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it’s mindblowing how the phrase “the beginning and the end are one and the same” is so deeply entrenched in evangelion’s main narrative. forget about rebuild’s loops (for now), because it’s ridiculously important in the original series, too
take episode 1 for example. the establishing shots of the military attacking sachiel? repeats itself in end of evangelion. misato marching shinji down nerv’s corridors? repeats itself in end of evangelion. emotionally charged peptalks between misato and shinji? repeats itself in end of evangelion. unit-01′s hand moving on its own for shinji’s sake? repeats itself in end of evangelion. even our very first shot of ritsuko, which has her emerging from an LCL pool in episode 1, laterally echoes the very last shot her falling into the LCL tank upon being shot in end of evangelion.
the beginning and the end are one and the same.
ever wonder why asuka’s debut episode takes place in the ocean? because asuka emerges from the ocean, kicking and screaming, in end of evangelion. and to top it all off, rei’s bookend appearances in episode 1 and end of evangelion respectively recapitulate the overarching concept of alpha and omega so perfectly.
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 – dude 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.
To think people discredit the legitimacy of kawoshin because of the lack of obvious sexual attraction between them takes me aback. That is the whole reason WHY kawoshin is so real and important and why shinji is so head over heels for kaworu
Throughout the whole series shinji is put into sexual situations. He is mocked and harassed for not experiencing sexual attraction i.e. them making fun of him for not wanting to bang misato, assuming his want to understand rei is because he wants her. He gets teased by adults to be more sexual (i.e. misato and then kaji in the rebuild which /:) and is constantly put in a sexual eye by asuka because of her own conditioned views of sexuality. He is surrounded by it and confused by it and hes obviously uncomfortable but he also seems to be frustrated that being close to someone must mean something sexual and it confuses him further
Then kaworu comes along. Kaworu doesnt expect any of this from him. They sit together naked and its nothing sexual. They just hold hands. They sleep together and its not sexual. Shinji feels for the first time he can open up to someone. Kaworu just loves him and showers him in affection. They learn and talk together. Theres nothing sexual there but thats what makes it so special. Its why shinji is so happy. Hes surrounded by this push to be sexual and he finally founds someone who will love him and not necessarily want that. He found someone who helps him understand that he can be loved regardless of that. Kaworu loved him without any conditions
yikes. this is an ugly post, and we need to collectively move beyond this line of thinking, asap
newsflash: people don’t discredit the legitimacy of kawoshin because “it wasn’t obvious enough” or “there wasn’t any sexual attraction” - people discredit the legitimacy of kawoshin because of the wonderful intersection between homophobia and misogyny. people discredit the legitimacy of kawoshin because they are obsessed with het ships; they are obsessed with asuka; they are obsessed with shoving asuka into het ships that sanitize and make her complacent, especially with the boy mc who has tremendous power over her, the boy mc who has tried to kill her twice, the boy mc who barged into her hospital room, saw her emaciated and comatose, and demanded that she help him despite of it, the boy mc who deliberately locked her hospital room door before masturbating to her body. people discredit the legitimacy of kawoshin because they are obsessed with the ‘de-bitchfiying narrative’ by which asuka, The Red Devil, is knocked down a few pegs. if you’ve ever read evageeks or other asushin-dominated spaces it becomes evidently clear that shipping asushin for asushinners isn’t so much about not finding “merit” in kawoshin – they don’t care if kawoshin was “subtle” or “overt” b/c it literally does not matter to them. they’re homophobes. – rather, it’s about asuka, and their obsession with asuka fulfilling the perfect waifu role, with shinji
but how interesting that this whole second paragraph conveniently neglects/erases the fact that shinji was pervasively objectifying+sexualizing asuka (and rei! and misato!) throughout the entire show. did you forget wall of jericho, where shinji lingers at asuka’s breasts before responding? (but shinji doesn’t act like kensuke and toji do around misato, so that must mean he doesn’t sexualize her, uwu!!) or when asuka falls in his bed and shinji ogles at her breasts before attempting to kiss her in her sleep? (but asuka forced him into that uncomfortable situation, uwu!!) or the entirety of eoe, where it’s revealed that shinji is deeply repulsed by overt displays of sexuality on part of asuka+misato but secretly gets off to them, because he objectifies them, because shinji cannot comprehend the fact that women can be more than a mother, a madonna, or a whore? where shinji yells at asuka, misato, and rei (yes! even rei!) for not attending to his needs while his subconscious projects smiling, placated, and most importantly naked images of asuka, misato, and rei gazing at him fondly in the foreground? ‘men/boys feeling uncomfortable w/ “female sexuality” whilst simultaneously objectifying them for it’ is a classic misogynist cocktail - i.e the boy frustrated at patriarchy who copes by retaliating against women - this theme resurrects itself in evangelion (and other works) over and over and over again
but is this all just… not mentioned because it taints smol birb infantilized fandom shinji? because it attacks the dominating narrative that vilifies asuka, the very same narrative that paints her as an abuser and/or “equally complacent in the asuka-shinji abuse”, the narrative that claims asuka levies power over shinji and not the other way around?
