something interesting that i realized about misato katsuragi is that she’s essentially a reflection of the state of the world. her life is inexorably tied to the angels and their effect on humanity. when she was young, she was ‘whole’, much like humanity was with the angels being dormant, until second impact happens and she loses her father, and likewise the planet loses a sizable amount of its population
in her college and adult years, misato appears playful and lighthearted, but we know that’s just a facade: she’s destroyed by the loss of her father and totally consumed by her revenge against the the angels. likewise, life goes on seemingly undisturbed in tokyo-III, but the damage left behind from second impact and the angels is evidenced in the empty oceans, derelict buildings, and destructive climate change
in 3.0, misato is cold and calculating, lacking any apparent compassion at all. likewise, the world is cold and unforgiving as are its remaining inhabitants. basically each impact heavily alters the landscape of the planet and we see these changes reflected in how misato changes over the course of the series
how many shots are there of shinji’s quivering eyes as he witnesses the bodies of women, girls, and girl-aligned persons being violently torn apart? girls’ mutilation in eva are mostly ever processed through being the source of boys’ trauma.
i’ve been wondering lately - what is it about nge that was so cohesive, that one singular vibe you saw in each of the characters. like, they all felt like they were part of a set, the same notes in a tone, regardless of the different stages of life, motivations, they ways they held other people at a distance (or too close), etc.
it’s contempt. i’m pretty sure that’s what it was.
you see it most in ritsuko and asuka - but contempt is there in varying levels with the others; shinji, misato, fuyutsuki, even rei. they say that contempt/disgust is one of the 7 universal expressions of humanity and i don’t know how much of that is bs, but contempt is such a crucial element in viewing nge, i think.
you have to start with understanding that contempt is a defense mechanism, and go from there. you miss so much of the subtlety in shinji’s narrative if you don’t see how tiny bits of contempt leak out in how he interacts with everyone (especially the girls, holy shit); how asuka tries to use her contempt as literal fuel for her fire until she burns from the inside out, how kaji thought he had it under control and stuffed down too many layers of lies but it poisoned him in the end, too.
it’s there. but the pinnacle of nge is not just the exploration of contempt and what it takes to truly hate yourself and others, but ultimately how nge doesn’t allow you - or the cast - one bullshit excuse to wave off your issues because of it. instead, it sits you down and says ‘you can be better than this.’
imo that’s something that needs to be said more. with that kind of honesty.
Rei doesn’t know emotion, so there’s no difference between what she says and feels; there’s nothing ulterior about her. At first glance, then, you may theorize: this is where her very great beauty comes from, from her surface, without depth, but with the absence of its necessity – someone truly mystical.
No. Rei’s beauty comes from the truth that she has feelings. When she cried, it meant the waters of the pool were coming out at last. The struggle to draw feelings forth, the reconciliation between your surface and your depth – that, I believe, is when we truly become alive, truly become human beings. And when I found the warmth beneath the coldness in Rei’s words, I synchronized with her for the first time. And it felt so good and I want to say thank you, from the bottom of my own heart.
What I learned from meeting a girl who didn’t know (1996, Megumi Hayashibara; translation by William Flanagan and David Ury)
So something I’ve noticed is the huge amounts of art/meta/gifsets showing Asuka & Rei and Kaworu & Rei as visual/mythological opposites, or talking about the differences between them wrt externalizing/internalizing mental processes.
While I think discussions about Asuka/Rei and Kaworu/Rei are important, I don’t think those two relationships are necessarily representative of a true oppositional force in the show? (I would label those relationships as a symbiotic duality that define one another in a vaguely codependent or complementary way.)
Anyways, here’s some meta about Kaworu and Asuka as Opposites and the space they occupy in the show as it relates to Shinji and misogyny.(god this is so long rip @ me)
This nails Asuka and Kaworu’s diametric opposition so well: why it’s thematically necessary that Kaworu and Asuka never get to interact, pertaining to who really gets to “forgive” Shinji within the larger narrative, and how gender circumscribes the right to unconditional love. Everyone needs to read this.
The use of dolls as a motif in this episode is rather interesting.
In the script for Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Mamoru Oshii described the psychology for the fear of dolls thusly:
[It’s] the uncertainty that perhaps something that appears to be alive actually isn’t, and the uncertainty that on the other hand something that doesn’t appear to be alive actually is. If you want to know what makes dolls so unnerving, it’s because they are modeled after humans. In other words they are man created in their own image. [It] creates the fear that the human phenomenon is fundamentally devoid of meaning and purpose…that humanity can be reduced to simple mechanical parts.
In the context of the story, the doll motif reflects the fear of being replaced. To be cast aside in favor of something new. Broken mechanical parts swapped out for newer ones that last longer and work harder.
