sadamoto yoshiyuki
ILLOGICAL DEVICE/ILLEGIBLE COMMAND: a mix for katsuragi misato. stream.
concrete wall – dog in the snow // peach, plum, pear (joanna newsom cover) – femfemfem // sparks – the dø // she’s spoken for – you say party! // love in the dark – yacht // stalemate – io echo // bad believer – st. vincent // running behind – holychild // logic of colour – wye oak // sky is black – h1987
Misato and Shinji are extremely afraid of being hurt. They both are unsuitable–lacking the positive attitude for what people call heroes. But in any case, Misato and Shinji are the heroes of this stories. - Hideaki Anno
his scene is loaded. there’s a whole constellation of themes that are finally being realized here, as shinji and misato – the two protagonists of NGE – share one of their more subtly powerful exchanges before everything goes to proverbial shit. this is the last ‘real’ moment of the show; come episode 25 and the audience is catapulted right into the throes of instrumentality.
a lot of people don’t know why misato says what she says, and what it actually means - for her, for shinji, and for kaworu (and others!). here’s my attempt at teasing some of that out.
discussions of self-alienating love, suicidal idealization, becker, feuerbach, and various other revelations below.
All the more reason to change the situation and quash all anxieties of the future.
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.
Hideaki Anno, End of Evangelion (1997)
“But if people don’t act on their own free will, nothing will change. So you must regain your lost form by your own volition. Even if it means your words become lost, or confused with the words of others. Anyone can return to their human form, as long as they are able to imagine themselves within their own heart. Don’t worry. Anywhere can be paradise, as long as you have the will to live. As long as the Sun, Moon, and Earth exist…it will be alright.”
Remember that moment when Kaji just casually decided to organize a trash bin?
this scene is not a casual fluke and actually carries some thematic weight on the down low but ok
I don’t see a lot of people talking about this scene. Maybe it’s the tendency to refer to Misato as The Mama Bear™ over the Eva kids, conveniently failing to mention that by Eva kids, we really mean Shinji Ikari. Asuka never gets Mama Bear treatment from Misato, and this scene is in many ways emblematic of the real dynamic between the two: which is marked by a whole lot of indifference, neglect, and a latent sense of casual disdain – mostly on Misato’s end. Granted, Misato never actually comes out and says “Asuka, I care about Shinji a lot more than I care about you,” but after watching this scene I don’t think she even needs to.
Here’s Asuka having a very thinly-veiled, very public, very loud breakdown in Misato’s own washroom, complete with a heated display of water-basin flinging. The most Misato does is, well, nothing, if you disregard the glaring – which is exactly the point. Misato’s recent share of shitty life experiences aside, it doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination to figure that she would’ve made an effort to reach out to Shinji if he were in Asuka’s place, just as she did in Episode 23, propelled by little more than a hunch that Shinji would be troubled after Rei II’s death.
Once you peel away all the pleasant pretenses and platitudes behind a lot of their initial conversations, this scene makes a lot of sense. Asuka has always framed Misato as both a rival and an exemplary in all its counter-intuitive glory. For Misato, Shinji’s been the pilot whom she feels most comfortable flexing her quasi-maternal muscles, precisely because Shinji is a boy, and Misato thinks she knows exactly what he needs from her, by virtue of Misato being a woman. Asuka is the problem, the conundrum, the puzzle Misato never really bothers to work through, up until the very end.
We can even see shades of this dynamic play out in Evangelion 3.0 (which is more or less an answer to Episodes 22-24 in NGE), where it looks like Asuka has now graduated to overt dislike of Q!Misato and her modus operandi (fuck your Eva, the mission is your top priority… you get the point.)
