a kid the same age as me

neon genesis evangelion (episode eighteen, "ambivalence")

all screenshots from fancaps

Hoo boy.

If you think about it, it’s surprising that nobody human in Evangelion has died. Killing somebody is sort of a universal way to say, in a television show, that you’re getting serious, and Evangelion has plenty of minor characters who could be sacrificed to this end. But nobody dies. That doesn’t actually change in this episode either, as we find out at the last minute. But, in some ways, our cast of characters has gotten by up until now not only by being resourceful and brave, which they are, but by being lucky. And like all luck, you don’t know you’ve lost it until it’s too late.

What do I mean by “lucky”? For instance: the Angels are weird and eldritch and hard to fight (and impossible to fight by conventional means) but they don’t seem very intelligent. They tend to have one move and once you figure that out you can win. There are no “two move” Angels.¹ They are also not “emotional.” They don’t have faces that you can read. Where they come from, if…