Evangelion month is now over and everything except for death and rebirth (which are just recaps) and the film that hasn’t been released yet has been covered! The word count of everything I’ve written this month is around 36k so that makes it a book in my mind. As well as this I still finished the project with a week left to spare! This has basically convinced me that Nanowrimo is possible for me if I decide to blog it, so maybe that’ll be coming in the future if I want too! But right now it’s probably not coming, isn’t this book good enough for you? What else do you want!
This has a review of every single episode and every single film as I carried on with the series, I’m proud to have finished this massive project and grateful to the people who have kept up with it, if you have you’ve read a hell of a lot! Good job!
It’s very clear that I have spent a lot more time writing this than actually watching the series which tells me that it was a really brilliant and interesting story. In this you can read my changing perspective on the show to see how my attitudes change over time! If you do decide to read the series as a whole then thank you very much! I hope you enjoy the series as much as I did! Also watch out for updates as changes are made here!
Evangelion Month
Neon Genesis Evangelion is 26 Episodes Long, and there are five more films after it. That’s 26 + 5 which equals 31, and how many days are there in January? Yes 31! So in other words this entire month will be focussed on reviewing every episode of Evangelion as well as the films. If you don’t like episode reviews then don’t worry! My episode reviews aren’t short synopsises, they tend to be long and thoughtful with analytical insights you hopefully haven’t heard before! Well that’s just my opinion; you can be the judge of that!
Unlike other series’ like this such as Shiki or JEARETTAS I have not had a long planning and production phase and I’ve not even written a single post yet|! This means the struggle will be interesting this time and I might actually be challenged to complete it!
I’m not going to reveal my opinion of the show yet as it will become obvious but whatever my attitude towards the show is I believe it will be worth talking about! So since I’ve seen very little Evangelion I hope you stick around to watch me become an expert over the course of the next month!
I will still be releasing other posts (not nearly as much, all end of year posts mostly) so I hope you’ll stick around for that as well! Also if you think this is going to be a reoccurring thing you are sadly mistaken, probably, I don’t really know; I’ve not watched the show yet!
So if you’ve not seen Evangelion this is a great chance for you to start watching the series with me!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Angel Attack [1]
My only experience with Evangelion before returning to episode one was seeing three episodes of it and not really enjoying it. It’s not that I thought it was even bad I just found it uninteresting, boring and slow paced. All I can say to anyone who, like me, found themselves baffled by how it received its critical acclaim is to try taking notes whilst watching it. This time whilst watching the episode I took notes and enjoyed it!
I really love the opening to Evangelion and how epic and airy it sounds before going into a really fun rhythm. I wasn’t very optimistic for this episode and remember writing about how I wish Evangelion was as both cool and fun as the OP! Hopefully this will be true!
The opening scene immediately establishes that something is terribly wrong. The streets are deserted, the train station’s empty and nobody seems to be around. It looks completely miserable. There’s an evacuation notice but the tragedy communicated is a lot better shown than told here.
But how bad can the tragedy be if theirs this little boy outside? That question is quickly answered when a giant angel mecha appears and starts exploding things! It makes you wonder how stupid the main character might be if he’s out in the open near a massive robot warzone. This set up is for Shinji (our main character) who is meeting up with a person from the military, maybe they should fix their meet up locations.
Whilst this is occurring we learn that conventional weapons don’t work on these Mechas and that a war could have been going on for 15 years, either that or there was a war 15 years ago, I’m not sure. I have to say for a sudden outbreak of conflict the streets look terrible but if it’s been going on for fifteen years I have to say that considering the enemy at hand this damage is pretty good!
Misato is the woman employed by the military to meet Shinji for reasons unexplained and it’s in one great shot that Shinji’s entire attitude towards her. It shows Misato’s exposed leg (She’s wearing something revealing but not that revealing) with Shinji trying as best as he possibly can to avoid looking. This shows his nervousness towards women and shows his real awkwardness. It also hints that there might be some attraction between the two provided Misato would stop teasing him.
Many things are expressed without words in this show such as Shinji’s relationship with his dad who clearly has negative feelings towards him. Later in the episode he even goes so far as to say that the reason he was ignoring him for all this time was that he was never useful until now. With that logic I’m just wondering why he didn’t leave him at birth in the flash back then! On a more serious note this attitude is a really selfish thing for a parent to have and is just terrible for the child. Expecting parents should know that children are more of a burden than a help at least to begin with and be prepared to put the effort in to give them a healthy upbringing. After all the parents are the ones who brought the child into the world and neglecting him/her makes me wonder why you thought to have the child in the first place. This is going to be pretty controversial but I think in some cases it might be less cruel to have an abortion than to raise a child you know you will neglect, be unable to provide for and not love. I’m still not entirely sure of my opinions on that matter though, I’ve got a arguments on both sides. I never thought I would get into such a controversial debate in the first episode!
So in the military factory, which is so big even the employee guiding Shinji got lost, we stumble across a massive robot which is called an Evangelion! And just like anyone Shinji does not want to pilot it against the thing he just saw blow up many military vehicles in one place. I have to question the decision to create robots specifically for 14 year olds but at least the military seem alright with dealing with the consequences of their actions and dealing with unnecessary drama to save the world.
Outside knowledge from the show has told me that piloting the Evangelion hurts the user so when the women whose name isn’t yet revealed is in crazy pain it made me really worried about would happen. This doesn’t strike me as a story where the hero’s will have a simple win, with machines as violent as that it’s hard to see how the main characters won’t lose at least something about their original character throughout the story. I see sacrifice coming into play during this story since it’s several 14 year olds pain for the benefit of the rest of society.
Many other shows have overpowered main characters where they immediately can connect to their mecha, I think I remember Hundred being one of them and it just felt wrong. But something about this show just makes the moment feel really cool instead of fake and forced as it’s represented visually. A rock is about to fall on Shinji but as he moves his hands to cover himself the mechas hands move at the same time protecting him. It was a great moment and established the connection immediately.
Shinji is put into a strange orange liquid that apparently oxidises his blood directly and is ready to launch into episode two!
I’m amazed at the complete change in attitude I had to watching this show, I thought I would just find it boring and explain why it didn’t work for me but I was pleasantly surprised to find that my attitude was changed! The situation is a lot more interesting to me now.
One complaint I already had in my head was the idea that the show presents you with characters and just expects you to care about them. I think that the reason why I had this idea in my head was just that I lost interest and wasn’t ready to pay attention to the more interesting aspects in an attempt to try and find out why the show is so beloved by many. I hope that through this post series I will be able to explain the appreciation for the show and hopefully bring to your attention things that will make you like the show more!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Unfamiliar Ceiling / The Beast [2]
The other series I’ve done like this is when I reviewed Shiki episode by episode and when I look at the notes I wrote and the word count of my posts it makes me think that this series will be very long indeed. It’s rare to run out of room while writing notes but it happened!
In a continuation from the previous episode we see the showdown between the angel and Shinji. Despite having perfect synchronisation with the robot it just doesn’t seem to work for him, when you see him simply try to move forward you can see why it took so long for people to synch with it and learn its use. He falls over on the ground; it’s really not looking good!
It’s then made clear to us a very bad design flaw of the Evangelion; the pain the robot feels is also felt by the user. When could this ever be a good idea? It’s just a really poor design decision, but while the show doesn’t give you a direct explanation I think it kind of makes sense. The Evangelion doesn’t seem to have many controls on it so that means it’s probably controlled through human movement hence the machine needs to be connected to the nerves. I’m going to skip ahead to the end of the episode to finish this point. At the end of the episode it’s revealed that Shinji’s robot might be biological since bio matter such as eyes can appear from it. Therefore if the two are in synch and are connected I think it would be possible for him to feel pain.
The robots arm breaks and Shinji can feel has actual arm in pain, which must be a terrible experience. Misato says that it’s not his arm in pain in a mad attempt to calm him down which could mean that it’s either a placebo or Misato is giving him a very bad coping mechanism which is far too late to reach him. Shinji seems to black out, he then wakes up in a hospital with an unfamiliar ceiling.
Whilst this is all going on we are given vague hints at what took place the previous day, along with a meeting with a lot of important people who happen to also come across as scumbags. They are basically there to reveal the economic situation. Basically if damage continues to be as bad as it already has they won’t be able to afford the repairs of the Evangelion and fight back.
Shinji is fine but understandably in a bad way. Yet again his emotions are communicated through visuals as he stares at the same arm that the angel broke earlier in the episode. He cannot believe that it’s still there and doesn’t understand how he’s ok. He also remembers the hurt and wants to get rid of it.
To clear things up from the previous episode a war broke out fifteen years ago and wiped out half the human race. Now the world is creating technology for if the angels return again, and they have! So my speculation from the previous post was only half correct.
So Shinji is escorted out from his hospital visit and sees his dad, who is still terribly cold towards him even though he most likely saved the world the day before! It’s not like he just justified his position as a key military figure or anything! So far they just seem to be showing us the relationship between Shinji and his father, I’m looking forward to seeing it explored more in the future.
Misato then lets Shinji come and stay with her, it’s funny that she seems to care about him more than his dad does, and they have a small welcome party! I find it really funny how Shinji didn’t really get why she’d have a party and it might hint at his introverted nature, which seems apparent.
We then view a very empty city scape and see it rise out of the ground. It’s amazing how something so huge can be made in such a small amount of time. The defence is genius but it’s sad that humanity has been reduced to hiding underground.
We are then taken to Misato’s house and let’s just say it’s seen better days. She lives in a very messy way and that’s either because she’s really busy or doesn’t care. More on this later though. I like that she acts really excited and hyper around Shinji as she wants to make him feel welcome, distracting him from the previous day. But this is contrasted later in the episode when she’s contemplating her attitude to Shinji alone. She describes herself as “transparent” which makes me think she’s just putting on an act to make him feel better and that she perhaps could be a lot more serious and sad on her own because her living conditions show someone who has stopped caring as much. She has a lot of beers in the fridge, which makes me think she might use alcohol as a crutch to escape the trauma of the military. That’s just speculation on my part though; it could later be revealed that I’m terribly wrong!
I’m sure everyone can relate to having difficulty sleeping due to stress and it seems apparent that Shinji will have this problem. We are shown a picture of Shinji who is just listening to music on a tape (very old for 2015 AD) and going over the previous events. I think it’s a really interesting decision to have the action scene in retrospect as we’ve been constantly seeing the consequences of it and dread the horror to come later.
We see that after Shinji gets knocked out he goes berserk, loses it and then relentlessly attacks the angel. I think this is only possible because of Shinji’s connection to the robot and his inner human instincts and desperation resulting in natural movements that resulted in a brilliant attack.
The episode ends when Misato enters Shinji’s bedroom congratulating him on the previous day and encouraging him not to lose heart. The message is directed at a panicked and stressed individual. Needless to say it’s going to be a long night for Shinji.
Neon Genesis Evangelion – The Phone That Never Rings / A Transfer [3]
After a three week time skip we see Shinji learning to use the Eva in a simulator and the bad thing is that he doesn’t even seem as good at piloting as he was during his berserk moment in the previous episode. He’s really starting from zero and has no skills what so ever except for the small amount that he’s learned in the recent time period. All the characters around Shinji didn’t actually believe he would return to the Evangelion and it’s really sad for two reasons.
The first is that they understand the harm of piloting the Evangelion and don’t really feel much sympathy towards the pilot, who is struggling very much. It’s clear the Shinji is being pushed to his limits to the extent where it’s just repeating instructions in his head instead of actually practicing fighting. I mean he was probably a little damaged before (as revealed later) but right now he’s become in a far worse state.
The second reason why I think it’s sad is that they don’t seem to have any faith in ShinjI! Most people think of themselves as a good person unless they take pride in not being good yet I’m sure out of all of these people nearly all of them would still take on the pain of fighting in the Eva because it’s for the better! If I had the choice to save the world at the cost of a year or so of terrible suffering I would just have to accept, provided the world needed saving of course. I think Shinji understands the responsibility, he doesn’t want it but he knows that he has a duty which is something I can absolutely get behind!
The characters think he’s doing it because he just does what he’s told but I’d really hate to think that this was the reason. Whilst Shinji is still a child, at his current state of mind he would know the importance of his role. The only thing that may make him run away is a traumatic experience worse than all previous ones. He’s not adjusting well to life but I think he’ll become competent by the end, either that or completely insane. I’ve not made my mind up yet!
We are given the simple fact that nobody ever calls Shinji on his mobile and has no friends. It’s really sad, this means that Shinji has been going to train and then sit at home doing nothing for the whole time. It must be pretty boring. I’m sure there are lots of people who rarely get calls, me being one of them. But these days things like Facebook messenger exist along with skype and discord so it doesn’t really mean the same thing anymore. In this version of 2015 Shinji has no human contact his own age and that’s pretty terrible.
Shinji is clearly a very lonely and shy individual who lacks social skills and the longer he spends on his own like this the worse it’s going to get. You hear a lot of cases of people who have been home-schooled and lack the social skills to talk to anyone and whilst this hasn’t happened to Shinji I think it’s making his problem worse. Something tragic about a few cases I’ve heard about in home schooling is the complaints that the children make e.g. “They wouldn’t let me go to school dressed as Sonic” where the strangest things become normal to them. Shinji hasn’t been home-schooled but I think it makes a good example because he’s too used to being on his own and it’s just painful to watch really.
As Shinji was sat in the classroom I remarked that the other pilot Rei was there just as blank and introverted as our main character. I wonder if it’s that kind of personality type which fits better with the Eva’s, I wouldn’t have thought so but you never know. I also thought of a reason why the pilots must be 14. The first war broke out in the year 2000 and the next is starting in 2015. People who are 14 would have needed to be born in 2001 so that means these 14 years old are the first people to grow up after the end of the war. I wonder if something happened where a chemical was released into the air or something like that which fundamental changes on the children had born. I guess we’ll find out! Or it will just never be explained…
Once Shinji reveals that he’s a pilot the whole class freaks out and starts talking to him. It makes me wonder if Rei has been suffering in silence as will since they should have probably mentioned that there were two pilots in the class. He has the opportunity to become the most popular guy in the school, but he doesn’t, later he’s just lonely again. I’m not sure if it’s because he likes his own company or is genuinely worried about human interaction and standing out. I’m not sure if Evangelion will try and answer questions like these, it strikes me as a show to leave lots up to interpretation, which makes it pretty nice to episode review!
Guess who gets beaten up after this event happens? I don’t even need to tell you because you probably already know. After a serious punch I can imagine you being outraged and furious. Shinji just seems able to hold a lot of it in because he knows he can’t win, especially with that attitude. He lets out that he didn’t chose to pilot the Evangelion which makes sense and it pretty apparent yet that attitude seriously annoys the classmate.
Our mean classmate is in a bad state because of his sympathy towards his sister who is in hospital due to the recent attack. But the whole scene plays out really weirdly. Here’s the transcript:
Mean guy: “Sorry transfer student, but I’ve got to beat you up! I won’t feel right until I smack you.”
Shinji: Silence
Friend of Mean Guy: “Sorry, his little sister was injured in the incident the other day. Well there you have it.”
Shinji: “I’m not piloting it by choice either.”
This is from the start of the scene until the end of the scene and it makes me wonder if the guys were having a conversation earlier than this and we were just thrown in. When Shinji says his line it’s extremely effective in creating a reaction within the mean guy. As the audience we understand that he feels obligated because he’s the only one who can actually pilot it and would rather someone else did. The subtext is that this opinion is strange to outsiders as they are most likely unaware of the stress piloting causes whereas to us as a viewer it’s very easy to empathise with Shinji. The mean classmate is so annoyed because he would have wanted to pilot it in Shinji’s place so that he could save his sister. This brings up the idea of pressure, as a consequence of Shinji’s actions people will die and he will be blamed even though others would be absolutely useless in his situation. Living up to society’s expectations is going to be difficult for Shinji and he might get just as much gratitude as grief for doing his job, which is to save the world.
Getting a glimpse of the underground shelter shows how safe the people feel during these attacks, they don’t appear worried in the slightest even the guy whose sister is dying as a consequence of these. In fact these guys even escape the shelter because they are unaware of the dangers.
Oh yeah that’s right, another invasion happens and Shinji is forced to yet again pilot his Eva. So it’s time to see what he’s learnt over the course of his training! Oh wait, he’s still not actually that good. He gets pinned down and can’t fight because of the transfer students, once he saves them he’s told to retreat, but he doesn’t. He has a one track mind to never stop fighting and to win. It doesn’t come across as heroic, more of a desperate trance. Shinji Is in fight or flight mode and all he can do is lash out in desperation.
We get a stalemate; both angel and Eva stab each other and just stay there. But while the robot is damaged Shinji and the classmates should still be alive as shown later on.
The classmates remark that Shinji hasn’t shown up for three days and try calling him. They don’t get an answer. What this basically tells me is that Shinji is still in that terrible state we saw when Rei came back injured in episode one and that he’s got a long process of recovery to go though. Good luck Shinji, you’ll need it.
(An episode review 1500 words long? If they start getting longer I might have to start splitting them into parts, the ten minutes before the ad break and the one after. Why do I have to have so much to say about you Neon Genesis Evangelion?)
-EDIT
The Mean Guy isn’t angry because he want’s to pilot the Eva, in fact this is only the ambition of the nerdy guy. In fact his internal monologue is more “why do you pilot it then” (if you don’t pilot it by choice). The mean guy interprets the events as if Shinji caused more bad than good which we know isn’t the case. The mean guy wishes he didn’t pilot because the damage caused to her sister was Shinji’s fault.
We know that Shinji has no real option: Pilot or let the world die aren’t great options. This is why the disagreement is caused and it makes you think that mean guy might not be as bad as we first thought. Perhaps he should be called mourning guy or angry guy, or angry at the wrong person guy.
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Rain After Running Away / A Hedgehog’s Dilemma
I knew before watching that this would be the episode where Shinji runs away, it seems like I was wrong earlier and I had watched 4 episodes instead of 3. Anyway this was the episode that I initially dropped the series on and it’s not too difficult to see why. Content wise this episode was very skippable but there were many more personal moments that saved this episode.
Effectively the episode is extremely self-contained and skipping it could make you believe nothing happened. Basically Shinji runs away at the start then comes back at the end.
To finish the volume of notes to post length ratio idea from the previous episode review I realised that the difference between this and Shiki is a lot more huge since I’m not talking about what I think will happen before watching, answering if I was correct, or saying what I want to happen in the future and react to that. So yeah this project is going to be huge!
We open to learn that Shinji isn’t badly injured like we once thought but just skiving; the stress has got to him. Then we learn that the stress has really gotten to him and he escapes! Misato is understandably annoyed but it’s hard to tell if it’s just because she lost a pilot or it it’s more personal than that.
