Last time, I alluded to an unpublished essay I wrote on why I like tsundere. I considered publishing it alongside these notes on Eva, but it’s not quite ready for primetime yet.
This is part two, covering Episodes 16–26. Next time will be End of Eva.
October 18th, 2012: Episode 16
Episode 16 is the first episode (but certainly not the last) to use Eva’s famous technique of character and plot development through psychobabble-filled monologues that play over bizarre images from earlier in the show or nowhere in particular. It begins with Asuka yelling at Shinji for something, which prompts him to apologize, which prompts her to yell at him for apologizing right away to avoid being yelled at. Misato defends Shinji, telling Asuka that’s just how he is; Asuka accuses Misato of being overly tolerant because she’s happy that she’s with Kaji again. Misato denies this, after which Kaji calls and leaves a message about the great bar he found, exposing Misato’s lie.
Misato was lying about being with Kaji, but I don’t believe that was really what made her defend Shinji—Asuka just brought it up because she wanted Kaji for herself, now knows she can’t have him, and is trying to ruin it for Misato. Ever since the beginning, but especially since Episode 11 or so, Misato has seemed to have a strong positive feeling towards Shinji. It seems as though he reminds her of herself when she was young, especially as regards his troubled relationship with his father, but it also seems (especially in this episode) that she has a motherly or big sisterly feeling towards him, as if she wants to protect and guide him. (He could sure as hell use some protection and guidance.)
We see this in the next scene when Shinji finally defeats Asuka in the synch ratio tests, and Misato praises him, telling him (in English) “You are number one.” Poor Shinji really deserves some praise for once, but Asuka doesn’t take this well and starts making snide comments about the perfect, wonderful, invincible Shinji. Shinji, on the other hand, starts to actually have some confidence (we’ve been building up to that for a while with his successes as a pilot). Unfortunately, he’s still a fourteen-year-old boy, and he goes too far. When ordered to observe an Angel and try to lead it out of the city, Shinji instead decides to make good on his earlier promise to Asuka to show her how it’s done, and his statement that fighting is a man’s job. He fires on the Angel and ends up getting sucked into a Sea of Dirac, leading him to an empty universe. He goes into life support mode, buying sixteen hours of time for the others to find a way to rescue him.
Misato takes his disappearance very hard, and when Ritsuko tells her that she’s taking command and wants to try a plan with a fair chance of killing Shinji, Misato slaps her. Asuka and Rei also bicker, with Asuka making snide comments about Shinji’s failure to deliver on his earlier boasts and Rei getting angry (in her own way). I don’t sense the romance between Rei and Shinji that fanfic writers infer, but there’s certainly some kind of fondness there; Shinji seems to be the only person other than Gendou that Rei shows emotion around, and after the rocky start to their relationship in Episode 5, Shinji has had several pleasant interactions with Rei, including the scene where he tells her she looked motherly while cleaning the classroom and might make a good housewife. But I think Asuka was also worried about him (the end of the episode also suggests this); she’s just too emotionally stunted herself to express it in any kind of normal way, and does what everyone expects.
After twelve hours inside the Angel’s alternate universe, Shinji begins to hold a conversation with “the Shinji Ikari that watches Shinji Ikari”, which is suggested to be his inner self or ego that forms Shinji’s own self image. They talk about the fear Shinji has of being disliked and abandoned, reminisce about various things from Shinji’s past, and argue about whether it’s valid for Shinji to try and forget the unpleasant things and drown himself in something he enjoys (piloting the Eva). The scene ends with Shinji seeing an apparition of his mother; outside, just as Ritsuko is about the begin the operation, Unit 1 bursts out of the Angel in a spray of blood, tearing it apart as it exits (knowing Anno, the resemblance to a human birth was probably not a coincidence). Even Asuka and Ritsuko are horrified by the appearance of the unrestrained monster, and Ritsuko asks out loud what sort of creature they’ve copied. This may have been Ritsuko’s way of having an excuse to partially answer Misato’s earlier question about what the Evas are that makes them so valuable as to be worth sacrificing a human life for them.
It’s difficult to say what actually happens during this scene. Shinji had been inside the Eva for twelve hours and was beginning to run out of air, so his conversation with his inner self may have been just a hallucination created by his asphyxiated brain. The particular form of the hallucination was likely prompted by his awareness that he had screwed up and his rampant self-esteem problems. On the other hand, the apparition of his mother at the end was likely created by Unit 1 itself, given the (soon to be revealed) knowledge that Yui’s soul resides inside Unit 1. Shinji spent several years without a mother, but over the course of the series, Misato has slowly adopted that role; this episode, along with that knowledge that Yui’s soul is in Unit 1, suggests that Yui has also been covertly mothering him during his piloting of the Eva. As he pilots, they grow closer (spiritually), and his synch rate rises; when he’s in trouble, the Eva goes berserk and saves him, in an act of maternal protectiveness that makes the mother grizzly bear look gentle.
With the Angel dead, the Eva stops moving and the entry plug ejects. Misato runs inside and embraces the barely conscious Shinji, in tears; Shinji mumbles, “I just wanted to see you one more time”, and it’s impossible to tell whether he’s speaking to Yui or Misato. Asuka remarks that Misato had earlier said she was going to chew him out for his disastrous overconfidence, but Misato ignores her. Shinji wakes up in the hospital to find Rei at his bedside. She tells him they’ll handle the rest and leaves, revealing Asuka waiting outside the door and looking embarrassed to be found out. This suggests that Asuka was really worried about him, but was too tsundere to let anyone know it, and was trying to keep an eye on him without letting anyone know she was doing it. (She failed.)
I can’t speak to later episodes, but the psychobabble in this episode did not bother me. For one thing, it was only about five minutes long, not an entire episode. For another, it actually advanced character and plot in a way that would have been difficult to achieve in another way. I can’t deny that it’s a pretty clumsy way to advance plot and character—it gets by mostly on audacity and avant-garde flair—but Shinji’s feelings were quite abstract and complex, and it would have been very hard to introduce the discussion into dialogue or somehow convey it through action without becoming stilted or unnatural. (The standby in Western fiction for a situation like this is to stage a scene where the character visits a mental health professional of some sort, but if the Eva universe had mental health professionals, a lot of the series might not happen, so that was hardly a viable option.) It felt like a necessary evil. Compare that with the psychobabble in shows like Betterman or ef—in both of those cases, there were more conventional techniques that could have achieved the desired end just as well. In ef, Miyako’s trauma over the divorce of her parents could have been revealed through a normal flashback or a conversation with Hiro, and the crazed tone of the psychobabble was not ever transferred into the actual show through any feeling or action. In Betterman, the psychobabble was mostly a way to cover up that the plot made no sense and couldn’t hang together without a boatload of retcons and dei ex machina. Compared with those cases, the psychobabble in this episode of Eva felt necessary and useful. I think that Anno probably fell into the trap of overusing these scenes because, unlike ef, the characters and plot of Eva are complicated and hard to advance through normal means, and become more so as the series progresses, and since the first ten episodes were monster-of-the-week episodes with very little plot or character advancement, there suddenly wasn’t enough time to develop everything properly, so the deficiency was papered over with scenes like this.
As I remember it, Asuka and Shinji both suffer mental breakdowns, but whereas Asuka’s is sudden and conveyed by psychobabble, Shinji’s is actually developed from various traumas such as the incidents with Touji and Kaworu. If there had been time, maybe Anno would have similarly developed Asuka’s breakdown, and we might have had less psychobabble.
