[Ok, maybe not you specifically, but probably someone you know or have been. I know I got suckered in when these movies came out.]
There have always been those of Evangelion to be worse: more shallow, more traditionally masculine, less interested in the pain of its characters, less emphatic altogether. Evangelion has historically responded to these demands older than the age of the average anime fan with spite. End of Evangelion, coincidentally one of the greatest films ever animated, doubled-down with venom on everything that made the series it concluded unpalatable: the weakness of its characters, the long dreamlike looks into inferiority, the obtuse cosmology.
Yet despite this history, when plans to remake and re-envision Evangelion as a series of films was announced way back when in 2002, there nevertheless existed hope that the Rebuild films would be different. The reasons for this hope, which grew over times were that Evangelion’s misdiagnosed faults had at their root the series’ lack of budget and the deep depression of its director, Anno Hideaki. When the first remake film neared release in 2007, Evangelion was cataclysmically popular multi-media franchise and Anno seemed to be doing ok. Reason enough to believe, it was thought, that a remake would get things “right”.
10 years on. We now know that Evangelion’s true master remains itself and its vitriol toward those that would love it on terms other than its own is as potent as ever. Though demand for uncomplicated heroism seemed to be met by the second of three Rebuild films, the third proved to be every bit as mean as End of Eva had grown in legend. Yet this return to form was not sudden, but premeditated. It is the purpose of this piece to prove through analysis that the final Rebuild film is of a piece, not just with the other two, but with its progenitor series. They believe in the same things, they attempt many of the same points.
It is the purpose of this piece to prove that Rebuild films are the perfect practical joke.
If you go looking for a necessary cause to Revuild of Evangelion, well, there was money to be made. Compilation films, recaps of popular anime series blessed with better production values and maybe even a few tweaks to the ending, are nothing new. If you’re in luck, the one you are watching will trim bloat from a production, but it is more likely the brief run time removes vital narrative tissue. Compilation films commonly treat the excised material as still occurring off-screen, themselves shorthand for the original text. Rebuild of Evangelion distinguishes itself by considering the material lost to be void and changes the arcs of the plot, along with its characters, accordingly.
Evangelion is merely acting according to its own philosophy. It was a series in large part about appreciating people in their fullness, in spite of what you desire from them. People are irreducible and our reduction of them is violence. Although we did not know it at the time, Evangelion reduced itself with all the spite and violence and irony that we have come to know it for. It reduced its characters violently, qualitatively. They are not concentrated, but lessened.
Now, in order to appreciate Rebuild’s reduction of itself in the first two films, the set-up to its punchline, we first have to think about the demands according to which that reduction occurs.
The adults in Evangelion and children that watched it have always wanted for Shinji to Do a Thing.
What Shinji always knew to be true of his father and thought to be true of everyone else, was that he only had worth in as far as he had some utility: piloting the EVA, or in more colloquial terms, getting in the robot.
Known or not, the reading that endorsed this prescribed to Shinji the only value he feared he had, what Asuka feared hers was: exclusively instrumental towards the needs of others. Yet, the needs of said fans and the needs of NERV are different in the sets of actions that they desire from Shinji. Both fail to sympathize with the character in so far as he is a person beyond their mold. However, the fans in bad-faith want Shinji to “Get in the robot”, because they consider it stable, even heroic behavior that would more suit a protagonist. Conversely, fans who largely overlap w/ this first group, would like Asuka to mellow out.
These desires in part stem from a misogyny that would prefer it if Shinji was more traditionally masculine and Asuka traditionally feminine. Sexism and Evangelion have always been fascinating bedfellows, because it has always been difficult to know when Evangelion was showing or supporting harmful stereotypes w/rt/ women. This has been written about far more thoroughly elsewhere than I will here, but what is important here, is to understand that the reduction of Evangelion in the Rebuild films is the direct reduction of women to fulfill male desire: Shinji’s desire, an audience surrogate.
In Rebuilds 1.11 and 2.22, the women of Evangelion collapse into what Shinji wants from them. Misato keeps her distance, while Asuka and Rei both strive to become better caretakers of him. None of them challenge him to open up, change, or become a better person in any way. All of them drive him toward his father, conspiring to set up a dinner date, careless of the sort of people Gendou or Shinji are. The scars Rei and Asuka bear in 2.22 are cuts from cooking meals, tally marks in competition for their only reason to be.
