#no fucking wonder gen z is so completely detached how could they be anything but apathetic

[isa-ah]

god it's so rough. what are we supposed to do with any of this

[popwasabi]

“End of Evangelion” and the tempting nature of oblivion

(TW: Suicide, Self-harm, Pain, Depression, Mental Health, Death)

“End of Evangelion” is a perplexing movie to say the least.

Not that the original classic anime “Neon Genesis Evangelion” series ends on exactly the most conclusive note itself, but “End” takes everything that transpired in the series and literally destroys it.

The films ends with Earth experiencing the long foreshadowed Third Impact and all of the planet returning to the primordial “soup,” as fans call it, with its main protagonist Shinji Ikari and comrade Asuka Langley Soryu as the only remaining humans left. A pseudo, twisted rebeginning of Adam and Eve’s Genesis.

The film is fairly divisive among the fans to say the least. Some fans consider it a masterpiece for its nihilistic tone and mind-bending illustrations of body horror and others despised it for being too dark and confusing with no clear explanation of anything that happened in the film’s events. Hell, even the movie’s fans have a difficult time explaining what exactly happens in the narrative.

I was somewhat in the middle with it after I watched it the first time not super long ago. It was certainly abstract, and I like plenty of stories that don’t make it easy for me to understand. The animation is definitely the franchise’s best and I enjoyed the character moments between Shinji, Asuka, and Misato. But it was also, as stated before, dreadfully confusing and still to this day hard to makes heads or tails out of with its plot.

But, as with more than a few movies I have revisited this year, 2020 helped me contextualize one aspect I think the story is concretely trying to get across.

(We’ll save discussion of “Rebuild” for another day...)

At my lowest points not long ago, I had this frequent vision that would crawl across my mind.

I imagined being up in the clouds on a beautiful sunny day, but I wasn’t floating or flying. I was plummeting, falling like a bird without wings at a speed that would definitely kill me once I got to the ground. But I never imagined actually hitting the Earth like a meat-bagged, human sized asteroid. I only ever imagined the falling part. The wind reaching a terminal velocity and the air rushing past my body and you know what look I had on my face?

Happiness.

I was confused a bit by why I kept imagining this moribund fall into oblivion over and over again. I wasn’t suicidal, though I certainly have had thoughts of self-harm plenty of times before and general detachment from life. But why the fuck was I so happy? I’m about to die after all!

What I have come to realize in recent years, as I’ve developed a better understanding of my mental health and what makes me tick, it wasn’t that I wanted to die so much as I wanted the freedom that comes moments before it. The feeling of finally letting go and letting fate/gravity do the rest.

Years of my life failing at various aspects of societal expectations and career obligations from not being able to get the girls I wanted to date so badly, relationships ending poorly, not quite applying myself the way I should’ve in college, and working a plethora of unfulfilling jobs since graduation made me yearn for that release. Just that feeling of saying “fuck it all” and giving in to the void.

I wanted to stop feeling out of control. The way the world is structured often feels like you are on a wild, rapid river flowing in one very stark direction but you desperately want to go the other way. You keep fighting and fighting it and realize after a while you are just swimming in place, you tire out and either float where the river wants you to go or you drown. I wanted neither of those things, I just wanted control and unfortunately part of life is accepting that a very large percentage of it is beyond your power to alter.

2020 made this feeling starkly apparent once again as we were hit with a once in a lifetime global pandemic that has killed 2.21 million people and counting. As common people struggle to find ways to handle the loss of loved ones and the fallout from economic instability those tasked with protecting us have more or less ignored the cries of needy. Hell, they’re fucking miffed that we would even have the audacity to ask for $2000 of our own fucking tax dollars to put a band-aid on the situation. Combine this with an extremely volatile two-party system and late stage capitalism, we are about as out of control as ever in terms of how much we actually can course correct our destinies in a period like this.

It is why so many irony-pilled millennials and gen z-ers are posting dank memes about meteors colliding with the earth over the course of the year. We’ve lived through two recessions, two forever wars, and now a pandemic in our lifetimes while paying off our crippling debt with slave wages and yet boomers still wonder why we are near universally depressed as a generation.

(Seriously, everybody needs a fucking therapist right now...and also to dismantle the fucking system that’s making us depressed!)

This is what I feel is the real heart of “End of Evangelion.��� The movie is a lot of things, obviously, but, after the events of this year and looking back on the more depressing parts of my life, I feel this film is about the tempting nature of oblivion. Giving up when things are clearly beyond your control so you can get that sweet but twisted, fleeting sense of freedom from it all.

Director Hideaki Anno didn’t feel too entirely different about the state of life when he made this series and certainly by the time he made “End” he was in a very dark place.

