i’ve mentioned this a little before too — while i’m rewatching this time around, i keep noting times where women and girls respond to moments of crisis and decide to assume responsibility. a few episodes in particular i just rewatched, 7 through 9, repeat this pattern pretty strongly.
there’s the corporate dinner to showcase the launch of jet alone, where we watch ritsuko press the company executive about the wide-reaching dangers of nuclear power, as well as assert her own knowledge and come up against public humiliation. later on, during the display of jet alone taking its first steps, we watch as the robot glitches. i’m gonna bring in my favorite analysis of glitch here: “a singular dysfunctional event that allows insight beyond the customary, omnipresent and alien computer aesthetics.” olga goriunova and alexei shulgin describe the glitch as an event — “a mess that is a moment“ — that users receive as unexpected, that may or may not come from a program error.
for jet alone, the program runs just as expected, exactly as told, but quickly its power begins to expand further that of the executive as well as any staffman there. though control of the program extends beyond the control of any personnel present, the robot runs exactly as it should be. like ritsuko reports after observing from the sidelines what we later learn is an orchestrated crisis unfold, “everything was done according to the plan.” and like a glitch does, the moment brings forth the structure of the systems from which it came. we view a montage of phone calls of men deferring responsibility, requiring approval — bureaucracy functioning at its finest as a procedural structure that splinters accountability and sanctions death.
we watch misato get fed up and take on the responsibility of shutting down the robot herself, and i read her stepping up as responding to the moral failure of the bureaucratic process by acting on what she describes as a moral imperative. she tells shinji, “i’ve got to give it my best shot, you know? my conscience won’t let me do otherwise.“
in asuka’s debut, we watch men assert dominance not through administrative processes, but through claiming sovereignty over the sea. when misato requests access to a power socket on deck, the captain states, “we’re in charge of anything on the sea. follow orders without question.“ even in a situation of almost certain death for both others and himself, the captain refuses to hand authority to misato and, by extension, nerv. misato says it best: “who gives a damn about your procedures?! this is an emergency!” here, asuka comes in and decides to take the opportunity to make her debut even grander, disregarding any potential pushback from the captain or even misato. here, we watch a girl decide to bypass any official authorities and clearance and maximize the moment as hers.
going back to the morning of the corporate showcase, we return to misato’s apartment to shinji washing dishes, then turn his head timidly and ask misato if she’s really gonna make his parent-teacher conference. she replies, “of course!” followed by, “don’t worry about that. it’s my responsibility.” he blinks back — “responsibility?”
in this moment, i took him as both receiving misato’s sense of responsibility as negating any care for him and, like many times in the series, grappling with where he fits in matrices of accountability to others, misogyny, and boyhood. it turns out, his training into manhood is running successfully too. in response to asuka voicing frustration about getting ordered to share her first battle in japan with shinji, shinji replies in what i heard as a pretty mellow and chipper tone: “that’s okay! that’s just procedures. you know!” in line with ongoing processes of inducting and training shinji into manhood throughout the series, the approaches he takes in interacting with others morphs to both contort and fit into forces of manhood that in turn shape him. though not (yet) the condescension and reverence for bureaucracy of the company executive, nor (yet) the blunt demands of the fleet captain, shinji, who always does as he’s ordered, attempts to placate a determined asuka, severing possibilities for her intervention by reminding her of and therefore upholding the limitations of their world. that’s just procedure (which is actually, really, misato’s, a person’s decision, as with any procedure and bureaucratic process)!
during this rewatch, i’ve noticed moments where i consider how women and girls respond to the violences of manhood, authority, and administrative forms of governance. i assume in evangelion and in the world around me a constant state of emergency in which accountability becomes dispersed, and women and girls bear the consequences. i take that note as a push to all together carry our responsibilities — to ourselves and each other.
The child, in NGE, is positioned towards the border of a kind of humanity, which allows its intimacy with its mecha, a quasi-human materialization of his or her mother’s soul. If we conjure the stereotypical figure attached to what Sylvia Winter has called “monohumanist Man,” we see quickly that he is a tall, muscular, European man, not unlike that depicted in Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Specifying this generality further, we envision his full control of language, bodily ability and a divide between self-and-other. Sexualized and slimmed out, as in many anime depicting the young teenage age group, NGE’s children are visually marked as other to this imagery, a point that is dramatized whenever we see one of the characters next to one of the humanoid robots. In dominant ideology, the child is positioned on the way towards this position, but not yet with full access to its promises.