Shinji listens to a tape as he escapes on the train. It looks like he constantly listens to the same one or two tunes because whenever we view his device he’s always switching between the same things. These must particularly resonate with him. I find it really strange how he sits there in the exact same place and position keeping to himself. I wonder if he’s just focussed on his memories, worried about being spotted or just naturally stationary. I found this whole train scene really strange because it was a little confusing.
The train started with a small amount of people which continued to grow over time as other people and school children got on. Then it emptied and morning turned to night. Once this happened it showed the train becoming more and more crowded again which means he wouldn’t have gotten off and just stayed on the train. This basically means that Shinji wants to leave but can’t force himself to move, the rest of the episode makes a lot more sense if you assume he went off at the same stop he got on at.
He goes to a lonely cinema to what looks like the most boring film ever made since nobody there cares about it. There is a couple who are basically making out in front of him and it makes him annoyed so he sleeps outside the room. There are two reasons why I think this annoyed Shinji so much, and it wasn’t because he was just trying to watch the film! The first is obviously jealousy, he lacks social skills to approach people in general, never mind somebody he wants to go out with. He must have felt to sad seeing two people right in front of him something he believes he cannot possible attain. That’s the first interpretation but the second which is most likely wrong says that he also feels angry because the two might make him think of his mum and dad before they had him. This could bring up sad memories of his dead mother (revealed later in the episode) and his dad who doesn’t care about him.
Shinji runs outside later to see the landscape rumble around him and hear emergency sirens. This must be caused by the stress of piloting the Eva and he runs to try and escape it and sits in the countryside on the edge of a cliff recapping flash backs of what happened before he left.
Misato scolded him despite his victory and I can relate to this moment very much. Shinji’s being scolded for something he already knows and understands is wrong so he just ignores her and glazes over it. Once Misato picks him up on this Shinji doesn’t seem to care because he won anyway. I can empathise with both sides but either way Misato explodes in anger against him and Shinji feels bad because he thinks he should be getting praise instead, ultimately leading to his decision to leave.
After the ad break Shinji meets his old nerdy friend in the field and he goes camping with him. Shinji bonds with him when he realises that he doesn’t have parents around either. I might be reading in to this too much but I think Shinji sees the nerdy guy as popular and normal with very little problems based on his initial attitude. When Shinji realises that this guy behaves fairly normally despite them both suffering the same lost I think it gives him hope for the future that things will get better.
When Shinji is found Misato has another interview and it’s the talk that makes Shinji quit from becoming a pilot. She realises that Shinji feels an obligation to the people around him instead of actually wanting to fight for his own reasons. This causes Misato to make him leave as he’s fighting for the wrong reasons. I have to question how sensible this decision was after Shinji saved the world twice in three weeks but if she believes Rei with her injuries and broken arm can do it instead then ok!
Once Shinji says good bye to his friends Mitsato has an epiphany about Shinji called the Hedgehogs dilemma. It’s about the challenges of human intimacy. It basically refers to a group of hedgehogs who want to warm up next to each other but can’t because their spikes will injure the other. Misato applies this to Shinji to realise that he wants to do his duty but has psychological barriers that prevents it. Once she realises this she travels to meet Shinji at the train station.
At the same time Shinji gets his own epiphany yet it’s a lot simpler because he can’t understand humans that well. He hears misato’s words “Hang in there” and decides to stay because that statement shows that someone believes in him. It might make him think that Misato’s anger was just worry for his safety as well.
The two have a fated reunion at the train station where they welcome each other back home. It’s a very touching moment to end the episode on.
So basically this episode wasn’t pointless since we learned more about our characters and they learn more about each other. Though I agree the plot might have been useless but the story really meant something.
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Rei beyond the heart / Rei I
We start off with a flash back of the testing of the very first Eva. I genuinely thought that the military guys were creating new body suits for humans instead of mechas due to the way the scene was shot. When you see something in an empty white room it’s difficult to notice size. It’s only when we get a glimpse through the testing facility that I understood how stupid I was.
Anyway the Eva goes Berserk and they decide to shut it off but there’s a problem with the communication! I’ve only seen five episodes of this show so far and they’ve already used that excuse way too much! They really need to fix these things.
To my (and everyone else’s) surprise it’s actually Shinji’s dad who comes to the rescue and it’s really unnatural to see him act that way; risking his life to save a humans. This scene comes into play later and results in two different attitudes between Shinji and Rei at how they view Gendo Ikari.
The purpose of this episode is to basically introduce Rei as a main character and establish her fully. We learn that all of Rei’s information has been deleted as well so she doesn’t really have anyone who knows a lot about her. The anime also implies that Rei changed drastically after piloting but that could just be myself reading into the series too much.
What I really like yet would never have thought of is the idea of looking at the angels once their dead to see how they work. They reveal that these angels have 99.89% human genes, I guess they got lucky and got rid of the 0.11% DNA which was responsible for causing injury from normal weapons.
Once this is explained Shinji realises what his dad did when they were first testing the Eva 00. Just like us we can see that Shinji doesn’t believe what happened. We can tell that the Ikari’s have some bad family history but I kind of want it to be explained at this point to give contrast between his attitudes between Rei and Shinji. What event made Shinji dislike him so much? Was it just simply him leaving or did something worse happen?
Don’t you think it’s strange that Shinji and Rei have never had a conversation at this point in the series? They have a lot in common. It’s really strange during the swimming pool scene when Shinji treats Rei as a stranger. They should know each other by now! This just shows how socially inept both of the characters are. When Shinji is caught staring at Rei, his friends tease him about his attraction towards her and it’s pretty funny. This is because his reaction is over the top and pretty childish, it reminds me of being a small child since that’s how bad his reaction is. Whether he has affection or not it’s surprising his reaction isn’t a lot better. I think this comes from a lack of experience with this type of conversation and a lack of maturity for all people in the conversation.
Rei has no friends despite being a pilot and Shinji was just wondering why. On the surface it’s that she’s simply introverted and quiet but I’m wondering if we’ll find out a deeper reason later. She’s not even cold to everyone though and is nice to Shinji’s dad of all people! Shinji can’t believe it and I’m sure he feels a huge jealousy for her and lack of understanding about the nature of his dad’s character. He can’t understand why he treats a little girl better than his own son! And neither can I really.
I wasn’t going to bring this up but the appearance of military penguin is way too annoying! How can I take anything seriously when theirs a military penguin running around with no explanation given? It’s very out of place. Not that I don’t like penguins, I just want a reason for the penguin to be there.
The episode progresses by giving Shinji the task of giving Rei her new card. What could possible go wrong? Well we see one of the most awkward scenes in anime ever made, and I’ve seen watamote!
Shinji is in the house while Rei is in the shower. She gets out and sees that Shinji is wearing her glasses. She runs to get them off him but Shinji ends up falling on top of her, spilling her underwear draw on top of them and then grabbing her boob.
In other shows this scene would be used for comedy and the main character would receive a slap on the face and that’s it. I feel like this scene was so much more important and expressed so much more than any of these scenes and actually had real consequences on the story.
The first thing is that the awkwardness is communicated very well. Rei is not a loud or panicky person and just stares giving Shinji the responsibility to move away. Once this is over she ignores him completely despite Shinji’s apologies and it just feels really bad. She doesn’t actually give Shinji a time to respond, communicating her distaste for the guy without even using words! And the next conversation the two have really doesn’t help things.
Shinji for the first time opens up to somebody about the difficulties of piloting an Eva and Rei says she doesn’t care. Does this mean she actually doesn’t care or just wants to end the conversation with Shinji faster? I assume the last one is truer. Shinji expresses his distrust and dislike for his father only to receive as slap from her since it angered him so much. Neither can believe that the other person has their opinion and it shows that Gendo (Shinji’s dad) has a more complex character than we first thought and it makes me wonder what conflicts and tragedies are resting in his head to make him the way he is.
Shinji’s dad is the co-ordinator for all of Rei’s experiments yet sees it fit to ignore Shinji. This could be because of Shinji’s resentment towards him but I reckon his dad reciprocates the same annoyance Shinji does.
Angels attack again and we see that Shinji is ready to fight. Except that he gets shot through the chest instantly, great! The character development / establishment was brilliant this episode let’s hope that this quality continues into the future! I’ve seen that theirs another pilot with orange hair to be introduced soon and I’m actually really looking forward to seeing what she’s like.
And I promise as soon as I write a shorter than average post for this series I will fit talk about the ED at the end!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Decisive Battle in Tokyo-3 / Rei II [6]
We’re going straight back to episode five to add another detail I missed about Rei’s character and discus a strange disconnect between two parts of her own character. To recap Shinji falls on top of Rei while she’s naked and she reacts by just staring at him. What I found so odd about this scene in retrospect was the major difference in reaction she had.
When she exits the bathroom she’s not annoyed with Shinji because she’s seen him naked, it’s because he’s wearing her glasses. Her reaction to this is instant; she rushes to obtain the glasses in outrage. However when Shinji falls on top of her she really doesn’t care as much. It’s not like Rei has supressed emotions either, she reacts badly by slapping Shinji as soon as he criticises his dad! What could this mean?
Rei doesn’t really seem to care about herself or her own personal safety (as shown later in this episode) yet cares about other external things. This is pretty sad. To make this theory or interpretation stronger she seems to care a lot about Shinji’s dad and expresses emotion towards him. So now I’m wondering if Rei’s coldness towards Shinji up until now was because of his intrusion in the house along with the mess he caused.
When Shinji apologised for the second time I remember Rei saying something along the lines of “for what?” I don’t think that most people in this situation would react like this; it’s like asking someone to bring up a horrible experience all over again. Even if someone would act like this I don’t think they’d say that exact line to a person like Shinji. Do all these things mean that Rei has no self-respect for her life? It may be a bit extreme but I feel like this disconnect shouldn’t be glossed over as simple social ineptness. Anyway on to the episode!
I think it was in episode four that Shinji said that he doesn’t trust his father or maybe the military in general. Well at the start of the episode it’s easy to see why! Shinji is immediately shot through the chest with no time at all to react. This minor mistake resulted in a 3 hour repair cycle for the Evangelion! How stupid are these guys?
The problem in this episode is a giant angel which looks different to all the others. It’s some kind of metal ball which has a shield to protect itself and a gun to fire at enemies with. Its ability to launch missiles and retaliate perfectly to incoming missiles might make it a bit of a problem.
But don’t worry Misato has a crafty plan in the works. Did anyone else have expectations that whatever her plan was it would fail miserably? At this point in the show I just couldn’t trust her as I feel like she’s made a lot of bad calls in the past. Things such as letting Shinji leave, giving him bad instructions in combat and finally launching Shinji into the direct path of a missile before he had any chance to leave. This made me trivialise her actions which might have been a mistake.
It’s great to see her act so responsibly to this sudden authority and work under the pressure of the entirety of Japan. Yes, this plan involves removing all of Japans electricity (approximately 180KW according to the show) and firing a massive positron rifle at it!
Meanwhile in Shinji’s hospital bed we see Rei give him his orders. They are to team up and fire the gun late at night whilst Rei protects him. This is actually a brilliant call by the guys. While Shinji isn’t great under the pressure I find it difficult to see him willing to endure pain to save Rei, it’s too risky. Yes in Shinji’s head he might be able to do it but as soon as he feels anything close to a threat / injury I don’t see him being very useful. Not as good as Rei at the least.
Later when the two get ready for the operation Shinji expresses his self-doubt and worry. Rei reassures him in a worrying way that she will protect him. It made me think that she would sacrifice herself if needed and having the attitude that you could die for a cause before going into battle isn’t a great way attitude to have for survival.
Rei also expresses the same philosophy I had earlier to saving society. She thinks she’s bound to pilot the Eva so she can save the world. She thinks she’s got nothing else to offer. It’s a very negative view to have on your life however in comparison to what she could be doing instead I think it’s kind of true. I’m not saying that a 14 year old girl couldn’t help against a space invasion, I’m just saying I don’t see any better way than piloting one of the only two machines which can combat the invasion. It’s not the content which concerns me but more of the attitude Rei has while expressing it.
So the two assemble on top of the mountain and I’m sitting there ready to cringe at the failure that I’m about to see. The angel can detect the high level of energy in Shinji’s positron rifle and fires, Shinji fires too and the shot seems to repel. This is pretty important information. I know a fair amount of physics but not about plasma or laser beams so take this interpretation with a lot of salt. Positrons are the anti-particles of electrons which means that the gun fires a beam of positive charge. So Shinji fires his beam of positive charge at the same time the angel does and the beams seem to repel each other quite strongly. This is most likely because the angels beam has the same charge as the positron beam. Both explosions have a similar size and the gunshots seem to be similar as well. This leads me to the idea that both Angel and Eva technology is very similar and the main difference between them is that one holds the same amount of energy as all the electricity in Japan whereas the other will cause a black out. So they’re not on a massively equal level if that wasn’t made clear already!
Shinji is targeted by the blast but Rei leaps in with a shield to save Shinji’s life but the protection is slowly disintegrating and Shinji needs to shoot the next blast quickly to save everyone. And to my surprise it actually worked! The missile destroys the angel and all seems well!
Even though Shinji’s ok Rei isn’t and we get a scene similar to the same one where Gendo Ikari saved Rei’s life. When Rei was defending the blast she didn’t seem to care about saving herself (hence the earlier interpretation) but really wants to save Shinji, this resulted in a massive injury which most likely nearly killed her.
This compassion and selflessness resonates with Shinji as he’s the only one who can truly relate to her pain and he knows how much it means that she went to the effort to save him. They have a really touching scene where Shinji cries and tells her not to die so easily. Rei sees Gendo in Shinji’s eyes and she really starts to like him and care about him in the same way Shinji cares about him. Rei has no idea how to react and Shinji tells her to simply smile. It was a really touching scene to end on and it’s nice to see that the two have come to know and like each other better!
Trust me I will talk about the ED at some point! This review would have been a lot shorter if I didn’t talk about the boob scene from the previous episode so it would have gone in there!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – A Human Work [7]
We open to a bright morning where Misato is completely different from how she was previously and it’s hard to believe the two people are the same and it kind of reassures my initial pre-judgement of her plan was correct since I see her acting like this. She lives a bad, messy lifestyle and Shinji makes this very clear by telling her that’s the reason why she’s single.
I think she’s single because she has a very long, important and stressful job but that might just be me. As well as that it’s not hard to see why she has a terrible home situation when dealing with the stress of her work. It’s hard to tell which Misato she prefers being. She might enjoy letting lose but she might like the idea of an important and proper military woman a lot more. At this point I’m leaning to the idea that she likes being slobby a lot more since I can relate to wanting to relax and drink at breakfast.
When she walks past school later Shinji remarks at how different their attitudes would be if they realised how sloppy she was. As Shinji is being taken away we get to see an outline of all the characters and it’s actually pretty cool to see how iconic their designs are. Shinji, Misato and Ritsuko’s (One of the other girls in charge) stand out clearly and I recognise the other two workers from earlier episodes even though I don’t remember their names. It’s also revealed that the Eva’s are made of biological material meaning my theory from one of the previous episode reviews was probably correct.
More information was revealed to us about the angels as well. Some of them have the ability to blow up continents! As if the stakes couldn’t get higher already!
When shows tend to introduce politics into their plots it’s rare to see it done well or in a way that interests me. Theirs one exception to this rule and it’s that I’m ok with it if it’s funny. The politics in this show were pretty funny so I’m ok with it! Ritsuko gets humiliated at a rally but it’s funny how much they trivialise the power of the AT shields. For some reason they think something that needs all of the electricity in Japan to break will simply go away and won’t be a problem. That’s pretty stupid. As well as this the same people laughing at our lovable main characters immediately make a mistake more stupid than the one where Shinji nearly died immediately and I found it funny how they only act like they knew what they were talking about.
It’s also funny how they thought putting a nuclear reactor inside an Evangelion was a good idea when we’ve seen the Eva’s battles and know that nowhere on its body is safe. They probably have one resistant to explosions but still…
So the opposition to NERV launch the first test of their robot EVA which goes terribly badly. They tell it to walk slowly, and then they stop it, but it doesn’t stop and keeps going, walking through the ceiling of their military base and then continuing on seemingly indefinitely. So it comes to the people who know slightly more what they’re talking about to save the day! Misato tries to get the password to delete all of this robots code and she asks for authority to know the password. The leader gets it and doesn’t care and the person who he passes it on too wants written permission. Oh yeah and he’s playing golf instead of doing his job, brilliant.
She gets the password anyway and goes with Shinji to try and shut it down. Basically Shinji holds the robot back while it’s walking and puts Misato inside to try and delete its code. You would have thought they’d have better testing procedures for robots capable of blowing up buildings but apparently not, the robot even overheats which is kind of bad since Misato is going inside of it. She enters the password to receive and error, she does it again and still nothing, she tries to prevent the robot from exploding by pushing really hard on a canister but at the last minute the robot deactivates. Misato’s ok but very tired and stressed.
Once this scene ends we get a really funny transition which shows Misato in the morning eating breakfast with Shinji and being the exact same. She’s still loud and bubbly and she still drinks beer! The disbelief of Shinji is the exact same as the audience!
After this event Shinji is forced to go back to real life and his friends change his opinion on Misato’s behaviour at home. They praise him and say that she should be thankful to Misato for showing him that side of her personality. She shows a side of herself that only Shinji can see and it makes him feel happier and it brightens his day. He is also told that the two are a family and that gives him a place of belonging I’m not sure if he’s really felt since very young childhood.
Alright I did say I would talk about the OP if I ever wrote anything shorter than normal so now is the time! The ED is extremely simple and has a shot of the reflection of the moon in water along with a silhouette of a character walking. It’s unclear who the character is though. I take the lyrics and visuals of ED’s quite seriously and the reason why I think the lyrics mean something is that in episode 7 the vocals and background music change to the same song but sang very differently! It makes me think that the song has changed perspective and is switching from my current guess (Rei) to either Misato or the new Eva which will be introduced (yes I watched the new ED so I saw that she’s appearing next episode!) and I quite like that idea.
The song is very quiet, low toned and calming in contrast to the OP. This is probably so the viewer mulls over the content of the episode instead of being whisked away into something that will completely distract them for a long time. The ED is talking about love and I can assume that it’s about the companionship between the character singing and Shinji, what If Evangelion was a secret harem? It would definitely be a cause to write part 13 of the harem series (part 12 is reserved for something else that’s coming when this month ends if I remember; we’ve got a lot of this month left!
The diagram above shows a human needs triangle for what a human needs / wants to survive. At the bottom we have food, water, warmth and rest, then security and safety. The first non-essential level to survival within humans is “belongingness and love needs” which is what I’m interpreting this song to be about.
