hitch is jean in a different font

i might have a new WIP or two cooking, and one of them has me vibrating and combing over canon to make this argument: hitch as jean's shadow, their parallel journeys, her growth only a few months behind his. marlowe as a kind of marco, stohess as her trost.

for me it's all toward a reijean / hitchannie agenda but pray any hitch and jean stans appreciate:

we meet hitch as an almost-jean: well-aware of what the military police actually is. pragmatic. in the anime's expansion of stohess, jean looks at the MPs scrambling and thinks, "i could've actually been one of them too, huh? just how did i end up here instead?"

the scene of marlowe and hitch cleaning up stohess is another anime addition, in the s2 premiere. marlowe is bewildered that titans were in sina to begin with, but hitch's focus is more mundane: "the worst thing about it all is that so many people died for no good reason." the hulu subtitles are more like "there's no official reason all these people died." levi echoes the sentiment in 59 when he bluntly tells them annie was the female titan: "no one knows a damn thing."

levi trusts jean to feel them out for a reason, and i think hitch impressed him way more than marlowe. he respects her disgust for loss of life, and her balls to blame the survey corps for it. she's actually a mini nile dawk there, to me, when nile realizes what erwin is up to in stohess, and it makes me think that jean's pragmatism is a necessary injection of the MPs' better traits into the suicidal SC. that it's in the same chapter as jean and armin recovering from their run-in with the interior squad is telling.

in the 125 hitch/annie date, annie is looking up at the colossals, and hitch literally grounds her. annie is struck by their height, maybe she thinks of bertolt, maybe she's thinking of her mission to prevent this from happening, but hitch doesn't give a shit about the titans themselves, only what they leave in their wake. it feels similar to jean telling eren about marco's death in 22. marco instilled in jean that a leader is honest about what they ask people to die for; hitch is disgusted by the senselessness of the death her whole career has been about cleaning up.

i think it's easy to look at hitch yawning among the jaegerists in 139 as a bit of her cockroach quality—keeping her head down and saluting along for her survival among fascists, like shadis advises the recruits who beat him (also in 125). but we have seen her demonstrate such kindness, and mourn. practically, she must be pissed that the junta she and marlowe risked themselves to install has been totally upended; she stands by her actions in the uprising arc, look at how she and armin witness zackly's assassination. but beyond that, she hates death more than anything. she could reason that marlowe's death was toward something tangible, the truth of their world, but that it snowballed into the death of most of the world? the rumbling is probably a national holiday to those freaks. it's ghoulish to her.

for my ship agenda (even if you're into these relationships only platonically):

hitch talking to annie's crystal feels like jean saving reiner in shiganshina. everyone else was ready to discard or forget about these traitors, but hitch, jean, and armin all cling to the softness they couldn't reconcile with annie and reiner's titan forms. with what he thought were his dying breaths, reiner delivered ymir's letter. on her day off, in Wall Sina, Goodbye, annie kept her word, and tried to reunite a father and daughter. hitch might have negged her for it, seen it as busy work, but it's the same kindness she bullied marlowe for, if carefully buried under annie's insistence that it was just the quid pro quo between them.

idc that armin talked to her, too, or he knew her longer. hitch fuckin mourned her!! and i think being angry with annie, questioning her for four years, is way, way more humanizing than armin basically monologuing at her while feeling sorry for himself and bertolt and titan shifters generally. (this sounds like i hate armin but swear i love him; i just think aruani is most interesting when bertolt is involved.)

hitch accurately clocks that annie seemed afraid of getting close to people. her own fellow cadets just thought of her as distant, bored; when hange asks the scouts in the 104th about RBA's interactions as cadets, they're at a loss, even armin. even her fellow warriors didn't really see her. annie's distance was a kindness, and her own armor. she sees reibert's deep cover as a waste of time, but i think she also sees they're bound to hurt themselves and their mission in the long run. even though everyone felt betrayed after stohess, reiner was a greater shock, a deeper wound. i think annie wanted to minimize hurt on all fronts. (look how she dips out of the alliance, it's because she's tired, and doesn't want to kill eren, or anyone.)

jean comes to understand reiner only after he and connie and armin have to kill their 104th classmates at the pier. hitch can't fully fathom annie's circumstances or pain, especially not annie saying she'd do it all again, but hitch listens to it all and thanks her for the vulnerability, for softening, which is more compassion than most of the paradis side of the alliance has managed so far. she has a head start on the emotional strides jean makes in between 127 and 133, maybe because she got a bit of catharsis beating her fists against annie's crystal for four years.

they're both sick of their shit