i want to be here

neon genesis evangelion (finale: "take care of yourself")

screenshot from fancaps dot net

Much like episode twenty-five, the Evangelion finale is basically people going around spelling out exactly what the show is saying. So… in lieu of summarizing the episode, I will summarize those points as I understand them. Here’s what Shinji discovers over the course of the process of Instrumentality:

• You want others to give you value.

• However, only you can give yourself value.

• Your reality is the product of your interactions with the world.

• It is always possible to imagine another world, another self.

• Limitless freedom means lack of definition and an inability to perceive oneself.

• The person who exists alone exists nowhere.

• To see oneself, one requires others.

• It’s okay for you to be here, but,

• You have to believe that yourself, others can’t believe that for you.

• Congratulations!

Or, to put more simply, human connection cannot give you what you want from it, but that does not mean that human connection gives you nothing and that you should learn to go without it. It gives you something different. You can appreciate what you’re actually given, or you can refuse to do so, but neither absolute reliance on others nor absolute reliance on self is going to get you through This Thing We Call Life. Life is always changing and the balance is always changing.

Part of why the finale of Evangelion functions the way it does, with different people saying different lines as part of a single thread of thought, is because of this need for self and other. The process Shinji undergoes is not a school lesson in which he learns to repeat the right answer, but a conversation in which he begins to change his perceptions. Shinji can’t come to the conclusion that it’s okay to be here on his own, but he also can’t rely on anybody else to come to it for him. With the help of others, he does figure it out. He wants to be here. It’s okay to be here. He doesn’t want to be alone.

Is this a good ending—as in, “a satisfying close to the story”? I think it is but I understand why people hated it (and might still hate it, I’m not exactly sure what the general feeling is about it these days). Evangelion had its trippy sequences before, but they were usually integrated with the story, and they moved it along in their own ways. Here, there was clearly a decision to say, you know, who cares about story, let’s just try to answer the question of whether or not you should kill yourself. And that works because, ultimately, this show is about the characters, not the “lore.”

But that means you end the show knowing that Shinji’s OK and has, to the extent such a thing is possible, worked through his shit… without knowing anything about anybody else. You don’t only care about Shinji, you know? What’s going on with Team Adults? What were those shots of dead Ritsuko and dead Misato in the episode just before all about? Is Asuka just in a coma some place?¹ What happened to Rei? We’re invested in all these characters and their storylines don’t get resolved. So what makes this finale work, what makes it feel like a real ending and not just the train jumping the tracks, is in the end the same thing that makes it frustrating.

And I don’t think Anno really solves this problem in End of Evangelion, either! That’s putting aside my own dislike of that movie, which we’ll watch soon.² End of Evangelion does provide an answer to what happens to everybody else, but it’s not really satisfying either.³ I think that a truly complete Evangelion ending would have to take us through everybody’s Instrumentality process, which might even require telling the story from the beginning with them at the center. So… it’s not going to exist.

You can see why the moment Evangelion ended its run on television there was the itch to “really” complete the show somehow, why there are so many pieces of Evangelion spin-off media, from dating games to manga where they’re all in some sort of apocalypse high school. It’s like a puzzle where no matter what you do, there’s always one empty spot and one piece that doesn’t fit that spot. And the Rebuild movies are, I guess, the final attempt to construct the puzzle, and maybe they do. My strong hunch is that they won’t. We’ll see. I’ve been wrong before.⁴

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The highlight of this episode, the part we all love, is when Shinji imagines an alternate universe where everybody’s normal and nobody’s an Eva pilot. It is a set of anime high school clichés mashed together to glorious effect, and there’s a whole spinoff manga (maybe two spinoffs?) that I am not going to read dedicated to fleshing it out.⁵ Asuka is Shinji’s bossy childhood friend who’s secretly in love with him! Misato is a hot teacher! Gendo is an absent-minded dad who cares too much work but like in a normal way. Yui is alive. There is… no way to imagine a version of Rei who is normal so she’s a klutzy hothead. Maybe the funniest thing⁶ about this reality is that this version of Shinji is a confident pervert and even a little bit of a jerk:

Why is this so great? Definitely, one reason is just that it’s wildly unexpected. (Or at least, it was.) Rei running around with toast in her mouth never gets less funny to me. Also, on some level, we would like it Evangelion was willing to get dumb as hell in the name of happiness. We would like to end up with some version of Evangelion where everybody’s happy and nobody dies. This particular version of the show would be unwatchable if it existed,⁷ but for a few minutes it’s like yeah Shinji, why don’t you recreate the world as some kind of awful nineties harem anime. Do it!⁸

But I don’t think the idea is to rebuke people for liking the possibility of dumb stupid happiness—which for some reason is how everybody loves to interpret endings these days.⁹ What Shinji says after this moment is over is that now he understands that things could be this way, that there are lots of possible lives for possible Shinjis. He doesn’t actually have to live a miserable life where he hates himself; not because he can reshape everything about other people with his mind, but because he can start living and thinking differently if he wants to. “Reality” is the interaction of facts, personality, and beliefs. You can’t do anything about facts, they are just what they are, but you can do something about the other two. You can decide to be kind to yourself. You can decide to take care of yourself. You can decide to stop assuming everybody hates you. You can decide to become a person you can like.