October 29th, 2012: Episodes 17–19
Episodes 17, 18, and 19 form sort of a trilogy.
Not much happens in Episode 17. Eva Unit 04 gets sucked into a Sea of Dirac along with its entire base, so the Americans decide they don’t want the Evas anymore and send Unit 03 to Japan. Meanwhile, Touji has started to get moody and doesn’t seem to have the life he once did. Hikari, the class representative, has decided for some reason that she likes him. She tries to go along with him when he’s asked by the teacher to deliver some handouts to Rei, but Touji doesn’t take the hint and asks Shinji along (which was probably for the best, because Shinji is one of the only people Rei likes, so everything goes a lot more smoothly with Rei when he’s around). She does, however, get him to take her up on her offer to feed him lunch every day, though he doesn’t get to eat it because he’s gone for the next while on his duties as the pilot of Eva Unit 03.
Kensuke takes a day off to go hang around the docks and watch them bring in Unit 03; when he asks if Shinji knows anything, Shinji is the one who ends up learning something, since he didn’t know anything about Unit 04 disappearing or Unit 03 being brought to Japan. Kensuke wants to be Unit 03’s pilot and tries to get Shinji to swing it for him; in Episode 18, he even goes to Misato’s apartment just before Misato heads off to Unit 03’s activation test to ask her.
Through various conversations and lots of Eva’s trademark haunting, silent scenes, we discover that Touji agreed to become a pilot under the condition of having his sister transferred to Nerv’s hospital, that Rei and Asuka both know (Asuka finds out when she ambushes Kaji in his office to try and get his attention; she’s not happy that someone she dislikes so much is doing her most valued activity alongside her), and that Misato has been trying to tell Shinji, but has been afraid. This is also the first time we hear about the dummy plug, which is some sort of autopilot system for the Evas that’s still under testing. These two episodes actually do their best to let you know that Touji’s the pilot without telling you. Touji doesn’t brag or tell Shinji “Looks like we’ll be working together.” In fact, he doesn’t tell anyone. He just sort of acts depressed for a few days. We don’t see him in a plug suit or inside the Eva until the very end, at the conclusion of Episode 18.
In Episode 18, Misato heads off to the test. During the test, there’s an explosion that tears apart the facility. Misato and Ritsuko are both injured, and Unit 03 runs off on a rampage, having burst free of its restraints. Unit 03 is declared an Angel, and Shinji, Rei, and Asuka are dispatched to stop it. Gendou takes command of the operation in Misato’s absence. For some reason, he has the three Evas hide in the hills and try to ambush Unit 03, but it picks them off one by one, first dispatching Asuka in Unit 02, then cutting off Unit 00’s arm, and moving on to Unit 01.
Shinji has been bothered since the beginning by the idea that Unit 03 has a human pilot. When he brought it up, Asuka came on the screen and was about to tell him who the pilot is, but the screen suddenly went static except for her screams. (She was attacked by Unit 03 right at this time, but I also suspect that Gendou cut her off, because he knew how it would affect Shinji.) When Shinji’s turn to fight Unit 03 comes, he sees the entry plug, realizes there is a human inside, and decides that he won’t kill another human. He is even willing to sacrifice his own life to avoid taking someone else’s, and argues with Gendou over the radio. Gendou orders the activation of the dummy plug, and Shinji suddenly loses all control of Unit 01. Unit 01 begins acting of its own accord and brutally tears apart Unit 03, finally taking Unit 03’s entry plug and crushing it in its hand.
Some time later, as the recovery operation proceeds, the injured Misato calls Shinji on his radio and tells him that she has something she should have told him already. She tells him that the pilot of Unit 03 is Touji, at the same moment that Shinji catches sight of the workers dragging Touji’s body from the crushed entry plug on his monitor. He screams.
Episode 19 opens with Shinji inside Unit 01, having sneaked in and gotten inside without authorization. Angry at his father, he threatens to use Unit 01’s battery power and smash as much of the Geofront as he can. Gendou has the command crew pressurize the LCL and knock Shinji unconscious. After they remove Shinji from the Eva, he is brought to Gendou’s office, where Gendou tells him that he’s guilty of criminal offenses and asks what he has to say for himself. Shinji says, calmly, that he won’t pilot the Eva anymore. When Gendou says they likely won’t see each other again, Shinji replies that he had the same intention.
It transpires, however, that Touji isn’t dead. For a while, he and Shinji are in the same hospital room. After Shinji leaves, Hikari comes to visit him and still won’t admit that she likes him. Touji asks her to tell his sister that he’s all right. He also, in one of the weirder scenes, sees Shinji and Rei sitting in the same train car that Shinji was inside during the psychobabble in Episode 16, arguing about whether it’s okay for Shinji to run away from unpleasant things. When Rei asks if he’s tried to understand his father, Shinji replies that he has, but he can’t. In Episode 18, when Kaji was staying over to watch Shinji and Asuka while Misato was at the test, Shinji asked Kaji about Gendou, and said that he felt he was able to have a satisfying conversation with his father. Shinji was beginning to feel that he understood Gendou a little, and even to have a more favorable view towards him, but the events of Episode 18 and 19 destroyed that. I’m not sure what this scene was supposed to mean—Touji’s presence suggests that it was an actual conversation between Shinji and Rei that he partially perceived as he slipped in and out of consciousness, and that the train car setting was just a weird flourish to confuse us. Or he saw inside Shinji’s mind.
Shinji’s parting with Misato at the train platform has a much different feeling than the first one, in Episode 4. He asks why Touji was chosen, and Misato says that she recently learned that his entire class is composed of candidates to be the Fourth Children, and that it was arranged that way by Nerv. Unlike the first time, Misato doesn’t lecture Shinji or try to give him advice. That’s probably because this time isn’t like the first time. Shinji isn’t running away because he’s afraid, or thinks his father doesn’t love him, or because he was hit by Touji. This time, he’s leaving because his father forced him against his will to do something that was utterly against his morals, which led to a close friend nearly dying. This time, Shinji is not so much running away from unpleasant things as standing on principle. His entire manner as he does it is different, too. Where before he was a bit whiny and sort of flippant, this time he acts resolute. I actually expected Misato to apologize to him, since we’ve seen how much she likes him. She sort of does; she tells him to remember that Nerv and humanity pinned all their hopes on him, and that everything they did to him, they did for the human race. Shinji says that it’s a self-serving excuse, and Misato agrees. She tells him she’ll keep his room set up for him and won’t void his Nerv ID card, although Shinji tells her not to bother.
As Shinji is waiting for his train, an Angel attacks. He ends up in a shelter inside the Geofront, which actually has a whole forest inside (I never realized this when I was watching the series before.) Meanwhile, Gendou tries to put Rei and the dummy plug inside Unit 01, but Unit 01’s synch rate drops to 0, so Rei is put inside the one-armed Unit 00. Asuka is sent ahead in Unit 02, but Unit 02 is decapitated by the Angel. As Shinji sits in the shelter and recalls Asuka telling him he’s stupid for doing evacuation training when he’s an Eva pilot, Unit 02’s head falls through the roof. Shinji runs outside along with the crowd and ends up standing and watching the battle from far away. He runs into Kaji, watering melons. Kaji tells Shinji that despite his decision not to pilot the Eva, Shinji has to make a decision so that he’ll have no regrets. He also tells Shinji that he decided his garden was the place he wanted to be when he died, even more than between Misato’s breasts.
