Neon Genesis Evangelion, and really the Evangelion franchise as a whole, rarely needs much introduction. Though rarely discussed outside of the anime community in my experience, it’s not a complete unknown. Perhaps you’ve seen artwork of the characters somewhere, statues of the titular Evangelion mecha, heard that one anime-fan in your life bring it up, or perhaps you just knew that bit of trivia that the late, great Robin Williams was a fan himself, owing to that scene in One Hour Photo.
For the anime community it holds a place of high regard, though not without its detractors for various reasons. It almost seems to be a rite of passage for many of the Youtube Anime Review community to have to cover it at some point in their career. On the early internet, debates over its themes and characters ran rampant (Rei or Asuka often being the biggest question, because the internet is just like that). If not debates, then there was much in-depth analysis into the characters themselves, the themes, or how to make sense of the pseudo-religious iconography. Fanfics as well are plentiful, with everything from retellings and sequels, to crossovers with other properties such as Warhammer 40k, X-Files, various sci-fi and even odder ones like the Tomb Raider series.
Evangelion, despite the rocky end to its initial production, has been a constant presence in the world for the last 25 years. If not through the re-releases of the original series, then by the Rebuild movies or just simple advertising and Evangelion themed merchandise. Think of a product, there’s likely an Eva-version of it somewhere.
I’ve wanted to talk about the series myself for a long time, but how I did that was always a question. I could go into the series in-depth, explain how the movies or video games relate. Talk about the production hell or go into the biography of its creator, Hideki Anno. I could, but I won’t. That’s been done by a thousand people before me and will probably be done by a thousand people more. There's no take I can up with that's original and not a regurgitation of something I've heard elsewhere. So any of this that does come up will be organic in the writing. If you are interested, a simple Youtube search will give you more than you need, but better yet, I’d say just go watch it first. If by the end of this post I’ve convinced you to do so, then all the better, but that's not the purpose of this.
Just in case, to get it out of the way, here is the watch order:
1) The original 26 episode run of Neon Genesis Evangelion (Any version, the Perfect Edition is a good choice).
2) The End of Evangelion feature movie.
3) The Rebuild of Evangelion Quadrilogy.
After this, anything else is supplementary and you likely won’t care unless you’ve become a dedicated fan in some way. That said, you don’t need to go and do all that before reading this, as this post will be relatively spoiler free all things considered, though broad strokes of the endings will be covered.
Like many anime fans my age, I grew up on what had been translated and televised amongst children’s programming in the UK. Pokemon, Digimon, YuGiOh, Beyblade, Zoids and Cardcaptors were major parts of the post-school and Saturday morning TV time for me and my siblings. It wasn’t until I was a teenager did I get more insight into anime with a few episodes of Bleach and Naruto, but we didn’t get the internet till late so I missed that typical entry that many fans seem to talk about. Instead, I received a subscription to one of the many monthly magazines that we get over here. These can be anything from model builds to DVDs sets (and incidentally the Lord of the Rings miniatures game featured elsewhere on the blog came in the same format). The series for me was one called “Manga Force”, and outside of the episodic shounen “children’s” anime I’d been used to at this point, this was really my true entry into anime.
This magazine showed me Akira, Ninja Scroll, Macross Plus, Ghost in the Shell and Perfect Blue, some of the greatest and arguably cult classics in their own rights. Naturally, amongst these came two more relevant to this post; Evangelion: Death and Rebirth and The End of Evangelion (EoE from now on).
The former is a movie length clip show, a shortened retelling of 24 of the original episodes (leaving out the original ending two episodes, though I didn’t know this at the time). It was brief, it was mad, and it served as a recap or primer of the series, even though I hadn't seen it. A smattering of robot-on-kaiju fights and enough of the character beats to give you an idea of who everyone was.
The latter was even more insane and the track "Komm, süsser Tod" will stick with me for a long time. I watched EoE more than a few times before I was able to get onto the internet and watch the original series. It is, as the name may suggest, the end of the original series and the accounting of a literal apocalypse within the setting. We watch as the main character, Shinji Ikari, is dragged through the whole thing, steered by the machinations of those vastly more powerful than him. People are murdered in droves as monstrous mecha fight it out and the very fabric of reality is shredded all in the name of people seeking godhood. Amongst it all, Shinji breaks and as part of the catalyst of it is handed the keys to the event itself.
And so he breaks the world… almost.
Shinji saw some shit.
We get no true resolution. Just two broken children lying on a beach in the ruins of the world. That was the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
It took me a long time to get an understanding of it all, even after I’d hunted down the original series so I could watch it properly in full. Look around and you’ll find any number of people calling Shinji Ikari weak, or a wimp, or stupid. Those same people perhaps a few years later reassess that once they've become and adult and can look back on thier younger selves. He is in fact, a very real, very normal fourteen year old boy with all the neuroses and selfishness inherent to that. It’s the world and circumstances around him that make him appear weak, compounded by a very real passivity to his personality. In the end, he’s tremendously relatable, and I think it’s this, more than the mecha-on-kaiju fights, more than the fanservice, or strange iconography, that makes Evangelion stick with people. And I think this depth of portrayal is not solely confined to Shinji himself, but it’s the one you’ll typically see related to, as many fans were teenage boys and young men themselves.
It’s no secret that Evangelion bears all the marks of Hideki Anno’s battle with mental health. Much like the idea that you can supposedly trace Sylvester Stallone’s career through the Rocky movies, you can do the same with Evangelion and Anno. More than just the production issues, the way the original series ended, the way certain characters are portrayed, right up until the ending of the fourth Rebuild movie (which is a definitive ending unlike previous entries), all of it is shaped by Anno’s feelings and the way he perceives the world. Shinji Ikari is Hideki Anno himself in a lot of ways.
