One of the cooler epiphanies from Japanese fandom. The areas where Unit-02 sustained damage in End of Evangelion correspond nicely with the duct-taped injury sites on Asuka’s plugsuit in Q.

Notice too the cat sticker on Maya’s laptop (better seen here) and Asuka’s corresponding cat helmet.

who’s the real canon gay of evangelion? kaworu, shinji, maya, and mari move aside  - a lot of people don’t know that makoto hyuga was supposed to be canonly gay, too. anno and co. slipped a quiet allude to his sexuality in the original episode 24 drafts (the same drafts that had kaworu and shinji kiss). ultimately the idea was trashed and promptly replaced with his crush for misato, likely for the same reasons they trashed the original kawoshin kiss. 

here’s the scene in question (you can read the entire draft here):

HYUGA: Seems like we’ve got ourselves involved in a pretty unbelievable organization.

[HYUGA hands MISATO more documents.]

HYUGA: Here’s my research on the Fifth Child. There’s nothing particularly suspicious in his history. He’s been in contact with the committee, but there’s no sign of involvement. As far as family goes, it seems there’s been some turbulence there. You could say he’s just a garden-variety pretty boy who’s had an unfortunate life.

MISATO: Just your type of guy, huh?

HYUGA: Cut it out…

qmisato:

evangelion is not a deconstruction of the mecha genre

evangelion is not a deconstruction of the mecha genre

evangelion is not a deconstruction of the mecha genre

everybody now

eva doesn’t deconstruct anything - deconstruction is a very specific approach to literary analysis with the intent of exposing semiotic contradictions within a genre - it doesn’t mean what western dudebros think it means (i.e: “dark and edgy storytelling”). space runaway ideon (1980) and gundam (1979) are both mecha shows that trade heavily on psychoanalysis, and anno Geek’d The Fuck Out on these shows (along with mazinger z, getter robo, ultraman, + many others) and wanted to pay his ultimate respects through evangelion. evangelion was paying homage to the mecha genre: anno didn’t reveal any ~hidden irreconcilable contradictions within it, he loved it and wanted to include his own OCs in the mix. (the ending of ideon and evangelion? exactly. the. same.) anno himself is a self-proclaimed otaku, and holds otaku sentiment to high regard. eva isn’t even genre-critical, it’s genre-exploratory

some interesting naming conventions in evangelion:

• asuka calls rei ‘yuutousei’, not ‘wondergirl’, which can be loosely translated as ‘honor student’
• shinji refers to asuka as simply ‘asuka’, but calls rei ‘ayanami’. likewise, rei refers to shinji as ‘ikari-kun’, adding the proper honorific at the end 
• asuka calls misato ‘misato’ without honorifics. a child referring to an adult without honorifics is considered extremely impolite in japan - for point of comparison, shinji first calls misato ‘katsuragi-san’ and later eases into ‘misato-san’. before you say it’s because she’s german, asuka is steadfast in calling kaji ‘kaji-san’ (she even refers to him as ‘kaji-senpai’ on one occasion)
  
• misato usually calls shinji ‘shinji-kun’, but sometimes she’ll jokingly refer to him as ‘shin-chan’ - a petname typically reserved for toddlers. imagine toji getting called ‘to-chan’ and you’ll get an idea of how cheeky this is on misato’s part
• on a similar note, the petnames ritsuko and kaji reserve for each other are especially hilarious. ritsuko refers to kaji as ‘ryo-chan’ and kaji refers to ritsuko as ‘rit-chan’ (consequently, ritsuko is the only character in nge who calls kaji by his first name, which is ryoji). ‘rit-chan’ and ‘ryo-chan’ are weirdly infantilizing/overly-affectionate; they only do this within the earshot of misato with the obvious purpose of annoying the shit out of her
• gendo still refers to fuyutsuki as ‘fuyutsuki-sensei’ (’professor fuyutsuki’); everyone else calls him ‘vice commander fuyutsuki’. old habits die hard
• misato and kaji refer to each other on an entirely last-name basis; misato calls kaji ‘kaji-kun’ and kaji calls misato ‘katsuragi’
• there are many different ways to refer to your father in japanese, but shinji refers to gendo as ‘otousan’. typically, children will use ‘otousan’ when speaking to their father and ‘chi-chi’ when speaking of their father, but shinji makes no such distinction, which says something about the emotional distance there. (interestingly, misato flip-flops between ‘otousan’ and ‘chi-chi’ when speaking of her own father. when does she use otousan? when she’s talking to kaji about her father)
• rei never once calls asuka by her name. the name ‘asuka’ never leaves rei’s mouth once. rei refers to asuka as ‘the pilot of unit-02‘ or simply ‘anta’ (‘you’) when speaking directly to her

Anno doing what he does best: iterative foreshadowing. Misato, Ritsuko, and Kaji are the only characters that die by the gun, and these two scenes hint at all three deaths with laserpoint exactness. Look at the position of Misato’s gun: she aims at the back of Kaji’s head and the crown of Ritsuko’s spine. Ritsuko later dies from a gunshot wound through the spine, and well – Kaji’s corpse isn’t shown, but you can make the required leaps of imagination. 

Misato confronts both Kaji and Ritsuko in the deepest belly of NERV, which is where she will eventually die. Both Kaji and Ritsuko cross-reference each other as they double-cross. Consider the history between the trio and you have what is best summed up by Kureishi: “Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.”

“rei ayanami was supposed to be creepy as a middle finger to fanboys!!”

this is an old western fandom myth fabricated during the early days of 4chan/evageeks. anno, hayashibara, and co. have never said anything remotely suggesting the sort (rather, anno’s described rei as the ‘most inexpressible’ part of him; hayashibara remarking similar) - this also evades everything rei is to justify never considering her beyond the surface level (if rei was supposed to be ‘creepy’, what else is there?)

rei is existential - rei is isolation, rei’s entire narrative gestures heavily at what it means to be a body (”the body as an identity involves resources”) - what it means to be defined by your trauma, physically and psychologically. people don’t relate to rei because she’s “creepy” (she’s not), people relate to rei because she’s othered, ostracized, abused, socially inept. rei was forced into a life of constant-dissociation by an abusive man, a life in which she is a stranger to herself, and pretentious nerds still have the gall to call her ‘creepy’ as if they’re saying something subversive

there’s nothing enlightened about calling an abused 14 year old girl “creepy”, nothing about rei is “creepy”, it’s sad and harrowing and existentially-laden

you know the recurring gag about misato besting the odds of .000001% isn’t a joke - the reason she ‘just so happens’ to ‘fluke’ her way to victory is because seele has the dead sea scrolls, a prophetic text that fortells of every angel defeat ahead of time, and the magi was created under their clout so that nerv may be kept simultaneously unsuspecting, reasonably motivated, and constantly ready for death

the joke isn’t that misato just so happens to best the odds, the joke is that the odds of defeating an angel are always 100%, every time, and in believing that they’re .0001% misato plays right into seele’s hands, every time

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.

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