Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion

Rewatching Evangelion is one of the scariest things I've chosen to do, recently. It was hard going back to it. I didn't care too much for Eva when I watched it as an angry, angsty 14 year old. At one point I may have even written a - thankfully deleted - post about what I thought about the characters and how Shinji is awful. I rode that bandwagon for a while, far longer than I should have done. "Shinji's a little bitch" I might have said. "No one is likeable" I might have also claimed. Sentiments that reflected how I was at the time; achild. I don't think I would have ever said that I didn't "get" Eva, at least in the sense that I see people talk about "getting" it, but it wasn't a show for me at the time. The only things I knew about it going into it was that it was ranked highly here, the last two episodes were - as someone I knew at the time described them - a "mindfuck", and the Spike Spencer rant. That was it. I didn't have any idea what else to expect from it. I didn't like it.

But people did, and that part always confused me.

A lot's happened since then. I'm 26 now, and a completely different person to how I was at the time. Over the years, I came to respect Eva more than I ever thought I would do; something worth seeing, even if only once. I tried recommending it to one of my brothers in the past, he still hasn't watched it - I'm not sure if he ever will. I began to understand that for some people, Eva was a transformative experience. Several friends I've spoken to have talked about how it was monumental, life-changing, really made them figure things out about themselves. I was glad for them of that, I didn't have that experience with the show, but I was happy that they were able to get something out of this that I wasn't. I realised that, as a teen, I lacked empathy towards Shinij, towards Asuka, towards everyone in the cast with the exception of Gendo, who I never liked. When I heard people talking about Shinji as a case study of someone living with depression and a complete lack of self-worth, I realised that there was definitely something I missed and tried to retroactively revise my views because of it. I still didn't like Eva, but I began to understand why people did.

As a teenager, I was bitter. I didn't have a particularly good time in secondary school. It took me several years to digest that, in spite of what I may have told my parents and other people, I was bullied. It didn't feel like it at the time because I was a scrappy child, always trying to fight back, always quick to violence and anger. I earned a reputation as something of a psychopath, I don't think there was a single person in my year group and the one immediately below it that didn't know my name at the very least. I think on some level, I was proud of that. It definitely caused me some issues, but I liked part of the rush that came with that.

I didn't have an issue with hurting people. I didn't have an issue with being nasty towards them, towards burning bridges with them, towards just not wanting anything to do with them. I was fine in my small bubble of me and the one person who I thought I was going to stick with through thick and thin. That cost me. It cost me valuable friendships that could have lasted all the way until now if I'd really tried. After I'd finished secondary school and gone into college, I met a person there who was nothing but nice to me. On the day of my 17th birthday, I was due to meet up with some friends and he showed up, uninvited, but it was a really nice surprise. He gave me a big hug. I should have valued that more than I did. When we returned to college I ended up repaying that kindness with a joke that went too far. He had explicitly told me and some friends not to make jokes about how he and this girl should get together, but we ignored his wishes and did so anyway. We definitely made jokes that we shouldn't have done. The following day he came in, crying because it turns out he had been going through a really rough time without any of us realising. One of the guys playing the joke argued that we were blameless because how were we supposed to know? It didn't matter. We should have listened. I apologised, but he never looked at me in the same way after that, and I haven't spoken to him again since college. I doubt he'll read this, but I've always wanted to give a better apology than what I gave him.

In that same year, I fell in love with someone. Hard. I had had crushes before, but this was different. I don't think I believed in love at first sight until then. This was the first time I had ever realised that I wanted something for myself. I think that was the first time I had ever made something of a conscious effort to change things about me. I was so determined to try and make something out of this that I had to turn down a guy who had a crush on me. I was absolutely flattered, but I knew it wasn't what I wanted. People on the internet - on here - had gotten the idea that I was intimidating and hard to talk to. I personally thought that I was cold and emotionally distant. It was over a year before we finally got together, and it was incredibly hard trying to form a relationship with someone. I screwed up several times in the process and nearly lost the whole thing. She was with someone at the time, I resolved to move on and just maintain the friendship because I valued it a lot. I began to understand why it was so scary to try and make connections with people of your own volition.

To hammer that point home to myself, I got back with an ex that I had met up with recently and reconnected with. We didn't have a particularly good breakup - she stole my copy of No More Heroes - but we reconciled and that was the main thing. I had moved on, I thought, but I was lying to myself. We broke up not too long after we got back together. I was going to university, she was working full time and it was already hard to find time to meet up with her on her days off. I argued that it was because it was too difficult to maintain this relationship whilst I was at university; she thought I was saying that as an excuse to do drugs and cheat on her with other people. I was fed up with the childish arguments with her over every single little thing, like I was walking on eggshells. We broke up and haven't spoken since, but at least I got my copy of NMH back.