Rei comes to the surface in her one-armed Unit 00 and runs at the Angel with an N2 mine. She cancels its AT field and shoves the mine at it, but the explosion has no effect. Shinji goes back to Nerv and asks his father to let him pilot Unit 01. He fights the Angel inside the Eva’s docking bay, looking nothing like usual. As he fights, Shinji is savage, but also controlled, fighting with all the experience he’s gained piloting the Eva. He pins the Angel against the wall in one of the launching elevators and tells Misato to launch, getting the Angel out of headquarters and back into the Geofront. But before Shinji can finish off the Angel, the Eva runs out of power.
The Angel attacks him freely and manages to cut his arm off as everyone from the command center comes outside to watch the battle. Shinji struggles with the dead controls before Unit 01 goes berserk once again. This time, it grows a set of horrible sharp teeth and its eyes become white and dead-looking. It roars, crawling across the ground on all fours. It tears off the Angel’s arm and fuses it onto its own stump, then bursts out of its armor and begins to eat the Angel alive. Ritsuko says that “she” has finally awakened, and tells everyone that the Eva’s armor isn’t to protect the Eva—it’s actually a restraint, so they can control it. The episode ends with Gendou, in his usual dark and mysterious manner, darkly and mysteriously saying to Fuyutsuki “It begins now”.
From here, Eva, starts to move into its final stage. We start to find out the secrets behind some of the mysteries, like how the Evas were created, Rei’s connection with Shinji’s mother, and the nature of Gendou’s final plan. Since my memories of everything after this are so murky, I don’t want to project forward; we’ll see what comes. But I will say that I’ve begun really enjoying Eva ever since Episode 11 or so, and have found that it completely lives up to its reputation. The early episodes that focused on comedy didn’t hold up so well—for one thing, the fan service falls far short of modern standards—but as soon as the character building and plot advancement started in earnest, the series became really interesting. I am glad that I decided, at long last, to re-watch this show, because it definitely rewards critical attention from an older mind. Placed in its proper context, the final scene of Episode 19 wasn’t a gore-fest that served merely to separate Eva from the recently cast off Disney cartoons—it was a frightening display of power, a battle between two demonic creatures, one of them carrying a reasonably innocent fourteen-year-old boy inside it. This time I was really able to feel the terror and desperation of a world that’s pinned all its hopes (as Misato earlier said) on a mentally unbalanced teenage boy and a barely-controlled monster.
Now, to bring down the tone a little, why are Shinji’s teachers always reminiscing about Second Impact? Don’t they have things to learn, like math and literature and the eight thousand years of human history that preceded Second Impact?
October 30th, 2012: Episode 20
Episode 20 is called Weaving a Story II: Oral Stage (yet another of those juicy Freudian references), but it’s not a review episode—it’s pretty much all new material. It opens with Ritsuko and Maya abandoning the smashed control room for the old, dusty secondary control room, which conveniently looks exactly like the old one but is different in ways that can’t be seen, like the absence of the Magi. (This was the era of hand-drawn cels, so animation reuse was rampant. Eva is incredibly good about this in general, but it does reuse animation, it just makes the reuse hard to notice by only reusing very short sequences that usually don’t show an entire character.)
Unit 1 is wrapped in bandages and restrained, looking like a massive bloody corpse with weird eyes. Shinji has been absorbed into the LCL; his quantum state and “soul” still exist, but have disintegrated and are floating in LCL. Here the show makes a minor continuity error. Shinji’s plug suit is floating in the LCL. But Shinji wasn’t wearing his plug suit in Episode 19; he was wearing his school clothes, because he suddenly showed up in the docking bay and asked Gendou to let him pilot the Eva again.
Over the course of a month, Ritsuko comes up with a plan to reconstitute Shinji, based on something her mother recorded while working at Nerv ten years ago during the development of the Evas. Meanwhile, Shinji is experiencing more psychobabble inside the Eva. He argues with himself about his reasons for piloting the Eva, hearing the counterarguments in the voices of people he knows, and wonders about what the Angels are and whether the reason he comes up with, that people are nice to him when he pilots the Eva, is good enough. Asuka’s voice berates him for wondering about why he pilots the Eva, saying that weird creatures are attacking and that’s a good enough reason. Shinji decides once and for all that people will only be nice to him if he pilots the Eva, and begs someone to be nice to him. Misato’s voice says that she is nice to him. Shinji then has a weird sexual fantasy where Misato appears, naked, and asks if he wants to become one with her, because it would be a very nice feeling. Asuka then appears naked and makes the same request, and then Rei. Misato and Rei use the same lines, but I found it amusing that Asuka’s lines sound like a parody of a tsundere from a bad erogame. She sweetly says “Hey, baka Shinji, want to become one with me? It would be a very nice feeling. Come on, idiot, you don’t see me like this every day.” I half expected her to add “The great Asuka is asking you! Be grateful!” or some other Taiga-like line. Shinji also sees some vague visions of his mother.
Ritsuko goes through with her experiment, but it fails. The entry plug opens and spills LCL and Shinji’s plug suit onto the floor. Misato, thinking that this means Shinji is dead, runs out and embraces the plug suit, in tears. Then Unit 01’s newly acquired S2 organ, which it got from eating the Angel and which allows it to move without a power source, opens and spits out a naked Shinji, to Misato’s great relief. In the next scene, Misato drives Ritsuko home, seemingly in good spirits. Ritsuko says that Shinji’s return was due more to Misato than anything she did. Misato then runs off to see Kaji. They have sex in a hotel, in another of Eva’s trademark silent, creepy, understated scenes. We see enough of them to know what they’re doing, but we mostly see the glass of liquor and the ashtray on the bedside table, and although we hear a little of them doing it, we mostly hear Misato asking Kaji about Gendou’s master plan, the Marduk Institute, and the Human Instrumentality Project. She also comments that Ritsuko probably thinks she’s horrible for running off to be with Kaji the very evening that Shinji returns. The episode ends here. We also see the seeds of Asuka’s mental breakdown being sown, when we’re shown an image of her room, her destroyed possessions littered everywhere, as she screams at Misato on the phone and then grumbles about being defeated by Shinji.
Throughout my re-watching of Eva, I’ve always tended to interpret the characters’ actions according to the belief that Misato, Rei, and Asuka have genuine affection for Shinji, even when they don’t show it. I won’t project ahead about what happens with Asuka; I’ll interpret when the evidence is before me. There is probably a way to interpret it according to my belief that she does like Shinji, and a way to interpret it according to the belief that she’s a horrible, self-serving, arrogant child who hates anyone that threatens her position as the ace, which is the favorite interpretation of many non-fans of Asuka. The evidence may show some of both sides. But I don’t think it can be denied that Misato loves Shinji—in a motherly or big sisterly way, despite his fantasies about “becoming one with” her. If no one else, Misato would miss Shinji if he died, not because it would wreck her plans, like Gendou, but because she cares about him, and it’s one of the tragedies of the show that Shinji never realizes it. Contrary to what Ritsuko thinks—expressed in her comment to herself as Misato drives away—Misato decided to visit Kaji because this is the second time that Shinji nearly died inside the Eva, and Misato knows enough about the secrets of Nerv to know that it must have something to do with Gendou’s plans. She visited Kaji because he has information about Nerv’s secrets, and she wanted to get that information because it might be useful to protect Shinji. That’s how I interpret their sex scene—which Misato plainly says is at least partially for information.
