This is a slightly cleaned up version of some notes I wrote in 2011 and 2012 when I watched Eva again for the first time in almost ten years. Since I have 32 pages of notes, coming to around 24,000 words, I'm splitting them up into three parts. Part I will cover the first half or so of the TV series. Part II will cover the second half. Part III will cover End of Evangelion.
January 29th, 2011: Episodes 1–5
The original 1996 series Neon Genesis Evangelion was one of the first anime I ever watched; along with Urusei Yatsura, it was the first anime I ever saw that was subtitled and not censored or Americanized in any way. It's safe to say that I wouldn't be the fan I am today if I hadn't seen it.
I've talked about Eva in some other essays, and even described how I was lured into tsundere by Asuka Langley Soryu. I've kicked it around, blamed it for Betterman's existence, wondered how they keep selling merchandise and why they keep making retreads, but it's been almost ten years since I actually watched Eva. I was only fourteen the last time I watched Eva, and I liked it mostly because it just seemed so stylish: an animated show full of blood, sex, swearing, nudity, with a plot so confusing I couldn't even begin to understand it. Eva had and, I suppose, still has a certain mystique around it that tends to overwhelm its actual qualities as a show. I remember getting all worked up (in all sorts of ways) over nudity like that in the opening that isn't even a tenth as revealing as what we see in every single episode of To-Love-Ru.
I figured I'd better watch Eva again so I could decide once and for all whether it was as good as I thought it was back then or just all gimmicks and animated breasts. I was also curious how much of what I remembered came from the actual show and how much came from the exhaustingly long Garden of Eva fanfic that spent a bunch of time reading through as a teenager. With the benefit of ten years of maturing and hindsight, I still like Eva, but for completely different reasons than I did back then.
The first few episodes weren't where it was really weird. They weren't the divisive ones that made people argue over What It All Means. But they were the ones that drew people into the show. And the show may not have been as weird as it later got at this point, but it took ten years of watching anime to realize that from the get-go, it was pretty damned weird. The show opens with Tokyo-3 menaced by a mysterious creature and everyone running for cover. Shinji Ikari, our hero, came to the city at his father's beckoning, knowing nothing except that he's supposed to meet an attractive woman named Misato Katsuragi, who sent him a photo of herself in a halter top kneeling on the hood of her car, with an arrow pointing to her cleavage. Misato finds him and they narrowly escape death as gun batteries and bombers throw everything they have at the alien creature. She brings him to the Geofront, the headquarters of his father's organization, Nerv, where Shinji is coerced into piloting his father's project, the Evangelion, a weapon system designed to fight the Angels.
Part of what makes Eva so interesting is that it never explains anything if it can get away with dropping vague hints that won't really make sense until ten years after you watch the show for the first time. The first episode tells you absolutely nothing about the Eva, the Angel, Nerv, or the characters. The second episode does the same. The third episode continues this trend. By Episode 4 we've received enough hints to discover a little about the characters, but it’s hard to make them amount to anything until you’ve already seen the entire series, read a bunch of stuff about it, and then waited for ten years and watched it again. For instance, when I was younger, I never questioned why Misato was always sexually teasing Shinji or why she more or less forced him to live with her. Now, after just three episodes, all the hints the writers dropped for the viewer to piece together twenty episodes later point to an answer. It's because she's incredibly lonely. During their first dinner together, Misato comments that it's nice to have someone else to eat with. She seems to have sensed that Shinji was a lonely person (perhaps she just extrapolated from the fact that he has a deadbeat father and no mother) and decided they could help each other.
As for Shinji, I kicked myself for being too stupid back then to think even a little about how abnormal he is as a hero. Maybe it's because I'm a little like Shinji myself, so it didn't seem so odd. He’s totally different from the heroes of Western works I knew of at the time I watched Eva—your Lion-Os, your Supermans, even your Spidermans and Batmans. And he's also nothing like the hero of any other anime I've ever seen, even the many many anime made in Evangelion’s wake that tried to copy its style of storytelling. He's more like the antihero of some Kurt Vonnegut satire, or the pathetic, pathological protagonist of an Orwell novel. The first episode sort of makes it look like Shinji agreed to pilot the Eva because he saw Rei brought out in bandages to be stuck in the entry plug and sent out; he does make a dive to save her when some girders fall. But his long hesitation before agreeing suggests that at the very least he had doubts about whether it was worth it to go in Rei's place. In his first battle, Shinji is completely useless. The series makes the odd, yet effective, storytelling choice of ending the first episode just before the battle, then starting the second episode after the battle, only later backtracking to show what happened. This takes emphasis off the battle itself, making it seem like just an afterthought to the trauma that Shinji suffered in it. Shinji can barely move the Eva, and only defeats the Angel because the Eva goes berserk and does it for him.