Both Rei and Shinji are without love and for a lot of the time I’ve seen them, they’ve had little or no friends either. This obviously results in psychological problems because they haven’t been accepted or loved by enough people for them to feel happy. This song could be an outcry for companionship that both these characters need and haven’t gotten. That’s my interpretation of this song so far, I may release a post talking about the OP and ED’s once I’ve completed the series!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Asuka Arrives In Japan / Asuka Strikes [8]
As soon as I start to think writing these posts might take me less time, as soon as I start to think that the show will be repeating ground so I’ll have less to say they go and introduce a whole new important character to talk about. That’s right, this episode we come across the third human capable of saving the world: Asuka!
Mistato, Shinji and Shinji’s friend take a lovely trip on a helicopter to the navy on the sea. And when I say the navy I mean the ENTIRE navy! Shinji’s two friends are very focussed on appealing to Misato, one going so far as to buy a hat. This hat ends up serving to create a brilliant establishment shot for Asuka as soon as they land on the massive ship.
He loses his hat and it goes flying towards an unknown girl’s feet. This girl stomps on the hat and we immediately know a few things about her from this alone. The first is that she is confident and more sociable than the other two pilots. None of the others would have the experience or desire to damage a stranger’s property so it shows that my previous opinion of the personality of Eva pilots is wrong. This doesn’t tell us that she’s sociable, just more sociable than the other two. It’s her bold introduction and slap to that same boys face that establishes her as a more confident person straight away. She’s so confident she doesn’t even address the guy at first and instead talks to Misato!
Due to the fact that this show has Evangelion in the title I’m sure that she has something strange or mentally wrong about her character. It could be that she acts confident but is actually insecure or something like that. But that’s just speculation and I have no reason to believe that. What we know is that unlike the other two who react in very nervous and introverted ways Asuka knows how she is and is confident to display her… well confidence.
It was really funny when the boy dropped his trousers to apologise for looking up her skirt only to receive another slap again because Asuka didn’t want him too. This shows us she’s a bit reckless and violent, which could make her pretty good at piloting the Eva.
We get to see all of the new characters introduced eating together, along with a new addition called Keji who enjoys flirting with Misato. It’s heavily implied that they had a past relationship when Keji asks Shinji if she still rolls around at night madly. The fact that Misato is so embarrassed makes me almost certain of their relationship; she is just embarrassed so much. If it was a guy you barely knew you’d be more likely to be angry at him than anything else. It seems like Misato is trying to keep this a secret, maybe because she stopped going out with him or just that she doesn’t want Shinji talking about his own criticisms of her privately.
A little while later Asuka decides to show Shinji her Evangelion. What I like about this is that Asuka immediately wants to establish herself as a strong person and a leader amongst the pilots by talking about how great her Evangelion is. I get the impression that she’s competitive and wants to be more respected and used than any other based on her actions here. For example it’s made specifically for combat. Hmm… I wonder how it deals with being underwater.
It’s here that an angel appears to attack the characters. This has made me certain that the angels know and can detect where our main characters are, probably based on the Eva’s energy or something like that.
Now Asuka is a character that I like because she can take the initiative. As a way to prove herself she immediately starts getting ready to pilot the Eva, not really caring if Misato wouldn’t allow it. She has a strong belief that she can achieve her goal which is really nice. I wasn’t entirely sure if she was actually good at fighting or if she was just a bit stupid. I don’t even know if it was made clear whether or not she had even tried piloting it before!
Now Asuka is German but the show made it very clear that it was made by Japanese people. I just don’t think it’s realistic for her to know Japanese. I don’t think that’s racist against Germans; it’s just that statistically not that many people know Japanese, of these people most of them are Japanese and not German and out of all the Germans who know Japanese very few are 14 year old girls. I think, it would make sense. The only explanation I can think for this is that due to Japans emergence of great technology (Even though realistically they wouldn’t advance the fastest out of all the countries) more people need to know Japanese so that they can understand and work with the military.
Anyway Asuka tells the Eva to work in her native language and it doesn’t work. However when she switches to Japanese she understands her perfectly. It’s very strange that a person using their first language wouldn’t be understood yet understood with the second. The use of Asuka switching languages of her Eva is pretty badly done but it makes sense for the director to make the decision so that the audience can understand her better.
So Asuka gets in and Misato immediately approves! It’s a really great moment for Asuka to act. If she didn’t then a lot of damage would have been caused and it would have been too late before the navy gave her permission to move out.
Anyway Asuka is actually a brilliant pilot but unfortunately goes into the water after stabbing the angel. This is when we see what happens when the Eva submerges in water. Luckily they don’t get electrocuted (you know how well water and electricity mix) but they still can’t move which is actually a lot better than it should have been.
It’s at this point that Misato comes up with another brilliant plan. In this case the plan was quite good but something about the way she explains her plans really annoys me. She acts like she’s extremely clever for coming up with something basic and explains each simple plan as if it’s complicated. You may need to re-watch to see what I mean. Her plan is to use this hook that Asuka and Shinji (Shinji is in the cockpit with Asuka – don’t read that statement the wrong way) to reel the angel to the surface, have Asuka open its mouth all the way and then shoot missiles into it.
Maybe I can explain the thing that annoys me about her plan exposition better. Instead of shouting out the plan in a hectic panic to try and solve the situation in time she almost steps out of the moment focussing on her plan as if it’s a long-term event, waiting for approval from the person she’s explain it too. That’s what annoys me, she should have just said the plan giving orders and explained it as she went.
What was interesting about Shinji and Asuka in the cockpit was the way Shinji was able to take charge over Asuka and lean over her to pilot for her. It’s clear that the two are touching and it was nice to see that Shinji was confident about it and focusing on the task. Asuka who had more time to think due to lack of control mentioned it but Shinji didn’t even understand. I think that he might be breaking out of the shell he’s created around him and making a new one which is really nice!
The situation was solved and the episode ends with Keji giving Gendo “the first human being” but it doesn’t look human at all. I’m intrigued to see how this goes in the future.
We’ve already been going on for quite a long time but I really do need to address the ED again since my interpretation may have been correct. The singer of the ED has been changing and I’m very sure that Asuka was singing at the end of this one, it had a certain energy that only she really has. Since Asuka doesn’t seem to have any obvious problems I can either continue the interpretation and say that she’s just feeling like that on the inside or watch the show more and create a better idea later on when I know more about everyone!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Moment and Heart Together / Both of you, dance like you want to win! [9]
It feels like I’ve been writing too much recently, I made 9 posts in three days, scheduling them out over the course of the month and it’s pretty difficult to do when nearly all of them are over 1000 words long. That’s not really a problem though as I’m really enjoying this process and it makes me feel like I’m actually doing something worthwhile instead of wasting too much time on video games. Yes I’ve been playing five video games recently but I’m going to be writing a post about each one individually so I’m not sure how much I should count that, especially when you see what I have to say about the games!
Enough bragging about how much I can write in a short period of time let’s talk about Evangelion. And may I first say that I’m really starting to enjoy watching these episodes more ever since I started eating mars bars through them! If you don’t like the show I highly recommend you follow this advice! If you don’t want to be fat and you dislike evangelion try carrots instead.
There’s already a lot of stuff in this episode to unpack so I should probably get right too it. Asuka has Shinji’s friends (whose names I should know) as stalkers. These people are called Suzuhara and Aida and it’s funny how they seemed to spend a lot of their time taking photos of Asuka who they apparently don’t like, I guess so they can sell them. It’s funny that these characters are spending a lot more time around her and it’s funny that I never took the time to find out their names until now. And speaking of forgetting names in the last episode I forgot one very important name even though I wrote it down: Kaji. Yes I wrote it quite a bit as Keji so that mistake will be fixed from now on.
Seeing Asuka at school is really interesting because she’s actually popular and has enough interesting stuff about her character that school is now worth showing. The other characters would simply study then go home but not Asuka. One of the first things she does is stomp on her many love letters – she likes doing that doesn’t she? It shows that she’s not really looking to date anyone, or anyone who would send her a card instead of talking to her at least. Another funny quirk about Asuka was when she addressed herself as “gorgeous” because it’s just rare for me to hear people do it sincerely.
Asuka approaches Rei saying that they should be friends but Rei immediately shoots her down. Rei doesn’t think human relationships are important. This is actually quite useful for telling us more about Rei since she seems to be alone by choice rather than with others. It’s still not great for her but it’s a lot better that she doesn’t want to try instead of the other way around. I don’t exactly mean better objectively, I’m only really saying this about her mental state not anything else. Rei says they will only be friends if she’s told too and that’s pretty funny. She’s not opposed to being with Asuka more she would just rather be on her own.
Despite the brilliant teamwork between Shinji and Asuka in the previous episode they get utterly demolished due to their lack of teamwork and they both end upside down in a hole in separate locations which doesn’t look good. It instead looks funny. I was sadly unable to take this situation seriously because of its humour. I think the teamwork malfunction was more Asuka’s fault than Shinji’s because she’s more likely to do what she wants without listening to the orders given. She also told Shinji that she didn’t want his help and moved away before he could do much without telling her to follow her unlike later claims.
Due to this error it seems like Misato was nearly fired and honestly I’m surprised it took this long. Luckily for her Kaji bails her out and see seems ok with only a thousand kilograms of paperwork to get through all talking about the exact same failure.
Asuka is now moving into the same place as Shinji and Misato so there are boxes everywhere. These seem to vanish almost instantly but I just assume they’re piled up somewhere. It’s not too difficult to see why Shinji is unhappy with this. While this episode is about teamwork the main problem of the series is ironically made worse at the start when the two work together, which made them on even worse terms. I’m sure it hurts Asuka’s pride a lot more than Shinji’s to be found upside down so I can imagine her deeper resentment rising from that while Shinji’s rising due to an opposition towards it. While I really like Asuka as a character she can behave in a really bad way on occasion.
Moving in with each other is meant to strengthen their bond so they can solve the problem together. It’s funny when the classmates open the door to find the pair dressed in the exact same way and also saying the exact same thing at once despite wearing headphones to reduce hearing.
One of my favourite parts of the episode was when the two were playing some kind of twister teamwork game and Asuka was complaining because she was so much better at it than Shinji. Then Rei switches with Shinji and they synch immediately. It’s not only a really funny thing but it makes Asuka reconsider her position and decide to become in synch. We are then treated to this really cool montage of them actually learning to behave better. It’s funny because they will still get angry at each other occasionally and it’s for not doing what they did. With that level of scolding going on every day it’s not too hard to see how they can get along so well so fast.
At the end of this trip Asuka somehow stumbles into Shinji’s bed facing him on the floor. Shinji then leans into try and kiss her before he’s stopped when she says “moma” and realises what he’s doing. To be honest it’s very easy to see how the two might develop feelings for each other after spending so long with each other focusing on every single thing they do but I find it surprising that Shinji doesn’t recognise she’s asleep or maybe doesn’t care. It’s pretty shocking to see this shy guy suddenly do something like that and it’s a really nice character progression. In the end he still respects that she’s asleep and moves to his own spot on the floor out of nervousness.
I wonder if Asuka is having trouble with her family or has lost them based on the fact that she said “moma” quite sadly. Since this is evangelion it looks like this might be her internal conflict which she hides through a confident shell. Only time will tell.
Kaji and Misato end up kissing and it’s confirmed that they did date instead of massively implying it. None of them are really over each other but Misato doesn’t really want much to do with Kaji whereas for Kaji it’s the opposite. It’s clear to see that Misato is torn about this predicament and she really does say things that contradict her lips. She still loves Kaji but remembers the bad stuff about him and is put off by it.
The now fully synched pair of Shinji and Asuka team up to fight against the angels. And it’s very fun to watch as they do everything together perfectly in synch. It’s so strange and hard to believe that it’s funny. They set a timer for how long it will take them to beat and it kill it at the exact right time together! It’s brilliant!
The only issue is that they fall on to each other after the explosion and have another embarrassing argument. So while they’re very compatible they’ve still got a bit of work to do!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Magma Diver [10]
Ok all of these have been way too long recently; hopefully this one can be below 1000 words for once! Not that I don’t want content worth discussing, it’s just that I’m never going to complete this project if I have to write over 30,000 words for the entire month! Shiki was 16,000 words for all 22 episodes and we’ve got nearly 12,000 for just 10 episodes of Evangelion! Oh well too many words… I should move on.
I like the set up in this episode leading up until the let down slightly later on in the episode. Asuka goes out to buy clothes with Kaji and their relationship is completely established. Asuka wants to impress and be liked by Kaji but he sees how young she is and treats her like a child (which is what he should be doing by the way). I like how she buys a swimsuit to in an attempt to appeal to Kaji but it feeds into the rest of the episode pretty nicely. As well as this don’t you think the table shot (probably the featured image so unavailable on the website) really demonstrates their relationship visually well?
Asuka is actually buying the swimsuit for the school trip that she thinks she’ll be going on. Unfortunately her expectations aren’t met because they aren’t allowed to go and instead must wait in case an angel appears. Asuka is really annoyed too and wants support from Shinji, it’s nice to see them getting on well.
To make matters worse Misato has all of their grades! We then immediately transition to Shinji doing computer science revision in a swimming pool. Why? Asuka helps him and the only reason why she’s not great at school is that she can’t read all of the questions since she doesn’t understand all of the characters. Finally some realism in languages! I can read katakana and hiragana because it’s fairly easy and helps with listening while watching anime but kanji sounds impossible and the most annoying thing to do. I’m sure if I stopped blogging and switched my writing time for kanji time I would be quite good at it but it would be nowhere near worth it. I know a little bit of Japanese but I’ve given up trying to learn and just know what comes naturally to me, which is actually quite a bit! So I’m quite lucky!
Oh no I changed the topic! WE NEED TO GET BACK ON TRACK. Shinji doing computer science revision? That’s actually a great idea! From the looks of things in Eva they are in dire need of more skilled software engineers. I study computer science and NO STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. OK, I think I’ve stopped. It’s funny how I always get confused between Rei and Asuka while writing my notes. NOOOOOOOO. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. This is what a tangent is like, I NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. NO.
It seems like Asuka can relax because she’s actually quite clever, it’s just the writing system she needs to learn. I think in my school system you’re allowed to get a teacher to read the question to you NOOOOOOOOOOO ARHGHGHGHGHGH. Shinji however can read the questions and it looks like he’s fallen quite behind.
I remember Asuka asking Shinji if he liked her swimsuit and if warming her breasts would make them bigger. I wonder why I remember that? Shinji just doesn’t react well though. I know in that situation I would say NOOOOOOOOOO NOOOOO AGHGHGHGHH STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP!
Ok so they assemble everyone together because they need to kill a dormant angel at the bottom of a volcano. Shinji thinks they’ll choose him even though he’d rather Asuka do it. To his surprise they ask Asuka to do it and I can tell that he’s got that surprised feeling when you expect something for certain and it’s taken away when you have no idea why. I know in the scouts this happened to me and I was like NOOOOOOO NOOOOOO ARHGHGHGHGHAGHGHAHGAHGH STOP!
I found myself asking, what the hell does Kaji even do? I thought he worked with the navy but now he works with the military just talking to random women? I don’t understand him, he shouldn’t be there. As far as I’m concerned Kaji is just there to flesh out backstory and look nice, what even is his job?
Anyway Asuka is wearing a massive heatproof suit and so is her Evangelion. She can’t deal with it messing up her style! But she can’t deal with other people sitting in her cockpit so she basically forces herself to suck it up and do the mission. I look down on her for thinking of fashion at a time like this, she can behave very childishly and stupidly at times.
To raise the stakes further, I went to the butches and said NOOOOOOOOOOOOO. To raise the stakes further we learn that they could simply shoot Asuka to death if the whole thing goes wrong which is pretty scary stuff. Not to mention that as she’s dropped. She gets dropped down lower to a point where she’s no longer at a safe height and it all starts going wrong. She lifts the angel up and she starts slowly taking it to the surface. Did anyone actually believe that the operation would go smoothly? We’re very used to things going wrong at this point.
I was right, the angel activates and Asuka is forced into a battle but she hasn’t got a knife because it fell out due to the pressure. Shinji drops her one just in the nick of time to kill the angel but the rope holding Asuka also breaks. Shinji saves her in just the nick of time though as well. And Asuka likes him a whole lot more.
After this the whole cast go to the hot springs to relax. Shinji throws them some shampoo over the edge and blushes as he hears Misato and Asuka fight playfully. He seems pretty embarrassed to have an erection and that makes me think he’s not very open or used to the idea of sex. Which is what I would expect to be honest.
We then learn that Misato was scared by the first invasion of angels and lived through it. We don’t know very much except that Misato and Kaji lived through the first invasion and I wonder if that’s where they first had their relationship. Anyway we watch the sun set with Misato and Asuka and it’s a very warm moment to end the episode on.
STOP,STOP,STOP,STOP,STOP,STOP,STOP,STOP,STOP,STOP.
Neon Genesis Evangelion – In The Still Darkness / The Day Tokyo-3 Stood Still [11]
This episode involves a black out of the entire city by some unknown saboteur. The characters think angels caused it which is most likely correct but I’m not going to rule out the possibility of a terrorist group doing it. Either way conveniently an angel is attacking the city right as soon as the power fails.
In this show way too many backups fail and it feels way too easy for the show to stop them just to add to the tension. While it makes the episode more interesting it makes NERV look like the most stupid people to be leading a resistance group ever. Shinji talks to his dad on the phone to tell him about parents evening, his dad is angry that he’s wasting his time and tells Misato to do it. These two clearly don’t like each other, and it’s horrible that a simple mistake on Shinji’s part (which shouldn’t have even been a mistake in the first place) results in Gendo’s huge outrage and it feels very uncalled for.
And for what feels like the first time since their meeting we get to see all of the Evangelion pilots together on a walk to HQ! I really like seeing all of them in one place because I feel like they work well together and their differences make their dynamic interesting. They show up and the power doesn’t let them through the gates, so the first thing that should obviously be done is declaring Asuka as the leader of the group! Once this is done they start making their way through manual doors and air ducts. The fact that these guys are actually able to break through into the main room of the base highlights a massive design and security flaw since nobody should be able to get through without swiping their card.
We now see the adventures of Asuka, Rei and Shinji as they travel through a maze of air ducts and passageways! This innocent adventuring is really fun to watch! Asuka opens a door only to find the angel attacking outside and it looks like a strange spider creature. Why is there no consistency between the angels? At first they looked just like the Eva’s but now they’re changing into spiders, cubes and giant fish! I wonder if these ones were just the slow ones.
Asuka doesn’t like that Rei seems to be the favourite but Rei disagrees with her. This argument seems to be really important to Asuka but I think she just puts too much pride on being the best. I think Rei is probably the least favourite because she’s stopped being chosen for missions.
