circuitbird:

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.

This interpretation is further hammered home by the theory that Shinji has attempted to drown himself in episodes 25 and 25’ (the beginning of EoE). Since Anno has directly stated that Shinji wants to kill himself but lacks the commitment to attempt it, we can assume that this is a sign Shinji has stopped running from his anxiety and has finally confronted it.

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.

rayanamei:

these are all gonna be half-baked, illegible, and probably already better said by someone else thoughts on boyhood

i’m revisiting an old response to a question i wrote about girl bodies/boy traumas as i rewatch eva and i’m thinking particularly about the circumstances of the scenes in which shinji was subject to witness rei’s pain. to thread into that thought, in this rewatch i’m noticing so many more instances i didn’t care to give attention to before about shinji’s contortion into the budding violences of boyhood. in that particular scene, gendo orchestrates a puppet show of shame and coercion with shinji as the subject and rei as the object, and that dynamic has been analyzed to death already, in eva specifically and gender theories more widely.

there seems to me to be still such a tragedy in that, though. eva, over and over, makes critical distinctions between boyhood/girlhood and manhood/womanhood. we’re made to witness shinji programmed into enacting the incursions of boyhood in the name of man — as we’re made to accept how asuka and rei are rendered the recipients of both his boy pleasure and his boy pain (there’s a sharp splinter too with this, asuka becoming shinji’s object of masturbation and rei his object of pain, but they’re tangled in with each other). there are particular moments where he engages with some kind of reflexivity and attempts to refuse to become sustained by these violences while he’s already composed by them. i’m thinking about the way he looks at a bandaged rei upon their first meeting when he holds her and finds his hands covered in her blood, and he looks down at his palms with horror. “this could be you” (boy)/”this is already you” (boy on track to manhood). what misato said: “the robot’s as rude as the man who built it!”

there’s shit that gets passed down spanning trauma to power to love, and often a messy conglomeration of all three and more, and aside from the comfort that delineating an easy ‘perpetrator’ and ‘perpetrated’ might offer, misato might remind us that responsibility must be taken regardless. whatever shit falls on us, whoever put it there, must be acknowledged and carried — not responsibility for responsibility’s sake, not to get our individual selves to an unquestioned somewhere better, but for accountability to those we love (and those we don’t). when misato and ritsuko witness how the violences of hypermodern manhood function, misato observes they occur not through cold blood but through bureaucracy and administration, the “evasion of responsibility” (or the funnier translation: “hot potato situation”), which also aligns with how the neoliberal state has been analyzed to function.

what has become so compelling about eva to me is how it simultaneously amplifies the grotesque pain of rigid and familiar relationship architectures (parent-child, husband-wife, mentor-mentee) while refusing to adjudicate and punish and banish and repress. everybody goes to hell, everybody goes to heaven. we’re made to learn the angels aren’t (only) enemies but kin. but there is also the theme of cyclic reproduction from/of trauma, not even only in an honestly tired freudian way, also in a transformative way. if there aren’t thoughtful, compassionate, sustained efforts to transform relationships and how we connect with each other (negotiating the hedgehog’s dilemma), we’re doomed to continue replicating harm even if we blow the fucking world up and start what we might think to be anew (rebuild). i think some of the most crucial moments in eva are those that can signal to us that we do have the capacity to cultivate those connections and flourish with each other, with all the pain and difficulty that will entail (congratulations!).

as i’m anticipating the end, i actually wonder what could’ve happened if yui via unit-01 hadn’t actually bit gendo’s head off

bisondollars:

Anno: Still concerning the face, I love Mazinger Z in profile towards the first episode in the pre-publication. It’s his first appearance and Kouji discovers it with a stunning cry.
Nagai: The scene in the house of the grandpa, is that it ?
Anno: Yes, it really marked me. That must be why I gave the same kind of eyes to the first version of EVA. When I brought these rectifications on the original drawings, I couldn’t prevent myself from drawing the eyes in the style of Master Nagai.
Nagai: And in the first episode of Evangelion, the first appearance of EVA is a big shot on his face, right ?
Anno: Euh yes, that’s it. (Laugh) Sorry.
Nagai: Fancy that? (Laugh)

Interview between Hideaki Anno and Go Nagai

Unit 00’s soul and the primal scene

circuitbird:

I’m really intrigued by the theory that the first Rei clone – or at least a portion of it – is present inside Unit 00. Apparently it is the prevailing theory because there is the most supporting evidence relative to contrary suggestion, but ultimately we will never really know, and I just happen to like it for symbolic reasons.

We know that Rei is Yui Ikari’s clone and a vessel for the soul of Lilith. We also know that all the Evas, with the exception of Unit 01, have been engineered from the genetic material of Adam. The two together constitute a version of the “forbidden fusion” like the one Gendo Ikari seeks to catalyze Third Impact and thus reunite with his dead wife.

The first version of Rei that we glimpse is a child. What strikes me about the interpretation that her soul, or a portion of her soul, has been implanted into Unit 00 is its parallels with Freud’s primal scene (i.e., the traumatic witnessing of parental intercourse and its interpretation by the child). If Rei, who is a Lilith vessel, pilots the Adam-derived Evangelion in a union that symbolically mimics the primal scene, it makes sense for the child Rei – the Rei soul that inhabits Unit 00 – to become violent and confused.

