A handwritten letter sent to Hideaki Anno from a Japanese middle school student. This message was featured during the tail end of End of Evangelion, among a quick series of communications that can only be read after slowing the movie down frame by frame. It reads:
I decided to send this letter because I am in awe after watching Evangelion. I’m a middle school student just like Shinji. I feel like I truly understand myself now, all because of Eva. I want to thank you helping me with that. Why do I say this? Explaining everything would take too long, but long story short, Shinji and I are very alike. We’re both depressed, helpless, and introverted. I remember watching Eva and seeing Shinji feel worry and anxiety and feeling the same. In Eva, they say over and over again how Shinji can’t run away from his pain or the unpleasant feelings that come attached. I feel that way too. In the beginning of the show, I really enjoyed the light feeling this anime gave me. But eventually, Ms. Ogata [FRAME CUTS LETTER OFF]
In the last scene, Shinji accepts everyone and they all congratulate him. That was a very nice ending and I felt very happy. Another friend [FRAME CUTS LETTER OFF]
This year I graduate from middle school. Now my focus is on being a high school student, and I’m going to put my best effort into doing well. I’m going to see the new Eva movie when it comes out, but I’m worried about what will happen to Shinji because I really enjoyed the last scene of the TV series. And thanks to Eva, I’ve started like myself more, and that has made me very happy. [FRAME CUTS LETTER OFF]
Mr. Anno, please keep working on Eva more. Thank you so much for everything!!
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.
i never noticed until recently, but the episodes where ritsuko forgoes her signature red lipstick (ep 5, 8, 12) coincide with the days gendo is off-post, conducting business overseas, or otherwise awol.
The scribble next to young!Fuyutsuki reads “David Bowie.” Anno seems to have a love affair for British eletropop, what with Q!Ritsuko closely resembling Annie Lennox.
this is actually so wild to me because of the violence against women used in all three of these movies, with the body of the mother as the vessel for pain and suffering
+ aronofsky’s plagiarism is well established. he’s a hack who purchased the rights to satoshi kon’s perfect blue to steal wholesale scenes for black swan and requiem of a dream without fear of suit. knowing him it’s likely he turned to eoe for inspiration, and knowing anno he likely borrowed from karel thole likewise
Some insight into the guns used in Evangelion and the obscene amount of detail that goes into them.
Gendo carries a CZ-75 pistol. As its name implies, this is an old gun, designed in 1975 under a secret patent. Currently, this the most popular handgun in the Czech Republic, where it was first designed.
Misato carries a Heckler & Koch USP, a personal handgun distinguished from the standard issue Glock 17s all NERV personnel carry. The H&K is a German gun, implying that she’d obtained it during her military stay in Germany.
Ritsuko carries an R-92 revolver, an obscure conceal carry originally intended for Soviet security in the 1990s. It’s not widely distributed, and has been put into disuse after the advent of the Udar revolver, so it’s uncertain as to how Ritsuko acquired such a rare gun in the first place.
In the show, Kaji’s gun is never actually revealed even though he is shown adjusting it in Episode 15. In Rebuild, Kaji pulls out a Heckler & Koch USP at an unknown assailant. Because Eva is so painstakingly detail-oriented and because of Kaji’s uncharacteristic show of fury, this leads many Japanese fans to speculate that this H&K is actually Misato’s gun that Kaji is using temporarily for whatever reason.
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.