Asuka values her skills as a pilot because they give her a sense of self worth via others’ dependence on her. She takes pride in her competitive spirit and her high synch ratios. She loves the fact that others depend on her to defend them against the Angels. However, she is dependent on others for her sense of self despite her personality. After all, human beings are social creatures and we depend on each other for both social, physical, and mental needs. You can’t live a healthy life “on your own”. Without the ability to pilot the EVA, she’s cast aside like a broken doll, broken parts in a machine by the power structure of NERV and SEELE who soon finds a new “toy” to replace her with in their game, now that she no longer has any value to them.
As a side note, the language that Gendo uses when discussing the pilots is rather interesting. In the subtitles, pilots are rarely if ever referred to by their names, the exception being Rei. Even Rei outright states that if she dies she can simply be replaced. When Shinji shows up, he’s referred to as “the spare”. The pilots are simply interchangeable parts in the command structure, kicked out when no longer useful and replaced.
More interpretations of Eva through the Becker lens
It’s worth noting that both SEELE and Gendo have mechanisms for eliminating the fundamental Death Anxiety in ways that Ernest Becker suggests are doomed to fail.
The terror of the mind/body dualism – which, in Evangelion, is symbolically represented by the Fruit of Knowledge and Fruit of Life – cannot be resolved through carnal reverence nor traditional religious means. Both are alternate versions of personal delusion in which existential meaning is sought through faulty channels: the body, which by definition cannot lend itself to spiritual transcendence, and monolithic faith systems, which are themselves imposed hero systems that cater deceitfully to the fear of oblivion they intend to absolve.
SEELE = a symbol for the classical religious pathway, in its singular control and perversion of spiritual goals. This is echoed by the imagery that represents SEELE, from the angel-like appearance of the Mass Production Evas to the biblical/numerical significance of the seven organization members.
Gendo Ikari’s agenda = a symbol for the bodily pathway, since his desire to reunite with Yui is precisely that: desire. His goals are rooted in the corporeal dimensions of human love and attachment, and he is clearly not satisfied with her occupation of a purely spiritual space, or at least not one that is separate from him inside Unit 01. His obsession with this physicality is so all-consuming that he creates a clone of her – Rei – to serve as the body vehicle for his ultimate plans.
The focus is then on Shinji, the despairing boy, the individual, to discover his own purpose and existential value for himself. And his only hope for doing this is by directly confronting the terror of oblivion, the terror of death and of fundamental aloneness, in all its forms. Only then can he truly transcend. There is a reason why he is the hero of the story.
The “Adult Quartet”: Misato, Ritsuko, Kaji, and Gendo
As promised, I am going to try to answer anon’s message regarding my thoughts on the “adult trio” in NGE (meaning Misato, Ritsuko, and Kaji). I struggled with any kind of systematic analysis until I included Gendo in the equation, and I think it’s because his relationship with Ritsuko functions as a symbolic complement to Misato’s relationship with Kaji.
Thinking about it last night made me realize how much I should be delving into Lacan’s concept of desire, which I have only read about in summary thus far and still kind of makes my head spin. But, as usual, the consolidated existentialist-psychoanalytic framework that Ernest Becker develops from Otto Rank suffices just fine. At least for starters.
I could have typed that up to look nice but screw it, you get my scrappy handwriting/my oversimplified layout of Becker’s existential paradox as clumsily navigated by our characters.
Remember that according to Becker, the foundations of human behavior lie in the terror produced by this paradox, and the frantic attempts to ensure ultimate and transcendent meaning in the face of bodily death. If we use the paradox as a lens, it becomes obvious that both Misato and Ritsuko are grappling with this terror in complementary ways, and that the objects of desire upon which they enact their terror (Kaji and Gendo, respectively) are symbolically antipodal.
I think it’s pretty obvious why I feel Gendo symbolizes death denial, or a refusal to be confined to the limits of the human body. His entire M.O. basically involves becoming god, and defying death in order to reunite with Yui. Why Kaji is representative of death acceptance (or perhaps even resignation) is less immediately clear, especially since we know so little about him, but the concept coalesces more on examination. There is not a single character in the series who is more prepared to accept their inevitable fate. Kaji appears to have a good idea of both how and when he is going to die, and when he does, greets it with equanimity. Kaji’s humorous nature seems a hint at the inherent absurdity of the paradox, or the “cruel joke” that it is to be the “God who shits” (as Becker puts it). Yet his serious side, as evidenced by conversations with both Misato and Shinji, suggests a grace, wisdom, and self-awareness that is not shared by anyone else in NGE.
Misato runs from Kaji because he reminds her of her father, and coming to terms with this would mean accepting that she does not have the sole power to design her own symbolic meaning. It is the failure of the personal causa sui to achieve its primary childhood goal — the defiance of the imparted causa sui of the parent — and is thus a form of death confrontation: the death of the “self-generated self.” She seeks refuge in the body component of the paradox while stripping away the potential for her relationships to carry more profound symbolic weight. To confront her true desires, after all, would mean facing up to death anxiety. She must confine whatever meaning she seeks to areas that do not remind her of her own powerlessness. Probably helps to compensate by investing most of your worth into the identity of Skilled Military Captain.
