I have complicated feelings about Neon Genesis Evangelion
Aesthetically, emotionally, and artistically it's had more of an impact on my life than basically any other media. Politically and morally I find its "fanservice" reprehensible. I became obsessed with it as a teenager, with the way it made me feel. I've spent hours chewing over its imagery and themes, internally debating its sins and merits.
It's a challenging series.
Asuka struck me immediately. Her rage, her ego, her isolation; it was like looking in a mirror. She embodied so much of how I felt, and she was facing the abuse I was seeing all around me happening to girls my age but could do nothing to fix. Her victimization made me want to vomit. I wanted to see her eviscerate them. The Series 2 fight from End of Evangelion is lodged in my brain permanently.
That scene did something to me.
I still love her as an adult. She's my shitty little bastard daughter. I have three figures and two keychains of her. And the rest of the series is important to me too, it's complex depths of emotions and morality and religious imagery still resonating with me.

04/03/2024: i saw end of eva in theatres two nights ago! the s2 series fight in person sent shivers down my spine. the whole thing was so intense. but the experience felt like it did the first time i watched EoE: i got really viscerally mad at the bit around the end where it veers into incel speech territory because it frames connection with other people exclusively as sexual contact with women, like it frames rejection as being sexually rejected by women. and thats such a reductive and misogynstic framework, it fundamentally positions human contact as a thing where women complete and validate men, and that prevents consideration of women as full people themselves. but that framework is what forms the basis of eva like fundamentally its shinji's jounrey where asuka rei and misato are all female objects that exist in orbit to him, like its about why he can't connect with them (in a paradigm in which connection involves male sexual desire). i ended up at a taco bell with friends for two hours after the movie complaining about how i loved 3/4 of it so much but it hamstrings its own social critique because anno doesn't see women as people. and i know im biased for kinning asuka so hard, but like when i was teenage girl watching eva for the first time i saw myself in asuka and the way EoE does that whole scene about her reconnecting with her own mother but then ultimately positions her just as shinji's foil, ending with him abusing her... again, it could be such a good critique if it weren't kneecapped by the fact that it fundamentally exists from the male point of view thus casting women and girls into this object mold that i hate. Arghhhhh evangelion.

browse my blog's asuka tag!