being aware of his disadvantages: “I’m physically weak and none too confident, so I can’t quite imagine how I could accomplish anything. But if there’s one thing I can’t do, it’s stand there and do nothing.” However interestingly enough, he seems to contradict this much later with his argument that the only people that can achieve a goal are those that are willing to sacrifice anything in the process—including Dot Pixis, who was responsible for the recovery mission. Perhaps as a result of Armin joining the military and being exposed to the desperation of war. Though overall, he has an acute sense of justice and morality. Not only does Armin feel very strongly about the recovery mission, but he has called people out when their actions lean towards self-preservation rather than benefitting the entire group, or: “Clueless people who only care about saving their own skin will unwittingly set humanity on a path towards self-destruction.”
Being a small, overly-bright child that was a frequent target of bullying took a titan-sized toll on his personal growth, so Armin came into the series with some very deep-seated issues with self-esteem. Upon joining the cadets with his friends, he swore that he would rather die than become a burden, but he struggled throughout his training, admitting it was a miracle that he even managed to succeed at all, given how difficult it was for him to keep up and how often he came close to failing. Even when they were finished with their training, and Armin was put in the spotlight, he’d try to deflect or warn people not to listen to his ideas, let alone follow them—“it’s just me, after all.”
He was humiliated by the fact that Mikasa and Eren had to rescue him constantly when the other children were beating him up, and he could never return the favor. He felt like deadweight in their friendship; he even convinced himself that Eren and Mikasa only viewed him as a weakling that they had to protect, and he could never hope to stand beside them as equals. He wanted to prove that he was more than that, but the lack of faith he had in himself nearly turned this into a self-fulfilling prophecy, where he would stop himself short because he didn’t feel good enough to be heard, and stunted his own progress in becoming a stronger person.
Then Eren is eaten by a titan in an effort to save Armin, basically right in front of his face. He blacked out and didn’t move until Connie found him still sitting on the rooftop where it happened (in the manga, Eren’s transformation into a titan occurs right in front of him, and Armin isn’t even aware of it). Upon being stirred back into consciousness, Armin began to scream again and cursed himself to die, viewing his survival as pointless and wishing that he had been swallowed with Eren (“This has become Hell. No wait, it hasn’t become Hell. I’ve just had the wrong perspective this whole time. The world has always been hell, a world in which the strong devour the weak. A world so perfectly simple”). But Armin continued to fight, and even devised two strategies that allowed the cadets reclaim their headquarters and restock on supplies (upon Mikasa’s insistence that he had once saved their lives before, when Wall Maria was attacked and he had gone to get Hannes after Eren and Mikasa rushed back to their house, and she trusted him to know what to do).
After the battle is over and Eren is ejected from his titan body, the military has all three of them surrounded by soldiers and canons, and at first, Eren tells them that he intends to escape into the walls in order to make it back to his father’s basement and avoid getting them all killed. Armin is convinced that Eren and Mikasa will leave him behind, until Eren left it to him to decide whether he should escape, or if he would talk to the military and vouch for his abilities being of use to the human race. Even when Armin is shocked by this sudden weight of responsibility, Eren goes on to tell him that he trusts him to make the right call (“No matter how messed up things get, you always figure out the best solution. I want to rely on you”).
This moment is a major turning point in Armin’s character development when he realizes he had been projecting onto people the poor image he had about himself. “It was all in my head, I had just convinced myself I was a useless burden. They didn’t think of me that way at all.” He never even thought about how his actions five years ago had helped his friends, but once it hit him that Eren and Mikasa trusted him with their lives, he found the courage to speak his mind in front of the well-armed mob of soldiers. He was even willing to die for their cause when it appeared like they weren’t going to listen to him.
