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So something I’ve noticed is the huge amounts of art/meta/gifsets showing Asuka & Rei and Kaworu & Rei as visual/mythological opposites, or talking about the differences between them wrt externalizing/internalizing mental processes.
While I think discussions about Asuka/Rei and Kaworu/Rei are important, I don’t think those two relationships are necessarily representative of a true oppositional force in the show? (I would label those relationships as a symbiotic duality that define one another in a vaguely codependent or complementary way.)
Anyways, here’s some meta about Kaworu and Asuka as Opposites and the space they occupy in the show as it relates to Shinji and misogyny.(god this is so long rip @ me)
This nails Asuka and Kaworu’s diametric opposition so well: why it’s thematically necessary that Kaworu and Asuka never get to interact, pertaining to who really gets to “forgive” Shinji within the larger narrative, and how gender circumscribes the right to unconditional love. Everyone needs to read this.
So, I recently discovered that the yellow shirt worn by Asuka during Episode 9, 15, and End of Evangelion is not actually Asuka’s shirt. It’s Misato’s.
I’m not pointing out this seemingly insignificant fact for the fun of it – because it definitely seems like a trivial, if not somewhat interesting, little detail – but like most things in Evangelion, Anno’s taken steps to imbue it with hidden and revealing character subtext. Eva often uses sequences of recurring, outwardly unimportant visual cues to tie some underlying theme to a character or characters. So why a yellow shirt? Turns out, it’s actually a pretty interesting symbol for womanhood and ill-fitting sexual expression.
More under the cut.
re: gendo ikari, and how gendo as a character is talked about within the fandom and the selective attention/dissonance that’s implicit in the framing of him solely as “The Bad Dad™”
when i think of gendo, i don’t necessarily zero in on his shitty parenting, because that’s basically a given for any parent in eva ever. i think of his using women – orienting women so that they directly (rei, naoko, ritsuko) or indirectly (misato, asuka) further his goals. obviously yui (and rei iii, since she’s ‘half’ yui) beatifically trumps his ace in eoe, but for the most part, he exercised unlimited amounts of emotional, physical, and psychological control on rei i+ii (and the whole thing is excruciatingly uncomfortable and suggestive in its visual language - something that i hardly, if ever, see people talk about); he used naoko/ritsuko for their minds and their bodies; it’s suggested that he deliberately capitalized on misato’s righteous anger by allowing her access into the paramilitary+gehrin, and what would later become nerv. remember when fumihiko tachiki said that gendo embodies the central core of evangelion, in that everyone’s moving around him while he stays still? passive, atypical control – even his relationship with shinji is unassertively neglectful. gendo doesn’t need to do anything because he’s relying on what’s dubbed ‘divine feminine energy’ (ultimately realized in lilith, his secret ace in the hole) to do his bidding for him.
i’m not very interested in gendo commentary/analysis/etc that acts like his neglectful parenting is the main cornerstone of his character, especially since that doesn’t uniquely differentiate him as a character from dr. katsuragi, naoko akagi, asuka’s father, etc. gendo being a terribad father isn’t the point – gendo is more so an expression of insidious power, masculinity, and immortality. and i think people stress on his parenting because shinji is the main character, and by being constantly privy to shinji’s adolescent frustrations and anxieties it’s harder to see how shinji and gendo are so fundamentally alike – more than anyone is willing or ready to admit. because what does shinji end up doing with his adolescent frustrations and anxieties? he takes them out on asuka, rei, and misato. the “gendo as the nondescript, one-note evil mastermind dad and shinji as the flawless cinnamon roll we must protect at all costs” is so hilariously ironic for that reason.
“rei or asuka?” really baffles me because they’re presented as inverse contrasts in the show, and you can’t really derive any concrete analysis or understanding of their characters by taking them in separately. you have to examine them together through a comparative lens – their backstories, how they view themselves, their respective methods of coping/internalizing neglect and validation (or lack thereof). this goes for literally every single character in evangelion, but rei and asuka are most prolific for the grossest and most nauseating reasons.
when people say they like asuka more than rei for “x” reasons or visa versa, to me that’s just another gauge of how badly they missed the point.
more thoughts on this. i don’t believe in the idea “if you like asuka more you like rei less”. it’s interesting how both rei and asuka suffer disproportional amounts of bodily harm in the show but the emotional focus/concern rests solely on shinji (both in-show and fandom).
asuka and rei’s dynamism plays out in how they interpret and react to their their “maternalness” and “materialness”: rei, contemplating on never becoming a mother (which is complicated by her connection with yui and lilith) - and then asuka, who hates menstruation, hates the idea of having children (complicated by her forcible rejection from her mother; rei is removed from motherhood in the bodily sense but closer “spiritually”, while asuka is the inverse)
then there’s rei and materialness (corporeality) vs the soul, how rei can’t retain memories after each resurrection (memories being connected bodily, stored in the brain), but she possesses base latent comprehension of emotions and relationships (as these are stored in the soul) – how rei morphs through bodily trauma and repeated physical resurrection, and then transcends corporeality completely, because rei is rei without a body. this is in contrast to asuka, who marrys her entire identity to her body, tries to find validation in the body, presentations of the body. when asuka’s body and her ability to use her body crumbles, asuka crumbles. rei grows/transcends with each instance of bodily trauma while asuka regresses/ebbs with each instance of bodily trauma.
asuka and rei compliment each other so beautifully in their characters and i love them both so much.