Asuka’s edges are sanded off, subtly weathered into a more suitable mold. While still worried about her position as an Eva pilot, she relents in service of her partners, rather than double-down in fear of them. While this is initially presented as a more sure, more mature iteration, it is hinted at that Asuka has instead internalized the image of herself as a prop, rather than devote her tremendous energy in defiance against it. She uses old video games to shut-out attention rather than careen towards it. Much more distressingly, she is shown talking to the doll her empty shell of a mother used to project Asuka, as if sharing that same projection.
Yet instead of Asuka breaking her isolation due to any direct action on Shinji’s part, she decides to go to him. Her growth toward her communion with the other pilots becomes but a step to give Shinji what he wants from her, without any effort or growth required from the lad himself. Asuka, in short, is done the most horrible wrong by Evangellion 2.22: she is made merely useful.
Yet Evangelion 2.22 is also awfully clear about the fate of those who let themselves be treated as tools. Asuka is not spent; Shinji does not have the agency to do that much. Instead, Asuka is obliterated, crushed in the monstrous hands and jaws of Unit 01. In Rebuild, she is the one to go out in the doomed Unit 03, all for the sake of letting him enjoy an ill-advised dinner with Rei and his father.
Less destructive to the woman in question is what happens to Misato. However, her role in the story is even more dramatic about how conforming to Shinji’s most superficial and immature desires
Her reintroduction in 2.22 is the first change for worse in the film. It is easily missed, but emblematic of the disconnect between what Evangelion was trying to say and what was understood. In the original series, Shinji joins his father at his mother’s grave after half an episode of hemming and hawing, even some prodding from Misato, but he does decide for himself that going there is a thing he wants to do. At that point in the series, he has grown enough self-determination to make that kind of choice. In the films, Misato couriers him there because she thought it was a thing he ought to do. She, like we do, wants Shinji to be able to visit his mother’s grave, but he doesn’t, she does it for him. Her intervention strips the act of its meaning by robbing him of his agency in the matter.
Misato Katsuragi in the Rebuild films might be a good person, but she is not a good mother. She does not share her scars with her charges to let them know they are not alone in the world or take them out to dinner to celebrate a job well done. Her actions are not meant to nurture Shinji as a person, but to get him to do a thing. Shinji is always told the facts relevant to his situation, but he is never told in ways that would make those facts mean anything to him. Instead of Misato sharing her past with him in a vulnerable moment of sympathy, he learns it from Kaji as dessert to a meal.
Her own confession comes so much later that it becomes less apology and more a last ditch grab at sympathy to get him back in the robot he has by now sworn to stay out of.
It wasn’t the personal information that made her talk with Shinji mean something to him in the original series, it was the fact that she was the one sharing it with him. It did not matter to Shinji that Misato apologized for her own interests, but that the apology came at a time when it put her interests at risk, rather than one when it was a means to protect them. Misato of the series made herself vulnerable, because that was a necessary thing to do in a loving relationship. Rebuild’s Misato respects Shinji’s boundaries in excess, because that more distant understanding is adequate for the project of using a person, rather than raising them. When Shinji does get absorbed into Unit 01 in Rebuild 3.33, it is impossible for her to be the one to pull him out. There is no bond there.
If this version of Misato is, in fact, trying to be a caretaker to Shinji like her series counterpart was, then she, like a large part of the audience, d not dig deep enough in what it was they wanted from Shinji, what was important for Shinji. What was important about Shinji’s visit to his mother’s grave, for example, was that it was a sign that he has become a certain, somewhat healthy sort of person. When what we ask from Shinji is for him to get in the robot, we must ask ourselves if that is all we want, or if what we want is a Shinji who would choose to get in the robot. Even then, for what sort of reasons would we like him to do so?
The reasons Misato can give are cold and abstract. She is as honest with him about the facts of the situation as she can be, that the angels coming into contact with Lillith will kill us all and he is their line of defense. She tries to get him to understand the brave men and women equally striving to defend their lot in life, the scared citizens who place their hopes in him. She gives Shinji the same set of empty morals that Rei has at the start of the story. Rei, born and made to be of use. Rei, having grown up with no love and little more care, who takes her mission for granted, because for her to even imagine alternatives is a capacity unknown to her. Rei, who does not need to find solace in those empty words, because orders are motivation enough anyway. Her reasons are what lift Shinji to his feet at the end of 1.11 and will come to damn him through insufficiency further down the line.