His timidity and lack of self-confidence proceeds to wane after this point, as he is placed in more situations where he can use his intelligence and his strengths as a tactician in a way that is not only acknowledged by his friends, but his superiors, as well. General Pixis overheard his suggestion of using “titan power” in order to reclaim Trost, and the army ends up following his plan to attract the titans to one end of the town while Eren in his titan form lifts the boulder and plugs the hole in the wall that the Colossal Titan had created.
Ultimately, Armin’s strengths lie within his brain, and this is where he is set apart from the curve. Not only does he display an innate skill in developing strategies, but he also has a keen eye for deduction. He is one of the key people that identified all the hostile titan shifters among the current recruits—the primary example being Annie Leonhardt on two separate occasions. First, when she killed the two titans that were being kept for research purposes; he noticed she had taken the 3D gear of one of their fallen comrades. And then when she appeared in her titan form during the Scouting Legion's 57th expedition, not only did she avoid killing him and Jean when she had the chance, but he also catches a moment where she grabbed Reiner (the Armored Titan) and he seemed to write letters onto her palms, after which she changed her course of direction. All of this helped build the conclusion in Armin’s mind that Annie was the Female Titan, and he stages a trap in an effort to capture her. And the very first thing that tipped him off was Annie presenting Marco’s 3D maneuver gear for the resulting inspection—Armin knowing it was his gear due to the fact that it had the same scratches and dents, implying that Armin has a photographic memory, to be able to access, let alone remember such minor details as that. Armin could tell you why kids love the taste of cinnamon toast crunch, and then identify individual pieces of cereal based on their stripes.
His eye for reading other people also comes into play when they are trying to retrieve Eren from Bertholdt and Reiner. Bertholdt basically has Eren strapped to his torso like an infant, and in order to distract him, Armin makes up a lie about the government torturing Annie (who had been captured on the basis of her being the Female Titan), and exploits Bertholdt’s emotional response by cutting the straps and freeing Eren.
He’s still not the strongest soldier in the world (rarely assigned to the vanguard, and he is almost never seen using his 3D maneuvering gear in active combat the way that characters like Jean or Mikasa do), but he has a lot of perseverance and dignity in spite of that. He never gave up on becoming a scout, regardless of how difficult it was. As they were training, there is a scene where Armin is struggling behind the group with a heavy pack that Reiner attempts to take it from him, but Armin just snatches it back and then forces himself to run faster in order to catch up with the rest of the group. He might not be Goku, but he is nobody’s fragile cupcake, either. He refuses to be carried or be treated differently just because of his weak points.
Even as a child, he was hyper-aware of the fact that a century of safety behind the walls didn’t guarantee that something terrible could happen at any point, unable to even keep silent about this fact inside the bubble of topic evasion that the other townspeople wanted to maintain (resulting in him getting beaten up by the other children). There is another scene where Armin is asked if he would die if it were commanded of him, to which he responds: “If I understood why I have to die, there are times where I think that’s what I’d have to do, even if I don’t want to. That’s always been my intention.” Armin understands that bad things are inescapable, and sometimes difficult decisions must be made in order to see any kind of positive change. But in the discussion of mortality, he also tells Jean that he doesn’t like to think about how he is going to die because it would interfere with his actions in the present. He is a realist, while simultaneously avoiding spiraling into total pessimism, which given the circumstances, would be easier to go down than a Slip ‘n Slide.
Name; Natalie
Contact;
Other Characters; No one
Activity proof; None
IC Information;
Character Name; Armin Arlert
Canon; Shingeki no Kyojin/Attack on Titan
(http://shingekinokyojin.wikia.com/wiki/Shingeki_no_Kyojin)
(http://shingekinokyojin.wikia.com/wiki/Armin_Arlert)
Canon Point; Chapter 49: Charge
Age; 15
House; House Odin
Power; Ice
Personality;
Amidst the rampant gore and human misery, there is this wispy dandelion of a boy and his fringe bangs. The unconverted readers that have never seen the series will just have to take my word for it that this is not a Miyazaki character or the criminally young love interest in a BL manga (which might feature a different sort of flesh-eating than what Shingeki no Kyojin truly has to offer). This is Armin Arlert, and he’s here to save humanity from giant monsters. He shares this motivation with his two childhood friends and their military peers; however Armin lacks much of the brawn and the honed fighting ability that they possess. What he lacks in size and muscle he makes up for in loyalty, determination, and being a guile hero. Not the one to unhinge someone’s mandible with a single punch, but instead utilizes wit and strategy to carve a notch for himself in the totem pole of usefulness.