Later, in his second battle during Episode 3, he is nearly as useless, and ends up going berserk himself, disobeying orders to retreat and charging in with a knife, narrowly killing the Angel before running out of power, then breaking down into tears afterward. After this battle, he and Misato have a conversation where Shinji is confused about why Misato isn't satisfied, since they defeated the Angel. Misato says if he doesn't change his attitude, the Eva will kill him, and Shinji replies that he doesn't care if he dies. In the original Japanese, Shinji seemed emotionally dead during this scene, making it unnerving and strange. In the dub (which is what I watched back in the day), he just sounds like a sarcastic teenager. After this he runs away from home and tries to quit piloting, but ends up coming back. It's hard to tell why he comes back, but his new friendship with Toji Suzuhara and Kensuke Aida seems to have something to do with it, and Misato as well.
Episode 5 is where we learn a little about Rei. Rei was always a strange character; she almost wasn't there most of the time, and her relationship with Shinji's father was odd. The show sometimes made out that she had a thing for Shinji, which fanfic and doujin writers took and ran with, but more often she seemed to totally ignore his existence. The only time she showed any emotion toward him at all in the series up to this point was when she slapped him for saying something bad about his father (which seems pretty unreasonable, since his father treats him like crap). Even when he falls on top of her, his hand on her naked breast, she just lays there until finally asking in her usual emotionless voice if he'll please get up. That scene is also another example of the way Eva twisted and subverted various anime cliches; even before Love Hina, it was pretty common for characters to have fits of extreme clumsiness and fall all over each other, usually leading to the female character getting mad and punching the male character. (Love Hina just pushed it over 9000.) Rei, though, shows no emotion at all. She doesn't get angry, and she doesn't get embarrassed, and she doesn't seem pleased; she feels as little emotion as she does sitting by the poolside at school.
Unlike the similar scenes with Asuka later on, the show seems to want you to find this scene awkward. It uses one of the show’s cinematographic trademarks: the entire scene is eerily still and silent, with no background music. The characters maintain a static pose for a long time, while we see multiple angles of that single pose. This means Shinji is laying on top of a naked Rei, his hand on her breast, for a solid minute or so, neither of them saying anything, while we view the scene from above, from the side, and from over Shinji’s shoulder, before Rei finally asks him tonelessly to get off and Shinji awkwardly scrambles to his feet. The whole thing is deeply unsettling, unlike the usual comedic tone a scene like this would have in other shows, or even at other times in Eva, and it only gets more unsettling as we learn more about who Rei is. In later episodes, Shinji and Rei do develop a kind of friendship, but the idea of a romance between them never goes too much further than this one extremely awkward scene.
Wednesday, July 4th, 2012: Episodes 6–10
Episode 6 concludes the two-parter begun in Episode 5 and does start to build up the friendship between Shinji and Rei. When Shinji is worried about dying, Rei tells him that he doesn't need to worry because she will protect him. After the battle, when Rei takes a huge blast to protect him, Shinji jumps out of his Eva and pries open her entry plug, just as his father did earlier. When he finds her inside, he tells her not to say "Sayonara" before leaving for a battle because it's too sad. When Rei says she doesn't know what to do at times like this, Shinji tells her to smile, and she does, actually looking rather cute.
Episode 7 is the first episode to give a hint to the shady nature of Nerv. It involves a privately-financed giant robot which runs on a nuclear reactor, made to compete with Eva as a way to fight the Angels. Evidently Gendou and Seele thought it was a threat to their schemes, because they sabotage its program, making it run berserk and walk towards a major city while edging toward nuclear meltdown. Misato, who wasn't in on this plot, summons Shinji and Unit 1 and has them stick her inside the thing so she can try to deactivate it, but she discovers the sabotage when the password given to her by the company executive doesn't work. This leads later on to Misato discovering the conspiracy inside Nerv.