November 9th, 2012: Episodes 21–22
This is where Eva really moves into the stage that made it famous, the part where everything stops making any kind of sense at all and the characters start to drift apart from each other. It opens with Fuyutsuki being kidnapped by Seele, the mysterious organization of dark mysterious men who speak through monoliths that was parodied by many other anime and manga, including Kami Nomi. They interrogate Fuyutsuki about Gendou, and Fuyutsuki reminisces about the days when he was a professor of bioengineering at a university, where he happened to play mentor to young Yui Ikari, a brilliant student of bioengineering. Yui eventually introduces him to Gendou Rokubungi, a coarse young man who calls Fuyutsuki one day and asks Fuyutsuki to bail him out of jail after a drunken brawl in a bar. Yui ends up marrying Gendou, against Fuyutsuki’s preference. He sees Gendou again after their marriage on a ship that’s investigating the causes of Second Impact at the South Pole. Fuyutsuki traces the funding sources for the expedition and discovers that the whole thing was financed by Seele, an organization begun by Gendou, and that Gendou has pictures of a giant of light at the South Pole that caused the Second Impact, contrary to the accepted story that it was caused by a meteor. Gendou convinces Fuyutsuki to join him by showing him the half-finished Unit 00. They begin working on the Evas as part of the research group Gehirn. When Shinji was about five, Yui brought him to the lab to watch an activation test of Unit 01; during this test, she is killed in an unspecified way.
Since Gendou wanted to be directly involved with Gehirn, he gave control of the master organization Seele to Kiel Lorenz, the current chairman who is now interrogating Fuyutsuki through his monolith. Seele knows that Gendou is hiding things from them—for instance, the Seele committee was shocked when Unit 01 took in the S2 organ from the Angel, while Gendou had clearly planned something like this to happen—and it ordered its spy, Kaji, to kidnap Fuyutsuki. Nerv intelligence knows that Kaji kidnapped Fuyutsuki and, as a precaution, takes Misato into custody.
We then see some reminisces of Ritsuko and her mother Naoko. (Early on we got to see Ritsuko as a cute high school girl; her hair is actually the same burgundy color as Naoko, but grown up Ritsuko bleaches it.) Ritsuko remembers how she worked hard to join Gehirn and was having trouble fitting in at school until Misato met her. Misato talked a mile a minute, as if, Ritsuko says, to make up for her time as a mute after Second Impact. Misato met Kaji and began skipping class to sleep with him all day.
On her first day at Gehirn, Ritsuko happens to see her mother seducing Gendou. Some time later, Gendou appears at work with a young Rei in tow. Naoko dislikes Rei from the beginning, because Rei reminds her of Yui somehow. Rei comes into the control room, and Naoko offers to bring her back to Gendou. Rei for some reason insults her, calling her an old woman, and tells her that that’s what Gendou calls her. Naoko is so enraged she strangles Rei and throws her off the control tower. Some time after that, Naoko mysteriously falls herself and is killed, and Gehirn is dissolved and reorganized as Nerv, which is not just a research organization, but also an operations organization.
The episode ends with Kaji releasing Fuyutsuki, presumably double-crossing Seele. He is killed, but not before he leaves a message on Misato’s answering machine telling her that he loved her and asking her to take care of his plants, which Shinji knows the location of. Misato breaks down in tears. Shinji happens to come into the kitchen and see her, and runs back to his room before she sees him, thinking that he knew at that moment, when he couldn’t do anything for Misato, that he was still a child.
The next episode begins with everything very awkward at Misato’s apartment. Mostly, this is Asuka and her terrible attitude at being surpassed by Shinji. Also, she’s on her period (someone as horrible as her must be a nightmare on a period) and has been having flashbacks to her childhood. Her mother, it turns out, suffered a mental breakdown and replaced her daughter with a doll. She then died, leaving Asuka to live with a stepmother and her father. Asuka’s stepmother calls early in the episode and they speak in a friendly manner, in German, which Shinji says he envies. (Yuko Miyamura’s German accent is pretty awful, by the way.) Asuka at first communicates with him normally, then remembers she’s supposed to mad and storms off.
Misato comments to Ritsuko later that things are getting pretty strained over at her house, then gets angry and snaps at Ritsuko over Ritsuko’s comment that she might not be able to play house anymore. It’s possible that it’s all Asuka making things bad, but it also seems like things are strained between Shinji and Misato; I suspect this is because Shinji has picked up on what Asuka hasn’t, that Kaji is dead, and he feels ashamed because he couldn’t do anything for Misato. Asuka is still wallowing in her own anger and continues making snide remarks to Misato about Kaji, completely missing the subtext of Misato’s replies. I do remember Shinji and Misato being together in the next episode; I’d at least like to see that relationship not destroyed, since it was so sweet and such an unexpected surprise to notice it.
Asuka’s sync rate continues falling and she has a blowout with Rei in the elevator when Rei tries to tell her that the Eva has a soul that she must try to connect with. Asuka screams that the Eva is just a doll, and that she’s always hated Rei because Rei is so doll-like, and she hates dolls. Asuka slaps Rei when Rei affirms that she would die if ordered to. She seems to listen, though, because she later talks to Unit 02 and tries to browbeat it into obeying her. She disobeys orders to let Rei take the lead against an Angel and dashes out to try and reclaim her title as the Red Baron of Eva piloting, but the Angel zaps her with a beam of light and “mentally rapes” her. The parallels with physical rape are much more apparent than I remembered—Asuka writhes around in the entry plug, screaming that she’s being defiled, yelling at the Angel not to penetrate her, crying that she doesn’t want to remember that, as the Angel picks through all of her worst memories and makes her recall them, and the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s “The Messiah” plays in the background. In the next episode, it turns out that she’s mentally pregnant. (Only joking.) Unit 01 can’t be used, so Gendou orders Rei to go into Central Dogma and get the Lance of Longinus. Misato is shocked, believing that if the Eva comes into contact with Adam, the Third Impact will occur, since the Evas are clones of the Angels (based on what Kaji told her). Gendou’s lack of response leads Misato to conclude that Kaji’s information was mistaken. (If I remember correctly, the mistake is that the thing on the cross in Central Dogma is Lillith, not Adam.) Rei kills the Angel, throwing the Lance into orbit and skewering it in her first major kill of the series (and last, I believe).
I said above that I was going to try and interpret Asuka’s actions during her breakdown under the belief that she does, in some way, like Shinji. I think the strongest evidence for this belief is the moment after she gets off the phone with her stepmother, when, just for a second, she talks to Shinji like she used to. She fell into it so easily that I don’t believe she could really hate him (or hate everyone, as she claims after the blowout with Rei). I think her anger is largely an act—one that she keeps up because of her childishness and emotional immaturity. Earlier in the series, when Shinji pulled her out of the volcano, she didn’t respond like this; instead, she insisted on taking the dangerous role in Episode 11 so she could even the score. Although she continues the sarcasm about “the great, invincible Shinji-sama” that she had in Episode 16, she can’t still be angry about that because Shinji was smashed down soon after. She is traumatized by what happened in Episode 19—the experience of being decapitated and being utterly helpless against the Angel—and doesn’t know any better way to deal with it than anger and sarcasm. Because she doesn’t understand why she’s so angry, she concludes that it must be because Shinji beat her. Maybe she was angry about that, but by this episode, her anger has subsided. But because she’s so childish, she won’t stop being angry at Shinji—that would feel like losing to him a second time.
