recurring visual imagery: downward escalator
neon genesis evangelion, dir. hideaki anno (1995)

so which one of you made this

I’ve never seen a protagonist - male or female - so effortlessly hide their ugly, unrepentant ego behind a veneer of warm compassion. Misato hits children, she hits wounded friends, she hits herself. My favorite Misato scene is when she just barely restrains herself from striking Shinji across the face, and slaps herself in redirected aggression. That’s her prerogative: redirected, impotent aggression, against the Angels and against herself. 

Misato’s a walking advertisement of her own desperation, which probably nets her more sympathy than she otherwise might deserve. Her violence aggrandizes her, but behind the display is total disempowerment. She tries to win back the control she lost during her childhood and it gets her nowhere. Her authority is skin deep.

i’m screaming that naoko akagi, chief executive scientist slash supercomputer bioengineer, likely 1) met misato and kaji in college, 2) interacted with them in some capacity, and 3) actually enjoyed them as human beings. did misato invite her to a thursday bar crawl? did kaji call her a milf? did naoko find their bumbling idiot comedy routine endearingly hilarious? how fiercely did ritsuko regret her decision to introduce the three? i have a lot of questions 

recurring visual imagery: coming to + coreferent
neon genesis evangelion, dir. hideaki anno (1995)
*note the placement of the blood/gauze on misato’s cheek.

Misato’s slap geared back, and an exit sign flashing in interval. I mustn’t run away. What an awesome cut - blink and you’ll miss it.

there’s a game where misato katsuragi does nothing except sit around, drink, and narrate the morning news to you in real time and i don’t have it

recurring visual imagery: misato + commanding
evangelion: 2.22 you can (not) advance, dir. hideaki anno (2009)
evangelion: 3.33 you can (not) redo, dir. hideaki anno (2012)

jbillustration:

College Kids

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