That speech of Misato’s to Shinji is a reversal hard to notice after the rote hour and 40 minute retelling that precedes it, but it is vicious in humor and sorrow. The greatest heroism of Shinji in Evangelion was that he met a girl who was designed to be fulfilling to his stunted needs, a mother who was also your doll, and attempted to be good to her in spite of every vector for abuse being present and every poisonous idea he had about himself and his place in the world
Shinji saving Rei’s life from Ramiel in the series was a deeply personal thing done for a very specific person, rather than the ends of their supposed utility. It was an act in defiance of the abstract cause that would have sacrificed Rei after Rei after Rei. That cause could never have made Rei care about the world beyond Gendou’s orders and it could never make Shinji care either. In Rebuild, rather than a personal triumph, their victory is but another move of two pawn pieces. Instead of Shinji and Rei finding reason to live, together, no matter how flimsy and dubious, Misato convinces Shinji to seve like Rei.
That is not to say that Shinji’s relationship to Rei was perfectly wholesome or altruistic in the series. Care in Evangelion, as in real life, is always, already compromised. However, oedipal origins or no, Shinji’s care for Rei was care that never needed to be rewarded by enshrining Shinji as the new centre of Rei’s world. The difference is the reduction of Shinji through the reduction of his relationships. The kindness and subsequent pursuit Shinji shows Rei is different from the kindness of Shinji in the series, because Shinji is a different sort of person and because Rei, like the other women in his life, is now predisposed to behave according to his desires. She is proactive in service to him. The Shinji of Rebuild has no reason not to expect Rei to behave according to his expectations, because that’s what everyone else is doing for him. The adults that should be taking some sort of responsibility for Shinji’s care are vocally happy to toss all emotional support and tethering to his new mommy gf. That the relationship that looks the most the same from the original series to the films is with the most passive person he knows only goes to show how little the film thinks of Shinji’s maturity. And, by implicit proxy, how little it thinks of the audience that wants this.
Rei’s being-for Shinji extends to her relationship with Asuka. Before, Asuka’s found fault in Rei for reminding of her of the doll she is distancing herself from. Now that Asuka identifies with the doll instead, it is what she thinks of as Rei’s ill-gotten favor as a tool that sparks more jealousy from her. Their fight is no longer one to assert themselves as individuals, but as services.
Yet here there is an interesting disparity in what some of the fans want and what Shinji wants. As icky as Asuka’s damage was, the outgoing attitude that was its symptom was attractive to many. So, as the old saying goes, if there is no Asuka, she would have to be invented. Evangelion can cruelly boast of tradition: fridging Asuka to replace her with someone who represents everything she lacked. In the original ,Kaworu; in Rebuild, Mari Illustrious Makinami. Mari is everything fans have wanted from Asuka from the get go: violent without being vulnerable and sexual and willing to tell Shinji what’s what without ever introducing vulnerability to herself or others. Yet, in fan reaction, her charm points and parables are rightly seen as hollow, because they have been transposed onto a character who is nothing but those charm points and parables. As much as they would rather have Asuka be less of a person, the fans at least recognized she was one. with all the spite and violence and irony that we have come to know it for. Read less charitably, perhaps investment in nostalgia poisons even gifts freely given.
Either way, when Zeruel shows up in 2.22, she and Rei go down just the same as Asuka and Rei did decades before. This is: the state of 2.22’s endgame: Asuka M.I.A., Misato not even tolerated anymore, and Rei subsumed into the angel Zeruel. Mari is there and has a dope fight scene, but Shinji doesn’t care. Shinji becomes nothing more than the want for Rei and awakens an Evangelion that, this time, is already self-sufficient. It has no need for the world and, apart from Rei, neither does Shinji.
