Character · Attack on Titan
Jean Kirstein
He signed up to reach somewhere safe, said so out loud, and then kept walking towards the worst place available.
In Otakana the clue reads: Cadet who wanted the safe posting in the interior
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Attack on Titan
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Jean Kirstein trained for the Military Police because the top ten of each class earn an interior posting and he had no interest in dying on a wall. He said this in front of people who found it distasteful, which is the point of him. Jean is the cadet who admits the thing everyone else is quietly thinking, and he does it with a face the others compare, repeatedly, to a horse.
Trost changes the arithmetic. He ends that battle collecting bodies, discovers he can lead people who are about to die, and signs up for the Survey Corps anyway. He never stops being frightened and never pretends otherwise. Among a cast of obsessives and prodigies he is the ordinary competent soldier, and his choices cost him more to make than anybody else's.
He and Eren spend the early series one shove away from a fistfight, mostly because Eren's certainty offends him and his honesty offends Eren. Later the story leans on the pair of them to argue about what the corps is actually for, which is a much better use of both. Kishou Taniyama voices him in Japanese.
Spelling JEAN
JEAN is four letters and looks French, though the pronunciation in the show is nothing like the French. The Japanese reads Jan, one syllable, hard J. Spell what you read rather than what you hear. The family name is KIRSTEIN, which fan translations rendered as Kirschtein for years, so asking for the given name spares everyone that particular argument.