Ten-year old Armin would be that kid you would babysit that would quietly eat his vegetables, wash his own dishes and then watch the news for an hour. And then comment on it while you internally question your intelligence when a prepubescent has informed opinions about healthcare and foreign relations. This is also the kind of kid you automatically assume is getting his little ass kicked on the regular. And he did get his ass kicked—so frequently that’s how we’re introduced to his character. Armin had told three bullies that humans would have to go outside someday, which freaked the other kids out, and they started beating him up.
Armin was bullied a lot during his childhood: he was timid, not to mention physically slight and unlikely to throw a punch. He tells the aforementioned group of bullies that he wouldn’t fight back because that would be stooping down to their level—“You’re beating me up because you know I’m right and you can’t prove me wrong.” He blatantly tells them they’re too stupid to argue with him reasonably, so that’s why they’re resorting to violence. If anything, his ability to articulate himself is the one advantage he has that he can rely on, since he’s not packing on the action hero muscles; even if it takes him a while to fully harness it.
He will sooner tell it like it is than mince his words or sugarcoats things. He’ll be very frank about a situation, even if it’s something that is difficult to hear (perhaps one example to use here is the morning before Eren’s trial, where he explains to Mikasa that they are trying to decide whether to keep Eren alive or kill him, despite the incredible touchiness of the subject). However brutal this honesty may sometimes be, it’s not meant to harm. Excluding the people that Armin is being sarcastic towards, he doesn’t tell people cold-hard truths to make them feel bad; more likely than not, he just doesn’t see the point in lying or omitting things from people that aren’t his enemies. He tells one of his comrades after a particularly bloody incident that someone has to become a monster in order to reach their goal—no matter what happens, some choice has to be made, and the ones willing to take extreme action (like Erwin Smith or Dot Pixis) are the only ones capable of change in the long run.
His approach tends to be very fair and mediated: he does not lean towards one extreme bias in a situation, but rather makes an effort to understand where others are coming from. He doesn’t just blindly support Eren’s decision to become a Scout Troop when Eren mentions it, acknowledging that it was a dangerous choice, but he also admits that he sees where Eren is coming from. There is another scene where he is at the mercy of the army alongside Mikasa and Eren and every rifle and canon they could find to properly spaz about Eren coming out of a titan body for the first time. And Armin still empathizes with their fear and lack of understanding, despite the danger he’s in with his friends. Armin has been overcome by nerves several times, but he’s never been shown to lose his temper or be overcome by vengeance in a profound, emotional way. Though he should never be mistaken as a pushover either, he can be quite the unexpected source of sass (there is a scene where Eren and Jean switch places, leading Eren to raise qualms that they could ever be mistaken for one another, to which Armin replies that they have the same “nasty, criminal look in their eyes.” And this is his BFF we’re talking about).
He’s also not what you would call an impulsive personality. He needs to think about his actions and be absolutely certain before he speaks about a topic. Even before he goes to vouch for Eren, he acknowledges to himself that his thoughts are “an unholy mess” but he’d have to make it up as he goes. This is probably one of the few times that he has gone into a situation without thoroughly thinking it through first.