In Episode 8, Asuka first appears, and this was really the moment I was waiting for, because Asuka was always my favorite character and I wanted to know if that was because she was a good character or because her boobs are big. She is very good-looking, but it's hard to say at this point whether she's really a good character. I had forgotten what a pain in the ass she was, and I never noticed how childish she is, always trying to one-up Shinji and Rei in stupid ways. Shinji reacts about like most people would; he alternates between angry retaliation and exasperated resignation. He doesn't seem to really even notice how good-looking she is until Episode 9, when the two of them are required to spend all their time together in a state of undress so they can sync up and fight an Angel that can split into two parts.
On the bright side, Asuka starts to get a little cuter in Episode 10, admitting to Shinji that she failed her exams because can't read kanji very well and getting more playful and less cantankerous. She also has a scene at the very end with Misato where she asks if Misato knows about her past; Misato replies that she does and says it's better to just let the past be the past. Not only did it do a good job of showing Asuka more vulnerable, it also showed a relationship between Asuka and Misato that I didn't remember. They seemed to know each other before Episode 8, and this relationship made it more believable that Asuka would move into Misato's house and make herself right at home as she does. I also liked this scene because it was a return to the quiet moments I appreciated on the first disc. A lot of the second disc was loud comedy scenes, with only infrequent quiet scenes. While some of the comedy in the early parts of Eva is still funny, a lot of it hasn’t aged that well and feels too broad and lowbrow compared to newer stuff.
I've seen these episodes several hundred times dubbed (I used to own just this disc, and watched it over and over again), and it's hard to get the dub voices out of my head because I still remember a good number of the lines. That's unfortunate, because the dub really wasn't very good. The writing wasn't terrible, but the acting was about average for dubs at the time, which was even worse than dubs now. The subtitled version lifts a lot of the lines straight out of the dub script, which doesn’t help me forget about the dub any better.
In particular, Shinji and Asuka are much better in Japanese; Spike Spencer's Shinji sounded whiny, and he never seemed to find Megumi Ogata’s creepily dead, emotionless tone that made for some of the best-acted scenes in the first round of episodes. His interpretation of the character was really more comedic than tragic, and when he did do drama, it usually sounded too whiny and too much like a defiant teenager instead of the damaged person that Shinji is supposed to be. Tiffany Grant has never impressed me as an actress, and her German accent is pretty much on the level of Peter Sellers’s in Dr. Strangelove. She’s also pretty shrill, which I guess fits Asuka's personality in some ways, but it doesn't go away when it should. Yuko Miyamura manages to make Asuka shrill when she should be and cute when she should be. (To be fair, Yuko Miyamura’s German accent is also terrible; it takes all of her energy just to leave out the extra vowels.)
Sunday, September 2nd, 2012: Episodes 11–12
Now that we've gone past Episode 10, we're into the run of episodes that I've only seen once—or never, in the case of Episodes 23 and 24. Episode 11 is a monster of the week episode like the previous few were, but it does include one worthwhile scene. Just on the cusp of a massive power failure caused by the enemies of Nerv within the government and elsewhere, Shinji calls Gendou to ask him to attend a career meeting with Shinji's teacher. Gendou gets angry and tells Shinji not to call anymore with anything like that and that he's delegated all such duties to Misato. Poor Shinji has been getting jerked around by his father his entire life, and it's even worse, if anything, now that he works under Gendou.
Episode 12 was also a monster of the week, but it began to include some deeper characterization and was overall probably the best one since Episode 4. (I used to love Episode 9, and I still think it's a good plot and a creative battle scene, but it doesn't rate as high on 24-year-old me's ratings scale as it did on 14-year-old me's ratings scale.) Episode 12 opens with an incredibly animated scene of destruction that is impressive in its art and impact even today. We see Misato's father struggling to carry her across an icy wasteland during Second Impact, and finally managing to get her into one of the last escape pods left undamaged before dying. Then we see Misato in the present day dressing and catch sight of a long scar across her chest, presumably left over from a wound that happened during that incident.
In the next scene, Touji and Kensuke come over to shelter from the rain and notice that Misato has been promoted to major, which Shinji and Asuka had completely missed. The Eva pilots attend a synchronization test, where it turns out that Shinji's synchronization level has improved a lot in a short period of time and he's coming up on Asuka's rate. Ritsuko praises him, but Shinji isn't happy (as Misato told Ritsuko during the test) and Asuka gets mad and leaves. As Misato drives him home, Shinji asks her how she feels about her promotion and Misato says she isn't very happy about it. Shinji admits he doesn't feel very happy when he gets praised for piloting the Eva and says it's because Asuka gets mad at him. He and Misato talk a little more on this theme during a party that Kensuke puts together to celebrate Misato's promotion. Shinji ends up asking Misato why she joined Nerv, but we don't see her answer until later on.