The core of the original series came down to the idea of the “Hedgehog’s Dilemma”. That people desire to be close to one another, but fear it all the same in case we hurt each other with our spines, so we put up walls. It is referenced directly in the show by Ritsuko, but also is displayed by the very idea of the AT-Field, the “barrier of the soul” and the actions of the characters themselves. Much of the series displays the loneliness caused by this, the character’s inability to talk and express their feelings properly to each other, to be truly vulnerable, to cope with loss, to just walk on their own two feet.
The AT-Field.
So, whilst I enjoy all of the series, its comedic slice-of-life moments, its mystery and esoteric imagery, and its over the top combat scenes, it's whenever I’m feeling melancholy or lonely that I tend to look back at Evangelion. Those are the times I relate most closely to Shinji Ikari, because much like him, I feel these ways in spite of the people around me. We pop in those headphones, turn on the music and the world turns around that little bubble. In fact, I’m doing it right now, even as I type this sometime around two in the morning.
There are people we could talk to, could visit, but it’s easier to be alone and wallow.
We could do something, make a move, but it’s easier to just sit and watch.
We could make a difference, but it feels like everything is against us, and we’d never succeed anyway.
We could make a connection with someone, but we might get rejected.
So why not just sit with the status quo and do nothing?
For Shinji, all of this led to the apocalypse, and many he cared about dying without him being able to do anything to help them. Even in the preceeding events, action could mean him making things worse.
For me, it means sitting alone in my flat at almost thirty-two years old, yearning for something that I can’t quite put words to. I’m not as paralysed by it as Shinji can be, but then the fate of the world doesn’t rest on my shoulders either.
The stakes are rather different, but the point remains the same. It's not about saving the world even in Shinji's case, that's just the background. It's about growing up and becoming an adult. Making choices and owning the outcomes.
At so many points in the series Shinji fails to do this and is left distressed by what happens, culminating fully during EoE and the third Rebuild movie in different ways. He reacts by shutting down, closing off, running away and yet still expecting someone else to just do something. He only does what he is told to do, purely out of fear of being abandoned again.
You have to get up and do something. You might make mistakes, but so does everyone. You might get hurt but you can grow and learn from it. One of Shinji’s mantras earlier in the series is “I mustn’t run away” and it’s always a bit more than that, in that it should be “I must step forward”. It’s going to be hard, you're gonna have to fight other people for it, but there’s always people at your back and if you’re lucky, that one special person will take your hand and run alongside you.
I have believed for the longest time, not in a God or gods, but in the power of human choice. Our choices define us, define our path, define our successes and failures and more than that, they so often define others. Any choice we make can either invalidate or confirm the choice of someone else. There’s over seven billion people on this planet all concurrently choosing and sometimes your failure is nothing to do with you but the composite choices of dozens or even hundreds of others that just happened to direct the flow of things against you. There can be malice there, but it can also just be life.
Do nothing, choose nothing and you'll still subsist in the flow of it all. Hollow and lonely.
In Evangelion, despite all the biblical references on display and the very real godlike beings in existence, at the core of the story it is people who shape everything, the gods often being puppets or tools for their machinations. The choices of the few caused the rapturing of every soul on the planet, all in the interests of sitting at the head of becoming gods themselves. At the same time, another choice saw this become outright war and the mental manipulation of their own son, purely out of grief for the loss of a wife and a desire to be with her once again. No matter how many other characters may have chosen, none of this could be prevented and it took the remaking of the world over and over for an incarnation of Shinji Ikari to put an end to it, but only after he’d been able to accept his grief and weaknesses and choose to do so. Those with power put every single event into motion and sweep everyone along with them, most characters still choose, still fight for thier own desired outcomes.
In the real world, politicians and world leaders shape the world around us, and I could no more prevent a war than Shinji could prevent the apocalypse, even if he became a key piece in it all. Even the smallest person can choose to live and thrive against the hardships of the world however, as shown multiple times with the side-characters in Evangelion, and as seen in real life in so many situations.
This is all just considering the physical. There are choices on other levels to, choices in perception and thought. You feel how your feel and that is very real but you can also often choose to ignore, shape or direct those feelings to something different from what they are. Do you like yourself? Are you happy? Perhaps not, but you can choose to find a way to change that.
It’s only very recently that I’d noticed my belief system in some ways had parallels to the ideas presented in Evangelion, and much of that had to be illuminated by the final movie in the series. Nearly twenty years of watching and rewatching that world, and I might not be that awkward, lonely wimp of a teanager like Shinji any more, but it’s still a part of me. I try to take the lessons I’ve gleaned directly or indirectly and keep moving forward, though I do wonder where I’ll find my own happiness, much like Shinji and Anno himself by the end of it.
Shinji and Mari.
This whole post really did devolve into a bunch of navel gazing around my own thoughts and feelings, but I think that is something that Evangelion truly has the power to do. It might not be Shinji for you, but I think there’s something in there that everyone can truly call back to. Perhaps it hit at the right time for me, discovering it as a teenager. I think so often it’s easy to hold things up on a pedestal and forget to outgrow them, I’ve certainly done that with other things and even people. I appreciate that I can put aside Evangelion and only return to it as needed however. It serves as a reminder to not backslide into certain periods in life, but to instead step forward.
I’ve lived alone now for nearly nine years of my life, broken up only by a failed relationship that’s the core of my fears of connection and abandonment. The recent lockdowns exacerbated a lot of the Shinji-esque mentality that’s stuck with me over the years to a point where loneliness has a hold that’s very difficult to shift, even in a world as “connected” as we live in. The desire to get out and make connections is balanced entirely by that fear of getting hurt, but I mustn’t run away.
At least I don't have to get in the damn robot.
Thank you for reading.