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
I'm sure you've answered this before and if so I'm sorry but why don't you like bandaged Rei?
i’m really tired of rei being capitalized upon. first with the introduction of rei into the series in bandages which is used by gendo as a tool to guilt shinji into staying. that scene introduces us from the beginning to understanding rei as a device, specifically rei with bandages which is a marked sign for rei’s sacrifices for humanity (rei doesn’t ever need bandages, they’re always tools for manipulation exacted through rei’s body).
and also, all of the following is crucial to what i’ve said above: there is a lot to say with regards to rei and gender but rei is heavily coded and even an embodiment in a lot of ways of girlhood in the evaverse (in canon and fandom both) and i’m also tired of young girls’ suffering being made beautiful.
who’s the real canon gay of evangelion? kaworu, shinji, maya, and mari move aside - a lot of people don’t know that makoto hyuga was supposed to be canonly gay, too. anno and co. slipped a quiet allude to his sexuality in the original episode 24 drafts (the same drafts that had kaworu and shinji kiss). ultimately the idea was trashed and promptly replaced with his crush for misato, likely for the same reasons they trashed the original kawoshin kiss.
here’s the scene in question (you can read the entire draft here):
HYUGA: Seems like we’ve got ourselves involved in a pretty unbelievable organization.
[HYUGA hands MISATO more documents.]
HYUGA: Here’s my research on the Fifth Child. There’s nothing particularly suspicious in his history. He’s been in contact with the committee, but there’s no sign of involvement. As far as family goes, it seems there’s been some turbulence there. You could say he’s just a garden-variety pretty boy who’s had an unfortunate life.
evangelion is not a deconstruction of the mecha genre
evangelion is not a deconstruction of the mecha genre
evangelion is not a deconstruction of the mecha genre
everybody now
eva doesn’t deconstruct anything - deconstruction is a very specific approach to literary analysis with the intent of exposing semiotic contradictions within a genre - it doesn’t mean what western dudebros think it means (i.e: “dark and edgy storytelling”). space runaway ideon (1980) and gundam (1979) are both mecha shows that trade heavily on psychoanalysis, and anno Geek’d The Fuck Out on these shows (along with mazinger z, getter robo, ultraman, + many others) and wanted to pay his ultimate respects through evangelion. evangelion was paying homage to the mecha genre: anno didn’t reveal any ~hidden irreconcilable contradictions within it, he loved it and wanted to include his own OCs in the mix. (the ending of ideon and evangelion? exactly. the. same.) anno himself is a self-proclaimed otaku, and holds otaku sentiment to high regard. eva isn’t even genre-critical, it’s genre-exploratory
some interesting naming conventions in evangelion:
asuka calls rei ‘yuutousei’, not ‘wondergirl’,which can be loosely translated as ‘honor student’
shinji refers to asuka as simply ‘asuka’, but calls rei ‘ayanami’. likewise, rei refers to shinji as ‘ikari-kun’, adding the proper honorific at the end
asuka calls misato ‘misato’ without honorifics. a child referring to an adult without honorifics is considered extremely impolite in japan - for point of comparison, shinji first calls misato ‘katsuragi-san’ and later eases into ‘misato-san’. before you say it’s because she’s german, asuka is steadfast in calling kaji ‘kaji-san’ (she even refers to him as ‘kaji-senpai’ on one occasion)
misato usually calls shinji ‘shinji-kun’, but sometimes she’ll jokingly refer to him as ‘shin-chan’ - a petname typically reserved for toddlers. imagine toji getting called ‘to-chan’ and you’ll get an idea of how cheeky this is on misato’s part
on a similar note, the petnames ritsuko and kaji reserve for each other are especially hilarious. ritsuko refers to kaji as ‘ryo-chan’ and kaji refers to ritsuko as ‘rit-chan’ (consequently, ritsuko is the only character in nge who calls kaji by his first name, which is ryoji). ‘rit-chan’ and ‘ryo-chan’ are weirdly infantilizing/overly-affectionate; they only do this within the earshot of misato with the obvious purpose of annoying the shit out of her
gendo still refers to fuyutsuki as ‘fuyutsuki-sensei’ (’professor fuyutsuki’); everyone else calls him ‘vice commander fuyutsuki’. old habits die hard
misato and kaji refer to each other on an entirely last-name basis; misato calls kaji ‘kaji-kun’ and kaji calls misato ‘katsuragi’
there are many different ways to refer to your father in japanese, but shinji refers to gendo as ‘otousan’. typically, children will use ‘otousan’ when speaking to their father and ‘chi-chi’ when speaking of their father, but shinji makes no such distinction, which says something about the emotional distance there. (interestingly, misato flip-flops between ‘otousan’ and ‘chi-chi’ when speaking of her own father. when does she use otousan? when she’s talking to kaji about her father)
rei never once calls asuka by her name. the name ‘asuka’ never leaves rei’s mouth once. rei refers to asuka as ‘the pilot of unit-02‘ or simply ‘anta’ (‘you’) when speaking directly to her
“rei ayanami was supposed to be creepy as a middle finger to fanboys!!”
this is an old western fandom myth fabricated during the early days of 4chan/evageeks. anno, hayashibara, and co. have never said anything remotely suggesting the sort (rather, anno’s described rei as the ‘most inexpressible’ part of him; hayashibara remarking similar) - this also evades everything rei is to justify never considering her beyond the surface level (if rei was supposed to be ‘creepy’, what else is there?)
rei is existential - rei is isolation, rei’s entire narrative gestures heavily at what it means to be a body (”the body as an identity involves resources”) - what it means to be defined by your trauma, physically and psychologically. people don’t relate to rei because she’s “creepy” (she’s not), people relate to rei because she’s othered, ostracized, abused, socially inept. rei was forced into a life of constant-dissociation by an abusive man, a life in which she is a stranger to herself, and pretentious nerds still have the gall to call her ‘creepy’ as if they’re saying something subversive
there’s nothing enlightened about calling an abused 14 year old girl “creepy”, nothing about rei is “creepy”, it’s sad and harrowing and existentially-laden
you know the recurring gag about misato besting the odds of .000001% isn’t a joke - the reason she ‘just so happens’ to ‘fluke’ her way to victory is because seele has the dead sea scrolls, a prophetic text that fortells of every angel defeat ahead of time, and the magi was created under their clout so that nerv may be kept simultaneously unsuspecting, reasonably motivated, and constantly ready for death
the joke isn’t that misato just so happens to best the odds, the joke is that the odds of defeating an angel are always 100%, every time, and in believing that they’re .0001% misato plays right into seele’s hands, every time
ya’ll: WHAT IF KAWORU DOESN’T KNOW WHAT A SNEEZE IS AND HE SNEEZES FOR THE FIRST TIME AND HE THINKS HIS HEAD’S ABOUT TO EXPLODE AND SHINJI HAS TO CALM HIM DOWN FDKSAJFLAFksggkD
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.
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, by their homophobia and sexualization of the eva girls
but on the other hand you have the people exclusively fixating all their interest/discussion on the boys and paying the shallowest of lip service to the girls, where fandom love for kaworu+shinji generates tons of meta/passionate discussion but asuka+rei+misato get nothing except for some cute fanart/gifs with empty tags like “queen!/princess!!/badass lady!!!” attached, where rei only gets worthy 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/pain/complexity, which is really ironic given that the source material, you know, deals with girls/women navigating male-dominated spaces and being punished for their girlhood/womanhood, and a boy mc navigating male-dominated spaces and being punished for his perceived effeminacy while also taking his frustrations out on girls because of his scarydeep internalized misogyny. life imitates art