Ritsuko, by contrast, cannot conceive of the body as a refuge (see also: her bafflement at Misato’s sexuality) and clearly desires a more meaningful relationship with Gendo than one confined to sex. Of course, Gendo is incapable of providing Ritsuko with any kind of emotional validation, and she plunges into suicidal despair. Unlike Misato, who copes with existential powerlessness with denial, Ritsuko attempts to transfer power — the power to designate ultimate meaning — into the wrong party: another human being who is as doomed to die as she is. Gendo may want to defy death, but he cannot; ironically, he pursues transcendence the same way she does, which is the misguided investment of ultimate power into a vessel that cannot hold it:
After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption — nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know that our creation has not been in vain. We turn to the love partner for the experience of the heroic, for perfect validation; we expect them to “make us good” through love. Needless to say, human partners can’t do this. The lover does not dispense cosmic heroism; he cannot give absolution in his own name. The reason is that as a finite being he too is doomed, and we read that doom in his own fallibilities, in his very deterioration. Redemption can only come from outside the individual, from beyond, from our conceptualization of the ultimate source of things, the perfection of creation.
(From The Denial of Death, p. 167.)
One of my favorite things about Eva is how they addressed bodies and how people use/feel about their bodies in both an abstract sense and how it relates physically to others. So, you have Asuka’s body that is going through pubescence and how she wants to use it vs how she feels comfortable using it; Rei who has no connection to her “human form” and feels very disassociated and disconnected physically; and then you have Misato, who doesn’t really know how to show “love” or “emotion” unless it’s using her body.
Anno uses Misato as a pivot on which themes of women’s bodies center. The first thing I noticed about NGE was that we have two really amazing lady characters filling traditionally masculine roles—commander and scientist—and that one of these ladies (Misato) is very over the top about her sexuality and body. The show uses really obnoxious, un-subtle fanservicey shots with her (and ffs, at the end of every episode Misato says, ‘And don’t worry! They’ll be plenty of fanservice!)— but then it’s revealed that, well, Misato has no idea how to “connect” with others unless it’s through sex. Like, jeez, the first time we meet her she’s trying to relate to a 14 year old boy by drawing attention to her breasts in a picture. Later on, after Kaji’s death and Shinji’s realisation with Rei (I believe), she sits on his bed and moves to make a pass at him. Shinji throws himself away from her and tells her no, and she walks out, and she curses herself for coming onto him. In EoE, she tries to give Shinji hope— she kisses him and promises him that there’ll be more when he survives (because Misato is always making promises and is always set on challenging fate and MAKING miracles and SURVIVING. always always surviving)— but in this situation, where it’s so dire and she’s going to die, she has no idea how to relate to Shinji, to give him hope, so she falls back on her body, her sexuality, how she views her “essence” as a woman.
And I think that given what Misato has been through, what with witnessing 2nd Impact, having so much rage for her father for pushing that trauma onto her and putting his family in a secondary position, she just does not know how to love. Misato has repressed these insecurities in a really masterful way. As a child she chose not to speak for a long time, and then out of nowhere it seems, she’s opening up with Ritsuko and is in this relationship with Kaji and getting her life together. (I think of it in terms of Misato doing exactly what Asuka wishes she could do with her trauma.)
Misato is flawed in a way that is subtle, that doesn’t focus on the “tragic” as it does with the children. But on top of that, she’s also very selfish— she uses Shinji as a pawn for closure with her father/her trauma, she disregards Kaji until she needs him, she doesn’t really take care of herself in general, and it’s these little things, these little unhealthy behaviors that peek through and show us how Misato is very damaged in her own way.
And the way society hypersexualises women’s bodies and to then discredit women based on that hypersexualisation is exactly what Misato kind of subverts in the show? Because yeah, we have this really goofy, fun-loving, messy/gross, but seriously sexy woman character who is AMAZING at commanding, who takes risks, and most importantly, needs to be in control. She’s ALL about control. She wants to feel in control of her feelings, of her body, of (her) fate. She doesn’t want to go through what she did as a child. When it came down to standing by and seeing if that big Fake Robot Thing would stop on its own, or possibly sacrificing her life, she chose the latter, so she could be in control of that situation. It’s all about challenging fate and if it’s between feeling powerless/helpless or death, she’ll choose death.
And that’s why Misato is an amazing, seriously underrated character.
Something I noticed during my most recent viewing of 2.0: the little round thing in the center of the chest of Shinji’s plus suit has changed colours between versions. I checked, and this differentiation seems to be pretty consistent.
There aren’t really any other noticeable differences about the suit, so why change that one specific thing? Hmmmm.
I’m not saying I think it’s a core allusion, but I think it’s a core allusion.