12/25/24
Evangelion is a very special series to me. I first watched Neon Genesis Evangelion about 4 years ago. I wasn't sure what was happening... but that's pretty normal for a first watch of this show. I definitely saw a few things that I immediately fell in love with, but I was not nearly as interested in the series as I am now. I started watching it because I heard the intro was good, and I continued watching it because I was in a stage of my life where I just binged anime all day. This stage is otherwise known as high school lol. Anyway I watched the End of Evangelion and then the rebuilds. The community seems to have some kind of vendetta against the rebuilds because of the animation being newer and I guess much of the audience has nostalgia / prefers the old animation and thinks that it is an integral part of the series. I can't say that I completely disagree but I think it is stupid to discount art because it is new. Of course that's not the only problem people have with it, but regardless I am a rebuilds defender. About two years ago I picked up the manga series as well and was delighted to read and see a different spin on the original story. About 2 years ago I found out that the final rebuild movie was going to be released here in America at select theaters for a single night at a single showing. I hatched up a plan with my best friend, Eion. I was offered shortly before to do some very intense yard work for a condominium association for $200 dollars through a connection of my mom's. I was already trying to convince him to join me and so we decided what we would do. We were going to buy japanese import onesies of the character Pen Pen and go to this showing together in the outfits. That day was awful but it was worth it in the end and one of our last things we got to do together before we graduated and he want to the military and I went to college (luckily he got out shortly after). This moviegoing experience was not the only one though as later we went to go see Shin Kamen Rider, also directed by Hideaki Anno, in a similar fashion and had a great time with that too, but that is a subject for another time. Anyway, I am now in the middle of reimmersing myself into the series very slowly due to a showing of the End of Evangelion at my college movie theater. So that is why I want to speak on the series and we are caught up to the present.
To start, obviously SPOILER WARNING. First of all Misato's picture that she sent to Shinji is very suspect and sets a weird tone for their relationship to continue for the rest of the show. They had a bit of a weird relationship in the show and sets a tone for how her character is seen thoughout the show. I see hwer as a slob as she is portrayed throughout the show, but rewatching the show I was surprised by the times in which she showed a sense of responsibility regardless of this aspect of her. She isnt't lazy, she just has good work-life seperation. One specific example is when she is going to shut down the rogue robot in episode 7. I thought that her commitment was incredible and started to root for her even though I knew what lied ahead. Her relationship with Kaji was as I remembered it. She acts like a bit of a tsundere but it ends up that her reason for leaving him was her being scared of herself for seeking out her father and she ends up being weak willed and turning to him for support and a touch later in the series regardless of the fact that she is aware of herself. She also later has feelings so strong for shinji that she, in my viewing at least, made the other members of NERV almost uncomfortable when he was liquified in the plug. However he returned because of her and so everyone's relief caused this not to be revisited. I also want to touch on the fact that she went nonverbal for two entire years and ended up alright enough to go to college very near after and seemed to have somewhat of a normal life. This seems weird to me. I have to imagine she has some kind of survivors guilt that is partially her motivation for being at NERV. She ended up immediately clinging to Kaji and being so infatuated with him and human touch that she stayed in bed with him for an entire week. I feel that this is her way of trying to find a relationship or a found family as fast as possible after she was functional again regardless of how it was for her. Lastly, she leaves the series by sexually assaulting Shinji after making a joke early on that she wouldn't as well as realizing after she lost Kaji that she was just searching for human touch. She was in a weakened mental state and fed into her primal instincts after taking care of Shinji almost as if he were her own for several months. In the end she was a traumatized little girl who tried to learn to live on her own and did not succeed in the end. She had moments of being responsible, but was quick to resort to her vices. She tried to take the role of a parent when she had not frame of reference and treaded into a boundary she should not have with the very child she was trying to protect.
Kaji is one of my favorite characters in the series. He is hard to describe well, but I will try my best. He is a womanizer, who is deeply in love with Misato. He sees her flaws and accepts her for who she is, even though she can not accept herself. He presents himself as a charming man, but sees himself as having many flaws as well. Asuka starts to fall for him. He is her first crush, and she does not see the fact that he is much older as a reason they cannot be together. This is due to her thought that she is grown-up and the people around her just cannot accept that. I'll get back to this later. Kaji's role in the series, from a surface level is as an agent of the United Nations. He was sent to investigate NERV. He stumbles upon the realization that NERV is lying. They are claiming that they are getting orders from the Marduk Institute, which is backed by around 140 institutions, as to which individuals are qualified to be pilots of the EVAs. Kaji learns that every institution attached to this project is a hoax. We learn that Gendo Ikari is the one pulling the strings. We also learn later, that Shinji's entire class is full of candidates to pilot the evas. This realisation, seems to be just a way to create tension between Misato and Shinji in this part of the story, as well as to differentiate further media by adding new pilots. Kaji ends up learning the whole truth of the evangelion pilot, the creation of man made angels from the fruit of knowledge of Lilith (whom he misidentifies), the intentions of Seele, and the goal of creating the 3rd impact. He tries to tell Misato as he is trying to get back into her life, but she pushes him away at first due to her mistrust of him. Later, after he had put her job on the line for treason, he showed her, and shinji, the truth of NERV. he is interesting to me due to his detective-like characterization, and his complexity in his relationship with Misato. The manga expands on this talking about how they were in college. One time they spent an entire week just laying in bed together. We learn that Misato dumped Kaji because he reminded her of her father. Their relationship feels as if they are both completely alone at all times, trying to guess what the other is thinking, and never truly bonding. They are both scared and confused due to the shared trauma of their past in the post second-impact world, and they don't know how to truly connect with someone. The manga shows, that while Misato was dealing with survivor's guilt, Kaji had a similar experience. He was in a group of adolescents trying to survive in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. They were stealing from a military compound. He get caught and gave away the location of their hideout, and they ended up dying so he could live. Misato and Kaji's dynamic heavily ties into the theme of the end of evangelion's rendition of the 3rd impact in which all humans come together and fuse into an evolved being. Kaji's attitude towards Shinji in the manga is very different than it is in the show and rebuilds. In fact there is a moment, where with the added context of his survivor's guilt, Kaji tells Shinji that he does not deserve to live, as he thinks of himself and Misato, due to Shinji not doing more to stop his EVA from killing Toji. This is extremely unfair to Shinji as he really did everything he could to stop him and was in a large bit of emotional turmoil, and this adds to the complexity of Kaji's character.