Meanwhile the guys who are actually working inside the HQ set up the Evangelions for our main characters to fight back with when they arrive. It’s really great to see them work together with painful manual labour for the sake of achieving a common goal. I also like how we hear the main characters in the vent before you see them fall down by breaking it. Asuka arguing with Shinji is pretty funny and the main characters in the room seemed to find it funny as well.
The show gives us the moment we were all waiting for: the pilots fighting together! They weave their way through a maze of massive tunnels until they find the place where the angel is. As they climb up the massive tunnel orange corrosive liquid from the angels eye drops on them causing them to drop their rifles to hide. They want to beat it but they can’t without their rifles. Isn’t that really stupid? If the Eva’s can only kill angels with Rifles, then why not just make massive rifles! I’m sure putting massive rifles on cars or bigger trucks would be just as effective of the Eva’s based on this logic!
So Asuka protects Rei and Shinji as they travel down to grab their rifles, Rei gets one and throws it up to Shinji who makes Asuka dodge out of the way so he can kill the angel. This works without any problems at all!
The power comes back on and we see the pilots just hanging out on the mountain top watching the lights come back on. It’s really nice. The ED has also changed to add everyone singing together which is really cool!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – The Value Of Miricles / She said, ‘Don’t make others suffer for your personal hatred’ [12]
We open with a shot of Misato’s back story where her father saves her life by putting her inside a massive capsule before an angel explodes killing him. Misato is still contemplating this moment as Shinji and his friends are taking shelter from the rain. It really shows the difference in personality when the characters say that they’ll be quiet for Misato sleeping and Asuka shouts as loudly as she can to get the characters out of the house.
Misato also has a promotion and while everyone is happy for her she’s not so sure. I think this might be because it’s not a real promotion, for example it could be one of those terrible promotions where you get 30% extra work for 10% extra pay or something like that. As well as that her responsibility is a lot higher which means she has more pressure to succeed.
All the characters have a celebration party for her promotion and literally everyone is there except for Rei. Misato is concerned that Shinji’s around for so many people and isn’t dealing with it very well so I can only imagine how bad Rei could be. I can definitely relate to being in Shinji’s position though, you can sometimes find yourself left out of a big group with no idea what they’re on about or without desire to join in. It must be sad being Shinji and having this happen to you a lot more often.
Then once this part of the episode is finished we switch to a conflict where a floating angel is dropping bombs and Shinji’s dad is away. This means that Misato has the free reigns to start her 0.0001% plan and nobody can really stop her. It’s sad but it’s their best bet.
In the elevator before combat Shinji asks Asuka why she pilots her Eva, and it’s for reasons we kind of knew already: She wants to show off basically. When she asks Shinji the same question he doesn’t know. At this point I thought it was because he had people he relied on and wanted to protect or wanted to do his duty for his country. This idea is going to be brought up later in the episode and it’s really interesting.
Then the Eva’s are deployed and they have to catch the angel with their AT fields before it hits the ground and destroys everything. Something about running through a city is really cool. Have you ever tried sprinting across a whole street? It’s really fun and I can imagine that Shinji might be feeling a little like that. Anyway he holds the angel up but can’t hit it, Rei and Asuka join him later and help him propel him up together and slash his eye out, killing it.
The city is pretty damaged but Misato is still praised as it was a very difficult thing to do. What was also amazing was that Shinji’s dad praised Shinj, he looks so happy! Later Shinji says that he might pilot the Eva for praise from his dad and that’s a pretty interesting yet sad thing.
Whilst this way of thinking might be nice way to end the episode it’s not really a good thing to be doing. People who base their self-esteem and ambition based on what one individual person thinks about them can be let down very easily and suffer greatly for it. This could have led to the damage that Shinji feels. On that positive and happy note, see you tomorrow! And wow this was actually half the normal length! Pretty good!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Angel Invasion / Lilliputian Hitcher [13]
This episode review may be a lot shorter than all of the others because my notes were a lot shorter for this episode than any other and the plot is very focussed on one specific thing. But we first open to see developers working on something called the magi.
You may have heard the name “magi” before however what does it even do? Well it’s the name for the computer system the people at NERV HQ use for absolutely everything. To test a new design function implemented into the new Eva’s everyone needs to go into their Evangelion naked. I think this change is a good thing for the show, who wouldn’t be opposed to that? But testing takes about three hours and the angels have other ideas. Basically an elite angel hacker is able to split up into many parts to join the NERV circuits and hack them, which isn’t a good thing. The experiment gets aborted and we spend the rest of the time watching the computer hack everything. In fact the Eva’s might not even work anymore as some of them were hacked as well, I like that Gendo prioritises Shinji’s robot escaping since it’s the one with no viruses on it.
We learn a scary fact that the angel is evolving (It’s actually called metamorphosis) and will be able to take over a lot of the system very soon. They set up a firewall to prevent this which buys them more time. They should have got malware bytes or something, but then again scanning the entire system would take it a very long time.
Later we learn that NERV HQ is going to self-destruct very soon, which is ridiculous. I hate the self-destruction trope in shows. For a building to self-destruct someone at the start of the planning phase needs to decide that their facility should have the ability to blow up at any moment. This requires a lot of explosives to just be lying there dormant for the many years the building is functioning! That’s stupid! Not only that, but the security is awful. If you’re going to have a self-destruct button you will need a lot more precautions than that! It should be nearly impossible for the creators of the button to press it, never mind a hacker! If you go into howsecureismypassword.net your password needs to nothing less than forever to guess by brute force. For example here is an impossible password: MBICEhg34_fg?@’rA$p!****cr”juPO_+_^&Chinesesymbolsmakethisbetter?~yeah#verylongandhardtosolvepassword?
That length of password is the shortest impossible password, taking one letter off takes it down to the low low value of 8,311,932,554,533366 nonagintillion years! Word doesn’t even recognise nonagintillion as an actual number, that’s how high and rarely used it is! But having that in place isn’t a good enough precaution either, and the technology I’m going to talk about actually exists and should be in Eva. Not only should there be an impossible to solve password, there should be an impossible to solve password that changes every 20 seconds or so and accessed on a device with extremely strong encryption such as the vernam cipher with a massively huge one time pad. That way it would be almost impossible to hack, with a negligible possibility of security of ever being a problem. Also what kind of building self-destructs? Even the most technologically advanced buildings go through a long safe deconstruction period instead of just using simple explosives!
Anyway because Hideki Ano can’t predict the future this doesn’t happen and the angel very nearly wins. But of course it doesn’t because Ritsuko saves the day at the last minute! How suprising! It’s not like Evangelion has put in so many deadlines that only almost get missed that no deadline feels tense anymore or anything!
I honestly thought it would have been a more interesting story if the HQ blew up. We would have to see the Eva’s escape, and then live very alone and fight with much fewer resources, not being able to repair their Eva’s. It would be much more of a survival story but it could have been really interesting and broke away from the episodic problem format. While I had a lot less to say (luckily I know a bit about computer science to make this longer) it was still a really entertaining episode. It’s hard to believe that I once dropped this show because I thought it was boring!
One more thing, I really like the references to programing in this series. Instead of implementing comments in the source code Ritsuko’s mum (who made the magi) implements them as small post it notes. It’s really nice!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Weaving a Story [14]
Something that makes my job a whole lot easier as an episode reviewer is the recap episode, to see everything that was shown in the recap just read all of the previous posts! I actually really dislike recap episodes and despite it being edited interestingly and uniquely it was still a recap episode and really suffered. I like the dramatic way it was shown along with the big title cards as well as a more accurate time line. I can imagine a lot of people losing track of time if they didn’t binge watch the series so it can help to put everything into perspective. When theirs a time skip it tells us, but those moments have been more and more infrequent which means that these angels attacks have been relentless. It makes you wonder why they didn’t all decide to attack on the same day!
Fortunately I’ve got some things to say because only half of the episode was for recap! A common theme in this episode was the idea of following a script. It seems like Gendo has a master plan for success which is being followed, thankfully someone has a long term plan.
The characters then perform experiments to synch with other people’s Eva’s. They can all detect the smell of the other person in their own Eva. Rei has a very loose grasp of who she is and what she identifies as. She uses terms like “this body” which shows her disconnect of reality. This could have been spurred on due to changing Eva’s however I think it’s just to introduce us to the inner workings of Rei’s mind. She is clearly not normal and it will be interesting to see if Rei’s problem will get better or worse over the course of the series.
When Shinji attempts to synch with Rei’s Eva something goes badly wrong and it starts breaking loose and running towards Rei on its own. Could this be that Rei’s loose sense of her own identity made the Eva connected to a part of her? Or does it just know something’s wrong? I don’t really know but I’m more inclined to believe the latter because the former is a bit unrealistic. Shinji loses his memories of this event and wakes up in that same hospital room! He’s not very happy, it must be terrible to wake up in a hospital and have no idea why.
Misato believes that the Eva was trying to kill Rei whereas Ritsuko thinks it was trying to attack her specifically. Ritsuko is clearly incorrect since the Eva was hitting the walls where Rei was standing. My own interpretation of the scene was that the Eva wasn’t trying to kill anyone, and instead wanted to connect with Rei and find her. But maybe we’ll find out more about this later.
Now for the first time since any other pilots were found Rei is sent out with her Eva? What will she do? Find out in the next episode!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Lies and Silence / Those Women longed for the touch of others’ lips, and thus invited their kisses. [15]
To give you an idea of how ahead I am in Evangelion month this is written on the 6th of January and Shadowcat’s first impressions of Evangelion post released yesterday. I do say that I’m worried about completing the month but very soon I will have a lot less time to write so I need to get out as much as possible! In Shadow cat’s review I am described as having the “longest and most thoughtfully brilliant episode reviews” and I feel like I’ve let him down a bit by reducing my content across the last two reviews because I wanted to finish Eva month faster. I’m not too worried about length but I will pledge right here and right now that I will never skip out any parts of the episode I had even a little to say about for the sake of making Eva month shorter from now on! If the posts end up being shorter anyway then that’s still ok!
I now finally have an explanation for who Kaji is! He is essentially spying on NERV as an investigator. This is unknown by the main characters but he comes across as a lot more scummy when you see how well he gets on with the rest of the cast. How could he betray his friends like that? He doesn’t actually come across as such a bad person though, maybe he can separate his personal relationships from his carers or maybe he’s the spying organisations’ enemy pretending to be their friend. Either way I can’t see anyone taking kindly to the news of Kaji’s actions once they found out. This still doesn’t even answer what he’s supposed to be doing though. Alright I just googled it and apparently he’s a “special inspector” which isn’t vague at all. So I guess he goes around checking up on things; would be a shame if he reported on absolutely everything he saw wouldn’t it? I think I’d like to spice this review up with some nature jokes; it would be great if I could wooden tit?
Right at the start it’s implied that Gendo could get fired from his work because of his projects with Rei. It’s a shame this plan hasn’t been explained yet but Gendo, like me, has no worries for losing his position because it realistically won’t happen. The plan everyone’s sticking too seems to be working fine, also his two side plans seem to be fine. Gendo comes across as having very few emotions, his attitude towards his extra plans are no different from the current ones so I think it’s safe to assume that he’ll be fine.
Something very easy to miss is the Marduk Institute which feels only very briefly mentioned and is very easy to miss. As I had no idea why it was important earlier I never mentioned it but now is the time! Marduk is supposedly the organisation which chooses who pilots the Eva’s using screening techniques. The thing that Kaji revels though, is that it’s a scam consisting of 108 companies which have nothing to do with it. While this is a minor part of the episode it’s actually a major part of the series because it tells us so much more about the selection process for pilots. If there isn’t a company to find the eligible pilots, how do they get found? That is not yet clear, that’s one of the many things about this show that is not yet clear (reference here) but that doesn’t mean we can’t use some guesswork. These ideas will start at most likely but then end at tin foil hat.
The first idea is that this doesn’t even matter and one of the 108 companies does the scanning and everything comes through normally. Another idea (Which would be the most fun) is that every fourteen year old can pilot the Eva’s and NERV are just selecting who they like, based on nepotism, a weird sense of a father-daughter relationship or a desire to have a good spread of different hair colours. What it could be is a mix of both, maybe there’s a lot more Eva pilots out there and NERV chose them based on their history and abilities. Isn’t it a little coincidental that all the pilots have no parent figure? Could it be that the pilots are selected based on external factors for who would be the easiest to work with, or maybe they need to make specific Eva’s for specific people? But that then defeats the point of the synch tests in previous episodes. Luckily for us Kaji seems to want to stick his nose into this Marduk case so maybe we’ll have an answer!
Asuka clearly fancies Kaji but due to his investigations he can’t spend time with Asuka, as well as this Kaji is clearly not interested in her and I don’t think her age is helping. These feelings of love in Asuka may be stronger than they appear because she goes so far as to pretend she’s being attacked just so he’ll pick up. Her friend convinces her to go on a blind date and Asuka accepts, probably because she wants a guy like Kaji so she can forget Kaji who doesn’t seem to feel the same way. It’s clear that this longing for love makes Asuka act strangely later in the episode.
One of the main events of the episode was when we learn Shinji needs to see his dad. Unfortunately Rei has no advice at all for him and maybe just grew closer from all of the experiments. It’s at this moment that Shinji tells Rei she looked like a mother, this makes Rei blush. I think it’s actually rare for Rei to be complimented, given Rei’s unsure sense of her own identity having a label to assign herself too might be a really nice thing for her. I think she must have very fond memories of her mother and the statement brings ideas of her being kind and nurturing like a mother.
Shinji then gets irrational feelings of worry towards his meeting even though he knows he can’t really do anything about it. Misato gives some great advice to keep the ball rolling once he’s made the first contact and I think it helps Shinji. Once Misato leaves we hear shouts coming from the other room and see Shinji cover his ears with a pillow, either to drown out the noise of the people outside or to get the problem out of his mind.
So the meeting between father and son happens at Yui Ikari’s grave. Gendo has removed all possessions of Shinji’s mum so Shinji doesn’t really know who she was. Gendo says that it’s because she only lives in his mind but I think it’s more than that. In a film called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind people’s memories of loved ones are removed by erasing all memory of possessions from their life, the lack of these possessions means they can forget. I think Gendo was in such turmoil from Yui’s death that he needed to remove these items and forget just so he could cope. Shinji says that he enjoyed spending time with Gendo but his dad seems to not care too much.
Misato, Ritsuko and Kaji all attend the same wedding and Misato drinks way too much. Due to this she calls Shinji to say she’ll be late and won’t be able to be there for dinner, this concerns Asuka who’s worried because Kaji’s there. On the way home Misato explains how Kaji reminds her of her dad and how it saddens her. She expresses regret over her role in the relationship but Kaji seems over it. Talking about her dad really made her emotional, which brings me dating advice. If you want to go out with a girl at some point you should ask her what her dad’s like, it connects to them more personally and whatever their answer it can always be used to improve your connection. The worst answer you can get is “fine” but it makes it worth a try still. As you can see Misato talking about her dad emotionally resonated with her and eventually led to the two kissing. We have so much to learn from Evangelion!
Meanwhile at the house Asuka is bored and on the surface she asks to kiss Shinji just to pass the time. I think she wants a real human to get her desires of Kaji out of her system but it doesn’t exactly work out. Shinji is incredibly embarrassed and just stands there going redder and redder as he becomes more and more awkward. I think if the situation was similar to Shinji’s previous attempt he would have been fine but he clearly isn’t used to this kind of thing. It’s also extremely rude to loudly wash your mouth out after asking the other person for a kiss!
Anyway Kaji returns with Misato to the smell of Lavender and Asuka’s true intentions are exposed. She wants to hang out with him but as I said earlier it really can’t work. It must feel bad for both Shinji and Asuka in this situation as Shinji has to watch Asuka pursue someone who doesn’t love her right after sharing a moment of intimacy (From his perspective).
Later we get a quick glimpse of the secret projects in the NERV facilities as well as a hint that Kaji will be killed before his investigation can be completed. Also why would they put the Christian cross on the first angel? For one thing his names Adam and not Jesus but I don’t see how these two are related because they’re nothing alike. Actually that’s not quite true if you look at it from the angel’s perspective. First he died and blew up a lot of the planet with it, sacrificing himself for the rest of the angels and now he’s being brought back to life. I am not saying these two are equal; they couldn’t be more different. And it’s strange to think that the humans are putting him in a Jesus position even though they can’t really see it from the angel’s perspective.
And there you go: a 1700 word post which was fairly detailed! If that’s not a return to form I don’t know what is!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – In Sickness Unto Death, and… / Splitting of the Breast [16]
On a seemingly normal morning Asuka shouts at Shinji (this will become a pattern) about how he apologies without thinking. In this case it’s about the temperature of Asuka’s bath water which is something Asuka should be doing anyway so it’s not hard to sympathise with Shinji’s uncaring apology. The thing is that Shinji does this a lot and I think it’s more that he already knows what he’s done is bad over anything else. In a way it looks like he’s already accepted that he’s done something wrong and apologises because he already understands his faults. The problem is that he doesn’t come across as a guy who thinks about how to change or improve his actions which is why he’s being criticised so badly for it. While he knows he’s done something wrong he puts in too little effort to try and change his behaviour.
It’s shown to us that Shinji is now the number one pilot in tests and as you can imagine Asuka is furious. She tries to seek another person to be annoyed with in Rei but she doesn’t care either. Under normal circumstances this would be normal but it looks like Asuka is now being annoyed at Rei as well. She wants a good ally to be competitive with but Rei obviously isn’t that at all and that makes the moment even more infuriating for her. It seems like Rei looks down on her behaviour but doesn’t care enough to comment.
Another moment I want to draw attention too is Shinji coming home on the bus after his new first place victory! Shinji can’t really contain his emotions and looks up to see a few people laughing at him. This must basically ruin his experience because he can no longer celebrate because he’ll be made fun of. When strangers laugh at you it’s very easy to brood over it in annoyance completely side tracked and Shinji might have done that.
It’s after this that a huge floating angel appeared over the city and the three pilots went out to kill it. Asuka sarcastically praises Shinji but he immediately turns it in her face and it’s pretty funny. It looks like the Eva’s use charging ports from buildings; something that I thought was always really cool. These are probably charges instead of tow ropes or something because the characters had no idea that Shinji would be in the situation he gets himself into! It’s funny that Asuka seems to be having the same problems as everyone else: the chord is too short! There are many design flaws in Evangelion however when you think that this was all made in 15 years from the year 2000 it starts to look pretty impressive.