While I concede the flaws of this ending (see above), the moment when Shinji begins to think maybe it’s okay for him to be here and the glass starts to crack is tremendously moving to me. Even if something about it is incomplete, it’s a beautiful and unforgettable ending to a very special show. I find it impossible to watch without finding myself feeling more self-reflective and vulnerable afterward. It’s hard to do justice to it and the feelings it raises in me, but I’ve tried.

TO HIDEAKI ANNO, THANK YOU
TO EVANGELION (TV), GOODBYE
AND TO ALL THE NOTEBOOK READERS,
CONGRATULATIONS!

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• I really love this ending. I teared up.

• Not to beat a dead horse (hi ho Silver), but one reason I think it’s really too bad the new English language Evangelion release could not afford “Fly Me to the Moon” is that I think that song’s dreamy utopianism, its sentiments, the various translations of its images into “in other words…,” and so on… all of that is meaningful in establishing Evangelion as a show that is not only tense and dark but also a show about love and connection and the importance of life. I think I may have verbatim already said all of that but I don’t care… I’m still bitter.…
  
  If I had been in charge of this decision I would have just licensed one version for the ending + the versions that play as background music. I was not in charge and nobody asked me and nobody cares but to me that would represent an acceptable compromise between “license 26+ versions of this song at enormous cost” and “scrap it altogether.”

• Why not have another one:

• The alternate title of the last episode—“The Beast That Shouted ‘I’ At The Heart of the World”—is a play on the Japanese word “ai,” which means “love,” because the title is taken from this Harlan Ellison short story.

• I think the Ellison story fits well with the finale, though they don’t really connect on any obvious referential level (aside from the title).¹⁰ That is, if you expect it to provide some interpretive skeleton key, it won’t, but there are certain resonances there, mostly with the idea of creating a utopia without humanity as such and the dark side of that dream. If you want to read the Ellison story, though, I recommend reading it twice—it works much better the second time.

• I keep looking at the image I picked for the header and asking myself: when does Rei ever look determined and clench her fist? I feel like… never? This never happens? This is sort of driving me crazy.

• The part where Shinji is holding the phone and the voice of every single character comes out of it saying “I hate you” is another episode highlight. I feel like this should become of those exercises where therapists ask you to imagine things. Imagine holding a payphone where everybody you’ve ever known says “I hate you.” How does that make you feel. What do you mean, “what’s a payphone”?

• I don’t know why but Ritsuko saying that good things can happen on rainy days is just extremely funny to me. Thank you Dr. Ritsuko Akagi. I’m sure it took a lot of science to arrive at that conclusion.

• Free idea for wealthy individuals:

  

• For some reason, in the monthly digest I said that the “current plan is to take a short break, then have a newsletter or two about the manga and other curiosities, and then move into End of Evangelion.” But obviously it should be the other way (End of Evangelion, then manga). So… we’ll do End of Evangelion on May 30 unless fate intervenes somehow. Do not click on the video below if you have photo-sensitive epilepsy btw.
  

• Dumb question for people who have read the manga: if I buy the digital copies, will not having a color e-reader make a big difference to the reading experience, or are the color pages mostly just illustrations included with the book…? I don’t really want to drag it around with me on my jet setting trip to different libraries if I can avoid this.

1. I like to imagine that Asuka avoided being absorbed in the Third Impact entirely because when Rei was appearing to everybody as the thing they most loved she just hated Rei too much for that to even work. I know this is not right but like. Shouldn’t it be right.

2. It’s going to be so funny if after rewatching it I log back on here like: guys, I love this movie.…

3. That’s partly because its answer is that (almost) everybody’s dead which makes Shinji’s little discovery that it’s okay not to kill yourself bleakly hilarious. Guys I figured it out! Guys it’s okay to be alive! Guys I don’t hate myself anymore! Uh… guys…?

4. Some might say, “most of the time.”

5. Initially I was going to read The Shinj Ikari Raising Project but it is… too long… for what it is. I guess it’s not even the only manga set in this alternate universe. I could probably do nothing but Evangelion spin off media for two years if I had any clue how to play all the games. Don’t tell me how, I do not want to do this.

6. The second funniest thing is that every single girl is a bossy mom except for Misato (who is a sexy mom). Even Rei is basically Asuka v2.

7. Neon Genesis Love Hina.… I never watched Love Hina, but I knew this would exist before I even checked:

8. And it’s also funny because you get the sense that Shinji actually such a dim grasp on “normal” he basically has to go to those clichés to populate this universe. Like he’s trying to imagine a world in which his parents are alive and most of the world’s animal population didn’t die and life is basically normal and he’s like “uh… normal life is… when a mom scolds a dad?” That is what he’s got to go on.

9. Similarly annoying: “the point of X is to stop watching X” and so on—I can do you one better, I can never start.

10. Originally, it was titled “The Only Neat Thing To Do,” a Tiptree story, and I think that would have been a pretty inapt reference because, as you can just sort of tell by looking at that title, the “neat thing” is killing yourself for the greater good. That said, the Tiptree story has several more obvious points of reference with Evangelion than the Ellison story does and it is, apparently, huge in Japan.