I went to university. My first year was a big change for me. I was living in a city that I had been to a few times for visits, but had no idea what it was like to live there. It was an interesting adjustment period. I was in private accommodation halls because all the halls of residence for students at my actual university had been fully booked. The accommodation was nice but I had no idea how to connect with the people there. They weren't going to the same university I was. They were aspiring drama students going to a specialist acting school that required you to audition every year to make sure that you have a place there. I was doing a combined honours course of English and History because I wanted to do a course I thought I would be good at. We had nothing in common. I'm from about as heavily a working class background as you can get, one of them had relatively rich parents that made sure their daughter didn't need to pay for their accommodation. The other dropped out to be with her boyfriend back home. The one remaining balked at it, "She could have been something, but instead she'll probably just end up working the tills at Lidl". I felt isolated. I didn't like this girl and it was clear that she didn't think too much of me. When other people on our floor - other students at that acting school - came over, they all looked at me like I was out of place and didn't belong there. I felt the same way they did, but not for the reasons they probably did. I wasn't a super-outgoing party animal, but I did try to spend time away from my accommodation whenever I could. I wasn't needed.

April the following year, I finally got with the person I had fallen for. We had stopped talking as often. I had said things that I thought probably damaged our relationship too much, but at the very least we were still talking, even if it wasn't often. She thought I had a right to know that she had broken up with the person she was with, which only irritated me at the time because I thought I was finally over it. I wasn't. We got to talking again and I realised once again that nothing had changed and I still felt the same way. With that in mind, we got together.

At the same time, I started to lose contact with the person in school who I thought I would always be friends with. He'd gotten himself a girlfriend. He'd had relationships before, but this one was different. The previous Christmas, he had gotten her a ring for a present which her family misconstrued as an engagement ring. It wasn't, but they went along with it anyway and it ended up becoming that. I didn't like her. I didn't like how she tried to undermine my friendship with him by acting like the things that had happened in school weren't such a big deal for us. People in school, people who liked him but didn't like me, always referred to me as his tagalong, or asked why I'm so gay for him. I realise in hindsight that on some level, it stopped being a friendship for me and that I was in love with him, at least for a time. I asked when he was going to stop the charade with the engagement ring and he said he wasn't. I can't remember what it was that ended up being the catalyst for us not talking as much until my third year of uni, when I cut him off completely due to what I described as "irreconcilable political differences", but it might have been that.

Our first year together was the happiest I had ever been with a person. I felt so content and, for what felt like the first time in my life, really loved and needed. I started venturing into other places like twitter and meeting people through there. It was wonderful. I was having a great time at university, too. I met people that I looked forward to meeting every week at the gaming society I ended up joining. A friend and eventual housemate I met there was talking about Evangelion with another friend. That friend didn't understand why it was that Shinji just didn't get in the damn robot, to which my housemate friend responded with "Alright, you try telling me that at 14, you would have gotten into that fucking thing, it'd be scary as shit". I laughed.

Things looked like they were going to go well in the second year, too. I thought things would pan out in much the same way, but they didn't. After a time my relationship began to show cracks. Small arguments at first, and then things started to get nasty. There were elements of this relationship that I wasn't prepared for at the time, but they were also things I wouldn't have been prepared for if I was to try a relationship like that now. I won't go into any specifics about that because it's not my place to do that, but it was very hard. It nearly all fell apart and then we finally met up after I flew to America the first time. That was an amazing holiday and I still look back at it incredibly fondly. We both thought that was what we needed to really make things better for us. It didn't last.

Fast forward a few months to December of that year. Everything fell apart. Late nights. Constantly exhausted Skype calls. When my dad came to pick me up for the Christmas holidays of that year, the first thing he said to me was "You don't look good, you've lost weight". I hadn't noticed because I've always been on the skinnier side, but I had dropped about half a stone or so without realising it. Maybe that was why I was so low energy and why some of my jeans didn't fit properly anymore. It was the worst Christmas I had ever had both physically and emotionally. I barely paid attention to eating out at the family meal with my mum's side of the family, I was too busy lost in trying to salvage what was going on in my life. I didn't want to try having a conversation with anyone or being open towards them, I just wanted to scream into the void at that point. It was hard. The following night something happened which I also won't go into specifics about here, but I hardly slept that night and broke down crying the following morning. My youngest sibling, who had resented me since secondary school, consoled me for the first time in years.

I stopped attending lectures. I didn't see the point in going, especially as I could just as easily listen to the audio versions on the university website. I hadn't written anything for my disseration yet and kept putting it off. The deadline was approaching and I applied for an extension on mental health grounds. I got the extension and still didn't write. I was too busy procrastinating, doing things that... weren't really anything. I watched anime, I watched a couple of regular TV shows and also played games. The disseration could wait. I was a mess at that point. My relationship wasn't getting any better and it wasn't right to call it a relationship anymore. I wanted to believe that it was, but they evidently believed differently. A lot of things happened which I still have trauma about to this day.

