whenever people pit one eva character against another, call one a villain to name another the victim, blame one to justify the other, cheer as their favored one lunges to strangle his supposed abuser (you know what i’m talking about), i have to wonder if they skipped through this entire scene:
REI: You never understood anything.
SHINJI: I thought this was supposed to be a world without pain and uncertainty.
REI: That’s because you thought everyone else felt the same as you do.
SHINJI: You betrayed me! You betrayed my feelings!
REI: You misunderstood from the very beginning. You just believed what you wanted to believe.look, anno is often vague and ambiguous but not in this case. it’s all there written out for you.
see, shinji has lived in a closed world even before the instrumentality lets him turn that into a physical reality. his is a world where only his views and his feelings are valid, with others reduced to paper cutouts, not allowed to be as complex, as flawed, as unsure, as hurt as he is. only when forced by the dissolution of the barriers between souls does he see that others are just as real, and even then he rages against the revelation and tries to exonerate himself: “how can I ever understand you if you won’t say anything? you never talk to me, but you expect me to understand you! that’s impossible!”
to which rei replies: “did you even try, ikari?” so, are you trying?
eva isn’t the kind of show where you can conveniently place yourself in the protagonist’s shoes and have the moral of the story fed to you in predigested form. shinji is an unreliable narrator at best, and so are all the other characters. to varying degrees, they all failed to understand, they all believed only what they wanted to believe, and that’s precisely the point. in carl jung’s words: “people will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.” but face their own souls they must once instrumentality begins. suddenly, the person next to you is as real to you as you are to yourself, their suffering no longer something you can turn away from, and that’s frightening, isn’t it? because suddenly the villains become the victim, the victim becomes the villain. suddenly you’re confronted with the reality that your interpretation of your own experiences could be entirely wrong (cue shinji’s “i thought this was supposed to be a world without pain and uncertainty”)
so the next time you watch eva, question each character’s intention, especially your favorite ones, the ones you identify with. don’t let them get away with believing they’re right. don’t allow them the luxury of always saying the truth about themselves or others. don’t allow them, and yourself, the luxury of writing off the unpleasant parts. don’t deceive yourself. question everything. after all, to give you the second part of jung’s comment: “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
that, imo, is the greatest thing that eva has made me do.
