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

me: 

One arm across the side - Misato’s trauma in visual language, the inescapable and self-recurring cycle of lived pain. It starts bloodied and ends bloodied.

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.

qmisato:

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

‘tis a wretched role i’m playing.

negativiteas:

went home and sent myself the original scan of that ritsuko

sneakysneakysnakes:

it just hit me that the first time we see shinji, he’s trying to call misato but there’s no signal - aka trying to communicate with her and failing - and that’s pretty meaningful and if the writers were so genius that they did it on purpose i’ll be forever impressed

shinji calls two people in the show: misato (episode 1) and gendo (episode 11) - in both instances his calls don’t go through or disconnect halfway in and both misato and gendo represent conflicting/addled parental authority. the telephone is nge’s interpersonal stage prop (misato gives shinji a cellphone with the hopes that he uses it to make friends at school, launching a discussion re: the hedgehog’s dilemma when he doesn’t) and helps to inform a lot of eva’s inter-cast relationships so 👁 🔍 whenever it makes an appearance

weird shit from evangelion that go unnoticed:

• shinji only listens to one song on his sdat and it’s you are the only one by kotono mitsuishi, aka misato’s seiyuu
  
• nerv’s 2nd branch is located in nevada USA, which just so happens to be the site of area 51
  
• everyone grows several inches taller in rebuild for some reason
  
• gendo is apparently “very small-waisted” and has to wear suspenders to hold his pants up
• maya is so short she has to sit on her cat pillow to reach the control terminal
  
• ritsuko’s listed hobbies include “punk rock and bonsai trees”
  
• kaji mentions going scuba diving in episode 10 and is seen throwing up the shaka sign with a surfboard in his character sheet
• nerv’s division-2 stalled on retrieving asuka from the bathtub so that kaworu could sabotage her eva which means they were secretly loyal to seele all along
• gendo and fuyutsuki are literally just straker and freeman from ufo
• kaji is literally just emma peel from the original avengers
  
• misato reads car magazines and nothing else
• ritsuko doesn’t have a car. she’s either taking the train or riding passenger in misato’s car
• in episode 19 toji enters shinji’s dreamscape and it’s never explained
• rei is a voracious reader of oscar wilde
  

recurring visual imagery: sleepover + aerial view
neon genesis evangelion, dir. hideaki anno (1995)