some things to keep in mind about nge’s very own the man, the myth, the legend, spending time on volume 7, stage 43 of the manga ‘verse. super rough, but i’m enjoying thinking about him more, even if just in sketches. i mean, come on, just look at him, that sweet baby k:
Part 1: “Let Me Appeal To Your Intellect”
this post is meant to suggest that manga vol. 7, no. 43 tells us all we need to know about what ryoji thinks about himself and his relationships, and therefore his own motivations; he explains this quite literally to shinji in the chapter, and it’s an incredibly useful backstory (courtesy of sadamoto) for this reason, but let’s backtrack to figure out why all the things he doesn’t say matter even more
the 1967 version, specifically! for those who don’t know, king ghidorah is godzilla’s arch nemesis - a three headed, lightning wielding dragon who was, interestingly enough, not featured in anno’s own shin godzilla.
Kotani Mari has related this act of cannibalism on Shinji-EVA’s part to the explosion of the radically feminine, that is, to what Alice Jardine calls ‘gynesis’. Kotani describes the scene this way:
The moment electric technology becomes unavailable (his power supply cords have been cut), Shinji strongly hopes for a miracle. Thus, with the ultimate aim to defeat the enemy, Shinji very naturally but miraculously comes to feminize himself. This sequence unveils Shinji’s epiphany. The more strongly he desires a miraculous breakthrough, the more deconstructive his own sexuality becomes. Hence the abrupt explosion of fearful femininity out of Shinji’s own male subjectivity.
Despite the hyper-masculine outlines of the EVA suit and the fact that the pilot of 01 is a boy, over the course of the series in scenes such as this one the Shinji-EVA cyborg amalgam is is decisively gendered feminine: the uncontrollable, insufficiently bounded body/subjectivity that enlightened, rational modernity has sought to repress. And yet, it is in precisely these same scenes that the Shinji-EVA cyborg through some kind of hysterical crisis to overcome the limits of technology; the power cord and backup battery; to defeat the attacking angel.
This narrative, therefore, employs both the male terror of being radically feminized through the excessive intimacy implied by the interpenetration and inter-corporation of the cyborg subject and the paradoxical hope that the one power that can finally oppose the various forces of evil is precisely the eruption of the abject femininity, permeability/penetrability; that is repressed in techno-patriarchal society. That powerful eruption can only occur, however, when the interconnection of the various cyborg elements is at its maximum. In the nineteenth episode Shinji’s synchronization rate with the suit is an inconceivable 400%, indicating that, despite the terror it provokes, the only hope for humankind is to move toward increased intimacy; permeability/penetrability; with the mechanical other.
Many thanks to milenashakujo for linking me to this. If you enjoy Donna Haraway, cyborgia, psychoanalysis, and Japanese science fiction, you will love this read.
Kaworu’s ultimate betrayal is not that he is an angel so much as he eventually does force Shinji to finally reckon with his own existential terror. “Life and death are of equal value to me,” he says to Shinji, which is horrifying to him because it is an explicit statement invoking the concept of existential absurdity. “Dying of your own will. That is the one and only absolute freedom there is.”
Remember this essay I posted? After so many episodes existing as the anxious dreamer, I like to look at Episode 24 as Shinji finally staring into the abyss of Nothingness, becoming dizzy from the anxiety produced, and beginning to faint. In doing so, he grasps at finitude – of which death is the ultimate – and it is only in doing this, in his own individual recreation of The Fall, that he will finally be able to comprehend true infinity: the possibility that he can mean something in spite of his absurdity.
And what is the ultimate anxiety? That we are the gods who shit, vessels containing the inherent paradox of finite and infinite, trapped in decay yet capable of comprehending what it all means (or doesn’t):
Episode 25 begins with Shinji interrogating himself, consumed with the guilt he must finally process, head in his hands. Why did I kill? Why did I kill? Why did I kill?
Frustrated and ever looking to deny his own agency, he screams that he had no choice (did he?), that Kaworu was an ANGEL and thus the enemy, and so had to be eliminated.
Apologies for the crummy subtitles. But there it is, the paradox, in writing. Kaworu was an angel, but he was HUMAN AS WELL.
The remainder of the series, as well as EoE, are Shinji’s attempts at coming to terms with the terror of this incongruity as well as the possibilities granted by recognizing the power of his own subjective will.
Asuka, I want you to stay here. In that place inside my heart, be safe and at your own pace. And I’ll do the keeping up and grow up right alongside you. You’re thrown and thrown against that wall - against either wall - but the stronger it seems, the more weapons will come into your hand. You’re in training for your life every day that you live. And you will learn to break through.
I don’t want to share my pain with you, or yours with me. I want that we should share our happiness instead, and grow closer that way. You see, life isn’t one exam, one time that determines everything. Don’t try and think everything all the way through to the end. Decide you’ll try and learn instead.