Anyway Shinji shoots the angel but it vanishes and appears right underneath him and sucks him up! Shinji doesn’t react in time and gets forced into the angel. Misato orders a retreat and starts a plan to try and rescue Shinji. Something constantly brought up in this time is whose fault it is for the problem and Misato gets blamed a lot. My issue with this is that nobody actually knew anything about this angel so Misato has an excuse there. As well as this she orders Shinji to escape and he has time, but he just panics. So in my opinion its Shinji’s fault in his personality which causes him to panic that created the problem. The person to blame should also be an afterthought once Shinji’s rescued. Sure someone’s at fault but that’s not important as actually solving the problem!
Asuka is annoyingly happy that Shinji got sucked into the angel which is absolutely horrible and it shows how her competitive and unnatural pride and desire to be the best conflicting with any sense of empathy. I’m sure you can relate to something bad happening to another person and being happy about it, the difference here is that normal people will keep to themselves and not even think this about terrible situations such as these. I think it might also show Asuka’s faith in the staff at NERV HQ. She has had close shaves and done impossible plans with success and I’m sure she is so confident that he’ll be back that the possibility of his death isn’t a thing in her mind. But there’s always a first time for failure and Asuka can’t understand that.
Rei really gets annoyed by this and in this situation she really isn’t afraid to let it show. You could say that this is due to the relationship of Shinji and Rei for how similar they are and how they seem to be getting on better especially with that mother comment from the previous episode, and you wouldn’t be that wrong. Rei obviously thinks this but I reckon she’d be angry for most people. I can imagine that she is thinking about the number days Shinji and Asuka spent together and is furious at how much she trivialises it.
But someone gets even more annoyed in this episode! The rescue mission involves blowing up the angel with Shinji inside while automatically activating the AV shield so he’s safe. The problem is that Ritsuko priorities the power of the Eva’s over the pilots. Misato cares a lot more for Shinji and slaps Ritsuko in retaliation. It’s at this moment that Misato realises theirs a lot more to the Eva’s than is being let on. Since we know slightly more than Misato we basically know what this thing is, in fact it almost confirms it. She cares about the robot and not the pilot when she should care about both. She should actually care about the pilot more because while Eva’s are expensive there are a lot more of them in the world than eligible pilots. This is when we can start to question if this is true, and I don’t really think it is. Ritsuko’s actions show a new side to this conflict which I will explain. This whole encounter basically shows that she’s lying about the number of eligible pilots in the world. Essentially she thinks Shinji’s replaceable but the Eva’s aren’t or are at a far higher cost. Could this be that it is actually because he’s replaceable? It would make the most sense when you look at all this information. Now we just have to work out why all 8 or so Eva’s aren’t being used, that’s going to be an interesting one.
Another thing that I don’t like is how they referred to the pilots as unit 00, 01 and 02 respectively, earlier I thought that this might be because the Eva’s were easy to spot or that they were referred to so that they could be referenced and talked about easier. But now I’m having second thoughts, what if every time they said “Rescue Eva unit 01” they meant get the Evangelion and not Shinji? This is a terrible way to treat pilots who are saving the world as best they can but it’s a possibility when you look at all the evidence.
Meanwhile inside the angel Shinji is on life support and contemplating things to himself, imaging a second voice to tell him things about his nature. This is really difficult to talk about but the first thing to note is how desperate and crazy Shinji is at this point. He also has the belief that he’s just waiting to die and that’s a terrible way to spend his last moments. Shinji who is very introverted, for the first time wishes for company, not to be saved but he says later “I wanted to see you all one last time”. The “last time” shows that he still thinks he was going to die but just wanted to be with his friends. This is an amazing revolution in Shinji’s character and this moment has been slowly built up too in previous episodes. Some of the best character development can happen so naturally that it’s difficult to notice. I think if you went back to Evangelion the Shinji in episode one would be nothing like the one we know now.
We also get a tiny glimpse into the history of Shinji’s mum’s death. It looks like Gendo was having a trial for murdering her but we still don’t know too much. In this sequence Shinji also thinks about some of his more major flaws as a character and learns from them, which is nice. It’s some kind of vision of Shinji’s mum that makes Shinji cling to life and go berserk, breaking out of the angel in a very violent display.
In the terrifying blood shed we learn more about the Eva’s. They were modelled on the first angel and could actually resent their pilots. If nothing else they definitely aren’t innominate objects. Asuka stares in disbelief that she can pilot something as strong and violent as the Eva shown in the episode. The volume of blood on Shinji’s Eva and around the city must be colossal, Shinji addresses this later.
Later in the hospital room Rei is with Shinji when he wakes up to say welcome and be happy in her own way. Asuka is standing in front of the door and she is seen by Shinji. I’m sure it’s a mixture of shame for her previous statements and embarrassment that stops her from saying hi. I like how Shinji understands what she basically want’s to say anyway. He saw her waiting after all and he can’t help but laugh! Despite this he’s still very stressed by the experience and can smell nothing but blood. The only real positive thing from this is that Shinji no longer calls his ceiling unfamiliar, and I don’t know how good that really is.
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Fourth Child [ 17]
None of the characters in this show really understand what angels are like, so understandably we start with an interrogation of Misato who’s acting as a proxy for Shinji. Misato uses her judgement to work out that Shinji isn’t in the right condition to comment on the angel situation. Shinji is not the kind of person to be in the investigative mind, granted, neither am I because I would have commented on it. The best thing to have done was to investigate as well as save his life but I can understand Shinji not doing that.
The encounter reveals a lot of things but the only ones I really noticed in particular was the idea that angels don’t communicate. I remember saying earlier “why don’t all the angels just appear at once” and it’s kind of explained. The angels don’t communicate and it’s not really clear if they even have a way of talking better than growls and roars. It also seems clear that the angels don’t really understand the human mind and don’t tamper with it. This is good. Shinji is traumatised but it’s not brain control from the angels.
A huge part of the episode is as a consequence of a mistake with Eva unit 04 which kind of blows up, it’s more that everything in its radius disappears. This removes but at this point it may as well be destroys the evangelion along with NERV’s second base. It’s hard to imagine a second NERV base quite like the one we know and love and I’m sure me as well as many others didn’t know NERV had a second branch in the first place. The pilots are only in Japan so this must be a backup place to create Eva’s. America’s 3rd Eva (Made in another NERV branch) is then transported to Tokyo-3.
It’s made very obvious later who the next pilot is going to be and that he’s been chosen specifically and without passing any tests. The more interesting discussion now outside of this proof is the reasons for choosing the pilot and I think I’ve got a good theory. Right in episode one we learn that it took Rei 7 months to synchronise with her Eva while Shinji synched immediately, It doesn’t look like it took Asuka that long either. Potentially everyone can synch but it takes them different amounts of time. So NERV chose the closest people to their location/ people from Germany to make Eva pilots feel rarer, making the Marduk Company seem real. This is in order to achieve the maximum synch time for the best kind of pilots. Who is this pilot, it’s not revealed too us which means I can use my excellent powers of deduction which everyone else also has to say that it will be Suzuhara (Shinji’s nerdy friend) because he’s given so much attention too in the episode.
The person who works out the Marduk Company for the viewers who haven’t caught on yet is Misato as she’s talking to Ritsuko. This is confirmed when she later talks to Kaji.
Alright I want to stay focussed on Suzuhara for now because he’s shown to be a pretty interesting character. We first see him visiting his sister and it reminds us of what happened, he’s a caring individual who really wants her to be ok. He is later used for comedy when he calls Asuka and Shinji a married couple over a silly argument that happens. It’s embarrassing for the two characters but it serves to show how strangely close the two are.
Later a romance plot point is introduced between him and the student council president and it feels kind of bad. The president puts extra responsibility on Suzuhara specifically so she can walk with him to Rei’s house and talk but is shot down because he wants to go with Shinji. They go to Rei’s house which is still as messy as ever to give her the notes. Shinji does a little bit of cleaning and Rei blushes and says thank you for the first time. Rei is becoming close to Shinji and it’s very nice to see! What I never noticed about Rei’s house is that she has a lot of pills, which she clearly uses in contrast to everyone else. This could be a consequence of the project Gendo’s doing with her or just medical problems.
After Suzuhara is told (it’s basically confirmed) that he’s going to be an Eva pilot he gets more after school tasks and the president offers to make him food, which he accepts. It’s impressive that he is still committed to his duties even after hearing the news. It’s going to be interesting to see how piloting an Eva could change him and their potential relationship.
This review has been all over the place but Shinji is asked by Kaji to go somewhere and he says “You do know I’m a boy.” Which was pretty funny. All I really took away from this is that Kaji grows watermelons as a hobby and knows about how Shinji was chosen, probably feeling sorry for him. Shinji isn’t really in the right place and his synchronisation rate in tests suffered, this could be a reason.
Since everything in this review was in a strange disorganised order I will talk about the last thing which is Asuka’s reaction to seeing the fourth pilot. It’s one that tells us it’s a character she knows and that all but confirms that Suzuhara will be here in the next episode!
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Selection of Life / Ambivalence [18]
The previous episode felt like a kind of mess of many things in my mind, yet this was more focussed and as a consequence hopefully easier to write about!
We open to a shot of Eva Unit 03 flying in from America and it looks cool, the creators of the show also took effort to make the Engrish not sound terrible, it’s not like it was great or anything but certainly well above average! This basically sets us up for the rest of the episode about the 4th pilot.
For the first time Asuka leaves to go to school without Shinji, and Misato says that he doesn’t understand a young girl’s feelings. At first I didn’t really understand Asuka’s perspective either but once I took the time to think I arrived at a good idea. I’ll skip slightly ahead to when Asuka walks in to the room to hear Suzuhara / Toji say “What, no martial spat today?” and is completely cold. At other times she would have cried out in anger but she seems especially mad today. Basically I don’t think Asuka is being a tsundere, it looks like she genuinely hates Shinji.
Once I started to look at it it’s like Asuka has been on a downward spiral for ages now starting when Shinji started to be better than her. She cannot contain her anger at being beaten by Shinji and praised so much. As well as that she must have felt massively challenged when Shinji broke out of the spherical angel, she has a clear point when she realises that Shinji has completely and utterly surpassed her. Before Shinji escaped she also had a horrible attitude towards Shinji being captured that goes a lot further than simple competitiveness. As well as this the fact that she has to live with Shinji all day every day has got to annoy her and I’m sure they get in each other’s’ way all the time. At first I thought this might be a tsundere kind of thing but that’s clearly not the case.
On the roof Rei has worked out that Toji is the next pilot but he says that she only cares about one person: Shinji. Rei remarks that this might be true. The idea of love seems like a strange thing for Rei to feel but there have been a lot of moments where Rei could have fallen in love with him, she blushes around him a lot as well. Being rescued by Shinji towards the start, being called a mother and tidying up has probably contributed to this attitude. I’m unsure if Rei understands these feelings though and I feel like the relationship could be plutonic just as much as it could be romantic.
This moment on the roof later turns into Toji’s disadvantage because the school president thinks that he likes Rei. Asuka completely switches her opinion of this to general disinterest when this is brought up again later. I think she just worries about her own conflicts and is too stuck in her own head at this point in time. The absolute panicle of this conflict between Asuka and Shinji is when Kaji is there and Asuka doesn’t care at all. She says she can’t be happy today and I think it’s because Shinji is there preventing her from having fun. We may find out that Asuka is having a different problem but right now this seems like a good idea to me. Oh yeah and she does a great job hiding who the pilot for unit 04 was! At least Misato had plans and her own strange reasons for not telling him!
At the same sleepover with Kaji, Shinji asks him what his dad’s like and it’s sad that he needs to ask this question. The fact that Shinji claims to have learned a lot about his dad isn’t really true, and I still think he knows very little. Kaji’s response is extremely vague and hints that Gendo might be nothing like what we’ve seen with him. Either that or he just wants to show Shinji that he doesn’t understand his dad as much as he thinks.
It’s at this point that I thought it would be such a brilliant plot twist if Suzuhara wasn’t the pilot. They focus so much attention on him and it would be funny if it was used for another reason. But Toji’s nerdy friend wanting to pilot unit 03 combined with his brooding nature over becoming a pilot is just too strong. Also it’s revealed who it is at the very end.
Suddenly a lot of things start happing at once when Toji starts to pilot his Eva. The Evangelion goes wild on them and turns into an angel because he can’t handle the transformation. I think this is a problem of the Marduk institute which really needs to exist especially after something like this! If one pilot going rogue can cause something like this then that’s really something that should be investigated!
The pilots need to kill it so they are sent out all at once. But the fact that they’re fighting a human really causes some problems. The two people who know who the pilot is back off and Shinji just doesn’t want to fight. Rei is attacked but they shut down her Eva so it doesn’t hurt her, the angel then moves targets to Shinji. Gendo switches to dummy mode so that the Eva attacks instead of Shinji, and he is just left there to watch as Suzuhara’s Eva is completely destroyed along with the pod that holds him and Shinji freaks out. I think I should remind you that the pilot feels everything that the Eva feels so Suzuhara is in massive amounts of pain.
We find that both Misato and Ritsuko are fine from the explosion and so is Toji. This causes Shinji to freak out, epically leading into the next episode!
The OP at the end is also an instrumental, maybe to represent the isolation Shinji feels from everyone else in his crazy mental outburst at the realisation that he could have killed Toji.
Neon Genesis Evangelion – A Man’s Battle / Introjection [19]
I think this episode is probably my favourite so far as it involves both the brilliant character moments we’ve come to expect as well as the great action we’ve come to love.
This episode is a direct follow up to the previous (not just in name only) because the events could easily flow as if they were in the same episode. We continue from Shinji in the robot screaming at Toji in outrage. This is a new peak for Shinji’s outrage and he actually threatens to destroy half the NERV base. Shinji’s attitude to authority completely shifts as soon as he is given orders he’s morally opposed too and this way of thinking is really cool to see but I’m opposed to it. He is eventually shut up by his dad using a gas.
My opinion of morality is that if one person could be killed to save the rest of the world then it should happen. However if nobody can be killed I think that way is the best at least conceptually. With Shinji in the Eva he has full control of it and can do basically what he wants. If Shinji had kept in control of the Eva he could have killed the angel while saving Suzuhara. Yes he would have hurt him a hell of a lot but it’s a lot better than the alternative which is switching to the dummy and then risking it.
Just like Shinji after his first piloting attempt Toji wakes up in hospital with no memories at all. Speaking of memories if you like comedy you’ll love this. Shinji wakes up next to Toji and I’m sure the feelings of betrayal still ring strong in his head. And a mix of relief for Toji’s safety as well as anger wells up inside him.
What I admire about Toji is that he still is able to keep a level head and remember things about the class president such as the lunches. What I also like about him is that he has the intention of reassuring his sister that he’s ok, which is something I can really respect and it’s clear that they love each other very much.
It’s been a long time coming and Shinji leaves NERV again. It seemed for a while like Shinji was being arrested for disobeying orders and threatening but he in fact gets away. His dad tries to stop him by saying they won’t see each other again and that he’s disappointed in him. Shinji feels the exact same way and it’s understandable (even though he’s kind of wrong) why he would leave. He is furious and nobody can take him seriously, I think the people commenting on the situation feel a lot of distance between it in contrast to Shinji. To them it was a sacrifice for the greater good but to Shinji it’s like he nearly killed a guy which are two separate things where both ideologies are easy to sympathise with.
What impresses me about Shinji leaving is that this time he’s not leaving because of cowardice or pain; he leaves because of an ideological difference in principles which is a stronger and more impressive thing to part on. He doesn’t feel like he can associate with people who oppose his ideals. He also has clearly found out what kind of person his dad is, and hates him for it.
This is the moment where the world is fleshed out a lot more, and starts to feel like a real thing. Shinji hears an evacuation alarm due to an angel and for the first time he needs to hide away. In Shinji’s wake some changes occur at the NERV HQ which is just brilliant, I love the following moments of the show.
Rei needs to use Shinji’s Eva but she cannot synch despite the test working previously. Then when they try the dummy plug it doesn’t work either and is rejected by the Eva. This is a great moment because it shows Shinji has achieved a great synchronisation with the Eva and sort of bonded with it. The Eva (which does have somewhat of a personality) agrees with Shinji and probably rejects people against its principles. I wouldn’t like to think this is just a coincidence and it’s so much artistically better to use this interpretation!
Shinji watches (or hears) the two remaining pilots lose badly from an underground bunker. The panic of his fellow humans makes you realise how terrifying it is for these people and gives you a greater sympathy for the population. The shelter seems to cave in and even Shinji, who should be used to this, freaks out. It’s not a nice scene to watch but the show just gets better as Shinji runs away to the next shelter which they’re told to go too.
When Shinji goes out he just stares as Asuka fights and loses badly. But we then see the surrealist scene ever! Kaji is just watering his watermelons whilst the fighting is going on, what a crazy man! I really love Kaji’s personal and calm chat with Shinji and if an event happened where Kaji was just in Shinji’s imagination I would have no surprise what so ever. We also learn that NERV’s 1st angel has the power to cause the third impact which is terrifying. I think it’s safe to say that NERV are trying to use Adam to retaliate against the angels but it’s dangerous to keep a thing of that power anywhere!
Rei tries to blow the angel up using a bomb in a self-sacrificing way. This act of selflessness coupled with Kaji’s encouragement gives Shinji the inspiration to go and fight back!
I’ve never seen Shinji this happy for combat before! He feels a belonging to the battlefield and his friends that once he sees them suffer he just can’t help but try and solve the situation! I don’t think this means that Shinji has forgiven NERV, it’s just that that he’d rather help his friends supporting a cause he doesn’t believe in than let them die.
Anyway Shinji absolutely crushes it in combat! He takes the angel and completely mashes it up! But his return to glory doesn’t last long when his power runs out. As he gets beaten up the angel tries to pry Shinji out of the Eva, but Shinji cries for help from his Evangelion and it unlocks some secret potential that all Eva’s have locked up inside them. His synchronisation level is through the roof: 400% and Shinji’s deathly human instincts merged with the Eva’s biology to create a terrifying… thing… that insistently claws and bites at the creature. As the angel trapped within the Evangelion synched with Shinji and turned more biological than machine I thought it was the best mecha show of all time. It lets out a ferocious cry and you realise that the Eva is a living being.
Something about the takeover was so brutally effective in creating a moment of desperation as well as huge growth within Shinji and his Eva. The massive all-out attack looks so brilliant that you can’t help but feel pumped! The emotions within Shinji for both his own safety and the hurt of his friends lead to a desperate relentless attack ending with the mecha consuming the angel’s flesh, eating its engine. It’s face and body morphs to something unrecognisable, the Eva sprouts teeth and grows muscles, letting out a triumphant roar and you know that this show will never be the same again.