I'm not with that person anymore. There were several times that I thought "this time I'll cut them off for good", but it didn't last. Now I don't talk to them at all and haven't had proper contact with them for a period of time that I don't care to keep track of. I kept talking to them long after I should have realised that it wasn't going to last. But it's better this way, I feel like it has to be.

In the past couple of years, there was a friend from school I reached out to catch up with. We went to have lunch together and she saw it clearer than I ever did. "You had a really rough time in school, didn't you? I'm glad you're doing okay now". By that point I'd already come to realise a lot of the damage that that environment had done to me, but it shook me to hear someone else had seen it long before I did. I wondered if anyone else had noticed it, or whether it was always obvious to people that my violent temperament was nothing more than a terrible defence mechanism against some of the things that had happened in school. Against things like being laughed at by teachers when I was rejected by someone, against my parents divorcing, which I was convinced hadn't impacted me in any way. Against the idea of being hurt, being in pain, trying to be close to people, trying to become friends with them. Doing anything I could to prove to myself that I wasn't lonely.

All of this, ultimately, comes back to Evangelion in the end.

I hadn't touched Eva in the entirety of the time that everything I just described happened. It had been on the back of my mind. Maybe I should rewatch it, I thought. I had come to like a lot of other shows that Anno had worked on in some capacity since then. Maybe it was always just childish sentiment that prevented me from going back to look at Eva with newer, older eyes.

But I was scared. I didn't want to do it. I ran away from it. I continued to convince myself that I didn't like Eva and that a rewatch of it wouldn't change that. There was nothing there for me. It wasn't a show that I would ever end up ultimately liking. I would never have the transformative experience with it that other friends who I love and respect had with it. It was alien to me, I wasn't going to do it.

End of Evangelion is showing at Scotland Loves Anime next week at the time of me writing this. The excuse I had been looking for to rewatch this show had finally arrived and I decided that it was going to be now or never. If I wasn't going to watch it now, when was I? If I buy the blu-rays, perhaps, but the opportunity to see End of Evangelion on the big screen would have long passed since then. A friend of mine said that he understood the novelty; he would see it there too if he was going.

So I got to work watching it. The first few episodes were a bumpy acclimatisation period. The fear of rewatching Eva had set in already. Why was I doing this? What did I want out of this rewatch? Did I finally want to like Eva? Did I want to see what Eva really meant to me, all these years later? No, I'm scared. I need to not like it. I have to look for reasons not to like it. Quick, talk to your friend about it. Oh, episode 4, Shinji aimlessly wandering around? Yes, an easy target. Talk about how it feels clinical and efficient, talk about it feels antithetical to what the episode is trying to do. Rei's smile in episode 6 is weird and creepy. Look for something, anything, *anything* to dislike this show. You cannot like it. It doesn't matter how petty it is. You can't find value in it. You can't find out what Evangelion means to you now.

It was when talking to another friend about this rewatch that I realised just why it is that I was so scared of this rewatch. Whether I like it or not, Evangelion has served as a sort of microcosm of the past 12 years of my life. There are other shows that I remember watching from the same period of time, Eureka Seven and Gurren Lagann, for example, which I liked considerably more and yet don't remember in the same way. I've not touched either of these for a similar amount of time that I've not touched Eva, and the difference is palpable. I remember fragments of Eureka Seven, bits and pieces of it. I remember Charles and Ray in the middle section, but I'm not sure how much of that is down to having seen Hi-Evolution. I would struggle to tell you anything that happened in the story of that show in even the broadest of possible strokes. My youngest brother, who I at least have something of a working relationship with now, told me that he watched it way more recently than I did, and he would still struggle to explain what happened. Gurren Lagann I at least remember more of, but again, it would be a struggle.

But Eva? I can recall things as vividly as though it was the first time I was watching it. Toji and Kensuke meeting Shinji and the formation of their relationship. Asuka arriving for the first time. One of the friends I spoke to about Eva told me their favourite episode was the one where the power gets cut to Neo-Tokyo 3, and at first I didn't remember it. I remembered everything about it immediately following the opening credits. It all came flooding back to me. Toji becoming the 4th child, I remember that entire arc, beat for beat and how I felt at the time. Seeing Unit 01 going berserk, really, truly going berserk, has been seared into my mind as Kaji watches on, watering his plants. Rei's monologue immediately following the recap. Everything about Kaworu. The Angel absorbing Shinji into its shadow and going inside his mind. Asuka's trauma. Misato trying and failing to be a functioning adult. I didn't need to rewatch Eva to remember this. It's all there, all of it lodged into my brain.