I also believe that Shinji’s observation that Asuka becomes like a different person when she’s talking to her stepmother is evidence that she feels close to him. Asuka says that she doesn’t get on well with her stepmother. Perhaps she doesn’t like communicating with her stepmother because she feels like she has to be polite and cheerful. With Shinji, though, she can be her real bitchy, childish self.
Based on what little I remember of this part of the series, I think that Asuka’s and Misato’s breakdowns probably trigger Shinji’s breakdown. As was hinted in Episode 16 and Episode 20, Shinji feels for the first time in his life that he’s liked by other people now that he pilots the Eva. But in Episodes 21, he began to feel awkward around Misato because he couldn’t say anything to her after she lost Kaji. In Episode 22, Asuka pushes him away because of her own issues. Shinji probably feels like he’s losing all the people who liked him. Even though his father had the most power over Shinji’s emotions, Misato and Asuka were really the ones supporting him and acting as his family over this period. They’re even family in the sense that he takes them for granted, until he suddenly doesn’t have them anymore. This might partially explain what happens in Episode 23.
November 10th, 2012: Episode 23
Episode 23 continues the mental breakdowns of the characters and the descent into making absolutely no sense. But for the first time in the series (during the rewatching), I really felt sorry for Asuka and felt that her vulnerable dere-dere side had finally appeared. Of course, Shinji doesn’t get to see it; the only person other than the viewer who gets even a hint of it is Hikari.
The episode begins with Shinji standing outside Misato’s room (with Pen-Pen) looking at a sign that says “Please don’t bother me, working”, then encountering a similar (but much more tsun-tsun) sign on Asuka’s door. Misato is sitting at her desk amidst a forest of empty cans of coffee, repeatedly playing Kaji’s final message. Asuka is not actually in her room; she’s gone somewhere and hasn’t returned.
Asuka, it turns out, has run away from home. She’s staying with Hikari, refusing to go to school or do anything other than sit around and play the Sega Saturn (it’s pretty funny, in hindsight, that anyone ever thought we would still have Sega Saturns in 2015). Hikari is reflecting on this bizarre state when Asuka abruptly turns off the Sega Saturn and suggests going to bed.
The two of them are sleeping together in a futon; Hikari is staring at the ceiling, seeming uncomfortable, while Asuka has turned towards the wall and hidden her face. Asuka quietly tells Hikari that she couldn’t win in her Eva, and that she’s worthless now. Hikari pauses a moment, then tells Asuka that Asuka can do whatever she wants, and Hikari won’t say anything about it, because Hikari knows that Asuka did her best. Asuka breaks into tears, probably making Hikari even more uncomfortable.
Seele grills Gendou over using the Lance of Longinus. The dark mysterious monolith council decides that it needs some concession from Gendou and asks to interrogate one of his people. It wants Rei, but Gendou offers them Ritsuko instead. For some reason, they make Ritsuko get naked. When they tell Ritsuko she can end this humiliation if she tells them what they want to know, Ritsuko says she can withstand anything. Turns out she was wrong; she becomes visibly disturbed when the council tells her that Gendou gave them her instead of Rei.
An Angel attacks, and Misato sends Rei out to fight it in Unit 00. Gendou orders that Unit 02 also be used, even though Asuka’s sync rate is incredibly low. Asuka is sitting in the entry plug looking utterly despondent, repeatedly telling herself that she’s worthless and will only get in the way. The Angel tries to fuse with Unit 00 and Rei; Misato orders Unit 02 to be launched, but Asuka’s sync rate is so low that she can’t even make Unit 02 move. She is recalled, and the command crew watches helplessly as the Angel attempts to merge with Rei. Misato orders Rei to eject, but Rei won’t, because the AT Field would disappear and the Angel would be able to take the Eva. Finally, Gendou orders Unit 01 to be launched. Upon hearing this, Asuka whimpers to herself that they didn’t send Shinji out to help her. (I felt super moe for Asuka at this moment.) Shinji reaches the surface at the same moment that Rei decides she can’t hold out anymore and self-destructs Unit 00, destroying the Angel and herself.
In the aftermath of Rei’s death, Misato goes to Shinji’s room. Shinji comments, in the same strange, dead voice that he used in Episode 4 when he talked about his own death, that even though he’s sad, the tears just won’t come. Misato tries to take his hand, saying “This is all I can do for you”, but Shinji pulls away violently and yells “Don’t touch me!” Misato leaves the room and begins thinking about how Shinji is lonely, only to find herself calling unsuccessfully to Pen-Pen and realize that she’s the one who’s lonely. Misato’s theory about why Shinji reacted this way is that he’s afraid of getting close to someone. I think he probably still feels awkward about his inability to comfort Misato over Kaji’s death—maybe he even feels that he doesn’t deserve to be comforted by Misato, since he failed her. Some people also interpret Misato’s line “This is all I can do for you” as an implication that she’s going to do something sexual with Shinji. It’s not completely implausible; Misato, like Shinji, has issues getting close to people, and she still seems to be confused and distraught over Kaji’s death; given the situation with Asuka, and now Rei’s death, she might be desperate to make sure she doesn’t lose Shinji, no matter what it takes. Of course, Shinji does also have issues about getting close to people, and perhaps Rei’s death introduced him to another possible unpleasant consequence of getting close to someone.
It turns out, though, that Rei apparently survived somehow. Shinji and Misato go to the hospital to see her. She and Shinji have one of their usual awkward conversations filled with silence and mysterious pronouncements by Rei. When Shinji tries to thank her for saving him, Rei doesn’t seem to remember; she comments that she’s probably “the third one”. Rei goes back to her apartment, looks around, finds Gendou’s glasses on the dresser, squeezes them as if she wishes to crush them, then puts them down again and says something about knowing what they mean even without having learned it.
Misato goes back to her room to look at a capsule, containing some computer data on some sort of SD card, that Kaji left for her. At the same time, Shinji receives a call from Ritsuko. Misato corners Ritsuko in Central Dogma and puts a gun into her back, demanding to be shown what’s in the inner sanctum. Ritsuko agrees, on the condition that Shinji also be allowed to come. They descend past a graveyard of failed Evas, their massive skeletons filling a black void, to a deeply-buried room that Shinji says resembles Rei’s apartment. Ritsuko tells them that Rei was raised here. She then turns on the lights to reveal many copies of Rei floating in a tank. Ritsuko tells them that these Rei copies have no soul; they are the basis of the dummy plug and are necessary to communicate with the Eva. She then comments that she’s a fool, just like her mother, implying that she was also in love with Gendou, but was hurt when he sent her to Seele instead of Rei. Because of that, she’s going to destroy the copies. With the press of a button, the copies break apart.
It seems like this episode implies that all the Rei clones share a single soul, which is transferred to a new body every time one dies. Naoko strangled the first copy, so the one that’s been with us the entire series was the second. Now that one has died, and we have a new one, the third one. She seems to have all the memories of the first and second copies, but is also aware that they aren’t her own memories. Because of this, it may be that she doesn’t have the same warm and fuzzy feeling about Gendou that the second Rei did, or at least she feels more ambivalent about it (the second Rei saw an image of Gendou’s smiling face before she decided to self-destruct).
