revolutionary girl » personality

Riza Hawkeye is not a person you can pin down easily. After all, she's reinvented herself through the years in part due to the painful events that surrounded her. The person she's now is not the little girl whose parents died early on, and is definitely not the young broken woman who faced Ishval. Hawkeye's come a long way and that reflects in her strong character and slight incongruities.

If there's something that has been constant in her personality, that's her stoicism. Something that would merge with her professionalism at work and that, combined with her somewhat rough exterior, could be mistaken with coldness. Nothing further from the truth. Although not widely known, Hawkeye is an extremely warm and sensitive individual by nature. Her defenses tend to be up most of the time (especially at work), but at times when she's surrounded by people she needs not to hide from, that's when her brighter self shines.

Also quite unknown is her rather quirky and dark sense of humor. Although it's always been there (visible when she was a young girl), it has developed through the years mostly thanks to the period of healing that was her stay in East City. In reality, she and Roy have many points in common, that particular type of humour being one of them. It's even hard to say who's the one who has rubbed more on the other after such a long time.

Hawkeye is not only incredibly skilled at physical matters (firearms being her strong point), but she's also proven to be crazy smart. Her ability to understand situations instantly, work under pressure and solve problems as they arise, has earned her comrades' trust time and again. That doesn't mean she's infallible. She's capable of making mistakes just as anyone, but she also learns and grows better from them.

As professional in her work and diligent as she is, it's a wonder she's made an art out of insubordination. Hawkeye is as far from being a mindless drone as you can get, she's always had a mind of her own, perfectly capable of differentiating between her orders as a soldier and what is right. She's not loyal to her employers, but to the people she stands by and to her own set of beliefs. As such, she will not hesitate to speak up her mind if she believes the person by her side is mistaken or has his judgement clouded. You may remember beautiful acts of insubordination such as throwing Roy to the ground to avoid him getting hurt, or refusing to follow his orders and flee if anything happened to him.

Despite being an expert with firearms, Hawkeye is not personally attached to weapons in any way. She's even claimed to dislike the whole military institution. Which is not something strange to feel despite it being her work, since Ishval was little more than an indiscriminate massacre. She initially decided to pursue a career in the military because she thought she could help her country and protect the innocent. Her nation, however, betrayed her and everyone she was trying to protect. Thus she decided to keep making use of her skills to reach a new goal, as a means to an end.

No matter how stern Hawkeye may look, her kindness and ability to sympathise with others is hard to miss. She knows when to act serious and she knows when to allow herself to relax. Her politeness and respect to others is something to be admired. She's brave, she's strong, she's loyal and she can count steps while pursuing a chimera underground.