In Lacan’s psychoanalysis, the child does not fully suffer the “human condition,” insofar as he has not fully fallen into language, nor fully coordinated his body in aggressive relation to the mirror’s image and the other. Positioned on the road to the human but not yet at its high peak, the child also stands near the border of a distinction between bios and zoe, the Greek terms for life Giorgio Agamben developed as the qualified life of the citizen on one hand, and the natural life and life processes categorized as outside of political on the other. Weaponized in service of political maneuvers, yet with no ability to advocate for themselves politically, children in NGE contrast Agamben’s figure of the homo sacer, or the man who can be killed by anyone but not sacrificed. In their paradoxically protected status, Shinji and Asuka cannot necessarily be killed by anyone, and are irreplaceable, but they are positioned as sacrificial in the broader political machinations of Gendo, NERV and Seele; Rei similarly cannot be killed by anyone, but her life is produced in the space of the show as reproducible and fungible, and thus not her life at all. As numerous moments in the show demonstrate, because of her life’s artificiality, she is also not ideally suited to operate the EVAs, in a sense because she shares too much in common with them, on the level of existence. This fact is additionally what produces the final failure of the adult-driven, world-ending project. In thinking about the shows discontinuous borrowing from Christian mythology, then, Asuka and Shinji are conceived of as chosen forms of life, not unlike agnus dei, Christ-like figures or Lambs of God. While Asuka’s body cannot fulfill this holy program due to a mental breakdown and subsequent battle defeat (though she is pierced with the Lance of Longinus, like Jesus…), Shinji’s body and the EVA he operates ultimately do come to the precipice of this sacrificial glorification, where he are elevated above the earth on a glowing crucifix. (The swift disjuncture between Asuka and Shinji’s storylines and mental states towards the end of the TV series ultimately comes down to gender, as yet another factor that determines the child’s proximity to or distance from capital-m Man).
In other words, NERV’s project requires human blood, but of a specific kind. The notion of the cyborg might also be said to need the same, since the hybridity on which it rests must first conceive as its constituent parts as fundamentally distinct prior to their glorified combination. This is intimated by the genesis of the Eva’s themselves, which are driven by “engines” containing the souls of the pilots mothers, extracted once their bodies disintegrate into the fluid called LCL. (As exemplified in the infamous scene where Unit-01, motored by Shinji’s mother’s soul, goes berserk, mothers are also depicted as short of the status of Man). While it’s hard to call NGE a critique of anything, it’s clear that its position on the possibility of a post-human or cyborg future is ambivalent at best. The result of the attempt, driven by adults, is continual death, precarity and, ultimately, desolation. The show seems to meditate on how children fare in actually any imagination of the future, and the ways in which they are violently instrumentalized to bring about such futurity.
whenever people pit one eva character against another, call one a villain to name another the victim, blame one to justify the other, cheer as their favored one lunges to strangle his supposed abuser (you know what i’m talking about), i have to wonder if they skipped through this entire scene:
REI: You never understood anything. SHINJI: I thought this was supposed to be a world without pain and uncertainty. REI: That’s because you thought everyone else felt the same as you do. SHINJI: You betrayed me! You betrayed my feelings! REI: You misunderstood from the very beginning. You just believed what you wanted to believe.
look, anno is often vague and ambiguous but not in this case. it’s all there written out for you.
see, shinji has lived in a closed world even before the instrumentality lets him turn that into a physical reality. his is a world where only his views and his feelings are valid, with others reduced to paper cutouts, not allowed to be as complex, as flawed, as unsure, as hurt as he is. only when forced by the dissolution of the barriers between souls does he see that others are just as real, and even then he rages against the revelation and tries to exonerate himself: “how can I ever understand you if you won’t say anything? you never talk to me, but you expect me to understand you! that’s impossible!”
to which rei replies: “did you even try, ikari?” so, are you trying?
eva isn’t the kind of show where you can conveniently place yourself in the protagonist’s shoes and have the moral of the story fed to you in predigested form. shinji is an unreliable narrator at best, and so are all the other characters. to varying degrees, they all failed to understand, they all believed only what they wanted to believe, and that’s precisely the point. in carl jung’s words: “people will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.” but face their own souls they must once instrumentality begins. suddenly, the person next to you is as real to you as you are to yourself, their suffering no longer something you can turn away from, and that’s frightening, isn’t it? because suddenly the villains become the victim, the victim becomes the villain. suddenly you’re confronted with the reality that your interpretation of your own experiences could be entirely wrong (cue shinji’s “i thought this was supposed to be a world without pain and uncertainty”)
so the next time you watch eva, question each character’s intention, especially your favorite ones, the ones you identify with. don’t let them get away with believing they’re right. don’t allow them the luxury of always saying the truth about themselves or others. don’t allow them, and yourself, the luxury of writing off the unpleasant parts. don’t deceive yourself. question everything. after all, to give you the second part of jung’s comment: “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
that, imo, is the greatest thing that eva has made me do.
Asuka, I want you to stay here. In that place inside my heart, be safe and at your own pace. And I’ll do the keeping up and grow up right alongside you. You’re thrown and thrown against that wall - against either wall - but the stronger it seems, the more weapons will come into your hand. You’re in training for your life every day that you live. And you will learn to break through.
I don’t want to share my pain with you, or yours with me. I want that we should share our happiness instead, and grow closer that way. You see, life isn’t one exam, one time that determines everything. Don’t try and think everything all the way through to the end. Decide you’ll try and learn instead.
They say you have to climb mountains and swim oceans. No. You don’t have to do it that way, either. You can learn to eat mountains and drink oceans. You don’t have to merely overcome an obstacle. You can savor it and become a person of taste. Life is fun, Asuka - and you don’t have to rely on chance that it should happen that way; instead you can make it so.
—
Asuka’s seiyuu Yuko Miyamura, “A Place in the Heart for Asuka”
Miyamura’s invested her all into portraying Asuka despite the physical abuse she’s endured at the hands of Hideaki Anno and Megumi Ogata.
it’s not even the least bit surprising that NERV has data on the pilots apoptosis pattern, or literally the mechanism by which their cells are programmed to die
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
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.