“It all begins here.” – Gendo Ikari
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Shape of heart, shape of human / Weaving a Story 2: oral stage [20]
I like starting episodes from when the previous left off. This time we begin with Shinji in his combined Eva form eating the angel’s core in desperation. The characters remark that they won’t be able to control the Eva anymore. So they unlocked a lot of potential but it doesn’t actually mean much. The higher ups didn’t expect the Eva to be able to absorb angel engines and I wonder if it will make the Eva power up even more.
The episode enters a sort of three day system and I thought we could be launching into a huge 6 episode finale or something like that. As well as this it kind of reminded me of Majora’s Mask which wasn’t released when Eva was coming out but could have been influenced by it. In Majora’s Mask the end of the third day signifies the end of the world so I was instantly looking for something like this. It clearly and quickly didn’t happen though.
To stop the Eva from going loose they chain it up and it worried me. The Eva has broken out of many things before like the angel and its own body so I don’t know if I trust the guys at NERV to not mess this one up. Also it seems a lot longer than 3 days, as far as we know it could be ten times that. I don’t think the show mentioned it though.
It was at the start of this three day journey that I realised all of the Eva pilots could be dead. It was difficult to tell if Shinji was fused or taken over and while plot armour is a thing they did take a huge amount of damage. I thought one would survive at least but wondered if they would kill a character off. So to answer Shinji is still in the Eva but is merged with it in spirit so his soul still remains. This explains the impossible synch rate, what makes me glad is that Shinji doesn’t feel ensnared by his cage in this whole encounter.
Rei and Asuka are also alive. Asuka wants to be left alone and still hates Shinji for beating her in piloting. She feels inferior because she couldn’t do anything and whished that she could improve herself.
They think that they can re-create Shinji’s body to its exact state, but out of interest wouldn’t people want to change something about themselves if they had this opportunity, for example I’d want them to fix my terrible posture! Anyway we are with Shinji as he experiences his second personal discover yourself adventure!
Doesn’t this whole thing make Evangelion not a mecha anime on a technical level because Eva’s are biological creatures supressed by NERV. I’d say for ease of access it should be counted as a Mecha anyway but does the fact that the robots are biological change anything about the series’ categorisation or does it count anyway? By this logic wouldn’t horse riding anime count as mecha’s as well?
Shinji finds a cause to fight for in this trip, he realises the angels are his enemy and he needs to fight to kill them. Another really interesting thing was when Gendo said to Shinji’s mum (paraphrasing) “If the baby’s a boy name him Shinji, if it’s a girl name her Rei” so it’s basically confirmed that Rei is Gendo’s daughter and Shinji has a sister or a step-sister. It’s a shocking realisation and explains Gendo’s love for Rei, I’m so glad it wasn’t this creepy pedo thing. Shinji also blames his dad for the way he’s become but the anime hints that it may have been Shinji who ran away himself and he’s been hiding it deep down inside. It’s getting quite late into the series and I’d be pretty happy to know!
I also want to talk about whether or not it’s possible for Shinji to experience something like this. The answer is most likely yes, and real people can do this too. Nobody who’s heard of this before ever believes me and often tends to think I’m stupid but theirs scientific proof and evidence for this phenomena, I’m just not going to bring them up now. I think this is more of a feeling than actually physically true but it’s called astral projection or an out of body experience. Basically if you convince your body that your mind is asleep you will enter sleep paralysis. Once you wake up and fall asleep enough times you will be in a mix between asleep or awake, you will hear vibrations in your ears and either have a lucid dream or an out of body experience. It sounds stupid and I thought just the same as you but there’s just too much evidence for the effect and people who have nothing to gain from lying whom I trust have had these experiences, also while attempting it myself one time I saw how strange the beginning process felt it seemed pretty legit.
So humans can still think without their body but normally they need their body intact to do this. Whereas deep breathing will break you out of lucid dreams, sleep paralysis or an out of body experience Shinji cannot return. And staying in this kind of form must be terrible.
Shinji then starts seeing visions of Rei, Asuka and Misato who seem to strangely love him. Then he starts waking up to people talking to him and it’s generally not nice. This basically means he’s rejecting being brought back into his body. Shinji eventually sees his mother and this combined with Misato’s desperation for him to come back lets him appear! She is thrilled.
We end this episode with a bit of a naughty scene between Kaji and Misato, in this we confirm that Gendo has a plan that nobody knows about. Misato also has started smoking but only at times like these, what I think she means is stressful times since cigarettes are known to help relieve stress, which is part of the reason why people in high stress environments become addicted to them. I get the impression that Misato just wants to relax after her stress and spending the night with Kaji might help her with that.
Then either at the very short end or a broken beginning Kaji hands her a pill, his last gift to her. I had no idea why a pill would be that important – it’s a bit too late if the sex is unprotected. But later I went on to the Wiki and found that it was a chip detailing all his findings of NERV, so I guess Kaji was good after all.
Neon Genesis Evangelion – The birth of NERV / He was aware that he was still a child [21]
If you are ever unable to watch anime in your normal streaming preference for popular shows you can always count on daily motion which is where I watched this episode, also I cannot stress this fact enough, if you stream anime online or even download it you need to be using the pop-up blocker extension on google chrome, do not trust your mouse speed because at one point it will fail! It happened to me, it will happen to you!
This episode really confused me and even though it was ten minutes longer than the rest of the other episodes I had a significantly small amount of notes. I didn’t like the way the episode jumped around scenarios in a way that was difficult to understand all at once either. You would have thought the director wouldn’t have made his exposition needlessly cryptic but oh well. I’ll try my best but I can’t promise something like every other time because it’s about characters I don’t feel strongly about.
We open with a long experiment which fails badly, the Eva has gone out of control and quarks are breaking apart which shouldn’t be possible unless they break apart in pairs! I assume this is because of the second angel engine the Eva absorbed which gives it unlimited power. Gendo looks like he’s going to try and use this to become god or something but I’m sure we’d appreciate it a lot more if he put it towards creating the first efficient nuclear fusion generator.
The vice commander is kidnapped and they assume its Kaji, which is pretty much definitely true. If you don’t know who the vice commander is then neither did I! It’s the old guy who gets most of the episode focussed on him! From what I can tell he had feelings for Yui and is very annoyed that Gendo: a criminal at the time is dating her. He also is annoyed that she’s marrying him. Gendo looks cool and exactly what I expected really.
Misato is also taken away to prison because of her presumed involvement with Kaji, though this is false, the way the show passes time to show how long she’s been there is through these flashback sequences. It’s told to us that Misato was the only survivor of the second impact and Ritsuko is amazed with how normal she is. We also see her old relationship with Kaji which is always cool!
Gendo has a trip to the location of the second impact and finds a perfect underground cavern for the third if it’s ever needed. This seems to be part of his godhood plan but I have no clue what that might entail.
Then we skip further ahead in the time line to baby Shinji! It’s funny how characters who have been established for a long time have very iconic baby designs who look just like them whereas it’s not the case normally for babies that aren’t intended to become characters later. For example I don’t think Rei would look nearly as identical to her younger self and I think it’s a bad design choice even if it looks like Rei: that’s why it’s so weird!
So Yui (Shinji’s mum) dies with Shinji in the factory and Gendo completely changes. Later Gendo brings another kid (Rei) into NERV HQ claiming that she’s his friend’s daughter, which is something I kind of doubt. Since there are no records of Rei there I can make an assumption that he might have been cheating on her, it seems like an odd coincidence that Rei is the name Gendo would have given to Shinji if she was a girl.
Rei calls one of the workers an old woman and she’s pretty annoyed. She loves Gendo and when Rei says that’s what he calls her she starts to freak out and strangle Rei, which is horrible. The worker can’t believe what she’s done and she kills herself (it’s not shown but implied) to be found dead the next day. I wonder if that event scared Rei in some way, she was quite a silent child already so I’m not too sure.
The finale happens when Misato receives Kaji’s phone call which confirms his death and that he’s been found out by NERV. Misato cannot help but cry and Shinji hears. He goes to look and does the exact same thing that I would have done: seen the situation and immediately dipped. Shinji is still scared and doesn’t know how to comfort her and Shinji remarks about how much he is still a child. You could say he was aware that he was still a child.
Neon Genesis Evangelion – At least, be human / Don’t be [22]
The reason why these past two episodes have been half an hour instead of twenty minutes is because I happened to see the director’s cut which is a pretty happy coincidence. I know that the directors cuts are a lot longer compared to the usual 22 minutes and since the director is adding content to discuss I think it’s a lot better.
We see a flashback of Asuka and Kaji before they see Shinji in episode 8, Kaji says that one of the pilots is a boy and could be her boyfriend but she only has eyes for Kaji, who says she needs to grow up more. She disagrees but there’s not a lot she can do. Being unable to do the things she wishes and failing at them is going to be a trend for Asuka’s struggle in this episode.
We learn that Asuka’s mum committed suicide and maybe treated her like a doll? Also it seems clear that at one point she wanted her to commit suicide with her which is not healthy for a child. She says that she won’t cry because of it, this is what’s probably responsible for her protective outer shell and bottling up her issues.
Asuka’s synch rate is also falling, and I think it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy at this point. Asuka puts her pride on the outcome of her fights with the angels and as she does worse her mental state becomes worse as well to a point that it’s not her losing but the way she reacts to losing that reduces her synch rate so much.
Another factor shown about her is how inferior she feels towards Shinji and how much she hates Rei. Asuka sees Shinji talking to Rei at the train station and is annoyed by how much he’s recovered, we also learn that he spent a month with no body, and she feels like she’s lost without seeing that it’s results that matter and not the way they’re obtained.
I get the impression that Shinji and Misato act very normally towards each other but Asuka is the person making it awkward because she doesn’t want to interact with the people she hates. Asuka just wants to find any way possible to get ahead of Shinji and I’m definitely not the only one who thought Asuka describing Shinji’s attitude as “Prissy” is a very hypocritical thing to do. The call from Germany that Asuka receives makes me remember the times where she was happier at the start of the show and her transformation is really nice to see. She talks happily to people at home but immediately reacts badly to Shinji later.
Asuka’s home situation is made worse by her outrage for sharing the same living space as the other two and it’s painful for Misato to hear. Asuka says she hates everyone including herself. At the time I thought it might have been hatred or that time of the month but it’s actually implied later that she is on her period!
And then we get a scene of Rei and Asuka in the elevator and it clearly communicates the awkwardness between the two. Asuka was always ahead of Rei but now that this is reversed she doesn’t like her too, neither are the kind of people to confide in the other so it makes sense. This scene is long but for the first time it shows their lack of friendship as well as the size of NERV HQ simultaneously! The two have an argument because Asuka won’t admit her heart is closed to the Eva and this fact makes Asuka’s piloting a whole lot worse. I bet none of you expected that Shinji would become the best pilot out of all of them right at the start of the show!
None of the pilots are in school which is understandable. If you think about it these pilots will die, or receive so much money for their efforts that they won’t need to work again. I wouldn’t be surprised in all of these guys got the nobel peace prize or something like that.
With the pressure of being removed from her position Asuka goes against the angel in the sky and loses badly with a psychological attack against her. This reveals more of her inner turmoil and overloads her with tragic memories which in the end cause her Eva to shut down making her pretty much useless.
Gendo then tells Rei to destroy the angel with the lance of longinus which she throws destroying the angel. But the lance essential to Gendo’s plans is now In orbit and is going to be very difficult to get back, but I bet the angels could do it. Asuka’s strange pride makes her feel terrible due to Rei saving her and I really hope she comes around by the end of the series to realise that results are what’s important.
I feel like these episodes have been getting simpler and going over things that we kind of know already, but they’re still pretty good! The only thing I really missed was that Asuka doesn’t know about Kaji’s death and that’s pretty sad as well.
Neon Genesis Evangelion – Tears / Rei III [23]
We open to a shot explaining that Misato really isn’t in a good place and is still mourning the death of Kaji and putting on a brave face to everyone else she knows. The only other real insight to Misato’s character is when she thinks she’s lonely when she can’t comfort Kaji.
Meanwhile we learn that Asuka hasn’t been at home and is just playing video games all day obsessively at the president’s house. The president tries to comfort her by saying she did her best and that’s ok but Asuka doesn’t think that it’s enough, and probably has depression by now. Every time we’ve seen her she’s completely miserable and the fact that she no longer cares about anything is common for people with depression as far as I’m aware.
This is shown later when Asuka doesn’t care about the fact that she’s going to pilot. She cares so little that the Eva won’t even be controlled by her and she’s sent back.
But I think Rei is the main focus of this episode as her mind is taken over much like Shinji and Asuka from the previous episodes. Once she continues to be taken over Shinji comes to save her but it doesn’t really go that smoothly. Shinji gets connected to Rei and the angel who was originally trying to become part of Rei tries to fuse the two together. But Rei just self-destructs herself so that they can’t be together.
Some time passes here but it’s with the Misato scene I described earlier. So we’ll just skip to when Rei is let out of hospital because she’s somehow alive after being blown up! How? If the Eva is ruined then why isn’t Rei, well this is answered later. But Rei doesn’t remember what happened and acts strangely, breaking her glasses. It’s strange that she cries but doesn’t understand why and I can’t really explain it until I’ve gotten to a later part of the review.
Ritsuko needs to go through an extremely embarrassing and humiliating interrogation scene which is harsh. We only see before and after but once it’s over she is clearly not in the right frame of mind and potentially damaged by the experience. Perhaps it’s this strange state of mind which explains her irrational actions later.
Misato goes through all of Kaji’s information and learns a terrifying thing about what is going on behind the scenes. Using a gun as a threat Misato makes Ritsuko take her and Shinji to the place where the Adam is. It’s interesting that Rei’s birth room looks the same as her own home, this basically means she’s been used to her own environment for her entire life and could explain why she has stayed basically the same throughout her life. The next thing we’re shown is the failed Eva’s and it makes you realise how difficult they must have been to make.
The final and most terrifying thing is the secret to Gendo’s plans and it paints him as a terrible, horrible person. Gendo is keeping clones of Rei trapped inside orange goo where Rei is shown to be just floating around. This almost confirms that the Rei Shinji met in the hospital is one of these clones and makes me think that the Rei from the whole show may be a clone.
Something I noticed was that all of the Rei clones had expressive facial expressions which Rei doesn’t normally have. This has made me think that the clones may each have an aspect of who Rei was inside of them which is stripped away to create the Rei we know, anything else taken would reduce her humanity. That’s just my theory and either way this is a tragic moment in the series. Ritsuko breaks down in shame and the episode ends.
Neon Genesis Evangelion – The Final Messenger / The Beginning and the End, or ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ [24]
I think I heard from somewhere that the final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion are just recap episodes so this might serve as the finale to the series and I can say that I’m pretty happy with it. I think it ended well.
I’m really sad about what happened to Asuka by the end of the show. She’s just been reduced to lying in a bathtub in her terrible depression. She was so happy and lively before and this wouldn’t have happened if she had the resolve to push on after suffering loss. She is going over the event of being chosen to pilot the Eva in her head only to see her mum hanging letting the depression come back through. I don’t think competitiveness with Shinji alone was enough to cause this but the stress of having her deepest and darkest memories exposed by the angel. This is shown to be caused by the death of Kaji.
Ritsuko is being held captive for killing the dummy system and we learn that Ritsuko just isn’t happy with Gendo and they may have had a relationship when Ritsuko says she’s not happy even when Gendo makes love to her. This relationship isn’t shown very well at all so I can assume that it’s not a positive one. What surprises me is that Gendo doesn’t show that he cares a whole lot since he really likes Rei and would want all of the Rei’s to be alive.
As Shinji doesn’t think he can face Rei he just stands there outside without friends since they all left in the aftermath of the previous episode. This is how he meets Kaworu the 5th child. I remember looking at the cover art for Eva on my anime list and wondered why a guy who had never even showed up took the centre stage, and while I still don’t understand I do know who he is. He seems to be going on about some idea I’ve never heard of before called lilim and apparently Rei is the same as well, but the only idea I have is that it could mean angels.
I found it so strange that all the characters were blushing at Kaworu, it’s so strange to me since the characters never blush. Kaworu seems very good with people and maybe knows how to emotionally connect with them, after all he becomes friends with Shinji almost instantly. He then confesses his love to Shinji but he doesn’t know how to react. The two stay together in the same room and it really shows how instantly they’ve gotten along.
Anyway Kaworu takes over Asuka’s Evangelion and starts attacking the base with it. That’s right; it’s revealed to us that Kaworu is in fact an angel! So Shinji immediately needs to kill his friend which is pretty horrible since he’s instantly become Shinji’s favourite human. Kaworu is the last angel, made even more interesting by the fact that he resembles a human and can communicate.
They continue to fight until Kaworu plunges Shinji into some new dimension that I’ve never seen before where he has to fight Asuka’s Eva. Once this is taken care of Kaworu reaches his own conclusion for what should happen to humanity. He decides to prioritise the life of humanity over his own. He likes the idea of choosing when to die and comes to the correct conclusion that prioritising 7 billion lives is better than his one. Shinji still really likes him though and it takes him a long time to kill him. It’s difficult to tell if he’s being crushed slowly or if Shinji is just hesitating. I’m just glad that in the moment Shinji prioritised humanity even though Kaworu was, at that time only, his best friend.
After the event Shinji remarks that it was the first time he was confessed too and really appreciated it. He goes on to say that he loved him as well, it’s quite a surprising thing to hear and to be honest I’m leaning to these feelings being romantic. You don’t blush constantly in plutonic relationships! I’m not sure how much it really matters anyway because Kaworu’s gone for good. Shinji is looking for comfort from Misato but she’s still preoccupied in her own turmoil’s.
And that’s how Evangelion ends, assuming my rumour of the next 2 episodes is correct, it ends in a really low key and depressed way. It doesn’t feel triumphant, it’s still insanely sad. Asuka is left in a state of mind breaking depression, and so is Misato over the death of Kaji. Rei still isn’t in a better situation than she was earlier and has probably been killed, cloned and replaced many times. And Shinji is left in remorse over the death of his best and maybe only friend, a guy that Shinji only knew for a day. His innate loneliness leading him to become infatuated and in love with the first guy who truly tried to connect with him, spurring him into a depression once he left the world at his own hands. The world is saved but all the main characters are unhappy. The war has taken a toll on humanity and we’re left to see our crippled and broken characters try to live past the drama and terror that comes with it.
Neon Genesis Evangelion – A world that’s ending / Do you Love me? [25]
So in the previous episode I thought that these two episodes were just for recap and the film “End of Evangelion” was the finale but it seems like things are still happening here. There is a good chance that the final two episodes of NGE are in “End of Evangelion” and if they are I will put an edit note at the bottom telling you whether you should watch this episode or the film.