For the most part, the people living inside the walls are content to be there and do not harbor any free-spirited desires to explore titan-infested waters. But Armin wasn’t satisfied with the small life of growing up within a glorified fish bowl and expressed interest in the bigger picture. The one problem with this was the Central Government had declared it illegal to own any materials pertaining to the outside world, let alone discuss it (justifying this stringent thought control with the paranoia that talking about the outside world would “invite” the titans inside). Armin and Eren were both agitated about being closed off from the greater portion of the world they had been born into, and dreamed of getting out one day to see the ocean and the deserts and all the other things from Armin’s books. Later on, Armin remembers this aspiration as he’s trying to bring Eren back from nearly losing himself to his titan form, asking Eren why he wanted to go outside in the first place, and it’s strong enough of a mental image to succeed.
Armin’s parents had also planned to go outside, but after Wall Maria was destroyed, they were sent alongside thousands of others on a “recovery mission” that in reality was designed by the Central Government for population control, to improve the strain on their resources. This hypocrisy is largely responsible for Armin joining the cadets alongside Eren and Mikasa, despite being aware of his disadvantages: “I’m physically weak and none too confident, so I can’t quite imagine how I could accomplish anything. But if there’s one thing I can’t do, it’s stand there and do nothing.” However interestingly enough, he seems to contradict this much later with his argument that the only people that can achieve a goal are those that are willing to sacrifice anything in the process—including Dot Pixis, who was responsible for the recovery mission. Perhaps as a result of Armin joining the military and being exposed to the desperation of war. Though overall, he has an acute sense of justice and morality. Not only does Armin feel very strongly about the recovery mission, but he has called people out when their actions lean towards self-preservation rather than benefitting the entire group, or: “Clueless people who only care about saving their own skin will unwittingly set humanity on a path towards self-destruction.”
Being a small, overly-bright child that was a frequent target of bullying took a titan-sized toll on his personal growth, so Armin came into the series with some very deep-seated issues with self-esteem. Upon joining the cadets with his friends, he swore that he would rather die than become a burden, but he struggled throughout his training, admitting it was a miracle that he even managed to succeed at all, given how difficult it was for him to keep up and how often he came close to failing. Even when they were finished with their training, and Armin was put in the spotlight, he’d try to deflect or warn people not to listen to his ideas, let alone follow them—“it’s just me, after all.”
He was humiliated by the fact that Mikasa and Eren had to rescue him constantly when the other children were beating him up, and he could never return the favor. He felt like deadweight in their friendship; he even convinced himself that Eren and Mikasa only viewed him as a weakling that they had to protect, and he could never hope to stand beside them as equals. He wanted to prove that he was more than that, but the lack of faith he had in himself nearly turned this into a self-fulfilling prophecy, where he would stop himself short because he didn’t feel good enough to be heard, and stunted his own progress in becoming a stronger person.
Then Eren is eaten by a titan in an effort to save Armin, basically right in front of his face. He blacked out and didn’t move until Connie found him still sitting on the rooftop where it happened (in the manga, Eren’s transformation into a titan occurs right in front of him, and Armin isn’t even aware of it). Upon being stirred back into consciousness, Armin began to scream again and cursed himself to die, viewing his survival as pointless and wishing that he had been swallowed with Eren (“This has become Hell. No wait, it hasn’t become Hell. I’ve just had the wrong perspective this whole time. The world has always been hell, a world in which the strong devour the weak. A world so perfectly simple”). But Armin continued to fight, and even devised two strategies that allowed the cadets reclaim their headquarters and restock on supplies (upon Mikasa’s insistence that he had once saved their lives before, when Wall Maria was attacked and he had gone to get Hannes after Eren and Mikasa rushed back to their house, and she trusted him to know what to do).
After the battle is over and Eren is ejected from his titan body, the military has all three of them surrounded by soldiers and canons, and at first, Eren tells them that he intends to escape into the walls in order to make it back to his father’s basement and avoid getting them all killed. Armin is convinced that Eren and Mikasa will leave him behind, until Eren left it to him to decide whether he should escape, or if he would talk to the military and vouch for his abilities being of use to the human race. Even when Armin is shocked by this sudden weight of responsibility, Eren goes on to tell him that he trusts him to make the right call (“No matter how messed up things get, you always figure out the best solution. I want to rely on you”).
