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.

nge!misato never came to a solidified internalization about adulthood because she simply wasn’t there yet – in fact, a lot of nge!misato’s character was marked by dissonance of identity: in some ways she was very childlike, in some ways she wasn’t. in some ways she was very motherly, in some ways she wasn’t. in some ways she was very immature, in some ways she wasn’t. well, q!misato has now made her choice and she’s sticking with it, for better or for worse. and i like to think that misato now looks at her father’s sacrifice very differently, considering that she’s consciously emulating a lot of his characteristics – his ingeniousness, his nose-to-the-grindstone tendencies, his physical distance, and his emotional weaknesses. i say consciously because misato has always been one of the most self-aware characters in evangelion. even when she’s majestically fucking up, misato knows exactly what she’s doing and frequently admits to it with a refreshing sort of transparency: 

MISATO:
I wanted a man like my father…
I chose NERV, intending to make a clean break with the past. In the end, I’ve been fooling myself by taking revenge against the Angels. No, that wasn’t a decision! I was just running away. Running away from the snare of my father!

MISATO:
I’m such a child. I have no right to tell Shinji anything.

MISATO:
Is he afraid of women?
No, he’s afraid of being intimate with people.
[…]
I see, it doesn’t matter who. I’m the one whose lonely.

MISATO:
God knows I’m not perfect, either. I’ve made tons of stupid mistakes and later I regretted them. And I’ve done it over and over again, thousands of times; a cycle of hollow joy and vicious self-hatred. 

MISATO:
This is the first time I’ve found myself in someone else’s position, so I finally understand my father a little better.
It’s simply NERV doing what’s needed. Commander Ikari did what was necessary with you piloting Eva as well. But, I put my feelings ahead of yours.

(that’s just a handful of the examples i have, but you get the point.) obviously misato has had a lot of time to maturate on that perception. so, everything that made nge!misato misato in the original has been swapped for its cold and bitter inverse – her long wavy hair is now significantly shorter, limper, and bunned up most of the time, her body is now totally covered head-to-toe in this unrevealing trenchcoat+leather pant combo, and her sunglasses are doing a pretty good job of concealing her vulnerabilities - the eyes are the window to soul, and so forth.

of course, many of these changes are there to solidify her evolution as “gendo ikari 2.0″, as i mentioned over yonder. and what’s so fascinating about that – the link between dr. katsuragi, gendo, and q!misato – is that misato is now rooting her identity in a role that is thematically patriarchal. in eoe, misato admits that she failed in being a “mom”… well, now she’s acting like The Dad. the Emotionally Unavailable Dad. the implications of this decision on a metatexual level are clear: basically, you don’t have to be a man to act like a “father”; i.e the template of ‘Father’ is a masculine phlegm that can be adopted by anyone regardless of gender.

with that being said, the wille crew very clearly respects her (save for asuka, but asuka and misato’s differences go way back), sakura’s seiyuu is quoted in saying that sakura’s respect actually borders on reverence, etc. as of right now, we’ve only seen q!misato in one mode – captain mode – and that’s a pretty limiting mode to judge a character off of. purposefully so, i think. then again, in some ways misato hasn’t changed much at all: a lot of people forget that misato was prone to stoicism, neglect, and coldness even in the original – i can gladly redirect anyone who doesn’t recall to episode 4, where all these aforementioned traits motivate shinji’s running away. (and later asuka’s, if we’re honest.) survival themes come to mind here as well, because misato is still surviving, still ensuring the survival of the human race. her hatred of the angels is as strong as ever.

another thing that i find absolutely fascinating is that q!misato isn’t wearing her cross necklace anymore. really, she isn’t, even under the trenchcoat. the cross necklace is significant in so many ways – it’s the only thing that grounded pre-Q misato as her “father’s daughter” – so much that the second to last scene in 2.0 is a shot of misato clutching it as if her life depended on it. this is the cross that misato bore in dr. katsuragi’s name, literally speaking, and now it’s gone? i have a theory about why it’s gone and if you’ve ever talked to me one-on-one about it you probably already know (feel free to message me if you’re curious). for now, all i’m going to say is that passing objects down is strictly a paternal motif in evangelion – gendo ikari passing the SDAT player down to shinji ikari, dr. katsuragi passing the cross necklace down to misato katsuragi, rei receiving gendo’s glasses… you know how i said that q!misato is reenacting her father’s trauma on the younger generation, namely shinji? with all the birth symbolism in q, the fact that the misato is commanding a ship with a giant sperm inside, and that holy grail nugget, it just might be shinji and someone else tbh. i’ll leave it at that. 

any more ramblings on my end would take us into assumption/speculative/headcanon territory, which is another story for another time. basically, depending on where anno decides to take misato’s character moving on in 3.0+1.0, she just might be the most redeemable feature of the rebuilds for me, which have otherwise been a disappointment on so many fronts and levels. here’s hoping khara gives her more than 14 minutes of screentime this time.