so, shouwa genroku rakugo shinjuu - if like me you were impressed with the evangelion seiyuus and the compelling performance they brought to their roles, rakugo features a whopping 5 members of the evangelion cast - in fact i don’t think i’ve seen an anime feature so many evangelion seiyuus together. what’s more, the entire main cast is made up entirely of evangelion seiyuu:

kikuhiko by akira ishida (kaworu), sukeroku by koichi yamadera (kaji), miyokichi by megumi hayashibara (rei and yui and pen pen), and yotaro by seki tomokazu (toji)

outstanding cast aside, the show is incredible, embroiling itself with showa-era history, storytelling, and adult drama involving a salient gay romance between two rakugo performers. watch it!

in order to centralize my unrefined NGE-related thots

formschon:

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. 

[lol what next…]

maggisystem:

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.

laryna6:

harunosakurasmoved-deactivated2:

Sadly, we can’t coexist…even though we are fundamentally the same creatures.

According to one of the video games (the one that, according to Anno, they used to cover backstory and other stuff that didn’t fit into even the infodump ending movies), this part of what Kaji dug up isn’t true.

Just more SEELE lies (what they fed to the rank and file involved in setting off Second Impact?) so they could get away with their instrumentality plan, and Kaworu and Rei would have known that & remembered their agreement that the planet would be handed over to Lilith and her children if it weren’t for the fact S2 engines damage memory (deliberately).

Meaning that after Yui flew away from the devastated Earth in an Eva, as a god, playing with her new power is going to mindwipe her. Poetic justice FTW.

Still, some lingering sense that he’d agreed that the Lilim had the right to Earth, even though this was supposed to be his planet, might have been another reason Kaworu refused to wipe us out and take it for himself (besides the fact that it’s obvious to any decent person that the genocide of billions to make way for another race, superior or not, is NOT OKAY).

Say that someone tells you that you’re Case Zero of a zombie virus. You might not want to eat brains now, but before it’s going to destroy your brains and personality and what’s left will go out and bite people and it’s going to be even worse than World War Z: Third Impact = all humans die instantly. 

Either way, you’re dead. The only question is whether or not you want to die as yourself, and save the world in the process, or be replaced by a shambling killer, a mockery of what you used to be. 

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 

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

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

Official Charlie Brown x Evangelion parody strips distributed by Gainax with the release of Neon Genesis Evangelion on VHS.

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.  

More rare scenes from Neon Genesis Evangelion: Second Impression, a 1997 Sega Saturn videogame distributed in Japan.