zmansnezy

[zmansnezy]

Falco's mom. I love the Grice mom and really wanted to draw her 🥺 I'll probably draw her again in the future! We don't know a lot about their parents but I know they are as sweet and kindhearted as their boys 🧡

[zmansnezy]

If I were to take a shot every time Gabi got mischaracterized, I would be dead

Little rant, but I’ve noticed this a lot and just can’t help but point it out. The vast majority of arguments I see from Gabi-Antis fall into two categories:

Pure Emotion: “I hate her cause she killed Sasha” there’s no real problem with this, art is subjective, love or hate whatever characters you want to love or hate. This however, does completely fail as an argument for the quality of a characters writing.

Mischaracterization Reliant: “she’s a sociopath/psychopath/saristic/etc” these are the main focuses of this post. Arguments that present a false version of Gabi in order to condemn her, allow me to explain.

Allow me to paint a picture of the average Gabi hater season 4 viewing experience: An arrogant girl is introduced and destroys a train full of people in cold blood, laughing as she does so. She then cruelly murders a girl, and gets her closest friend hurt with her own blabber mouth. Then, she cries crocodile tears to convince the friends of the woman she killed to help her. Eh, little exaggerated but not far off.

But as many of you know, this is not actually the case. Gabi is not sadistic, or a psychopath. She’s a deeply misguided kid. There are two scenes of hers that often go overlooked, but are vital to her character:

Her conversation with Reiner: in chapter 93, we see Gabi show very clear care for Reiner as she confronts him about how off he’s been. Ending the conversation, she expresses her desire to understand him deeper.

Her conversation with Falco During the Liberio Raid: here, we see her say very bluntly that everything she did was to prove to the world that Eldians were not bad. Now, her methods are misguided, but her intentions are unquestionably good.

when one takes this care she has for her friends and her people into account, one simple truth becomes apparent: Gabi’s primary motivation is love.

does she bear hate in her heart for a time? Yes. But that is not the deeper thing driving most of her actions, what drives her is love. She doesn’t put her own life at risk to take out the armoured train because she loves killing people, she does so to prevent a mass charge of 800 of her kin (anyone who knows a thing or two about WW1 tactics knows how much of a bloodbath this would have been).

She wouldn’t have gone after the Scout’s airship if it wasn’t for her witnessing the brutal deaths of her two closest friends and the destruction of her hometown.

everything she did in the warrior program she did because she believed she was furthering her family (and her peoples) advance towards equality.

when Falco gets hurt because of her, her immediate instinct is to die in his place.

and when she learns she’s wrong, she immediately changes her ways and feels remorse for her previous actions.

While she obviously does bear incorrect views for a great portion of her time in the story, her intentions were always pretty pure.

And it is with understanding this, that most arguments against her fall apart. Most arguments rely on this idea that Gabi is in fact sadistic, and Isayama is justifying the acts of sociopaths through her. This is not the case. Isayama is explaining the actions of child soldiers through her. Acts which, mind you, have a lot of historical precedence.

there is much of Isayama’s post timeskip writing I am critical of, but Gabi is easily the best character introduced post time skip and frankly, it’s not close.

Unlike other parts of the timeskip, Isayama did not chicken out on Gabi when his vision and general reception began to diverge. Despite the hate, he did not stray from his vision, because his vision (in this case) was ultimately correct.

Gabi is one of the redeeming aspects of post-timeskip AOT and one of the best depictions of a child soldier in fiction. Isayama did not shy away from the ugly reality of child soldiers, but more importantly he asserted strongly the compassion required for a solution to this problem.

so yeah, that’s about it.