If this episode was recap it’s one of the most interesting ones I’ve ever seen, instead of going through plot points it goes over character psychology and their development over the series in an artistic mess which is difficult to understand.
We see the massively bad things going through Shinji’s head at the end of the episode, the idea that Kaworu was human like him and things like that. I’m also not so happy with the ending; I think it might have been better for everyone if Kaworu just lived as a normal human. The show didn’t really establish any reasons for destroying the angels other than the fact that they keep attacking. If the angel is being peaceful, why not leave it? I’d like to find a good reason for this from the show but didn’t really find it.
The episode really focusses on the mental states and they are basically the same as described at the end of my previous review so I don’t have much to say here. An interesting thing I noticed was how Rei talked to a lot of versions of herself and I might be able to assume that they’re all the dead Rei clones, they say “we are Rei” which means they all believe themselves to be the same entity and it’s sad that none of them have their own individuality.
Each person says something like “You are the (name) of my mind” and the other says “That means you are the (name) from mine.” Which made me think all the characters were coming together in the same head space for some unknown reason. It wasn’t a simple situation where one person was imagining the other.
All of this is actually explained when they show that all of humanity is coming back together at the end in one entity. I think the explanation for this is that only one angel can exist at once (explains why they don’t work together) so all of the humans who are collectively one angel need to return back to become one. This is why I think the angels should have lived together, win or lose the end of humanity was inevitable. It was only with peace that everyone could have been happy.
Sorry for the short length recently, the show just has constant interpersonal scenes that are more difficult to talk about than normal, especially when they seem to be going over things I’ve explained already. See you next episode for the finale!
-Edit
You can watch both, but you should never skip the final film.
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.
End of Evangelion Build Up
This interlude I’m doing here is so that I can build up to what I’m about to do, which is review the end of evangelion film. I now understand the reluctance for writing a review because you don’t feel like you’re able to express your ideas and cover everything well enough.
This post isn’t meant to exist, but it’s here anyway. I’ve never felt this much worry and anxiety for releasing a post before. It’s something so huge and massively broad that I’m worried about missing it. It will come as soon as I start but that’s the most difficult part to me. I’m still contemplating whether I should re-watch this and I only finished it about half an hour ago.
I’ve just been listening to Komm Süsser Tod over and over again thinking about what happened, and contemplating the events in my head. I don’t think I’ve seen anything so mind breakingly confusing, personal and emotional all at the same time, it’s a lot to take in all at once.
Anyway I should probably get on with it. I think I’ll hide this at the end of the massive recap post at 27,787 words in or something. Nobody reads this far, and definitely not in one sitting but if you’ve seen this, let me know.
Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion – Love is Destructive / I need you
What a movie this was. What a brilliant movie this was.
We’ve come a long way, and it’s all led up to this.
I hate that this film is so good, because now I have to review all of it, the whole damn masterpiece.
But I’ve got a few things to clear up first, the first involving an aspect of Shinji’s character I never really noticed or understood until I thought about it. It’s about why Shinji doesn’t pilot the Eva and while I kind of implied this fact, I never really said it because I’d not made the connection in my head. Why won’t Shinji always pilot the Eva? And why has he decided to come back every time? It’s not because theirs two other pilots who will do it for him, but I feel like it happens (excluding the last time which was ideological differences) because he has no place in the world. Your nature as a person is often informed by your life experiences and Shinji’s life up until the start of the series has been pretty terrible, giving him his lack of place in the world. So when Shinji runs away I’m not sure if it’s that he doesn’t want to pilot despite the end of the world, it’s that he doesn’t want to pilot and doesn’t care about the end of the world. Which is quite a thing to accuse him of but his negative experiences of the world has probably made him not care about if it ends since he’s not very happy in it anyway.
Something else I also never noticed was Rei’s glasses in episode 5, because Rei never wears glasses. These are Gendo’s glasses that she keeps and forms a strong attachment too because of her irrational companionship with Gendo. This realisation makes the events later in the film a whole lot more impactful.
I guess I’ll start talking about the film now. Shinji starts by confiding in an unconscious Asuka because Misato and Rei scare him. This kind of shows us that the movie isn’t really in line with the end of the previous anime and seems to be taking place all at the same time or in just a different universe. There is no place for Shinji to be scared of everyone at the end of episode 26. But it’s not really told what happened to him what made him afraid so much. What I can tell is that it’s at a time after all the angels are killed but before the conversion starts to happen. I think Shinji might be afraid of Misato because of the way she treated his issues at the end of ep 24 without much empathy while worrying for her own troubles. The Rei thing could be because of the fact that Shinji saw all her clones die, he was told she was an angel or just from her cold attitude.
Needless to say something is badly wrong if Shinji needs to confide in Asuka for help, a huge aspect of this film is these two trying to get back together even though Asuka hates him. But Asuka is unconscious and on a life support system (or something like that) and will not respond. The last time we saw Asuka I think was when she was lying in a bath in her depressed state, if this would continue I would not be surprised if it was a suicide attempt that got her in there. Asking for help from someone who’s potentially suicidal and caught up in their own worries can’t be good for either side. Maybe it is sometimes but not with Shinji and Asuka.
Shinji is so desperate for help that he shakes Asuka until she is released from all her wires and her naked body is exposed, prompting Shinji to wank on the spot. You’ve got to wonder what led Shinji to becoming like this. At the start of the series Shinji was nervous, especially around sex and I didn’t even believe that he knew what jacking it was because he never caught on when Asuka said Misato would be spending the night with Kaji or something like that. So something must have changed dramatically within Shinji to take his nervousness go away and do something he considers disgusting in a public place. I think people got turned off (me included) by this scene because of how disgusting it was but we’ve got to consider that it was there for a reason to show what Shinji has become as a character, instead of just some dumb stupid thing made to freak you out.
If you went back to the start of Evangelion I think you would be amazed at the very subtle character development that took place. Asuka changed something in Shinji, for the first time he had a person of his age and maturity to argue and get in the way of. We see him argue and fight more, forgetting his nervousness and losing himself a whole lot more. While they had their disagreements it’s clear that some kind of strange bond formed between them which Shinji still feels could be intact. This is probably from their week being in synch with each other. This bond allowed Shinji to put up with Asuka more throughout the show and made Asuka colder towards him at the same time. This is the companionship he has. While Shinji is still nervous Asuka helped him to become more argumentative when it counted, not being a complete wimp all of the time.
Now I want to skip to another part that Shinji feels about Asuka: his obvious physical attraction towards her. Being around someone for a long period of time will always change your opinion of them for better or worse unless you’re used to them for a very long period of time. When you’re with people more you tend to think of them a whole lot more as well, for Asuka this makes her hate for Shinji worse as she constantly shares the same living space. I believe that this has the opposite effect for Shinji and he becomes more attracted to her through kissing and the things at night to mention just seeing her every day. It’s also cannon to the universe (as mentioned in school) that Asuka is attractive and as an impressionable fourteen year old I think it’s more likely than not that these feelings have developed and grown, if not for their relationship her physical appearance.
The image of Asuka must encourage the same argumentative and abrasive feelings and moods that Shinji had while she was around. It’s not just that he finds her attractive though, this is a girl he’s been thinking of for many months lying naked in front of him. These extra emotions combined with hormones is what leads him to jacking off all over his hand, in a hospital, over someone who’s on life support. As a side note can anyone say they’ve ever spunked on their hand? The idea sounds gross, you’ve got to use something else Shinji!
And thank you for reading 869 words all about the lead up and execution of a dude jacking off; I hope you feel happy about yourself!
An interesting question posed after this is what will happen to NERV and the Eva’s? It’s a question that hasn’t been expressed before and I would have assumed that they’d be kept for military/defence reasons in case there are more angels or new conflicts with other countries. Having three Eva’s makes Japan a sort of military super power and could lead to more war because victory would be near certain, though it’s obviously a lot more complicated than that.
This is when our attention is taken away from the Eva’s and turned to Lilitth, Gendo’s secret project which will form the basis for a lot of this film. At the end of NGE this plot point was untouched (well kind of, more on that later) but the whole film will try to explain what the deal with that was. Don’t you find it strange that they say all the angels are dead but lillith still remains, I wonder if that will be what the 3rd impact plot point is about?
At the end of the previous review of the finale of NGE I was very sad about the idea of humanity converging because it’s like winning, but losing anyway. What I never thought of was a way to prevent this from occurring, which is what the film does in a really interesting way. What helps it is the fact that we’re only vaguely aware of explosions and the consequences of the event without actually seeing any impact. This is a smart move because it could be made up or changed over the course of the series to allow events later to occur and nobody would notice! I like the idea of the convergence being humanities last challenge, they effectively have to save the world twice.
Evangelion uses a clever foreshadowing trick which I can only really appreciate going back over the film. She hacks into NERV and finds out what really happened in the second impact; she’s shocked, but why bring this up now? The reason is obviously that it wasn’t important before but is now. Misato who was there at the time should know a lot but she’s completely shocked as well, she had no idea how bad it could be, this means that something crazy is going to happen right? If only I knew…
This is when NERV HQ gets invaded… by Japan? Why Japan? As I mentioned earlier Japan could become a military super power, and at the least never be threatened. The only explanation I have is relating to an old game of risk (I think it’ll be more fun and easier to understand this way) that I played with a friend who lost very, very badly. In risk you can make alliances, but those can also break. This person had an alliance with two of us but both of us were neighbours to our friend, who wanted to take down another guy but couldn’t because we were in the way. We all had one guy on every boarder while he had four guys against our one when he could have placed his other troops better instead of layering ones on top of threes next to our ones it started to get very concerning and it was completely unnecessary. You do not need four against one at every single boarder with three already and this “precaution” as he called it turned into distrust which made both of us cave in on him and destroy him. Removing him from the game very quickly because of the way you can stack troops in risk. What I’m trying to say here is that the Eva’s are threatening and pack way too much power, and if the angels aren’t around then other countries may ask “why do you still have those terrible war machines, you’re not up to anything are you” and attack out of fear. So Japan has to either attack with the Eva’s or end them to improve political stability and reduce the chance for conflict. It seems like they want the latter, which is something I can agree with.
Did anyone else question why they invaded instead of asked politely? Then I realised that Gendo and his massive angel was still around and thought they made the right choice.
This invasion starts with a cyber-attack on NERV with the power of five magi who hack into the system completely. I’ve already talked about my opinions of NERV’s security and I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve had my fair share of issues with viruses and once a Trojan and can say that there are a lot of things you can do to get rid of them, normally without too much effort, it’s more waiting for the process to finish than any work on your end. But what I can’t say is that an organised attack by JAPAN AS A WHOLE is likely nothing like this. I’ve never had a virus where I still couldn’t control my computer so they’ve all been solvable, but I feel like an attack by the JSSDF is a whole lot different because it’s not just a program hidden on your computer but a mass attack by a lot of people all at once. And I don’t know whether to call NERVS actions during this very good or completely and stupidly unrealistic. Maybe a bit of both? While they do still get hacked I don’t remember how it was explained that they could still access some parts of the magi, oh well.
The most contradictory part of the episode is the point when they say that SEELE is doing this entire thing as they start to be invaded. I never explained who SEELE were because I never thought they were important (and they aren’t even that big) but I feel like I should here to show my confusion, you’re of course free to skip all of this, it’s going to be a long ride!
So SEELE is a very influential company who has control over lots of the world and influence everything from the background, presumably by binding world governments with money though it’s never shown. SEELE is also a company that controls NERV, and they secretly want to cause the “Human Instrumentality project” which is why they take over NERV. But wait, what does Gendo also want? Could it be the human instrumentally project so he can reconnect to his wife Yui? So this whole thing seems like a terrible error in communications for me. I think it’s more the differences in knowledge between the two. SEELEE have made 9 robot Eva’s to cause the 3rd impact but Gendo just has Rei and Lilith for something to hopefully occur.
I think looking over the whole series the fact that SEELE’s plans were so similar to Gendo’s really helped him to try and do whatever he wanted since most of his steps benefited them. I guess the main difference is that Gendo wants to use this to become a god (though I don’t know how) whereas SEELE just wants to make everyone join together effectively killing everyone in my opinion.
SEELE have a strange goal for an evil organisation so it could be that they know more information that we do which would make the convergence worth it. Maybe everyone there feels like they’re in heaven or something but I doubt SEELE would be able to know that.
I guess with Gendo being so distrustful in this way SEELE launch the attack to prevent retaliation or combat by NERV, they may not know them In the same way we do so they could be considered a lot more threatening.
Anyway hacking into NERV was a really good idea for starting an invasion, NERV have the ability to lock up all their doors to trap and kill attacking soldiers. By hacking the system first they can let the troops in and totally forget about the self-destruct button! The JSSDF (The Japanese Strategic Self Defence Force) are also attacking for the reasons said above. This is so hard for NERV to deal against because they have to kill humans and aren’t used or prepared for a massive attack.
NERV know that their only real chance of survival is to use the Evangelions but Shinji is hiding away on his own, either in shame or fear. Three people from the military arrive and confirm to us that they are trying to kill the Evangelions and the pilots so they can’t be used against them. Misato knows where Shinji is and finds him in just enough time for the military guys to explain what they’re trying to do without actually doing it!
Misato tells us the 2nd impact was caused by humans to reduce the damage the angles could do, to save more lives in the long run. This was the big secret and I guess it’s just held back on for no real reason so that the reveal is shown too us at the same time it’s revealed to Shinji to make it more dramatic. The knowledge of this puts into our head that the 3rd impact could be caused by humans just as easily. Misato also says that Shinji must destroy the rest of the Eva series so that the humans (the 18th angel) can be fine. This will be to stop the 3rd impact later in the film.
Oh yeah and someone drops a bomb on a building with a self-destruct button in it and nothing happens!
(End of part ¼ (arbitrarily decided by me) (Alarm bells))
So the film establishes what happens in relation to the last two episodes and this, and theirs a debate on whether they are complimentary or alternate. I have clear memories of Asuka awakening in her Eva for no reason and this moment is repeated in two parts. So the main difference between the two in my opinion is that episodes 25 and 26 cut out a lot of the plot and just focus on the psychology.
The people who are attacking have nine automated Eva’s with them and Asuka suddenly has the depression removed from her after seeing her mum. At several times people talk about the true meaning of the AT field and at this point Asuka says she understands it. So here’s what I think of the AT fields: All the angels have AT fields, since humans are angels you could say that they have their own AT field as well. This is explained by saying that the AT fields are the things that stop you from connecting from other people. So this makes me thing the stronger the synch with the Eva the better the AT field can be, as well as this connecting to a human strongly will also make the field stronger.
This connection between Asuka and her mum also makes her stronger so she can combat the 9 eva’s, she also seems to go Berserk and I wouldn’t be surprised if she reached perfect synch. After taking down the Eva’s she has no problems with taking down the opposing air crafts even though they have people in them! Which is a good thing since they’re trying to take over the world. It’s also not surprising that the automated Eva’s suck after you saw what happened to the last one. She kills them brilliantly at a rate of 20 per second!
Meanwhile Misato is shot while she and Shinji are running away. This prompts her to use any means possible to get Shinji into that robot. Misato kisses him and promises that they’ll do the rest once he’s piloted it but both Shinji and Misato knows that she won’t make it that far. Either that or it would be a very creepy thing for Misato to say if she wasn’t as cute as she is. This makes Shinji go into complete despair, and the roles of Shinji and Asuka are completely reversed for this section of the film.
Something that I only annoyingly noticed later in the series was Ritsuko’s hidden relationship with Gendo. It’s brought up underground near the Adam where Gendo and Rei are staying. Ritsuko changes the programming so that Gendo cannot complete his project, unfortunately the magi has other ideas and doesn’t let her in. Ritsuko is pulling a gun on Gendo but knowing she won’t shoot he shoots her in retaliation, so Ritsuko dies knowing both her lover and mother betrayed her in the end, which is a really sad way to die.
Isn’t Ritsuko’s entire character arc extremely sad? While on the surface she’s cool and calm she allows herself to be treated very badly by Gendo and it’s all kept away, hidden in the background. It would have been great to see more of Ritsuko’s internal turmoil which she kept to her-self. It’s not all bad though because at least she goes through with the shooting and deleting the code even if it didn’t work out in the end. It feels sad that a character you knew so well had a dark secret that was only revealed at the saddest moment of her life. What do you think Ritsuko does when she goes home? I genuinely can’t picture her doing anything or having many other friends besides Misato and Kaji, that is speculation but these final things make me think that it’ll be true. This means she’s either unsociable or very lonely. She probably has issues to do with self-worth to let herself be treated that poorly by Gendo.
Asuka continues to fight strongly but the spear of Longinus returns and she gets brutally stabbed.
At a similar time Shinji’s robot almost grabs him and tries to force him into the Eva. As soon as he sees the terrible things that have happened to Asuka he screams, concluding the first half.
What I find somewhat unfortunate about the series is that Shinji has to be the main character; I would have got such a rush out of everything if Asuka continued her awakening to become really strong while Shinji was the one to fail and feel bad about it. This is just a suggestion though, I still like the film very much overall.
(End of part 2/4(Don’t worry these are getting shorter!))
Using the Adam (now known to be Lillith instead) Gendo wants to use Rei to get to Yui. But how can this be done? Well this is going to get a bit conspiratory but the character designs above are very similar to each other. As proven in the Asuka picture, evangelion doesn’t think characters change much appearance wise when they grow up:
So this means we can assume that they will grow up to look very similar with the main differences being hair colour and hair amount, which will change over time e.g. I used to be blonde but now I’m brown and will definitely have different amounts and colours of hairs in the future! So could Rei be a clone of Yui or an attempt to create a new Yui and is that why Gendo will be able to connect with her? That’s my idea so far. The problem with this is that DNA deteriorates over time (it’s why old people look old) and Yui’s DNA will be different enough when she dies that any attempt at cloning couldn’t create someone who was like her. I’m no expert so correct me if I’m wrong, please!
The unfortunate thing about this is that if Yui was brought back she wouldn’t be happy with the way he sacrificed many 14 year old human clones in her place. We see Rei realise that Shinji’s in pain and cut towards Shinji!
Shinji is being pinned down by the rest of the Eva’s in mid-air and the third impact starts. I don’t know if you recognised it but the diagram at the start of the OP is the exact same one for the third impact which is really cool!
Actually there are a few differences but I thought it was worth mentioning anyway!
Rei realises that she’s just being a puppet for Gendo and becomes a massive, massive version of herself! This is strange; all I know really is that she basically becomes Lillith. Shinji is brought to Rei and is left defenceless once she turns into Kaworu, this allows the sphear of Longinus to merge with Shinji into the world tree and enter the creature responsible for the convergence. Shinji is then put into full control of the convergence with the ability to start or stop it.