Ikari Shinji in the Rebuild films becomes pitifully, awfully his father’s son. The women succeed in bringing the two closer together, but not how they intended. An inspired twist in 2.22 is that the Walkman Shinji shuts out the world with had been Gendou’s before it became his. It reaffirms his self-imposed isolation as a thing he shares with his father. It sticks with him, the closer and closer he follows in his father’s footsteps. The one time it does leave him, it falls to Rei, who grips it tight as she goes on a kamikaze mission for the sake of keeping him out of the Eva. She becomes the mere instrument to Shinji’s will, as Gendou had attempted to mold her for himself. In his reuinion with her, he comes into his own, not as a hero, but as a tragic mirror of Evangelion’s principle villain.
When he breaks the world to save just Ayanami Rei, in mirror of his father chasing Yui, the Walkman is returned to his possession. When he awakes years later, it will be the hollow prize he is left with. This Shinji never struggled to change, because as Mari says: “Things just happen for him”. But the things happening are Shinji’s wants and, without having grown, what Shinji wants is toxic. Without having taken any time to consider the humanity of himself or others, only Ayanami is granted the thought a person deserves.
Like his father before him, he would damn the world to have one person near him, equally convinced of his own unlovable existence without her exception to the rule. So when he is put in the driver’s seat of instrumentality, with no one but Rei left in his world, that’s exactly what he does.
By collapsing Shinji’s trajectory to exclude his introspection, Anno changes its course. The processes of personal change, like people themselves, are incapable of collapse without doing them disservice, in part because to reduce the process is the reduce the people that help shape it. The long-form introspection that so many found distasteful was necessary work toward the growth of Ikari Shinji. With it gone, he becomes the destroyer. Not even the monstrous others, those angels that force him to reevaluate the conceptions he has of himself and others, appear in the Rebuild films to help avert disaster. The greatest con Anno Hideaki pulled was in convincing us that a Shinji not pushed into self-examination by Leliel and its ilk would have been better off.
The nevermade promise of Rebuild, that it would “right the ship” of Evangelion, is shown to be a cruel joke. Like the monkey paw of tired renown, Rebuild shows the iniquity\ in the wish made of it. Where End of Evangelion responded to hopes of a more emotionally sterile, straightforward mecha anime by going apocalyptically nuts, Rebuild became that anime with the purpose of its own implosion.
If it was ever possible for there to have been a true Rebuild of Evangelion, an uncomplicated do-over, it would have not had the run-time of a few films. More importantly, the the enormity of influence and the great part of Eva’s influence stemming from being misunderstood in emotionally regressive ways and the enormity of that influence, precluded that possibility. Every person that truly believed in getting in the robot, went out into the world with that in their hearts, and cried out for blood over what they saw as failings of their standards made their owning through multi-million-dollar film franchise all the more necessary
Consider the assumption: that the world in which Evangelion got made by a happy, healthy, well-funded production team is more true to an ideal artistic vision and also recognizably itself. It is insulting and chauvinistic to assume someone’s improved mental health will make them more inclined to conform to your tastes. It is a combination of unjust views, of mental health is of a person, what a person is in art, what art is to taste. It is an invalidation of vulnerability as power that helped Evangelion be so resonant in the first place. Evangelion, though dire, was a deeply affirming and empathetic series. What was the expectation, for a happier person to place less importance in our common good?
The truly amazing thing about this, the thing that perfects this joke, was that those expectations persisted up until the moment 3.33 hit theaters. After all, it stands to reason that the same audience that missed or disdained the point of the original series would lap up what 2.22 offered, not knowing or caring about how wrong it was all going. Third Impact was just a big thing on screen that could mean anything without shown consequence. Rebuild needed a sucker punchline. A joke only lands if its punchline does, after all. Thankfully, 3.33 was an extinction level impact.