This moment is a major turning point in Armin’s character development when he realizes he had been projecting onto people the poor image he had about himself. “It was all in my head, I had just convinced myself I was a useless burden. They didn’t think of me that way at all.” He never even thought about how his actions five years ago had helped his friends, but once it hit him that Eren and Mikasa trusted him with their lives, he found the courage to speak his mind in front of the well-armed mob of soldiers. He was even willing to die for their cause when it appeared like they weren’t going to listen to him.
His timidity and lack of self-confidence proceeds to wane after this point, as he is placed in more situations where he can use his intelligence and his strengths as a tactician in a way that is not only acknowledged by his friends, but his superiors, as well. General Pixis overheard his suggestion of using “titan power” in order to reclaim Trost, and the army ends up following his plan to attract the titans to one end of the town while Eren in his titan form lifts the boulder and plugs the hole in the wall that the Colossal Titan had created.
Ultimately, Armin’s strengths lie within his brain, and this is where he is set apart from the curve. Not only does he display an innate skill in developing strategies, but he also has a keen eye for deduction. He is one of the key people that identified all the hostile titan shifters among the current recruits—the primary example being Annie Leonhardt on two separate occasions. First, when she killed the two titans that were being kept for research purposes; he noticed she had taken the 3D gear of one of their fallen comrades. And then when she appeared in her titan form during the Scouting Legion's 57th expedition, not only did she avoid killing him and Jean when she had the chance, but he also catches a moment where she grabbed Reiner (the Armored Titan) and he seemed to write letters onto her palms, after which she changed her course of direction. All of this helped build the conclusion in Armin’s mind that Annie was the Female Titan, and he stages a trap in an effort to capture her. And the very first thing that tipped him off was Annie presenting Marco’s 3D maneuver gear for the resulting inspection—Armin knowing it was his gear due to the fact that it had the same scratches and dents, implying that Armin has a photographic memory, to be able to access, let alone remember such minor details as that. Armin could tell you why kids love the taste of cinnamon toast crunch, and then identify individual pieces of cereal based on their stripes.
His eye for reading other people also comes into play when they are trying to retrieve Eren from Bertholdt and Reiner. Bertholdt basically has Eren strapped to his torso like an infant, and in order to distract him, Armin makes up a lie about the government torturing Annie (who had been captured on the basis of her being the Female Titan), and exploits Bertholdt’s emotional response by cutting the straps and freeing Eren.
He’s still not the strongest soldier in the world (rarely assigned to the vanguard, and he is almost never seen using his 3D maneuvering gear in active combat the way that characters like Jean or Mikasa do), but he has a lot of perseverance and dignity in spite of that. He never gave up on becoming a scout, regardless of how difficult it was. As they were training, there is a scene where Armin is struggling behind the group with a heavy pack that Reiner attempts to take it from him, but Armin just snatches it back and then forces himself to run faster in order to catch up with the rest of the group. He might not be Goku, but he is nobody’s fragile cupcake, either. He refuses to be carried or be treated differently just because of his weak points.
Even as a child, he was hyper-aware of the fact that a century of safety behind the walls didn’t guarantee that something terrible could happen at any point, unable to even keep silent about this fact inside the bubble of topic evasion that the other townspeople wanted to maintain (resulting in him getting beaten up by the other children). There is another scene where Armin is asked if he would die if it were commanded of him, to which he responds: “If I understood why I have to die, there are times where I think that’s what I’d have to do, even if I don’t want to. That’s always been my intention.” Armin understands that bad things are inescapable, and sometimes difficult decisions must be made in order to see any kind of positive change. But in the discussion of mortality, he also tells Jean that he doesn’t like to think about how he is going to die because it would interfere with his actions in the present. He is a realist, while simultaneously avoiding spiraling into total pessimism, which given the circumstances, would be easier to go down than a Slip ‘n Slide.