and of course shinji and kaworu can sit, bathe, and sleep together sans sexual objectification from either side – shinji loves kaworu. kaworu is the only character in the show shinji loved and respected. like, that’s the whole point. shinji, like all boys under patriarchy, objectifies girls/women as a desperate vie for control. shinji does not feel the need to exercise power over kaworu because they are equally matched, their love is equally matched. c+p’ing this to underscore:
Specifically, it is important that Shinji takes to Kaworu immediately and how Kaworu’s Position as being a boy affects the way Shinji receives him.
Shinji’s sexual assault on Asuka in EOE is 100% motivated by Asuka being a girl and Shinji being a boy, and is about power and overpowering someone who is more vulnerable than you. & When you truly, truly look at who Shinji has the power to hurt the most, it all leads to Asuka. He objectifies Asuka, he sexually abuses Asuka in the hospital room, he strangles Asuka twice. The way that Asuka protects herself verbally as a defense mechanism is contrasted with the extremely violent ways that Shinji seeks power over her.
These events do relate to Kaworu, too, because who immediately resolves to forgive Shinji and encourage Shinji to forgive himself for whatever sins he may have committed? The thing with that is that it’s not exactly Kaworu’s place to do that, but Asuka’s.
i am so tired of these infantilizing metas that implicitly suggest shinji’s assaults on asuka are not shinji’s fault, but asuka’s, metas that obscure and shove context neatly under the rug. shinji is an incredibly complex character, and he’s one of my personal favorites, but yikes. yikes. yikes.
i’ve been thinking a lot about misato, and why she resorts to alcohol and sex, specifically as means of self-medication/preservation
obviously there’s this tendency to characterize her as this errant drunkard, despite the fact that she only saves her binge-drinking for the home. she’s smart as hell - we know that misato hates the dark, that darkness begets all these traumatic memories of second impact – and i like to think that misato literally drinks herself to sleep every night, quite plainly self-medicating with alcohol, harnessing the ways in which it suppresses debilitating memories and emotions so she can function during her waking hours, as a military officer no less: a functional alcoholic in every sense of the term
and with regards to sex; how misato’s childhood is characterized by a very conservative, purity-fixated upbringing, and then the trauma of years long isolation in a bare-bones holding cell with no means of communication, no therapeutic companionship, just a couple of toys to keep her sound. for years. sex, for obvious reasons, so intensely connecting person to person in the most tangible form… misato’s going to find that especially useful in preserving function, feeling alive (”to prove i exist”) versus the isolation symbolically associated with death. (it’s interesting, then, when misato is shoved into a holding cell again in episode 21, kaji dies the very same day.)
but much the same with alcohol, misato exerts this unbelievable amount of self-control and restricts her sexual expression to just one person - yet shame and guilt plague her still, shame that shapes and defines how she thinks others are perceiving her as a woman. misato has self-surveillance, self-awareness, and self-policing in incredible spades. she’s only allowed herself to ‘medicate’ under very narrow, very specific contexts, and that’s pretty fascinating, i think
people really underestimate how darksided nge’s fandom is
on one hand you have the pretentious evageeks-type neckbeards who have systematically asphyxiated even the slightest insinuation of gay text/subtext by deliberately mistranslating the show’s subtitles and supplementary material, withholding key interviews, and recontextualizing the narrative to make it more agreeable to their tastes while parading around as ‘experts’ (evageeks/4chan) or whatever; all of this being exacerbated by their misogyny, by their ableism (”shinji is a depressed wimp!”), by their homophobia and sexualization of the eva girls
but on the other hand you have the people exclusively fixing all their attention on the boys and paying shallow lip service to the girls, whereby fandom love for kaworu and shinji churns out tons of meta/passionate discussion but asuka+rei+misato get squat except for some cute moe-y fanart/gifs tagged “queen!/princess!!/badass lady!!!” et al, where rei only gets serious mention as a footnote in kaworu-origin discussions, where an assbackwards misogynist sentiment like “asuka abused shinji because she forced him to snap/sexually assault her” is actually something that’s popularly expressed around here. because shinji ikari defense squad, right?? right
and it’s funny, because either way the female characters lose out. one way or another nge fandom stays idolizing boy’s emotions+narratives at the expense of girl’s narratives/complexity, which is ironic given that the source material, you know, centers around girls/women navigating male-dominated spaces and being punished for their girlhood/womanhood, and a boy mc similarly suffering for his perceived effeminacy while also taking his frustrations out on girls because scarydeep internalized misogyny. life imitates art
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.