I didn’t like the wedge between Shinji and Misato being driven further in during this episode. I feel like Shinji doesn’t really understand Misato; he doesn’t realize that she wouldn’t blame him for not being there for her when she heard Kaji’s final message, and he doesn’t know how much he means to her or how worried she was when he disappeared. He is trying to drive her away because of his guilt and his own ineptitude at dealing with people, but in his mind this seems to get all turned around and become a belief that Misato doesn’t like him anymore. Misato, for her part, doesn’t know how to show Shinji that she cares about him the way he needs to see it. I know (from hearing things) that in The End of Evangelion movie, Misato’s final act is to die for Shinji; I hope that this can, in the end, convey to him how much she cares for him.
If Shinji suffers from a lack of support from other people (which at first was due to Misato grieving Kaji’s death, but now is due to Shinji’s own actions), Asuka is destroyed by it. She’s difficult to deal with at the best of times, and in Episode 22, she went out of her way to isolate herself from everyone and make sure she was the last thing on anyone’s mind as each character dealt with personal problems. She went to stay with Hikari because she couldn’t bear to face Shinji or Misato in her current state, but Hikari is also the only person she opens up to about what she’s feeling. Unfortunately, Hikari doesn’t seem to know what to do for her; a normal fourteen-year-old girl like Hikari couldn’t possibly understand the trauma that Asuka is feeling, and though she tries, it may actually have hurt Asuka more that she said she knows Asuka did her best, because that leaves Asuka to believe that her best wasn’t good enough.
Her depression is the result of her mental rape by the Angel in Episode 22; with help, she could probably get over it, and even be a better person for it, but as I said above, if people in the Eva universe had proper support, most of the series wouldn’t happen. Her super moe whimper that they didn’t send Shinji to save her from the mental rape isn’t just more of her usual whining. Rei is the only person in the world that Gendou cares about at all, which is why he risks Unit 01 going berserk again to save her. He didn’t care at all about Asuka, and ordered Unit 01 to stay put even when Shinji asked to go out. Shinji may not have even been able to do anything; the Angel was in orbit, and the positron cannon from Episode 6 couldn’t penetrate its AT Field. But the line is significant because Asuka asked for help—even if she’s several days too late, and was only talking to the inside of her entry plug, she asked for help from Shinji, who I theorized above is the only person she might respect a little. Asuka admitted, implicitly, that she would rather have been saved from the mental rape by Shinji than have to go through it on her own, contradicting her previous statements that she’d rather die than lose to Shinji. If someone who could understand what she was going through and who cared enough to try were able to get though to her, this could be the start of a good thing for Asuka—a move towards mature confidence, away from the childish arrogance that’s been her hallmark throughout the series. Of course, there is no such person. If Shinji, Misato, and Asuka had come together at this point instead of drifting apart, they might have been able to overcome their problems; but Shinji is too worried about himself, and Misato is concerned about Kaji and Shinji and Rei and herself, and Asuka made a point of driving them both away and seeking out Hikari, who can’t understand what Asuka is going through or offer the kind of support Asuka needs.
Depressed, mentally raped Asuka is moe moe enough to very nearly make up for what a pain in the ass she was for the rest of the series. As the proto-tsundere, Asuka is unique among tsundere, because Anno goes for the long game. Waiting for Asuka’s dere-dere side to show is an endurance match against one’s inclination to dislike her tsun-tsun side. Most tsundere writers don’t have the guts to make us wait for twenty-three episodes to see the dere-dere side; even the Ore Imo writers only made us wait eleven for a big dere scene from Kirino, and there were smaller implied dere scenes all the way back in Episode 1. And most tsundere writers aren’t willing to make the character’s tsun-tsun side as unrelentingly unlikable as Asuka is for most of the series. However, Asuka admirably fulfills every part of the tsundere formula that I described in my essay on why I like tsundere. As I said there, the main element is that the tsundere’s personality and actions have to somehow be made believable. The abandonment Asuka experienced when her mother replaced her with a doll explains her desire for attention; her belief that piloting the Eva makes her special and others are less valuable than her explains her haughtiness and shrewish bearing. The conflict between her contempt for Shinji’s passive personality and her belief that, as an Eva pilot, he must also be special, explains why she alternates between harshness and kindness when dealing with him. Her haughtiness also explains why she won’t talk about her feelings—she feels too good to talk to anyone frankly. That probably made it extra shocking for Hikari when Asuka opened up to her in Episode 23.
I mentioned in that essay that, without that glue to make the personality believable, an intended tsundere just becomes a horrible bitch that the writers are trying to foist on us as a sympathetic character. Because Asuka’s traumas are unseen until very late in the series, either because we haven’t been shown them or because they haven’t happened yet, many viewers lost the endurance match and began to dislike her. Many of them probably felt that she deserved to come to where she is by Episode 23, rather than feeling sympathy. But what’s admirable about the way Anno handled her is that he never does actually foist her on us as a sympathetic character. Unlike Louise or anime Naru, no scene in Eva particularly tries to present Asuka as a likable person. Even in Episode 23, the viewer is free to interpret her actions as more of her usual whining and complaining and continue to dislike her. Shinji and Misato certainly seem to regard her as sort of a pain, but they’re Japanese, and they can’t get out of working with her, so they just deal with her as best as they can. What makes this even more admirable is that Anno was dating Yuko Miyamura, Asuka’s voice actress, at the time the series was being made. Asuka was the most obvious romantic interest for Shinji, Anno’s author avatar, and Anno was dating her actress. The temptation to try and make her likable must have been enormous; nonetheless, Anno resisted.
Since I have tsundere kuru, I would have liked to see Asuka recover from her depression and regain her confidence, becoming a more humble and loving person in the process. That’s the big payoff for tsundere fans: the moment when dere-dere overtakes tsun-tsun and the two start to mix in proportion instead of alternating at random. I know that won’t happen. This is Eva, after all. It is a little like Ore Imo ending after Episode 5, when Kirino has just started to come down off her high horse, but hasn’t yet had a really nice dere scene, and that’s why so many doujinshi, fan fictions, manga, and reboots have stepped up to depict what might have been. From what I understand, The End of Evangelion gives a slightly brighter ending for Asuka than the series. For now, her story concludes.
One of my goals when I undertook this rewatching was to understand Rei better: both her character as presented in the series, and where all the Rei love in the fandom comes from. I understand her now a little better than I did, and I like her more than I used to, but I felt like she never had any really good moments like Asuka’s whimper or confession to Hikari in Episode 23 or Misato’s sobbing embrace of Shinji in Episode 16, where we start to get a sense of what she feels towards the people around her. The closest was when Shinji commented that she might make a good housewife, which was nice, but not as good as the incidents I mentioned for Asuka and Misato. I wanted to see some really nice Rei scenes around the middle of the series, but they never appeared; if they had, I might have gone over the edge and converted from Asuka-ism to Rei-ism. Rei’s voice actress, Megumi Hayashibara, was beloved in Japan at the time, sort of like the Yukari Tamura of the 90s, which partially explains her popularity in Japan. But I’m still having trouble understanding how overwhelming and abiding her popularity is. I guess I’m not the only one—I hear Anno doesn’t understand it either. But then, he was dating Yuko Miyamura, so he must have tsundere kuru too.
November 12th, 2012: Episodes 24–25
Asuka’s part in the story concludes at the opening of Episode 24 when we discover that she left Hikari’s house and somehow gave the Nerv intelligence agents who were watching her the slip. They find her a week later, lying naked in a bathtub in an abandoned building, emaciated and raving about her own worthlessness. We find out in a vision that Asuka has just before this that, on the day she was chosen as an Eva pilot, she came home to find that her mother had hanged herself.