As usual, an Angel appears. In the lift, going up to their Evas for battle, Shinji asks Asuka why she pilots the Eva and Asuka says it's to show off her talents to everyone. She asks him why he pilots it and Shinji says he doesn't know. Shinji flashes back to Misato's response to his question about why she joined Nerv. She tells him that her father was devoted to his research and ignored his family, much like Shinji's father; her mother had divorced him by the time Second Impact came around, and Misato felt he had gotten what he deserved. When he saved her from Second Impact, she became confused because her feelings about him were so mixed up, and she joined Nerv because she felt that she wanted to destroy all the Angels who caused Second Impact so she could stop thinking about her father.
After the battle, Misato contacts Gendou, who is at the South Pole (now the Dead Sea, a wasteland of purple water with nothing alive in it) to report on the battle. Gendou actually praises Shinji for his work piloting during the battle, telling him he did a good job, and Shinji admits that he pilots the Eva because he wants to hear his father's words of praise. Asuka thinks it's a stupid reason (probably because she has her own problems with family), but Misato seems to understand.
I really liked the main character arc of this episode, about Misato and her father and how their relationship parallels Shinji's relationship with his father. Not only was it well written, it also gave us a little more insight into Misato's loneliness and the sympathy she feels for Shinji that was first hinted at in Episode 2 when she remarked how nice it was to eat with another person. In this episode and Episode 11, Rei was in the background, but she made her presence felt, and while I still don't understand the unbridled love for her, I think she's a pretty good character after all. I'm still not seeing the Shinji x Rei pairing, though.
Asuka is more annoying and childish than I remembered, declaring herself "team leader" when the three pilots have to crawl down into the Geofront in Episode 11, naming Rei "Miss Perfect" sarcastically because of Rei's super clone abilities, and getting annoyed at Rei for not respecting her authority as "team leader". But she does get one good moment in Episode 12. Misato promised the pilots a steak dinner after the battle; Shinji and Asuka pretend to be excited, but apparently steak is passe to the youth of 2015 and Asuka starts plotting which expensive restaurant she wants to go to. She wants Rei to come as well (Rei wouldn't come to Misato's promotion party), but Rei dislikes meat and doesn't want steak. After the battle, the three pilots and Misato are on a train headed to Asuka's chosen restaurant and Misato tells them that she can even afford a full course meal, while thinking that her bank account is in terrible shape now; the restaurant turns out to be a ramen cart, which Asuka chose because she knew the state of Misato's finances and because Rei had agreed to come and eat ramen. I liked seeing Asuka do something nice. It made me feel better about having her as my favorite character. I remembered her being abrasive and arrogant, but I just didn't remember her being so damn childish; since I was basically a child myself at the time, I guess it was too hard to see it.
September 5th, 2012: Episode 13
Episode 13 focuses on Ritsuko and begins to hint at the important role her mother, Naoko Akagi, played in the founding of Nerv. During a test of naked bonding with the Evas (designed solely for fan service, I assume, but you can't really see anything so it's a bit disappointing), something goes wrong and an Angel manages to infiltrate Nerv headquarters. The Angel is some sort of microorganism that can evolve to try and reach a perfect state. It takes up residence inside the Magi, the three supercomputers that control Nerv headquarters, and also secretly the government of Japan, as revealed in the last episode. (I wonder if they can play Jeopardy.)
It immediately takes over Melchior and takes over Balthasar partway before Ritsuko comes up with something to halt its progress for two hours. Misato wants to just blow up the Magi and get rid of it, but Ritsuko refuses and comes up with a plan to use Caspar, the third Magi, to accelerate the Angel's evolution, which will somehow make it die. (They made it sound like this was a well-known rule of evolutionary biology, but it doesn't make any sense to me. Of course, my expertise in evolutionary biology is limited to Discovery Channel specials.) Ritsuko crawls inside the computer and accesses its brain directly—like the Evas, the Magi use biological components, so it has actual grey matter inside a protective metal sphere, which Ritsuko attaches electrodes to in order to program it directly. It must use some kind of weird biological assembly language. Ritsuko comments that like the Evas, the Magi have an operating system that allows a person's brain patterns to be downloaded to the computer to create an artificial intelligence based on a living person. After defeating the Angel, she tells Misato that each of the Magi houses one of three aspects of her mother's personality: her mother as a scientist, her mother as a mother, and her mother as a woman. Ritsuko says that she greatly respected her mother as a scientist, and since she will never be a mother, it's difficult to understand her as a mother, but she hates her mother as a woman. She also comments that Caspar is the one that houses her mother as a woman and that it's very like her mother to remain a woman to the end.