It’s worth noting that both SEELE and Gendo have mechanisms for eliminating the fundamental Death Anxiety in ways that Ernest Becker suggests are doomed to fail.
The terror of the mind/body dualism – which, in Evangelion, is symbolically represented by the Fruit of Knowledge and Fruit of Life – cannot be resolved through carnal reverence nor traditional religious means. Both are alternate versions of personal delusion in which existential meaning is sought through faulty channels: the body, which by definition cannot lend itself to spiritual transcendence, and monolithic faith systems, which are themselves imposed hero systems that cater deceitfully to the fear of oblivion they intend to absolve.
SEELE = a symbol for the classical religious pathway, in its singular control and perversion of spiritual goals. This is echoed by the imagery that represents SEELE, from the angel-like appearance of the Mass Production Evas to the biblical/numerical significance of the seven organization members.
Gendo Ikari’s agenda = a symbol for the bodily pathway, since his desire to reunite with Yui is precisely that: desire. His goals are rooted in the corporeal dimensions of human love and attachment, and he is clearly not satisfied with her occupation of a purely spiritual space, or at least not one that is separate from him inside Unit 01. His obsession with this physicality is so all-consuming that he creates a clone of her – Rei – to serve as the body vehicle for his ultimate plans.
The focus is then on Shinji, the despairing boy, the individual, to discover his own purpose and existential value for himself. And his only hope for doing this is by directly confronting the terror of oblivion, the terror of death and of fundamental aloneness, in all its forms. Only then can he truly transcend. There is a reason why he is the hero of the story.
oh god, i hope you’re ready for what is definitely going to be a long and passionate rhapsody on this topic – and you’re absolutely right, there are a lot of people out there who think q!misato “completely destroyed misato”, etc. obviously as someone who loves both nge!misato and q!misato – and someone who sees the very natural nexus between the two – i couldn’t disagree more. to keep it short and succinct, the reason why i find q!misato so fascinating is that she’s all but given up on her original goal to be a mother, and became a father instead.
misato is the only character in evangelion that we’ve seen go through most of lifes’ stages – we’ve seen her as a little kid no older than 5, we’ve seen her as a 14 year old, we’ve seen her as a college student, we’ve seen her as an adult on the cusp of her 30s, and now we’re seeing her as a 43 year old woman. that’s her father’s age – she’s no longer so much the ‘victim’ of her father’s trauma but an actor implicit in her father’s trauma. misato’s at the age where she is reenacting what are now solidified internalizations about how the world should work upon the younger generation, namely shinji.
like i said, this got long. more under the cut.
i’ve been getting a lot of messages about ogata/”episode 1 takes place on june 22nd” and how it lines up (or doesn’t) with the week by week breakdown. under the assumption that episode 1 takes place on june 22nd, i attempted to replicate the timeline using the dates we are explicitly given in the show and… it doesn’t add up. basically: there’s no way june 22nd works as episode 1 if you refer to the few dates and times listed in the show. let me explain why!
ok, so we have a good amount of in-canon dates to work with to verify “june 22th” – namely september 11th (israfel’s defeat), and operation yashima, which takes place on a full moon. we know that 22 days after rei is injured during unit 00′s berserk, episode 5 begins. so let’s say that shinji arrives at tokyo-3 on june 22nd – this necessitates that episode 5 would have to occur around june 11th per ritsuko’s statements in episode 2. but that can’t be right, because june 11th is waning crescent, not a full moon. by extension, we know operation yashima must occur at the end of july, i.e midnight of the 31/august 1, to make everything fit in narratively sound order.
we also have september 11th, the day of israfel’s defeat. i’ve worked backwards from that day, again under the assumption that episode 1 begins on june 22, and it also doesn’t fit, per hikari’s comments about rei’s school absences and a whole host of other very small and itemized details that i wouldn’t list out here for brevity’s sake.
ogata mentioned that she got this june 22nd date from someone else, who supposedly got it from a supplemental non-official magazine. i invite anyone to try their hand at this and see if it makes sense, because i couldn’t get everything to work in a way that doesn’t blatantly contradict canon dates. and at very least, i’m very confident that everything from september 11/ onward is accurate, or as accurate you can reasonably get with a series like evangelion.
air conditioning; neon genesis evangelion; soryu asuka langley+katsuragi misato; general, t, 3.5k.