(End of part ¾)
We are treated to a scene where Shinji and Asuka interact in a really interesting way, showing his internal thoughts right up until the moment where he decided to end the world. In this Shinji thinks that the people around him are putting on fake masks of being nice, hiding things from him. He wants to be able to relate and be on good terms with the people around him but something has clearly been holding him back, perhaps his shame, or general distrust which was made greater by the attack.
Asuka needs help from Shinji and he needs help from her but neither gets it. Asuka lashes out with a coffee machine, burning Shinji and he flips a table over, something he never would have done at the start of the series. He then decides to strangle her for not being able to do anything, the convergence starts and one of my favourite songs in anime starts to play, come sweet death.
“What do you mean favourite song in anime? You’ve only seen this film once!” I’ve got some baggage to do with this song as I’ve heard it and enjoyed it in many other places. The most notable is from the best film on YouTube “Horseshoe finale” where it was used to brilliant effect to communicate the plethora of emotion and ideas inside the creators head. Another time was when I wanted to create a podcast with friends and film it, instead they got the idea to go completely silent on me and I ended up filming them and making them really embarrassed because they put on a stupid persona and behaved in terrible ways. When I released it against their will I used this song in the background to kind of say sorry. As well as this when a friend that I knew for 5 years moved away I put this song on and cried, it was so sad, “I wish I could turn back time” really related to me at that point.
So basically a lot of things went through my head when this song came out. I like doing posts specifically talking about the music so I will release a post sometime in February talking about the song and the sequence.
Rei greets people as they die, giving them what they appear to watch, one co-worker is met with a death from a kiss by Misato and another from Ritsuko. The convergence isn’t demonised as terrible and it’s actually treated with a bit of nuance as if the characters are happy for it to occur, it represents people’s pain being taken from them which is nice at first but the show still has a lot to say about it. At this point my notes just turned into a mess of philosophical statements I couldn’t keep any track of what so ever. Luckily theirs a funny thing about films, you can watch them more than once! This means I will be focussing on the bigger events instead of every random thing.
Gendo is just lying there ready for his plans to become reality. Both SEELE and Gendo seem happy with the situation so I think what they wanted was similar enough that it really didn’t matter, either that or Gendo’s plan has already failed and he’s lying there regretfully. He thinks that leaving Shinji alone was the best thing he could have done as he didn’t want to hurt him, this idea relates to the hedgehog’s dilemma which both Shinji and Gendo have faced. While Shinji doesn’t really have a way to deal with this Gendo puts on a hard front to protect himself. This was a terrible decision on his part, and if you don’t know why you’ve not been paying nearly enough attention! This is a case of somebody doing the worst things for the best reasons in that situation but Gendo died regretfully hoping things could have been different as he felt Shinji’s anger crush him in death.
Shinji who has combined with the spear enters the massive Rei through her third eye and Shinji is given another chance to change his mind, at this point he sees our world. Let’s talk about the meta narrative first. Ano seems to be saying that Shinji looking in to our world is just like us looking into his. If you bear that message in mind when I talk about the ideas that go through Shinji’s head it’s clear that Ano seems to have an anti-otaku viewpoint.
Shinji escapes to our world and becomes engulfed in this version of reality where he can escape from his pain. He learns that he should continue in his reality despite his pain and everyone is set free. The final message before the next scene tells us that you wall always have the chance to be happy, it will be ok.
The final scene is between Shinji and Asuka on an island in a sea of LCl and wreckage. It’s a very quiet and peaceful moment, and the fact that the world is saved dawns on us. There can finally be peace in the world and while damages won’t be easy, humanity can recover.
Then in the midst of all of this Shinji tries to kill Asuka by strangling her, paralleling the previous time when he did the exact same thing. At this time Shinji is annoyed that she cannot help him, but in the midst of all of this she strokes his face. Asuaka’s near death experience changed her a lot; she had the experience of being the best pilot at the time and was glad that Shinji was able to save the day. I don’t think in the entire course of this film Shinji and Asuka had a conversation except for the ones in their head. This means that through the events that have taken place they’ve come to a greater understanding of each other.
Asuka’s stroke of Shinji’s face represents her understanding and the fact that they’ll be able to help each other from now on. It’s this realisation within Asuka despite being strangled that makes Shinji so emotional and happy in the end, losing himself in both happiness and shame from his actions, causing him to lose himself and cry onto Asuka.
She still has her thoughts and emotions held together as she says “How disgusting” and you’re left with the distinct impression, that despite all the problems left in the world, everything will be ok.
Evangelion 1.0: You are (not) Alone
What I’ve decided to do is put this section about the rebuild films before the end of Evangelion film post. I wouldn’t recommend viewing Evangelion in this order but just think of the original broadcast for the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, the episodes weren’t originally released in order so that the emotional pay off would be at the end to give a long lasting effect on the reader, that’s what I’m doing basically. The payoff for EoE is like ep 6 of Suzumiya, that way you will feel better about being made to wait!
This film is a recap of episodes 1-6 and goes through nearly all of them very quickly. I think on the surface these films are a really good thing, I initially dropped Evangelion because I was annoyed with the slow pacing and characters who I thought were boring so I would have appreciated a more fast paced look into the story at the time so that I wouldn’t get bored so easily! Evangelion does have notably slow pacing and character moments and these films can really help the viewers who don’t like that style of directing.
The animation and visuals are significantly more modern but not necessarily better. I don’t particularly love the old anime aesthetic but I really dislike the soft edges and blended together backgrounds of most modern anime, it’s just my preference though. Old anime’s visuals tend to be more distinct and striking in contrast to what I said earlier. So if you like the new anime aesthetics then you’ll love the stylistic change! If nothing else I’m glad the annoying side bars are gone.
To condense all these episodes into each other you need to cut out a lot of things. Evangelion did this by skipping a lot of the more deep character moments, favouring to explain some of them or just flat out ignore them. This is until one disappointing moment at the end of the movie, and yes, this will be the first time I’m criticising Evangelion in such a massive way. Also it concerns me that these films condense the show but the ending of the anime is a full length film! So they need to condense a film into another film and add the other parts or just flat out ignore it.
I will only bring to your attention differences or new things that I find interesting. If you want a more condense recap of my entire episode reviews 1-6 put together then I’m sorry that I have to let you down, I guess I’ve been a fool to myself.
When Shinji is in the car with Misato he doesn’t bother asking questions because he doesn’t believe he’ll get an answer. It’s a really sad state of mind for Shinji to start the show in. He lets his self-defeating thoughts get to him in the most minor of situations, this foreshadows the future conflicts Shinji will have but also display very easily to the audience how depressed he is and that very simple things hold him back.
Another thing I noticed was when Shinji first meets the Eva he’s surrounded on all sides by strangers. Gendo is looking down on him and Ritsuko and Misato are stopping him from escaping on both sides. This portrays the fact that Shinji is a little trapped and a little forced into it a whole lot easier and it’s really cool in my mind.
After Shinji’s battle Shinji and Misato go to a grocery store to buy food for his welcoming party. What I find funny about this is that there are a lot of main locations in Evangelion such as the house, HQ and underground bunkers but this is the first and last time that we ever see Shinji outside of his environment except for his escape in episode four when he’s literally filling up time because he doesn’t know what else to do. It’s sad that he doesn’t get out more really, this might be because he has no reason in his mind to go anywhere else or he could just not have enough time to do anything.
Films are long, and to keep the reader interested for that length of time they need to add little extra things to make you more interested. That’s why in this film they introduce the human instrumentality project, the Adam, and Kaworu a lot earlier to provide more intrigue into the story. To a person who’s never seen NGE they might not know the reason for having a new event every 10-15 minutes or so this must be very helpful to them!
I don’t know If this is just with the stream I was watching but the party scenes audio mixing was terrible and one of the most poorest mixes I’ve ever heard. Misato’s theme music is way louder than the voices in the party scene and it’s distracting. The audio being louder than or as loud as the music wouldn’t be as bad if they were mixed together correctly; it’s possible to have a whisper heard above music far louder than it if it’s mixed correctly, this didn’t happen. What I can say is that this never happens for the rest of the show.
This film now explains everything about the biggest mystery about the show: why is the penguin there? So Pen-pen the penguin is there because, it’s Misato’s pet. Great! Not only did we know that already but it just brings up even more questions once you start to think about it!
The next thing that I have to say is about the final act of the movie, to create a good time for the audience it’s a good idea to make a final showdown arc which hypes the viewer about the film. The film could hardly introduce Asuka right at the end so the event should be before that, but the robot isn’t that exciting. So they decided to cut it at ep 6 and have a big finale, this was a terrible decision in my opinion.
The pacing of Evangelion isn’t bad once you get used to it but the rapid pacing of the episodes across the film got you into a state where you enjoyed everything taking place at once. This ended when the final plotline was introduced where they needed to take all of the power out of Japan. So we switch from around 10-15 minutes per episode to a finale which is a lot bigger than the actual episode itself and the pacing and plot starts to feel seriously boring. I’ve already seen the episode but seeing it again but slower and with more things I don’t really care about really made the ending suffer for me. So here’s what they should have done instead.
This film should have been longer so that more episodes could have been included. I think the finale would have been a lot better if it was in episode 11 where all three pilots learned to work together and used teamwork to fight the angel that dropped from the sky. For me that part of the show had a lot more impact because it showed how the characters could work together for a better future. This would allow Asuka to be introduced and fully established and they wouldn’t need to spend more time hyping up a less hype event when the one that takes place in episode 11 is so much better in my opinion. This would prevent the slow pacing of episode 6 and allow the film to continue at its normal pace.
100 minutes isn’t particularly long for a film and adding another 40-50 minutes to make it that much further into the story would have been so much better in my opinion. It’s true that Asuka changes everything so her introduction would produce a sort of break from the fast paced action and switch to more character interaction which would split up the film better so you’re not seeing very similar events all the time. We spend so much of our episodes getting to know Asuka more so it wouldn’t be too difficult to form a connection and pay if off with that brilliant team work at the end of episode 11!
So that review was slightly different from what you’re used too but I hope you liked the change and my suggestions, what do you think? Would you have preferred the film with my changes or the original thing?
Evangelion 2.0 – You can (not) Advance
I watched the director’s cut for this film instead of the original but they’re similar enough to not really matter. As well as this a mistake I made was thinking that Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 was already out so I have one day left free in Evangelion month to do whatever I like, fortunately I’ve got something else to put there but you may be a bit let down.
What happened to this series of films? We started with an incredibly faithful adaption and then switched to something massively different, I can understand that the staff may have wanted to do something different but I’m just wondering why they didn’t change things from the start.
We start with a completely unknown character who is piloting the 5th version of the Eva. The whole time I thought they’d just completely messed up Asuka’s character but it was actually someone else! This is one of the many changes that take place in this show.
I don’t exactly think making changes is a terrible idea, as long as the resulting product is still good, so what did the 5th pilot bring to the table? Well she was there for maybe 3 minutes, was pretty shy and a bit strange and filled in for a pilot at the end. Honestly her whole inception seems to be there just so that they can cut things out later, as I will explain when the time is right!
These time saving measures are made very apparent when they waste no time in introducing Asuka who flies in when a new angel appears. Yes it skips good parts of the show out, probably too much really, but it kind of makes sense. The episode they skipped before Asuka’s introduction is about a robot that goes rogue and kills everyone and it hold very little importance, only because they don’t really focus on those events for the rest of the series. As well as this the film would start pretty slowly and feature non fleshed out characters like Toji and introduce Kaji who would have ruined the pacing and the audience’s opinion of Misato quite badly.
Taking us out to the ocean too early wouldn’t have worked too well since there was nothing to take a break from. For the whole first film Misato is shown as a fairly composed adult who’s knowledgeable and good at her job, Kaji could change the audiences opinion very quickly towards Misato with her embarrassing moments and I can understand the creators not wanting to do it.
Asuka is actually introduced well in my opinion, and it communicates her personality in a much shorter and easier way. Did any of you also notice that they messed up Asuka’s name? It just comes across as strange, I guess it communicates the awkwardness that Shinji has with her by not using her first name but that’s fairly normal anyway for people who have just met.
You would have thought that in the film they had a lot of episodes to get through and thus shouldn’t include filler but the creators were trying to go through a completely different thing and included an aquarium scene and skipped many other fights.
What I liked about this was how it established Shinji as a cook, and later showed him making everyone’s meals, this is implied in the show but often forgotten about. I never really assumed this of Shinji and it was nice that the film added to his character instead of skipping out too much.
What I’m glad wasn’t cut out is the angel falling from the skies because that scene is epic! It makes me sad that they cut out the underground fight scene with all three Eva’s where the three main characters go on a treasure hunt through NERV HQ together.
I think Asuka’s depression is treated a whole lot worse in this show because they have to handle it faster instead of having it occur naturally, that’s why it’s so strange that she’s so sad about her mediocre (but not bad) performance. At this point she should be competitive, at this point she would should still be fighting.
I don’t know if we learn more about Rei, or if they just change Rei to make her more dramatic she is shown with a knife at the sink and much later a lot of plasters on her hands. She either uses cutting to escape her misery or she’s very bad at doing the dishes! I think this change is very specific to the films because we’re shown Rei’s hands a lot and nothing’s there, as well as that she’s shown naked and she has no cuts there either. At the end of the day they are still very similar but one tries to help their pain through self harm, it makes her a sadder character but I don’t think the Rei from NGE would think of it as a method to make her feel better, never mind go through with it.
I get the impression that the Asuka in this film is a lot more of a tsundere, she falls more into those tropes during the episode and it’s sad to see. When you first watch a tsundere you shouldn’t be sure if she loves the main character really. In NGE it’s very clear that Asuka hates Shinji but in this show it’s not as certain, she certainly acts like she likes him a lot more.
One terrible decision was that the Toji becoming an angel was replaced with Asuka. In the original this made sense because Toji had never piloted before but Asuka should know better! She gets defeated and is taken out of the film just like that! This is when they bring up the back up pilot from the start for the rest of the series, that’s the only reason why this character exists – so that they could skip out Toji completely. This tells me that they really don’t care about Asuka anymore and that she could be completely replaced by this less interesting character we’ve only known for life 5 minutes!
As I said in the episode review the angel situation could have been handled a lot better if they tried to keep Toji alive. Shinji was probably good enough to retrieve him. The only real benefit to having Asuka as the angel is that the emotional connection is established so much better, which isn’t even a problem that the film would have had if it paid more attention to its side characters and didn’t want to butcher one of its main characters!
A positive about this film is that it ended at the correct time, when Shinji turned into his beast mode Evangelion. Rei gets trapped and Shinji has to save her, he does and the film ends!
I can understand that the show wants the rebuilds to be their own thing but decisions like removing Asuka is just a horrible mistake. It’s so strange to have such a strange follow-up to a very loyal film. The show has probably also gone too far into the story for the second movie, it’s going to run out of material for the third one! And when you consider that a fourth film is coming it makes you wonder what they’re going to fill the rest of the series in with!
Evangelion 3.0 – You Can (Not) Redo
This will be the last review I write for Evangelion month because I’ve written the end of Evangelion post already. I have to say that I was really disappointed with this film because it was just really dumb.
We start with Asuka flying around in the skies to get to the Evangelion unit 1 for some unknown reason; it looks like the explanation for this is that the aftermath of the previous film led to Shinji being in a coma for 14 years. What a stupid and ridiculous idea! So this film is set 14 years into the future for some reason.
If Asuka has been a pilot for 14 years I can understand that she might have an eyepatch even if it seems a bit convenient, what I don’t like is how little she’s changed both personality wise and physically. She looks the exact same and can still pilot the Eva! Do you remember when they said that only 14 year olds can pilot? What is she doing here at 28 doing the exact same thing! Also remember yourself from 14 years ago, can you say that you are anything like that person at all? People change a hell of a lot and it’s stupid to think that Asuka’s bratty attitude would continue until she’s 28! I don’t actually mind it with Shinji and Rei because I’d accept that the Eva’s preserved them but they have completely butchered Asuka in this one!
So Ricchan now has short hair and Misato is the commander of a rival organisation to NERV called WILLE, this simply ruins so much. The characters who we liked have now completely changed, yes I complained about this with Asuka but when we’re not given time to see how much people have changed and what they’re really like it’s hard to like them as the new people that they are. But I honestly think that people care about Shinji way too much. Shinji was only with them for 6 months at most, I doubt I’d even remember someone I knew for 6 months 14 years ago.
Ultimately this time skip was unnecessary, especially since they literally used the exact same plot point at the end of the film, calling it the fourth impact instead of the third. So it seems like the third impact happened in this film, so the dramatic event that would have destroyed the entire world is now rendered completely inconsequential because nothing mattered in the end and not even the characters near the impact were blown up.
So it turns out that Rei didn’t die and she collects Shinji and sends him to NERV, I understand that Rei is her normal age and personality because it could easily be a clone. I thought the fact that none of the pilots aged in 14 years could have been a joke on Pokémon where Ash Ketchum never grows up but I think even that’s a bit far for Evangelion.
Kaworu, despite being on the moon at one point is now fully integrated as a NERV pilot and he teaches Shinji to play the piano. This works fine as a way to establish their friendships but as a pianist myself I find it really annoying how easily Shinji picks up playing the piano, it’s so badly done.
Shinji blames himself for the third impact even though it was all SEELE’s doing. I find it funny how they state later that their plans are coming to an end and it’s going smoothly despite the third impact having happened already and the 4th being 14 years late.
To make the ending scenes more emotional Kaworu takes Shinji’ s collar and puts it on himself, the only reason why he does this is so that they can have a dramatic moment at the end when Kaworu dies. There are much better ways to do this though, for one Kaworu’s an angel so he would need to die anyway meaning the collar was pretty much useless.
Shinji is kind of manipulated into triggering the 4th impact but it’s stopped so that we can continue in the next instalment of this brilliant film series! A lot of this was a mess that just went over my head buy that’s all of my notes taken care of, so there you go.
Don’t watch this film unless you like seeing things you love ruined, Evangelion was marketing to quite a strange group of people really.
My Brain Is Completely Empty 
I was supposed to try nanowrimo last year (signed up and everything) and then work went to pieces on me and I didn’t write a single word of a story in that month. I did manage to keep the blog going but that was about all I could handle. I’d still like to do it properly at some stage so maybe this year I’ll try again and see how disastrous work decides to be.
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Yeah you totally should, hopefully I’ll release a post soon that will inspire you that it’s possible! The hint is that when I said I’d write a book in one day I wasn’t talking about this one!
Good luck with it if you do decide to do the project! What you find after getting really far into the project you start to fear when the characters fear and get worried when they do, it’s quite rewarding.
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