Neon Genesis Evangelion – The Beast that Shouted “I” at the Heart of the World / Take Care of Yourself [26]

We learn that the people are combining to form one entity where every person’s flaws make up for the others. Which is a nice idea to better everyone but the fact that everyone is still joining together doesn’t make this a good thing in my eyes.

Shinji goes over his attitudes to running away. He doesn’t like running away because of his fear of rejection, at this point he hates himself anyway and is struggling with feelings of inadequateness but he still feels like he owes people things. He goes through the paranoia of this when everyone gives him a phone call saying that they hate him. Shinji is running through the idea of running away and experiencing the rejection he’s paranoid of through the people at a distance, which shows how he will feel after running away. It seems that nobody really gets Shinji and he needs to open up more.

We then get plunged into the funny make believe world which is a slice of life, rom-com and maybe harem anime. It’s full of clichés which were probably old at the time, never mind today. All the clichés are thrown in your face at a rapid rate and it makes you think of how good the show is due to its humanisation of characters instead of using the same tropes as everyone else. Asuka is a tsundere and the girl next door and Rei is the clichéd new transfer student running along with some toast. This is all while Shinji plays the common and boring generic protagonist to play straight man to everything.

It’s really funny. You would never have expected to see Rei fall over and care that Shinji saw her pants, or that the president would grab Toji by the ear for a dumb remark. I’m impressed with the character of Asuka in this situation because while on paper the characters are similar they feel completely different and one feels like an actual character who you could meet, though a lot of you might not like to meet, and the other is just another boring anime character.

It’s Shinji that realises this world of his imagination is fake and he tries to come back to reality. He forces himself to accept reality instead of escapism and I think we can agree that it’s more or less a good thing. Shinji removes this barrier around him and the walls of his container start to break, and all his friends applaud him for making the achievement of coming to terms with reality!

But one question still remains. One massive and huge question that none of us have thought of an answer for and nobody knows. Why was there a military penguin I this show?

That is Neon Genesis Evangelion Completed! For the rest of the month we will be focusing on the movies! My word document is 100 pages already; let’s see how much more I have to say! I have already seen the ending film but I’ve not written the review yet, I know it’s going to be the most difficult post I’ve written.