Even the first time I saw this episode back in 1999, I thought it was a unique and creative twist on the formula, after several episodes of robots fighting giant monsters. The Angel is kind of a pushover, but it was a good way to bring Ritsuko into the spotlight and start setting up her role later on, and it was also a good way to show that Angels can take any form and don't have to be giant monsters, which gets us ready for Kaworu later on. I also got to see some of that nice, old-fashioned anime science fiction scenery where everything seems to be built from masses of twisting pipe and full of dark tunnels and crawlspaces. I had forgotten a lot of the plot from this episode, but I remembered the visual appearance of the inside of Caspar, with its pipes and tubes and the Post-It notes that Naoko stuck everywhere to remind her how everything fit together. Now I'm actually glad that Eva is moving out of the more lighthearted phase and into the darker phase of the story. I never thought that would be the case; when I was younger, I always preferred the lighthearted parts, though I thought the dark parts came in handy for bragging about how mature and deep the show was. Of course, I didn't really understand the impact of half the things in the dark part, but perhaps I am now sufficiently advanced to appreciate the real quality of Eva.
Next up is the annoying review episode that every show used to have. Thank goodness no one does that anymore! (Monogatari Second Season? There was no review episode there. It did have this annoying habit of going on hiatus every few weeks...) Its only value seems to be that it reveals the names of the Angels; some fans seem to know them all off the tops of their heads, but I can never remember them and always just go "the one with the laser tentacles" or "the one that split in two" or "the one from Episode 8".
Friday, September 7th, 2012: Episodes 14–15
Episode 14 was the review episode, "Weaving a Story". The first half is a review of the Angels up to this point, giving their names, how they attacked, and how they were killed. There are also some chilling excerpts from the personal diaries of Shinji's classmates Touji Suzuhara and Hikari Horaki that shed some light on just how much suffering the constant Angel battles wreak on the normal people of Tokyo 3, with the constant evacuations and the casualties, like Touji's sister, whose existence is covered up by Nerv.
The second half of the episode is more darkness and plotting by Gendou with and against Seele, a shadowy organization that wishes to bring the Human Instrumentality Project to completion. Gendou denies that the incident in Episode 13 ever happened, and the Seele council comments that this would have completed the Human Instrumentality Project on much too early a schedule.
Since I have seen the end and have some idea of what the Human Instrumentality Project actually is—a plan to destroy the world in a Third Impact and use the power of the human psyche, specifically Shinji's psyche, to remake it—a number of questions occurred to me at this point about Gendou's plan to make Shinji the driver of Human Instrumentality. The most obvious one is that, as we see throughout the series, Shinji's psyche is not terribly stable. Most of this is Gendou's fault. Given that the world can probably be better remade by a happy, stable child than by one who needs psych meds and counseling, why didn't Gendou take some action to make Shinji into a better instrument for his purposes? But then, I don't remember from the final episodes if what ends up happening is even what Gendou intended to bring about; maybe Shinji becomes the driver only by mistake, and the driver was supposed to be Gendou himself (at least in End of Eva, this was the case). It does seem that it was set up from the beginning to be Shinji, though; Gendou went so far as to download his own wife into Unit 01 so that Shinji could use it more effectively. I am interested to see how much of what I remember about later events was actually misapprehensions and misinterpretations.
The episode ends with Rei in Unit 00, taking a large lance (The Lance of Longinus) down a hallway within the deepest bowels of Nerv.
Episode 15 was another interesting episode, like Episode 12, both for character development and for plot development. We see at the beginning that Kaji is meeting an informant in an abandoned warehouse in Kyoto, trying to dig up dirt on Nerv, Seele, and the Marduk Institute, a mysterious organization with 108 front corporations, 107 of which are dummies. It turns out that Kaji has been a double agent for the government the whole time, and has been passing them information about what goes on at Nerv.
