#in the end even the outline can't escape the scrutiny that held up my writing process

[mmmmalo]

Halloween Jack posted:

Like a million other people, I was obsessed with Evangelion as a teenager, so I can so: the problem is that the competing interpretations are very bad. Actually, it's worse: they aren't really interpretations of anything, just a lot of spotting references and drawing connections, without ever adding up to a real analysis.

SuperMechagodzilla replied:

As an example of this: because fascist Shinji is vaguely feminine and sad in highschool, the show apparently has a sizeable queer following online. (A chicken-or-egg situation with the Jesus ‘shipping, I guess.)

So, go back to the part I noted, where the giant demon in the form of his dead mother tries to seduce him into being absorbed into her body. One fan interpretation is that this means Shinji wants to become a girl, so Shinji is trans! Cue a bunch of fanart of Shinji with breasts.

Like, I’d be down if that were going on, but there are literally multiple scenes in the show where Shinji gets uploaded into the matrix, and he invariably identifies as male - male avatar, etc. The ambiguously-gendered person who does identify as female is the ginormous demon. But, more importantly, this misreading basically unwittingly says that trans people become that way due to debilitating mommy issues. It’s like saying Marty McFly is a transwoman because she wants to obliterate herself in the incestuous vortex of sex with her mom. Problematic!

I understand the need for representation, but it’s also important to identify what isn’t representation. Evangelion itself is basically just a less-successful version of Michael Bay’s Transformers, but fans - who don’t actually like the show - mentally edit out the satire of fascism, and the part where the protagonist kills Jesus (and so-on), to create an entirely new and distinct series of works.

Not necessarily endorsed, but as a person who is literally simultaneously engaged with ‘death as return to womb’ and ‘death as sex’ and ‘death as union with feminine identity’ (in the context of Egbert at least), the above is something I try to be wary of. The possibility that only a fraction of those things are relevant, I mean, and that their apparent superposition is my failure as a reader.

The first instance (afaik) of Egbert thinking about death and femininity is the shot of wondering whether the mailbox has mail in it (only for it to be scooped by Dad). I read that as the same dysphoria metaphor as Damara (the doll, the body) stealing Rufioh’s ‘happy thought’ -- retrieving the green box from the car is Fiduspawn, is godtiering, is death-rebirth, is suicide, is becoming-yourself. This is why the shot of looking out the window is reused when Egbert meets Vriska.

But I wonder to shift the point of focus to the mailbox, the other instance of John thinking about death in act 1 (gazing at the fireplace below Nanna’s portrait) is dominated by discussion of whether a fire belongs in a fireplace (and whether his voice belongs in his body)(x) -- which makes knocking the ashes out of Nanna’s urn sound like a displaced attempt to exorcise the invading voice? Which perhaps again works as dysphoria for people who dislike their own voices, but I keep getting this nagging sense that I’m focused on the wrong things, regardless of how consistent it sounds (because confirmation bias is real, and I’m very good at thinking I sound convincing!).

I wanted to counter myself with how this could run counter to John’s sexism (eg saying prototyping Jack with the armless girl doll would make him weak) but even that seems to be anticipated in anecdotes like the Dersites discovering that there can be value in an apparently ‘ruined’ crumpled hat. John emerging from a crumpled car to talk with Vriska (and her big red X!) about rejecting the path of aggression becomes linked to Equius’s perverse enjoyment of submission in the prior scene, like there’s this sense that femininity is simultaneously humiliating and desirable? But Equius’s literal loss of breath (feminized corpses) again makes me wonder if I ought to be more focused on like, narrative control in some ill-defined way, especially since John appears to have assumed such control in Seer: Ascend?

Gamzee meme ‘cant it be both things’ is comforting but not much of an argument.