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One of my friends read an article which claimed that Armin Arlert of Attack on Titan is female. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

This article included the following statement:

Q: Out of the group of female characters in the 104th Trainee Squad, who did Mikasa get along with the most?

A: Armin

This related article further states the following:

Isayama has revealed that Armin is a female character. Now this is a huge surprise for Shingeki no Kyojin fans. Everyone thought that Armin was always a boy but it looks like she was a girl.

Finally, here's another article discussing the possibility of Armin being female.

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オレンジ
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4 Answers4

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Armin is a boy.

There are some reasons worth consideration:

  1. His appearance is male. This isn't always telltale, due to traps.
  2. Armin uses distinctly male language in Japanese. (He refers to himself as 僕【ぼく】 (boku), which is a male pronoun, fairly rarely used by females unless they are traps.)
  3. The Shingeki no Kyojin Wiki refers to him as male.
  4. Armin is a boy's name. (One source, but there's many.)
  5. He is voiced by a male in the English dub. Though he is voiced by a female in Japanese, this is common for young or weak boys (Shinji Ikari, Edward Elric, etc.). However, a male voicing a female character is exceedingly rare, and I doubt the mangaka would have allowed it.

In the article you are referring to, the answers to the questions are actually just for humorous purposes, and should not be regarded canonically. For example:

Q: Mike smells all kinds of stuff, how does a titan smell?
A: They smell like a spa-town.

After this article, Armin was later confirmed to be male by the mangaka himself at a public event found in this Japanese video at 3:09 (thanks @OshinoShinobu):

Q: アルミンの性別はどっちですか？
What is Armin's sex?

A: 男です。
Male.

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Cattua
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  • It's 男です！ I don't understand what he says after すみません… is he negating his answer? Makes me wonder if Hange's relatively ambiguous gender is a joke by the author, too? – Gao Dec 14 '14 at 00:55
  • @GaoWeiwei He says 「あの、すみません、紛らわしいこと・・・」, meaning "Err, sorry, [his gender] is a bit confusing..." – Cattua Dec 14 '14 at 00:59
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    I would like to point that #3 "Wikia page says so" is not a good reference for almost anything UNLESS it cites sources. Wikia (and wikipeida at a lesser extent) are not canon sources. – Mindwin Remember Monica Feb 15 '15 at 09:49
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    @Mindwin I am well aware, and that's why it is among other evidentiary sources. – Cattua Feb 15 '15 at 16:04
  • Don't forget, Goku is voiced by an older lady in the Japanese audio as well. – YetAnotherRandomUser Jul 28 '18 at 22:32
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Armin is confirmed to be a boy in story when:

He is kidnapped while pretending to be Krista/Historia. While the kidnappers originally think him to be female, they are... shocked... when they find out he is male.

kaine
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  • Makes sense, but dont forget there is such a thing as a Double agent. A female who appears male and acts male, but for the sake of (in this case deception) pretends to be someone else who is female could also be the case that also accurately describes this scenario. – Ryan Apr 29 '16 at 16:00
  • @Ryan This proves that Armin identifies as male while some discussions of this question have assumed that the Armin identifies as female but androgynous appearance and Japanese pronoun weirdness resulted in that being lost in translation. You are completely correct; he could be a trans-man but if that is the case I don't really care. You could argue that about almost everyone from Hange to Captain Jack Sparrow. So, eh, can we do chromosomal analysis of the manga pages? – kaine Apr 29 '16 at 18:25
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Armin is a boy because of his physical appearance. Although a woman plays Armin in the Japanese version of Attack of Titan, the voice actor is a guy in the English version.

nhahtdh
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MikasaxEren
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Armin is male. It was joked that the girl Mikasa got along with best was Armin. This is kind of a joke on the fact that Mikasa doesn't seem to have any female companion that she likes and also because of Armin's more feminine build and behavior as opposed to Eren or any other distinctively male character.

It is common practice in Japanese production that mild, gentle and physically weaker males are voiced by women as well as young boys. Armin is all of these as a 15 year old intellectual who has been thrust into the position of a soldier because he was alone and scared.

Gao
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koechan
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