They say you have to climb mountains and swim oceans. No. You don’t have to do it that way, either. You can learn to eat mountains and drink oceans. You don’t have to merely overcome an obstacle. You can savor it and become a person of taste. Life is fun, Asuka - and you don’t have to rely on chance that it should happen that way; instead you can make it so.
”—
Asuka’s seiyuu Yuko Miyamura, “A Place in the Heart for Asuka”
Miyamura’s invested her all into portraying Asuka despite the physical abuse she’s endured at the hands of Hideaki Anno and Megumi Ogata.
these are all gonna be half-baked, illegible, and probably already better said by someone else thoughts on boyhood
i’m revisiting an old response to a question i wrote about girl bodies/boy traumas as i rewatch eva and i’m thinking particularly about the circumstances of the scenes in which shinji was subject to witness rei’s pain. to thread into that thought, in this rewatch i’m noticing so many more instances i didn’t care to give attention to before about shinji’s contortion into the budding violences of boyhood. in that particular scene, gendo orchestrates a puppet show of shame and coercion with shinji as the subject and rei as the object, and that dynamic has been analyzed to death already, in eva specifically and gender theories more widely.
there seems to me to be still such a tragedy in that, though. eva, over and over, makes critical distinctions between boyhood/girlhood and manhood/womanhood. we’re made to witness shinji programmed into enacting the incursions of boyhood in the name of man — as we’re made to accept how asuka and rei are rendered the recipients of both his boy pleasure and his boy pain (there’s a sharp splinter too with this, asuka becoming shinji’s object of masturbation and rei his object of pain, but they’re tangled in with each other). there are particular moments where he engages with some kind of reflexivity and attempts to refuse to become sustained by these violences while he’s already composed by them. i’m thinking about the way he looks at a bandaged rei upon their first meeting when he holds her and finds his hands covered in her blood, and he looks down at his palms with horror. “this could be you” (boy)/”this is already you” (boy on track to manhood). what misato said: “the robot’s as rude as the man who built it!”
there’s shit that gets passed down spanning trauma to power to love, and
often a messy conglomeration of all three and more, and aside from
the comfort that delineating an easy ‘perpetrator’ and ‘perpetrated’
might offer,
misato might remind us that responsibility must be taken regardless.
whatever shit falls on us, whoever put it there, must be acknowledged
and carried — not responsibility for responsibility’s sake, not to get our individual selves to an unquestioned somewhere better, but for
accountability to those we love (and those we don’t). when misato and
ritsuko witness how the violences of hypermodern manhood function,
misato observes they occur not through cold blood but through
bureaucracy and administration, the “evasion of responsibility” (or the
funnier translation: “hot potato situation”), which also aligns with how
the neoliberal state has been analyzed to function.
what has become so compelling about eva to me is how it simultaneously
amplifies the grotesque pain of rigid and familiar relationship
architectures (parent-child, husband-wife, mentor-mentee) while refusing
to adjudicate and punish and banish and repress. everybody goes to hell, everybody goes to
heaven. we’re made to learn the angels aren’t (only) enemies but kin. but there is also the theme of cyclic reproduction from/of trauma, not even only in an honestly tired freudian way, also in a transformative way. if there aren’t thoughtful, compassionate, sustained efforts to transform relationships and how we connect with each other (negotiating the hedgehog’s dilemma), we’re doomed to continue replicating harm even if we blow the fucking world up and start what we might think to be anew (rebuild). i think some of the most crucial moments in eva are those that can signal to us that we do have the capacity to cultivate those connections and flourish with each other, with all the pain and difficulty that will entail (congratulations!).
as i’m anticipating the end, i actually wonder what could’ve happened if yui via unit-01 hadn’t actually bit gendo’s head off
I’m really intrigued by the theory that the first Rei clone – or at least a portion of it – is present inside Unit 00. Apparently it is the prevailing theory because there is the most supporting evidence relative to contrary suggestion, but ultimately we will never really know, and I just happen to like it for symbolic reasons.
We know that Rei is Yui Ikari’s clone and a vessel for the soul of Lilith. We also know that all the Evas, with the exception of Unit 01, have been engineered from the genetic material of Adam. The two together constitute a version of the “forbidden fusion” like the one Gendo Ikari seeks to catalyze Third Impact and thus reunite with his dead wife.
The first version of Rei that we glimpse is a child. What strikes me about the interpretation that her soul, or a portion of her soul, has been implanted into Unit 00 is its parallels with Freud’s primal scene (i.e., the traumatic witnessing of parental intercourse and its interpretation by the child). If Rei, who is a Lilith vessel, pilots the Adam-derived Evangelion in a union that symbolically mimics the primal scene, it makes sense for the child Rei – the Rei soul that inhabits Unit 00 – to become violent and confused.
