DECEMBER 8TH 2015 - KATSURAGI MISATO’S BIRTHDAY
“Playing her was difficult. She hides her heart. I’d get overemotional during scenes where Misato’s feelings would explode, scenes where she’d pour her heart out. My hands would shake, and it took all my might to keep the script I was holding from rustling or making noise. She’s strong, brave; a woman. I’ve focused exclusively on Misato for so long – I wanted to know her, to understand her – I concentrated my all on her.” – Kotono Mitsuishi
i’ve been thinking a lot about misato, and why she resorts to alcohol and sex, specifically as means of self-medication/preservation
obviously there’s this tendency to characterize her as this errant drunkard, despite the fact that she only saves her binge-drinking for the home. she’s smart as hell - we know that misato hates the dark, that darkness begets all these traumatic memories of second impact – and i like to think that misato literally drinks herself to sleep every night, quite plainly self-medicating with alcohol, harnessing the ways in which it suppresses debilitating memories and emotions so she can function during her waking hours, as a military officer no less: a functional alcoholic in every sense of the term
and with regards to sex; how misato’s childhood is characterized by a very conservative, purity-fixated upbringing, and then the trauma of years long isolation in a bare-bones holding cell with no means of communication, no therapeutic companionship, just a couple of toys to keep her sound. for years. sex, for obvious reasons, so intensely connecting person to person in the most tangible form… misato’s going to find that especially useful in preserving function, feeling alive (”to prove i exist”) versus the isolation symbolically associated with death. (it’s interesting, then, when misato is shoved into a holding cell again in episode 21, kaji dies the very same day.)
but much the same with alcohol, misato exerts this unbelievable amount of self-control and restricts her sexual expression to just one person - yet shame and guilt plague her still, shame that shapes and defines how she thinks others are perceiving her as a woman. misato has self-surveillance, self-awareness, and self-policing in incredible spades. she’s only allowed herself to ‘medicate’ under very narrow, very specific contexts, and that’s pretty fascinating, i think
So, I recently discovered that the yellow shirt worn by Asuka during Episode 9, 15, and End of Evangelion is not actually Asuka’s shirt. It’s Misato’s.
I’m not pointing out this seemingly insignificant fact for the fun of it – because it definitely seems like a trivial, if not somewhat interesting, little detail – but like most things in Evangelion, Anno’s taken steps to imbue it with hidden and revealing character subtext. Eva often uses sequences of recurring, outwardly unimportant visual cues to tie some underlying theme to a character or characters. So why a yellow shirt? Turns out, it’s actually a pretty interesting symbol for womanhood and ill-fitting sexual expression.
More under the cut.
This scene is pretty amazing. We know that a huge part of Misato’s inner turmoil is that she cannot face against her father’s killers head on – instead, she must exact her revenge on the Angels vicariously through Shinji, Asuka, and Rei. But in this one moment, framed in such a way that disturbs our sense of magnitude, Misato is forced into lethal proximity with what she hates the most and stares it down anyway. She doesn’t run like the others. Notice that grip on her cross – subconsciously protecting her father’s memory, his only essence, over her own life. In the tradition of ars moriendi, to die a good death is to die as you’ve lived: face death with resolution and maintain your deeply held convictions till the end. Shinji comes swooping in to fend off The End at the very last second, but it’s a good reminder that for Misato, killing Angels isn’t about saving lives or protecting the world - it’s personal. Not so noble – Evangelion being the kind of show that it is – but it is compelling.
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.
’ sᴀᴠᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ, ᴅᴀʀʟɪɴɢ ʟᴏᴠᴇ, ғʀᴏᴍ ᴍʏ ᴋɪɴɢᴅᴏᴍ. ’
CROSSES IN ANTARCTICA. ( listen )
words unspoken, exchanged between a stranded daughter and her estranged father’s ghost on the night of the second apocalypse. dark, lonely melodies as misato floats out to sea. katsuragi family centric mired with a heavy industrial influence.
air conditioning; neon genesis evangelion; soryu asuka langley+katsuragi misato; general, t, 3.5k.
Familiarity breeds contempt. And Asuka has known Katsuragi Misato for a long, long time.
it crushes my spirit that the adults of evangelion aren’t talked about more. especially misato; she’s intended to be the secondary protagonist yet is talked of as though she were a supporting character, a sidekick, or a deuteragonist - forever doomed to be a talking point to the extent that her actions motivate shinji’s personal growth
whatever it is that makes evangelion good, misato, ritsuko, kaji, yui, fuyutsuki, and gendo are just as emblematic as the pilot kids. all of these characters have compelling and interesting stories of their own. but there’s nary a whisper when the adults get misinterpreted among casual and serious fans alike; the show goes to great lengths to debunk a lot of popular fandom interpretations that persist to this day (for example, think about how many people assume misato is a slut with a high “body count” when the show explicitly mentions her only having been with one man)
if you’re watching nge, focus on the eva adults! their backstories, their motivations, the parts of themselves they keep hidden or concealed. there’s plenty to learn and love by watching misato, ritsuko, and kaji’s old friendship that you can’t get by watching shinji, asuka, and rei interact with each other. you’re missing out, otherwise