Ernest Becker interprets the primal scene as traumatic not because the child feels frustration at his exclusion from the act (see: Freud), but because it is representative of betrayal and a kind of anxiety-provoking, existential contradiction:

“He can well feel betrayed by them: they reserve their bodies for the closest relationship but deny it to him. They discourage physicalness with all the powers at their command, and yet they themselves practice it with an all-consuming vengeance. When we take all this together we can see that the primal scene can truly be a trauma, not because the child can’t get into the sexual act and express his own impulses but rather because the primal scene is itself a complex symbol combining the horror of the body, the betrayal of the cultural superego, and the absolute blockage of any action the child can take in the situation or any straightforward understanding that he can have of it. It is the symbol of an anxious multiple bind.” – Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

No wonder, then, that Unit 00 is on a hair trigger to go berserk, smashing its own skull into the walls of the test chamber when Rei 2.0 – the teenage Rei that we see for the majority of the series – is in the entry plug. If Rei 2.0 has whatever remains of Rei 1.0’s original soul, reuniting the two of them in the pilot seat of Unit 00 forces confrontation with unresolved trauma. For Becker, the fundamental trauma is any reminder of the dualistic human condition: that we are the “gods who shit,” or conscious entities capable of comprehending meaning and existence while being trapped in a decaying, defecating animal body. Uniquely transcendent, yet destined to rot like every other beast on the planet. We thus construct our lives around a culturally-sanctioned causa sui project – a self-generated purpose and practiced self-delusion of identity, the vital lie of a self with meaning – in which we attempt to carve out symbolic permanence for ourselves in the face of the anxiety of death and oblivion.

What Gendo seeks to achieve is an ultimate transcendence of the body through Third Impact, or the fusion of Adam (the seed of life, and in a Beckerian interpretation, representative of the animal body) and Lilith (the seed of knowledge, representative of the mind and conscious awareness). The irony is that he is pursuing this goal  in a way that is symbolically and inescapably sexual and thus grounded in the very bodily reality he is attempting to escape. Furthermore, his desire to be reunited with Yui is itself a sexual goal and thus doomed to fail as a causa-sui project:

“No wonder, too, that most of us never abandon entirely the early attempts of the child to use the body and its appendages as a fortress or a machine to magically coerce the world. We try to get metaphysical answers from the body that the body – as a material thing – cannot possibly give. […] It is comfortingly infantile in its indulgence and its pleasure, yet so self-defeating of real awareness and growth, if the person is using it to try to answer metaphysical questions. It then becomes a lie about reality, a screen against full consciousness.” – Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

When Unit 00 tries to punch the shit out of him in a fit of self-destructive insanity, it is Rei’s terror and confusion at the primal scene and a rejection of the forceful imposition of Gendo’s causa-sui project on her. (This rejection is bookended at the conclusion of the series by Rei as a whole, maturing woman and not just the fragmented Rei child-soul within Unit 00.) She is a replaceable cog in his misguided machinations, trapped within his doomed and sexual preoccupations, and Unit 00 is raging against the repression of Rei’s individual will and ability to self-determine.  

“I wanted to erase Evangelion” - About Yuko Miyamura’s infamous relationship with the Evangelion franchise and it’s creator Hideaki Anno

kaworunagisas:

Despite the praise and love the creator and director of the classic “Neon Genesis Evangelion” Hideaki Anno and his creation may receive from many fans. The same adoration cannot be said for the voice actress of the ever iconic Asuka Langley Soryu, Yuko Miyamura.

Keep reading

sir-argues-a-lot:

Honestly, I’m surprised it took me this long to pick up on what Rei’s feelings towards Asuka really are.

She doesn’t express herself, but apart from some biting remarks, Rei seemed to be legitimately indifferent towards her, while Asuka was pretty clear in her dislike of Rei, and made it explicitly known to us.

But honestly? Rei hated Asuka much sooner and much harder than vic versa. In this scene from episode 14, also known as the clipshow we don’t talk about, Rei makes it very clear that she absolutely despises the color red. She associates it with blood and mankind in her monologue, but given its prominence in the show, there are at least two noteworthy elements heavily associated with the color red.

The first, of course, is Asuka, who is drenched with red in everything she does. This association is easily interpreted as Rei secretly despising Asuka from the start, even if she never acted on it. In this case, it’s interesting to note that while Asuka was rather rude in putting Rei down, Asuka did initially make several genuine attempts to befriend Rei: the most obvious effort in episode 12, when Asuka went out of her way to ensure that Rei could join them in their celebratory dinner. Meanwhile, Rei simply didn’t give a shit about the redhead. She’s ice cold.

The other notable instance of the color red in association with Rei is seen within Rei herself, specifically her eye color. Eyes are the window to the soul, and the use of the color red here is largely symbolic. (A similar instance of such symbolism with regard to eyes is seen with Gendo, whose shades metaphorically close him off from the world.)

Rei’s soul, as we later learn, is not truly hers, but in fact comes from Lilith, a monster which isn’t human at all. Rei detests this, and tries to assert that she is her own self, even if she cannot shake of the feeling of this “wrong" presence within her, serving as one of her primary personal conflicts throughout. Essentially, Rei hates this presence inside her; Rei hates her “soul". Rei hates herself.

It’s quite an interesting visual metaphor, and the subtle allusion to Rei’s actual feelings helps to add to her character.

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