I understand Shinji now more than I ever thought I would do. I get him. I understand what it's like to be at your lowest now. To have no sense of self-worth. I've had moments of breaking down crying, realising how much I hated myself and the things I'd done. Wishing I could take it all back, that I could do it over and never make the mistakes that I made so that things would be okay. But I can't go back. Those mistakes, everything that's happened, has defined who I am today and to do that would be a disservice to myself and everyone else that I've met in the years since Eva.

I relate to Misato more than I ever thought I would do, or wanted to. I get what it feels like to be a barely functioning adult, dealing with the crushing pain of traumatic experiences and old relationships that are better off not rekindled, but you wish they could be, because the fire in them burned hot. What it feels like to justify to yourself that what you're doing is okay, and that you're not just using people. I understand it all, now.

I realise now that Asuka's self-destructive tendencies are nothing but a terrible defence mechanism to cope with the horrific trauma she's endured. They don't work. They only serve to push people away and isolate her, but I understand them. The struggle to really be nice to people, to let people in and actually be willing to repay their kindness with kindness. To feel completely inferior to the people around you and to hate because of it.

I understand now that Kaworu and Kaji both influenced my taste in men way more than I was willing to admit. I do not actively look for people like them, regardless of gender, but I am ultimately drawn to them regardless. That has probably led to some questionable decisions which I have made in the spur of the moment that I can look back at and laugh at now, but they happened nonetheless.

I admire Rei now. I don't think she will ever be a character that I can relate to personally, but I admire the growth she goes through and how, even if it's only a little bit, she does grow as a person and tries in a way that Shinji and Asuka don't. She may not be very good at living, but I admire what she becomes nonetheless.

I still don't like Gendo. There will never be a time that I like Gendo. When I was a child, he was just an absolutely terrible person to me. Now that I'm older, I see Gendo as every expectation that was placed on me by family that I failed to live up to. That I never had any hope of living up to. Now that I have to deal with the existential yawn that is working for a living, I realise that Gendo represents everything I cannot stand when I am inevitably compared to people I did not ask to be compared with. When Shinji resigns from being a pilot and says that his intention is to never meet Gendo again, it was something I sympathised with him over then and even moreso now.

Over the course of rewatching Eva, I came to another gradual realisation: whether or not I liked Eva in the end is irrelevant. For what it's worth, on this rewatch I ended up liking it quite a lot, even in spite of its issues. But whether I liked Eva, or what Eva really meant to me were both things that did not end up mattering to me in this rewatch. I could never approach this show as though I had never seen it before, as though it was a clean slate. The memories of the imagery of the show are too vivid, too entrenched in my mind for me to ever act like I've not seen it before, to act like I have no opinion on it. I got something far more important out of it instead.

When I go to see End of Eva next week, I will be meeting up with friends that I haven't seen since before the pandemic started. I will be meeting up with my partner, who I have also not seen since before the pandemic started. I'm very excited to once again be surrounded by people that I love and care about, that I value so much, who ended up encouraging positive change in me. In spite of how many negative anecdotes I might have included here, there has also been plenty of good. I have a circle of friends who mean the world to me and would do absolutely anything for now. Real, meaningful relationships with people that I don't want to give up. The kind of people who make things worth it, even when life gets too much.

Whether or not I ended up liking Evangelion ended up not being important in the end. Whether Eva meant anything to me ended up not being important in the end. The score I ended up giving it here isn't important; a mandatory requirement of MAL's which I just have to deal with. Watching Evangelion was scary, but it gave me an opportunity to talk to myself. It gave me a chance to talk to myself about everything that's happened in my life since then. I got to talk about all the good and bad. I got to let my 14 year old self know that, in spite of it all, things do get better for them. They end up figuring things out about their sexuality and gender that they never thought they would do. They end up not giving up on the things that they're passionate about even when they give up on other stuff. That they end up finding new passions and are equally enthusastic about them. That there's going to be a lot of bad stuff that happens that you won't know how to deal with, that won't be easy, but there's absolutely going to be more than enough good to make up for that. You're going to go to Anime Expo at some point and get drunk and high with friends, you're going to yell at kids in the street "Be gay, do crimes" and try stealing one of those electric motor scooters. You're going to have a lot of fun, I promise. It gave me the opportunity to look back at things that I didn't think I would ever look back on, that I didn't think I would ever want to look back on and really, truly talk about them. I wanted to run away from them several times. It was scary and unsettling. It was emotional, charged, it made me question if it was really worth it. I'm glad I got to do it.

In the end, if I didn't end up liking Evangelion, that would have been fine, too, because I got to talk with my younger self about it, and I didn't run away.