Hikari sets up Asuka on a date with a distant acquaintance, while Misato has a friend's wedding to attend and Shinji is set to spend the anniversary of his mother's death visiting her grave with his father. He tries asking Rei for advice about talking to his father, but she doesn't have anything useful. Shinji is nervous about spending time with his father; as usual, Gendou speaks as little and as curtly as possible, but he tells Shinji that he's locked up all his memories of Yui inside him and that it doesn't matter that there's no body in her grave and no pictures of her. A helicopter, in which Rei is riding, comes and picks him up. As he leaves, Shinji says that it was good spending time with him, and Gendou's response is "Sou ka.", which is tantamount to saying "Whatever."
Shinji is sitting in the kitchen and playing the cello when Asuka comes home; Asuka claps for his performance and actually compliments him, saying she's sort of impressed. Shinji says he's really not very good since he's been practicing since five and can only play that well. It's hard to tell what interpretation the viewers are supposed to get from that. When he's playing, it sounds good, but in anime, when a character sings, a twenty-piece orchestra and a twelve-person choir will swell up behind that person even in the middle of the forest. Shinji has no self-esteem to speak of, so maybe he only thinks it's terrible; Asuka is hardly a music critic, but we know she's hard to impress and not inclined to give away compliments for free. In any case, I liked seeing Asuka be nice. When Shinji says he thought she'd be back later from her date, Asuka says that she ran away from her date when he was waiting in line for the roller coaster because he was boring. Earlier in the episode, Asuka was trying to get Kaji to take her out for the weekend, but I think it's interesting that she'd rather sit at home with Shinji than be out getting free food and amusement park rides with some guy, even if he's boring.
Misato ends up walking home drunk with Kaji from the wedding's after-party after she vomits in the alley behind the bar. She tells Kaji that she made up a fictional other man to get out of her relationship with him back when they were in college, because she realized that he was just like her father, and now she's realized she went to Nerv with the same purpose of running from her father's memory. She admits she's no better than Shinji, who she earlier told that he couldn't keep running away when he seemed afraid of spending time with his father.
Shinji and Asuka are sitting at home waiting for Misato to return after receiving a call from Kaji, when Asuka randomly asks if Shinji wants to kiss her. When he asks why, she says it's because she's bored. She ends up plugging his nose and half-suffocating him as they kiss, then running into the bathroom and washing her mouth out.
I've seen tons of interpretations of this scene, including one from the Rei-fans and my fourteen-year-old self that Asuka was genuinely bored and is such a terrible person that she amuses herself by sexually teasing Shinji just because he happens to be there. (Actually, my fourteen-year-old self didn't think that was terrible, but rather that it was great, and was exactly how sexy redheads behaved the world over.) But I don't buy it anymore. Asuka has no use for boys; she despises Touji and Kensuke and was so bored with her date that she just ran off. The only male she likes is Kaji, and in the scene following this, when he brings back Misato, Asuka smells Misato's perfume on him and seems to recapitulate his utter lack of interest in her at all times and begin to realize she doesn't have a chance there. The only thing in her life that she cares about other than Kaji is being an Eva pilot. Since Rei is so uncommunicative, Shinji is not just the only boy, but the only person in the world that can share that with her. At first she didn't seem to care, but it seems that she's begun to respect Shinji's piloting skills. Shinji rescued her from the volcano in Episode 10, and in return Asuka took the most dangerous part of the tactic in Episode 11, saying she hated owing him. She actually admitted that Shinji had helped her. In Episode 12, Shinji held off the Angel while Rei and Asuka killed it; he was the one who found the strike zone and managed to keep the Angel from crashing into the earth until the others could arrive. Even Gendou complimented him for that. Even Episode 9, when Asuka and Shinji fought in synch, may have left an impact on Asuka. There was also the harmonics test in Episode 12, when Shinji improved over a short period of time. Shinji himself seemed to think Asuka was mad, but compared with some of the things she's said to him, she was practically clapping him on the back (in her own snide way). In short, Shinji is the only boy that Asuka respects, because although he may be passive and a bit whiny in his personal life, he's good at piloting the Eva, and he's the only one Asuka can share that most important part of her life with. Asuka also seemed genuinely impressed that Shinji could play the cello, so perhaps she found something to like about him outside of an Eva as well. Asuka is starting to develop positive feelings toward Shinji. Maybe she's even attracted to him, or maybe she just wondered if what she was feeling meant she was attracted to him. That was probably what led her to kiss him; she probably knows deep down that she'll never be able to be with anyone who can't share the Eva with her, leaving Shinji her only candidate. But being how she is, she would probably feel disgusted with herself for even thinking about being attracted to Shinji, who she still mostly regards as boring and useless. That's why she ran off and rinsed her mouth out, along with the usual tsundere reason of hiding embarrassment. The claim that she was bored was just a convenient excuse so Shinji wouldn't think she was attracted to him, letting her hide her feelings and her embarrassment, and it was believable enough, given her usual selfishness.