Asuka...
I have seen in recent memory. We are quickly introduced to many characters including a hippo whose only goal in life is to gain recognition from the internet to the point that he becomes a sort of vigilante with a following that looks up to him. In the end he is beaten without any retaliation as he was in over his head and only started the whole thing for attention and money. We are also introduced to a cat(?) who is a gacha-addicted office worker whose phone was destroyed by a run-in with the taxi and then we get a whole backstory about how he was a desperate child who tried to buy an eraser of the character Donraku (the eraser and character show up later) and it led to him stealing his father's credit card and he felt depressed sending him further into basing his self worth off of collectibles. The show has some heavy themes and incredible characterization. The characters feel fleshed out and almost all have some sort of backstory/ stated reasoning for their intentions. Throughout this show Odokawa is meant to be the favorite character with his strange sense of justice, snarky humor that bounces well off of other characters and his noble desire to continue living his simple life without achieving for more.
In many mystery stories it is often easy to assume that you do not need to suspect the main character. Often they are intelligent and may have a few simple traits, but mostly they are there as a way to reveal the story to you. Oddtaxi has it's share of this but there are many times in which Odokawa is a mystery in and of himself. There are a few times in which the watcher is shown his actions and meant to be skeptical. There is even a plotpoint where he flat out is accused of kidnapping the missing girl by little Daimon and the tapir who is a mafia boss and runs the organization for orphans that result from traffic accidents. Along with this, in less direct terms there are times in which Odokawa refers to characters as the animals that they are and they are clearly confused such as when he refers to the calico cat, Shiho, in his taxi. There are also other hints such as the existence of regular animals such as the cat in the intro sequence and the bird in Goriki's picture when he is near his diagnosis. Along with this we also see that Odokawa is able to see what he refers to as "something like aura" around people that allows him to easily recognize them. While some of this made me a little wary in my first wathc through, I was taken completely by surprise in the ending that he had visual agnosia and that the people were people all along and his brain was tricking him into thinking that they were animals due to deep-seated trauma related to his fear of water.
Odokawa flies off the bridge repeating the incident that he was in as a child. After this Shirakawa saves the day and Odokawa is cured (I guess reliving a near death experience just solves all problems from the first time)? We then get a sequence in which everyone's human forms are shown off, which made me chuckle as usually fans come up with animal designs of their favorite characters and now the studio had to come up with human designs off their characters just for a few minutes at the end of the show and movie. I was extremely touched by this ending revealed in the credits and the extra content at teh end of the movie. It showed the acceptance of all of Odowaka's friends of him and his agnosia. It was loved just as it was a part of him and in my view was a very strong message of being accepting and caring towards people with disabilities. The end of the show reveals just how psychopathic the black cat is showing that she killed the original member of Mystery Kiss, was happy for the arrest and framing of Nikaido, and was contemplating killing Shiho, all while on her way to get rid of evidence by killing Odokawa. The movie showed her getting caught though in the end. Overall I loved this show and will probably rewatch it in a couple of years and hope that I can lose some memory of it to watch it as I did the first time. Maybe I just have to drive a car off a bridge and Ill lose some of my memory?
before I finish talking about this amazing story I want to talk about a few parts of this show that I just liked. The first was the Homosapiens. I liked their dynamic, even though they split up in the end. I also think their name was funny due to the fact that they ended up just being a couple of dudes and their name hinted to the big reveal the whole time. Odokawa was told to turn them off like 3 or 4 times throughout the show as well. I loved when Shirakawa pulled out the Capoeira and music starts playing as she says that she learned it to lose weight. Also my second favorite character was Yano due to his rapping throughout the show even though he
was being evil and the bane of everyone's problems. I really enjoyed that he kept referencing how he spent his freetime "expanding his vocabulary". Overall this show was really funny, really heartwrenching, and really entertaining. I would reccomend it (regardless of the fact that I just spoiled the entire plot).