Board Thread:Wiki/@comment-28807545-20160621071026/@comment-5774380-20160621151612

It's not silly because that's the best we can do with the information available at the moment. There will always be the possibility of being wrong because there's no way to know what the author is thinking, and the unexpected events are actually part of the fun of any story; so we can only act according to what we know at a certain time and be prepared to make the necessary changes if the author reveals or makes something else in the future. The status unknown is only used when there are equal possibilities for someone for being alive or dead, but if you weigh Armin's chances, we have:

In favor of being dead


 * The physically weakest of the 104th Training Corps
 * Horribly burned, to the point of being totally disfigured
 * Fell from around 50 meters to a hard and solid surface
 * All the death thematic of this chapter, including giving up his dream, being acknowledged by Eren as "you were the bravest of us all", and the last words of the chapter: "his body may have been burned out, but the dream he left his friend remains".

In favor of being alive


 * "Plot armor" (speculation, and we know that Isayama originally planned to kill everyone at the end, so the "plot armor" actually has no value here)
 * Levi/Hange/someone else saving him with Titan Serum/unknown processes (speculation)
 * Stories of people surviving extreme conditions (irrelevant for a work of fiction, we don't know if Isayama has even heard about those anecdotes)

So on the one side we have actual and solid facts, and on the other side, nothing more than speculation; which for practical purposes equals to nothing. There's nothing so far to support the idea of him being alive or not even enough to warrant a "status unknown".