Literally. Third impact sort-of-almost happens at the hands of a Shinji that doesn’t care about the world. The world becomes a blasted hellscape where every wish has been corrupted and attention can finally, fully given over to the question of the remake. Allow me to explain. Across the Rebuild flms, there is a fascination with mass-produced results. Iteration upon perfect-copy iteration, mirrored into depth and breadth of the frame, all working towards the same purpose. In 1.11 and 2.22 they move with purpose, providing the artificial dynamo for Shinji’s assault on Ramiel and infusing Tokyo-3 with the ritual of lives lived. In 3.33, the endless machinery still moves, but no longer with destination. The purpose of all this momentum, this multiplication and reiteration has been an ultimately pointless respiration of a world that never lived in the first place. Kaworu, appears as a role of support, but even he cannot stop telling Shinji what to do. Adam, the origin, Himself becomes obsolete through multiplication. His primacy was already in question in 2.22 when he was shown as four bodies in a flashback to Second Impact and replaced entirely with a (for now) irrelevant doodad in its present. In 3.33, he ends up losing even nominal primacy when he loses his place as the first angel through Kaworu. Shinji and Kaworu’s descent to the lances is framed by the Utena-like corpses of countless Eva that have lost name, past, and meaning beyond failing at the purpose Shinji will soon fail in kind. Their failure stems from insanity, expecting different lances, different results, from mere repetition of their ritualized past. Mere repetition cannot improve. There can be no improvement without attention, care, and imagination. No how much something is re-attempted, without the knowledge of its meaning, it will fail its purpose.
Yet insane action is all that this Shinji still knows. This Shinji has had no way to deal with contradictory desires. He has never known another person who was not defined by their relationship toward him, he has never known another person, period. He was living a fantasy in which he only had one set of expectations to fulfill and everyone else fell in line. It is all the fans have expected of him. Diegetically, everyone has only ever desired his pilothood from him or else put themselves in his service. Having failed catastrophically at even that and given no toolset to understand, not even how to be a different person, but even a fraction of what a person even is. Shinji becomes catatonic until Kaworu offers him not only a reversal of all the misfortune he has wrought, but one that still fits the format that Shinji has ever known. He is only following orders, Kaworu’s, and within those orders, he is still his only known self, an Eva pilot. Shinji, in a world more radically different from any in the series, can only continue to stay his most limited self.
This Shinji who has not taken the time to do work on himself is disastrous, but can only be disastrous. The utilitarian, solipsistic, stunted world where others can only use him or be used by him, is an exterminating world view that Shinji only knows how to double down on. He does not have the imagination to do anything other than fuck-up on the grandest scale and repetitiveness has robbed even the grandeur of that. The fans finally have a Shinji who can get in the robot, but it is a pathetic creature for whom that is the only option. Rebuild creates a Shinji even more appalling to them by molding him according to their desires and, in doing so, holds up the mirror harshest to them. This is what comes from disregarding the trauma and desires of others for our own ends: the destroyer, pathetic. Everything they want is pointless, unfulfilling, and doomed.
Even Kaworu, at once the radical concept of an other that could be wholly loving, as well as a demonstration of how useless that concept was without self-love, can only be yet another individual that directs Shinji. He still responds to Shinji’s wish to be forgiven. However, it is only by making use of Shinji that he can do so, which he does according to the only sense of self Shinji has been taught to have. When things do inevitably go to shit, it is Kaworu’s turn to be spent in Shinji’s stead. His final words are a hope that Shinji (and perhaps this franchise) might find rest.
Ironically, it is the very woman done such deep wrong by Shinji’s solipsism in 2.22 that carry with them the greatest hope for a happy ending to this punk session. It is very Eva to seed hope when it looks like it is salting the Earth. The two girls obliterated in Shinji’s orbit in the last film are given new life and the promise of full identities even more radically removed from Shinji’s than was ever the case in the series. At the same time, life in perversion of fan desire. Asuka may have gone from mean to bitter, her body’s aging may have stalled in acknowledgment of its decades long merchandising, but she has apparently gotten her shit together enough to ditch the Eva that used to be her life’s purpose when needed. In fact, Mari, the character that was the stand-in for an Asuka the fans asked for, is now her subordinate. When Rei was consumed by Shinji’s desire for her, her clone became the more void of identity than any version before her. Yet, at the same time, that means she has been reborn with even more radical opportunity to become her own person. Furthermore, it is confrontation from Asuka that inspires her new quest to become her own person. Nothing could have spited Shinji’s solipsistic version of Evangelion more.
Now we are truly in uncharted territory. Evangelion was a series that said all it needed to say. Rebuild as a series of films is a truly grand failing mark for everyone that continued not to grasp the point. Does Evangelion still think it can say anything for Shinji and the fandom beyond that or does Evangelion end to leave them both, finally behind? I can not wait to find out.
;)
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