Anonymous
Can you explain why you like Q Misato? She got a lot of flak since the last movie and I was wondering if I could hear some of your thoughts on her character progression?
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.
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kaatsuragi:
’ sᴀᴠᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ, ᴅᴀʀʟɪɴɢ ʟᴏᴠᴇ, ғʀᴏᴍ ᴍʏ ᴋɪɴɢᴅᴏᴍ. ’
CROSSES IN ANTARCTICA. ( listen )
words unspoken, exchanged between a stranded daughter and her estranged father’s ghost on the night of the second apocalypse. dark, lonely melodies as misato floats out to sea. katsuragi family centric mired with a heavy industrial influence.
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.
Splitting of The Breast is remarkable for its striking, supersaturated visuals. It’s no accident that the episode is marked by such high contrast, light and dark, when the subject matter involves Shinji embarking on a psychoanalytical voyage within the surrealist confines of a shadow. The “angel of the week”, Leliel, is a massive floating behemoth in black and white – diametric opposites – and likewise the entire episode is built upon complementary inter-textual contrasts: the rational vs emotional, parent vs child, boy vs girl, physicality vs the soul. After 15 episodes of relative tame and exposition, Episode 16′s harsh colors, formalist diagonal structure, and oppressive shadows allow the more arcane Freudian undertones
to finally take their command.
qmisato:
What’s most interesting about the latest Groundwork release are the corrections made to the initial Misato drafts, largely because Misato Katsuragi is the only character in Q whose precise emotional state is deliberately obscured.
The first draft is very “Pre-Timeskip Misato”, in that it’s fully demonstrative of the extent of Misato’s emotions. But the alterations (adding wrinkles around the eye, clenching the mouth, tightening the brow) really do well in communicating that Misato has now learned to bottle much of her discomforts and fears. A word to describe the first draft would be “anger”, but finding words to describe the finalized expression is a more variegated task — yes, there’s anger, but there’s also fear, exhaustion, tenacity, and maybe a little bit of regret.
Without having the full scope of what she’s gone through during the 14 year timeskip, this change is perhaps the most mystifying and disorienting in terms of character development, which is in part why the conclusion of Misato Katsuragi’s Rebuild arc firmly remains one of my most anticipated moments in Evangelion: 3.0+1.0.
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
EVA CINEMATOGRAPHY - MISATO UNDER PRESSURE
Although she doesn’t easily speak her true feelings, I loved the manner by which Misato hid the loneliness and darkness deep within her heart. After the TV series ended, I listened to Cruel Angel’s Thesis again and was struck by the lyric “Although I cannot become a goddess, I will live on.” Surely this must be the voice of Misato’s heart. - Kotono Mitsuishi (x)