Familiarity breeds contempt. And Asuka has known Katsuragi Misato for a long, long time.
it crushes my spirit that the adults of evangelion aren’t talked about more. especially misato; she’s intended to be the secondary protagonist yet is talked of as though she were a supporting character, a sidekick, or a deuteragonist - forever doomed to be a talking point to the extent that her actions motivate shinji’s personal growth
whatever it is that makes evangelion good, misato, ritsuko, kaji, yui, fuyutsuki, and gendo are just as emblematic as the pilot kids. all of these characters have compelling and interesting stories of their own. but there’s nary a whisper when the adults get misinterpreted among casual and serious fans alike; the show goes to great lengths to debunk a lot of popular fandom interpretations that persist to this day (for example, think about how many people assume misato is a slut with a high “body count” when the show explicitly mentions her only having been with one man)
if you’re watching nge, focus on the eva adults! their backstories, their motivations, the parts of themselves they keep hidden or concealed. there’s plenty to learn and love by watching misato, ritsuko, and kaji’s old friendship that you can’t get by watching shinji, asuka, and rei interact with each other. you’re missing out, otherwise
i’m just saying, if the bulk of your evangelion viewing/fandom experience puts kaworu, shinji, and kawoshin at the very Center of Importance, and in the process you neglect the other thirteen characters – especially the women – or put them on a semi-relevant backburner where all their nuance is lost or glossed over unless their narrative somehow implicates kaworu or shinji, no offense but what the fuck are you doing.
like i don’t know when the fandom will sit down and question why kawoshin has become instantly synonymous to evangelion, or why “OK BUT when’s the white haired boy gonna show up??” is the textbook viewing experience for most new fans, or why f/f gay subtext (ritsuko/maya, asuka/mari) is only mentioned in passing, or why 80% of the meta devotes itself to relatively minute dialogue between kaworu and shinji to the blissful oversight of everything else, etc. call it what you want but a boys fest is a boys fest, especially when one half of it is an interesting – but ultimately ancillary – love interest with 17 minutes of screentime in a 26ep series + feature film, pitted against 13 other characters (more than half of which are girls/women) with fully realized, multiform development arcs that are blatantly mischaracterized or oversimplified.
As promised, I am going to try to answer anon’s message regarding my thoughts on the “adult trio” in NGE (meaning Misato, Ritsuko, and Kaji). I struggled with any kind of systematic analysis until I included Gendo in the equation, and I think it’s because his relationship with Ritsuko functions as a symbolic complement to Misato’s relationship with Kaji.
Thinking about it last night made me realize how much I should be delving into Lacan’s concept of desire, which I have only read about in summary thus far and still kind of makes my head spin. But, as usual, the consolidated existentialist-psychoanalytic framework that Ernest Becker develops from Otto Rank suffices just fine. At least for starters.
I could have typed that up to look nice but screw it, you get my scrappy handwriting/my oversimplified layout of Becker’s existential paradox as clumsily navigated by our characters.
Remember that according to Becker, the foundations of human behavior lie in the terror produced by this paradox, and the frantic attempts to ensure ultimate and transcendent meaning in the face of bodily death. If we use the paradox as a lens, it becomes obvious that both Misato and Ritsuko are grappling with this terror in complementary ways, and that the objects of desire upon which they enact their terror (Kaji and Gendo, respectively) are symbolically antipodal.
I think it’s pretty obvious why I feel Gendo symbolizes death denial, or a refusal to be confined to the limits of the human body. His entire M.O. basically involves becoming god, and defying death in order to reunite with Yui. Why Kaji is representative of death acceptance (or perhaps even resignation) is less immediately clear, especially since we know so little about him, but the concept coalesces more on examination. There is not a single character in the series who is more prepared to accept their inevitable fate. Kaji appears to have a good idea of both how and when he is going to die, and when he does, greets it with equanimity. Kaji’s humorous nature seems a hint at the inherent absurdity of the paradox, or the “cruel joke” that it is to be the “God who shits” (as Becker puts it). Yet his serious side, as evidenced by conversations with both Misato and Shinji, suggests a grace, wisdom, and self-awareness that is not shared by anyone else in NGE.
Misato runs from Kaji because he reminds her of her father, and coming to terms with this would mean accepting that she does not have the sole power to design her own symbolic meaning. It is the failure of the personal causa sui to achieve its primary childhood goal — the defiance of the imparted causa sui of the parent — and is thus a form of death confrontation: the death of the “self-generated self.” She seeks refuge in the body component of the paradox while stripping away the potential for her relationships to carry more profound symbolic weight. To confront her true desires, after all, would mean facing up to death anxiety. She must confine whatever meaning she seeks to areas that do not remind her of her own powerlessness. Probably helps to compensate by investing most of your worth into the identity of Skilled Military Captain.