Ernest Becker interprets the primal scene as traumatic not because the child feels frustration at his exclusion from the act (see: Freud), but because it is representative of betrayal and a kind of anxiety-provoking, existential contradiction:
“He can well feel betrayed by them: they reserve their bodies for the closest relationship but deny it to him. They discourage physicalness with all the powers at their command, and yet they themselves practice it with an all-consuming vengeance. When we take all this together we can see that the primal scene can truly be a trauma, not because the child can’t get into the sexual act and express his own impulses but rather because the primal scene is itself a complex symbol combining the horror of the body, the betrayal of the cultural superego, and the absolute blockage of any action the child can take in the situation or any straightforward understanding that he can have of it. It is the symbol of an anxious multiple bind.” – Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
No wonder, then, that Unit 00 is on a hair trigger to go berserk, smashing its own skull into the walls of the test chamber when Rei 2.0 – the teenage Rei that we see for the majority of the series – is in the entry plug. If Rei 2.0 has whatever remains of Rei 1.0’s original soul, reuniting the two of them in the pilot seat of Unit 00 forces confrontation with unresolved trauma. For Becker, the fundamental trauma is any reminder of the dualistic human condition: that we are the “gods who shit,” or conscious entities capable of comprehending meaning and existence while being trapped in a decaying, defecating animal body. Uniquely transcendent, yet destined to rot like every other beast on the planet. We thus construct our lives around a culturally-sanctioned causa sui project – a self-generated purpose and practiced self-delusion of identity, the vital lie of a self with meaning – in which we attempt to carve out symbolic permanence for ourselves in the face of the anxiety of death and oblivion.
What Gendo seeks to achieve is an ultimate transcendence of the body through Third Impact, or the fusion of Adam (the seed of life, and in a Beckerian interpretation, representative of the animal body) and Lilith (the seed of knowledge, representative of the mind and conscious awareness). The irony is that he is pursuing this goal in a way that is symbolically and inescapably sexual and thus grounded in the very bodily reality he is attempting to escape. Furthermore, his desire to be reunited with Yui is itself a sexual goal and thus doomed to fail as a causa-sui project:
“No wonder, too, that most of us never abandon entirely the early attempts of the child to use the body and its appendages as a fortress or a machine to magically coerce the world. We try to get metaphysical answers from the body that the body – as a material thing – cannot possibly give. […] It is comfortingly infantile in its indulgence and its pleasure, yet so self-defeating of real awareness and growth, if the person is using it to try to answer metaphysical questions. It then becomes a lie about reality, a screen against full consciousness.” – Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
When Unit 00 tries to punch the shit out of him in a fit of self-destructive insanity, it is Rei’s terror and confusion at the primal scene and a rejection of the forceful imposition of Gendo’s causa-sui project on her. (This rejection is bookended at the conclusion of the series by Rei as a whole, maturing woman and not just the fragmented Rei child-soul within Unit 00.) She is a replaceable cog in his misguided machinations, trapped within his doomed and sexual preoccupations, and Unit 00 is raging against the repression of Rei’s individual will and ability to self-determine.
Despite the praise and love the creator and director of the classic “Neon Genesis Evangelion” Hideaki Anno and his creation may receive from many fans. The same adoration cannot be said for the voice actress of the ever iconic Asuka Langley Soryu, Yuko Miyamura.
in case you missed it: asuka and ritsuko are the same character. i could talk about this for ages, but in the interest of brevity:
both asuka’s mother and ritsuko’s mother were emotionally distant in life, and compartmentalized upon death - asuka’s mother resides in unit-02, ritsuko’s mother resides in the magi
both watched their mothers commit suicide
both have a distant mother-figure - for ritsuko it’s her grandmother, for asuka it’s her stepmother
both fixated on an older man at a young age - for asuka it was kaji, for ritsuko it was gendo
both express a desire for never having children
both stand in opposition to rei/grow to detest rei over time
their entrance and exit scenes are laterally mirrored - both emerge from water, then die at their mother’s betrayal
in that same vein, both share in visual imagery: there’s a scene where ritsuko stops to wash her face in the bathroom that asuka goes on to mirror
this one’s a little more elusive, but all the more fascinating: i need you. gendo’s silent words to ritsuko, shinji’s words to asuka during instrumentality. guess what asuka and ritsuko both respond with? liar.
take it as you will, but in one of the supplementary games it’s said that asuka wanted to be a scientist after piloting. yeah.
i forgot the best one:
you know how many of the evangelion characters were named after japanese wwii battleships? battleship akagi and battleship soryu, ritsuko and asuka’s namesakes, were together deployed at the 1942 battle of midway, where they were both subsequently destroyed