The intelligence agents bring Asuka to Nerv headquarters and put her in the hospital. Meanwhile, Shinji looks out over the massive crater that was once Tokyo-3, caused when Unit 00 self-destructed. He reflects that Touji, Kensuke, and Hikari have all left and going to see Asuka would be pointless, and that he has no one left he can call a friend. At that moment, a mysterious bishounen speaks to him. This bishounen is Kaworu Nagisa; when Shinji expresses surprise that Kaworu knows his name, Kaworu lightly chides him for being so unaware of his position.
Kaworu is Asuka’s replacement pilot for Unit 02. Maya and Fuyutsuki discover during a sync test that he can set his sync ratio at will; Hyuga, the nerdy guy with glasses from the control room, has become Misato’s new partner in her quest to uncover the secrets of Nerv and hacks Maya’s computer to get this data. (He’s been obviously in love with Misato since quite a bit earlier in the series, and is always taking risks to try and impress her. Misato always ignores his flippant attempts to express his feelings.) Misato begins investigating Kaworu, though it ultimately comes to nothing.
Kaworu encounters Rei and comments that she’s like him, though Rei seems to dislike him and resent the comparison. Shinji, on the other hand, is immediately drawn to Kaworu and waits for him to finish a test so they can spend time together. He blushes and stutters around Kaworu like he never did around any of the girls; they end up taking a bath together and then spending the night together at Kaworu’s room, in an array of scenes dripping with homoerotic undertones. Kaworu at one point even says that he loves Shinji. (The translation of this line was actually a huge judgment call on the part of the translators; Kaworu really says about Shinji “Suki da”. That could mean lots of things, from mere friendship to the passionate gay love that the bath scene and sleepover scene imply. The problem is that Shinji, possibly projecting his own feelings onto Kaworu, almost certainly takes it to mean something like “love” in English, so when he later discusses this with Misato, he needed to say “love” in the subtitles.)
It turns out that Kaworu is the 17th and final Angel. He is implied to be a clone made by Seele which was sent to disrupt Gendou’s plans. He uses his Angel powers to take control of Unit 02 and descends to Terminal Dogma, where “Adam” is kept. Shinji is dispatched to fight him and struggles with Unit 02 as they descend into a black pit, with Kaworu floating nearby. Shinji and Kaworu have some conversation about what’s going on, and finally they reach Terminal Dogma, where Kaworu discovers that the Angel on the cross is in fact Lilith, not Adam. He decides that he will die to save the human race, and offers to let Shinji kill him. Shinji grasps him in Unit 01’s hand and sits there for a very long time, until finally squeezing and decapitating Kaworu.
Afterwards, Misato and Shinji are at the same spot overlooking the crater where Shinji first met Kaworu. Shinji says it should have been him to die, because Kaworu was a better person than him, and tells Misato that Kaworu said he loved him. Misato tells Shinji he’s wrong, because Kaworu had stopped fighting to live, and anyone who does that deserves to die, and Shinji comments that Misato is cold.
Episode 25 completely leaves behind even the vague sense of narrative that Episode 24 maintained, and becomes similar to the second disc of Xenogears—it’s all various characters sitting in chairs in a dark room, arguing with their own psyches about their traumas and motivations. Most of it is just explicit statements of things that could be inferred without much trouble from the rest of the series. There are a few interesting moments: Misato argues with her own psyche, but she does so in the presence of her mind’s perception of Shinji. She seems to want to hide her shame from Shinji. She dumped Kaji originally because she was afraid that he was like her father, and she decided at a young age that she didn’t want to be like her mother, who “selfishly” cried when her father wasn’t around. She apparently feels ashamed because she thinks that she uses men as tools to hide her loneliness. (We never saw any evidence of this during the series. The closest thing was how she used Hyuga’s crush on her to get information, and he did everything he did willingly and never seemed to regret it. That leads me to believe that a lot of this is meant to be Misato’s own terrible self-image, similar to Shinji’s terrible self-image that worries that he became a murderer and killed Kaworu and Touji all for the approval of his father.)
We also hear from Rei, who tells us that her dearest wish was for the Instrumentality Project to be over so she could die and return to nothingness. She seems to have had very conflicted feelings about Gendou—she felt warmly towards him because he was kind to her, but she also resented him because she wished to die and he prevented her from doing so.
During Misato’s examination, Ritsuko appears and explains the meaning of Instrumentality—she says that all humans have a spot within their hearts that wishes to be with other humans, but is afraid to reach out and blocks itself off. Kaworu said something similar when he told Shinji that humans have an AT Field inside their hearts. Instrumentality is meant to take the souls of all humans on the planet and wrap them up in a big blibbery blobby souly-wouly ball where they can all be together. At the end of the episode, we see Shinji watching the proceedings from the audience floor of a theater, and various characters appear and tell him that this is Instrumentality.
I’m starting to understand what all the anger was about back when this series was first on. After 23 episodes, most of them brilliant, all of them above-average for the time, we randomly discover that Shinji is gay (or at least bi-curious), get a raft of incomprehensible innuendos from Kaworu that couldn’t possibly all be explained in the time we have remaining, and then we get psychobabble that doesn’t even follow in a natural way from the previous episode. I read recently that the budget started to fail towards the end of the series and Anno was forced to scrap his original vision for the final two episodes. The animation also took a noticeable hit—certain still frames stay on screen for far too long, such as the scene of Hikari and Asuka in bed in Episode 23 or Unit 01 holding Kaworu in its hand in Episode 24. The latter especially was poorly done; given Shinji’s reticence to kill Kaworu, I can’t believe he could sit there that long without losing his nerve.
The Kaworu arc passes way too quickly. You can see the outlines of something interesting there: Kaworu comes to Shinji at a time when Shinji feels completely alone, alienated from Misato, with Asuka in a coma and his other friends all evacuated. He pounces on this, getting a Shinji hungry for affection to eat from his hand, but it’s tough to say exactly why. We never get the sense that Kaworu is just manipulating Shinji, and their relationship doesn’t seem to help him accomplish his mission in any way. It’s interesting primarily for what it tells us about Shinji, or it would be, except that it’s so difficult to figure out what it’s trying to tell us about Shinji. I understand that Rebuild spends more time developing Kaworu as a real character, so perhaps when I finally get around to watching it, I’ll get a more satisfying take on this arc.
I’m not sure how commonly held my opinion that Episode 24 belongs on the garbage heap with Episodes 25 and 26 is. There were people at the time who disliked it because the idea of the hero coming out gay disturbed them. One reviewer I recently saw quoted on Wikipedia seemed to feel that way, but he also complained that it felt like a desperate attempt to be controversial. I don’t really see it that way, because gay characters were reasonably common in anime at the time, though they were usually presented in a comedic light, so I don’t think it was really that controversial. (Though I do think there are yaoi fangirls who trace their love of yaoi back to Shinji and Kaworu the same way I trace my love of tsundere back to Asuka—Shinji and Kaworu were unique because their relationship was not presented comedically, and it included actual homoeroticism like the bath scene. I still don’t think this was enough to make it controversial.)