Ritsuko, by contrast, cannot conceive of the body as a refuge (see also: her bafflement at Misato’s sexuality) and clearly desires a more meaningful relationship with Gendo than one confined to sex. Of course, Gendo is incapable of providing Ritsuko with any kind of emotional validation, and she plunges into suicidal despair. Unlike Misato, who copes with existential powerlessness with denial, Ritsuko attempts to transfer power — the power to designate ultimate meaning — into the wrong party: another human being who is as doomed to die as she is. Gendo may want to defy death, but he cannot; ironically, he pursues transcendence the same way she does, which is the misguided investment of ultimate power into a vessel that cannot hold it:
After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption — nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know that our creation has not been in vain. We turn to the love partner for the experience of the heroic, for perfect validation; we expect them to “make us good” through love. Needless to say, human partners can’t do this. The lover does not dispense cosmic heroism; he cannot give absolution in his own name. The reason is that as a finite being he too is doomed, and we read that doom in his own fallibilities, in his very deterioration. Redemption can only come from outside the individual, from beyond, from our conceptualization of the ultimate source of things, the perfection of creation.
(From The Denial of Death, p. 167.)
One of my favorite things about Eva is how they addressed bodies and how people use/feel about their bodies in both an abstract sense and how it relates physically to others. So, you have Asuka’s body that is going through pubescence and how she wants to use it vs how she feels comfortable using it; Rei who has no connection to her “human form” and feels very disassociated and disconnected physically; and then you have Misato, who doesn’t really know how to show “love” or “emotion” unless it’s using her body.
Anno uses Misato as a pivot on which themes of women’s bodies center. The first thing I noticed about NGE was that we have two really amazing lady characters filling traditionally masculine roles—commander and scientist—and that one of these ladies (Misato) is very over the top about her sexuality and body. The show uses really obnoxious, un-subtle fanservicey shots with her (and ffs, at the end of every episode Misato says, ‘And don’t worry! They’ll be plenty of fanservice!)— but then it’s revealed that, well, Misato has no idea how to “connect” with others unless it’s through sex. Like, jeez, the first time we meet her she’s trying to relate to a 14 year old boy by drawing attention to her breasts in a picture. Later on, after Kaji’s death and Shinji’s realisation with Rei (I believe), she sits on his bed and moves to make a pass at him. Shinji throws himself away from her and tells her no, and she walks out, and she curses herself for coming onto him. In EoE, she tries to give Shinji hope— she kisses him and promises him that there’ll be more when he survives (because Misato is always making promises and is always set on challenging fate and MAKING miracles and SURVIVING. always always surviving)— but in this situation, where it’s so dire and she’s going to die, she has no idea how to relate to Shinji, to give him hope, so she falls back on her body, her sexuality, how she views her “essence” as a woman.
And I think that given what Misato has been through, what with witnessing 2nd Impact, having so much rage for her father for pushing that trauma onto her and putting his family in a secondary position, she just does not know how to love. Misato has repressed these insecurities in a really masterful way. As a child she chose not to speak for a long time, and then out of nowhere it seems, she’s opening up with Ritsuko and is in this relationship with Kaji and getting her life together. (I think of it in terms of Misato doing exactly what Asuka wishes she could do with her trauma.)
Misato is flawed in a way that is subtle, that doesn’t focus on the “tragic” as it does with the children. But on top of that, she’s also very selfish— she uses Shinji as a pawn for closure with her father/her trauma, she disregards Kaji until she needs him, she doesn’t really take care of herself in general, and it’s these little things, these little unhealthy behaviors that peek through and show us how Misato is very damaged in her own way.
And the way society hypersexualises women’s bodies and to then discredit women based on that hypersexualisation is exactly what Misato kind of subverts in the show? Because yeah, we have this really goofy, fun-loving, messy/gross, but seriously sexy woman character who is AMAZING at commanding, who takes risks, and most importantly, needs to be in control. She’s ALL about control. She wants to feel in control of her feelings, of her body, of (her) fate. She doesn’t want to go through what she did as a child. When it came down to standing by and seeing if that big Fake Robot Thing would stop on its own, or possibly sacrificing her life, she chose the latter, so she could be in control of that situation. It’s all about challenging fate and if it’s between feeling powerless/helpless or death, she’ll choose death.
And that’s why Misato is an amazing, seriously underrated character.
i don’t care for the curse of eva. i don’t care for khara’s transparent, half-assed attempts at maintaining the children’s youthfulness while simultaneously giving everyone a superficial excuse to sexualize them with some fancy guilt-free clauses attached. the “well, they’re technically 28” argument is fallacious as all hell — people aren’t sexualizing their “grown” “adult” “minds”, but their bodies, which have oh so conveniently stayed the same.
ritsumaya is canon and that’s amazing
