Thanks to @masksarehot‘s scans of the Erwin MOOK booklet, I was able to do a quick translation of Isayama-sensei’s Erwin interview! :-D

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“Drawing Erwin became fun after he started becoming more (fallibly) human”

The character Levi was created after the image of the character Rorschach from the film The Watchmen. However, there was one other Watchman character–Ozymandias–who served as a character model for me; I created Erwin with the image of Ozymandias in mind. In The Watchmen, Rorschach and Ozymandias are, in a way, characters who are absolute polar opposites of each other. To put it in very oversimplistic terms, Rorschach is a hero and Ozymandias is the villain. That said, so that there are no misunderstandings, I want to clarify that The Watchmen is absolutely not a film that tries to divide good and evil in a simplistic way. At least, that’s an over-simplified way to explain it anyway. What’s more—and perhaps this is only my individual interpretation, but—I feel Rorschach and Ozymandias are actually very similar to each other.

Levi has the easily understood moniker of “Humanity’s Strongest Soldier.” But Erwin doesn’t have anything of the kind. He’s the leader of the Survey Corps, is respected by all, and is an insightful leader.* That was my image of him as well, but on the flip side, that was all I had on him.

If you take Hanji, for example, you could say that she’s “someone like Tomohiro Machiyama-san, the film critic who lives in the US” and get a solid image of her. Whoever you ask, you’d probably get a consensus that she is, indeed, “a person similar to Machiyama-san.” I’d imagine anyone who knows Machiyama-san personally would instantly go, “oh, you’re right!”

But for Erwin, there’s no person I can easily compare him to like that.

The main reason for that is probably because I didn’t have anyone in my life who was an “insightful leader” like my initial portrayal of Erwin. Of course, I’m sure there were people who were “insightful leaders” to a certain degree around me, but—and this is likely due to a quirk of my own personality—the grander a person, the more my eyes are drawn to the places where they’re frayed, or are coming apart at the seams.

Armin once said of him, “If a person existed who was capable of bringing change, they would have to be able to sacrifice things that are important to them.”

Erwin is certainly someone who can do that, but because I had no one in reality to model him on, and because I, the creator, had no shred of an “insightful leader” within myself to use either, I think I ended up making Erwin more and more human as I went along.

In the anime, Erwin’s voice actor, Daisuke Ono-san said of him, “I didn’t understand Erwin, so I tried to imagine what made him happy and ended up feeling quite negative in the end.” So the creator’s sloppy character conceptualizing ended up being sensed by his voice actor as well.

Lately, though, I’ve started enjoying drawing Erwin. To put it simply, I think it’s because I am now able to write Erwin not as the “insightful leader,” but as he is inside my heart, an Erwin who is very complex inside.

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*The term Isayama-sensei uses is “dekita hito,” which, from what I understand, is someone who has high emotional intelligence and can understand and influence/lead people well.

**Tomohiro Machiyama, film critic and author; he wrote the screenplays for the live-action Attack on Titan films.