The idea of Shinji turning out to be gay doesn’t really bother me. But I can’t figure out why Anno did it so suddenly like this. Until this point, Shinji was presented as somewhat repressed and Oedipal when it came to sexuality; following Freudian beliefs, the series implies that he had issues with intimacy and sex that were the result of his mother’s death and his abandonment by his father. But whenever a sexuality was implied, it was always heterosexuality—think of the “Would you like to become one with me?” scene in Episode 20. I can think of four possible explanations for the sudden switch. First, I’m no scholar of Freudian theory (and in general, I find Freud’s theories laughably outdated and outlandish), but I know that Freud regarded many abnormal behaviors in boys and men as the result of Oedipal urges that had not transferred to socially acceptable targets. (Just as he regarded many abnormal behaviors in girls to be the result of penis envy—maybe that’s Asuka’s problem?) Perhaps the implication is that Shinji’s Oedipal urges have driven him to homosexuality, which Freud would have probably considered abnormal; because of his fear of intimacy, he was never able to learn to get close to women (and it didn’t help that the only available woman was Asuka, who was usually unpleasant to be around), so he couldn’t resolve his Oedipal urges and instead became gay.
The second possibility is that Shinji was meant to be gay from the beginning. This is sort of the reverse of the above explanation; here, I would guess that Shinji’s emotional stuntedness and repression either made him unable to analyze his own feelings, or were actually something he imposed on himself because he was afraid of his inner gayness. The “Would you like to become one with me?” scene was some sort of misinterpretation of his positive feelings towards the three girls, which were affectionate but non-sexual, and were identified wrongly as sexual feelings when Shinji began to have sexual feelings for the first time. I don’t find this explanation very convincing, because it’s much simpler to explain Shinji’s apparent lack of interest in the girls using his repression directly, and to posit that the “Would you like to become one with me?” scene meant exactly what it seemed to, that Shinji was beginning to experience sexual feelings toward the beautiful women in his life.
The third possibility is to draw on the other side of the fourth wall and assume that there was no meaning behind it, that it really was just an attempt to create controversy or that there were meant to be hints which never made it into the show because of the diminished budget. It seems plausible to me that Anno simply wrote too much story to fit into 26 episodes, and kept following the script even when there wasn’t time or money to fully animate that story.
The fourth possibility is the most obvious, but I listed it last because I reject it. Kaworu appears just as Shinji is reflecting on his friendlessness and loneliness, and reaches out to him. Shinji then goes out of his way to spend time with Kaworu, and seems very touched when Kaworu says he loves him. All this suggests that Shinji just felt lonely and sad, and he latched on to Kaworu because he was willing to settle for pretty much anyone. I don’t buy this explanation. It goes against everything we know about Shinji and his fear of intimacy. And if Shinji finally decided to change at this point, he still has Misato, who seems to have been trying to rebuild her bond with him. I don’t believe this could be it. Even if Shinji isn’t in love with Kaworu (and the homoerotic undertones are so obvious that I don’t see how that couldn’t have been the intention), it was something about Kaworu that attracted him. It couldn’t have been just anyone, because it couldn’t even be Misato; it had to be Kaworu.
The Wikipedia page states that Anno wanted all viewers to have their own interpretations of the meaning of the show, so what I’ve done above is consistent with this goal. But I do think that Anno had his own interpretations in mind when he wrote the story, and he used such a confusing manner of telling the story in part to hide his own interpretations from the viewers. I also think that he did let the script get away from him. I am hoping The End of Evangelion can give an ending—not even a good ending, just some kind of ending. I consider Episodes 25 and 26 to be like the scene inside the hero’s consciousness prior to the final battle that was somewhat common at this time in anime.
November 14th, 2012: Episode 26
Episode 26 was largely similar to Episode 25, except that it concentrated solely on Shinji and was even more nonsensical. Struggling with his own psyche, Shinji finally says aloud that he hates himself and asks how anyone could love someone who hates himself. This somehow leads into Shinji attempting to create his own world, breaking down everything until he’s left on a white background, then gradually reimposing limitations until he has a new world, one meant to be full of love and happiness. This is the alternate world that inspired that fanfiction Garden of Eva that made me undertake this mission to watch Eva again in the first place. (I was reading it, thinking “Was Asuka really that huge of a bitch? Was Misato really that slutty? Did I somehow miss all of Rei’s character development and every hint that she and Shinji might have feelings for each other?” Turns out, the answers were: Yes, she was (but unlike in the fanfiction, she had a dere-dere side); No, she wasn’t in objective terms, but as one of the only women in all of anime to have a sex scene, she’s slutty relative to her competition; No, didn’t miss it. It really wasn’t there.)
In Shinji’s alternate world, Asuka is his childhood friend and comes to wake him every morning. His mother is alive and his father isn’t evil; he lives a normal life with them. Misato is their sexy yet slipshod teacher. Rei is the flighty transfer student who accidentally flashes her panties at Shinji when they collide as she runs to school in a panic. Shinji is not repressed, but wholeheartedly joins in with Touji and Kensuke when they drool over Misato. There are no Evas or Angels.
Shinji decides that he isn’t fit to live in this world because he hates himself, so he doesn’t deserve to be loved by others like that. Various characters from the series appear and argue with him. Finally, Shinji decides that he wants to try liking himself, and become fit to live in that world. Everyone from the series appears and congratulates him, including his mother and father. And thus, the series ends. I feel like a big question mark should have appeared on the screen at the end.
I wasn’t even going to write about this episode, but Shinji, in some bizarre way, actually made the decision to move on and try to become a better person. Whether he’s really experiencing this or (as I choose to believe) just hallucinating or dreaming as he waits for the real ending, he somehow made a turn for the positive. I’m not sure how much I like his alternate world—I think I’d rather see him return to his original world, try to mend his relationship with Misato, try to show Asuka that he cares by helping her through her own problems, try to be there for Rei as she deals with the new challenge of being the only one of her there is, and tell his father that he can’t be manipulated anymore because he doesn’t have a gaping hole in his heart that yearns for Gendou’s approval. In short, rather than a perfect, effortless fantasy, I’d like to see an imperfect, but improvable, reality. I know this absolutely is not where the story goes in the movies, but as I haven’t seen them, I’m speaking only from the series.
I was really surprised by how good Eva turned out to still be. There were certain aspects of it that were dated, like some of the slapstick comedy (and the dub), but the quality and intricacy of the writing and the still-impressive animation put to rest any thoughts I may have had that it was all hype and fan-service. Eva had a profound effect on modern anime, but was also unique enough that no one has been able to duplicate it; it still feels fresh and original seventeen years later. Not many shows take the kind of creative risks that Eva does, and even if it wasn’t always satisfying as a narrative, there’s no question that it’s a tremendous work, one that should be regarded as an anime classic.
Postscript
Hey, it’s 2016 me here, and I still haven’t seen Rebuild. I watched about fifteen minutes of the first movie a while ago, but I haven’t taken the time to sit down with it and give it its due yet.
That’s because Eva is a challenging work; to really appreciate it takes a lot of effort, and I haven’t been up to expending that kind of effort. For the past four years.
I did, however, go on to watch End of Eva. Another very challenging work. Damned near impossible, even. Like the third Madoka movie, it’s not really an ending; it’s a make-your-own-ending kit, which can be interpeted to make the series end almost however you want it to.
Speaking of Madoka, it’s really the show that carried Eva’s torch into the 21st Century: a dark, challenging show that takes on a beloved genre of anime, commenting on it, deconstructing it, and eventually reconstructing it, as Eva did when it spawned Gurren Lagann, and as Madoka seems to have by spurring Sailor Moon Crystal and the upcoming new Card Captor Sakura manga.
Next time will be End of Eva.
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