As it moves through its middle portion, Eva is starting to get more interesting. This is where it begins to really distinguish itself from the generic action-comedies that preceded it and the horde of pretenders that followed it. The animation still looks pretty good and the art direction is still top-notch, but it's really the character writing that lets Eva keep being worthwhile sixteen years after its original release. With Episode 15, Asuka became less like a childish, cranky baby and more like the kind of tsundere that I wrote about in my essay on why I like tsundere.
Episode 15 ends with Misato confronting Kaji with the knowledge that he's been spying on Nerv. Kaji opens a door and reveals an Angel stuck to a cross with an Eva-sized lance. He says this is the first Angel, Adam, which caused Second Impact. I thought this turned out to be Lilith, the Second Angel, which the Evas are cloned from, but as I said above, a lot of my memories from this part of the show are murky.
Postscript: Garden of Eva
I first watched the series in 1999 when it broadcast on my local PBS station as avant-garde foreign cinema. I bought some of the VHS tapes, and later some of the DVDs, but I never owned the entire series. Owning an entire series was expensive back then—the DVDs were about $30 each, with about four episodes per disc. The VHS tapes were also about $30 each, but they only had two episodes per tape.
So at the height of my Eva obsession, I wasn’t actually watching the show that much; I was watching a couple of episodes, mostly the early Asuka episodes (“Asuka Strikes!”, “Both of you dance like you wanna win!”, and “Magma Diver”) over and over again, and filling in the gaps by reading fan fiction. My favorite fan fiction series was Garden of Eva, because it was long, full of highly amusing violence and sex and soap opera antics, had an extensive mythology that somewhat logically integrated with the mythology of the show, and had a scene where Asuka tied Shinji up and fucked him to death while wearing a dominatrix outfit reminiscent of her plugsuit. (See: full of highly amusing violence and sex and soap opera antics.)
As a consequence of this, there are more than a few things about the show that I only remember through the lens of this fan fiction, and when my memories of the show conflicted with how the fan fiction portrayed the show, I couldn’t always remember which was correct. The most significant example: the fan fiction makes Rei a major player, both in the story and for Shinji’s affections, whereas my memories of the show indicated that Rei never played much of a part in anything and there was very little relationship between Rei and Shinji (or really, between Rei and anyone, except Gendou), let alone a romantic relationship.
Watching the show again confirmed that my memories were basically correct. It’s pretty clear that insofar as the show ever tried to hook Shinji up with anyone, it was trying to hook him up with Asuka. (The case for Kaworu is actually far more compelling than the case for Rei.) I’d even characterize Rei as a secondary character, on the level of Ritsuko or Touji. The main protagonists, the ones whose actions and emotional states really make up the narrative, are Shinji, Asuka, and Misato. Rei gets her moment in End of Eva, after having, honestly, less impact on the narrative than Touji up to that point.
I totally understand what it’s like to be a fan of a secondary character who never really gets the spotlight; after all, my favorite character in the Monogatari series is Tsukihi Araragi. I don’t dislike Rei; the problem is, I also don’t really like her, because she has such little personality. The Rei archetype was later modified into characters like Haruhi’s Yuki Nagato, who I actually do like. But Yuki has personality and rudimentary emotions, and Kyon has a great dynamic with her. Shinji and Rei do later develop a kind of friendship, and this seems to be what triggers Rei’s big moment in End of Eva. But there’s never anything particularly romantic between them; the only hint at a romance I can remember was the breast-grabbing scene in Episode 5, which was just awkward and bizarre. Plus there’s the whole “clone of his mother” thing to get over.
There were other things the fan fiction exaggerated (Misato was not a gigantic whore; she had two sex scenes in the entire series, both with the same man; there were her sometimes creepy come-ons to Shinji, but that’s a separate issue), but amplifying Rei’s role was the biggest one.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.