So, quick history lesson, “Neon Genesis Evangelion” debuted in 1994 and quickly became a classic among fans of anime and the giant mech vs monster genre. Critics loved it for its exploration of mental health and depression and of course plenty enjoyed the hell out of it for its giant monster/robot escapism as well. Fast forward to the conclusion of the series, critics and fans especially are far more polarized. I won’t try to explain exactly what happens in the ending and frankly I don’t think anyone can, but that confusion led to quite a bit of outcry by the fans.

Hideaki Anno, the series’ director, received tons of hate mail and death threats following the series conclusion. The fans hated how abstract it was, how it had an undecisive ending and chose to dive into the mind of Shinji instead of conclusively describing the events of the Third Impact with plenty going as far as to say he had “ruined” his own series for them. This made him unfortunately quite depressed himself over the ending he felt creatively fairly content with.

(I think it should be clear who Shinji is mostly likely a stand-in for in this anime...)

The fan reaction was toxic to say the least and all too familiar for many creatives who didn’t adequately satisfy the insatiable vapid needs of their fandom. Anno did not take this well to put it lightly. A man who was known as a delinquent in high school and expelled from the Osaka University of Arts much earlier in his life, and dealt plenty with his own bouts of depression, Anno had plenty of his own demons to sort out and quite clearly wanted to explore that mental state in “Neon Genesis Evangelion.”

I’ll be honest and say that I myself was not fond of the ending either when I watched it the first time as a freshman in college, and even went as far as to describe it as everything that was wrong with anime to friends in the years that followed for a while. I felt it was confusing and “fake deep,” existential for no reason other than because it just wanted to and people were “dumb” if they liked it.

When I rewatched it again as a much older adult when it came on Netflix last year, I found it much more fascinating and interesting. A sort of abstract introspective into the mind of a troubled teenager, who I had written off many years prior as a “whiny baby.” Though I wouldn’t say I completely understand it still, I get it much more now and I think it has a lot to say about depression and mental health.

Unfortunately, most fans did not have that reaction back then and as a result Anno made his true conclusion “End of Evangelion” as a response to that negativity.

(You’re welcome, nerds.)

As mentioned before, “End of Evangelion” is an extremely nihilistic film that seems to one up each dark moment as you traverse its spiraling narrative. It’s a film where things never get better. If you go into it blind expecting that big last minute heroic save the day moment, it’s always teased and never comes. Things just end very badly for everyone. Nobody gets a “happy ending.”

While the ending to the original series is strange for sure, it does end on a light note that can be interpreted in a number of different ways but ultimately positive. With the way fans reacted to it Anno decided to write a big “fuck you” to them by, in many ways, smashing his toys so no one could play with them again. He even went as far as to splice in the actual hate mail he received into the movie to quite clearly show to the audience, as their favorite characters met their grissly ends, that this was their fault.

(“Gee, I wonder what that was all about.” ~ a fan walking out of the theater back in 1997.)

In a way though, Anno created something strangely beautiful from that reaction. “End of Evangelion” is about giving up in some ways and accepting our inevitable doom. There are no easy answers, no workable solutions to achieve a happy ending because sometimes in life there isn’t one. Despite last ditch efforts by Misato, Shinji, and the crew of NERV the world still ends through the Third Impact. But tonally it’s not quite pessimistic; it’s actually positive, in a very twisted sense of course.

Set to the song “Komm Susser Tod” by ARIANNE, the film’s apocalypse can almost be described as a celebration. With people “popping” and turning into the primordial soup they all largely have smiles on their faces as they kind of get what they want whether it’s a desire to reunite with loved ones, to be with people they have crushes on, or happiness that they have sought for so long in the embrace of others. Everyone’s depressed! But now they are happy because it’s finally all over, they don’t have to give a shit anymore.

As the planet lights up like a Christmas tree, there are images of suicide and death that rapidly cross the screen in the form of the Angel’s final transformation but again, nobody is truly sad about it. They all have some kind of twisted smile or joy that they get from it. It’s a shocking film, if you’re not already prepared for what’s going to happen, and provocative to say the least.

(Can’t decide if I recommend watching this high or not...)

I had no idea what any of it meant at the time when I watched it several years ago (I watched it well after I had seen the original series), and to be fair there are many ways fans have interpreted what exactly took place in the film and have debated endlessly on its meaning for decades now. But at least in my interpretation, after everything we’ve been through this year, “End of Evangelion” to me is about the sweet release of not giving a fuck anymore.

Whether it’s about Anno feeling that way about his own life or the expectations of his fans or both, the film quite clearly doesn’t care about what people may or may not have wanted for Shinji and the NGE characters and is perfectly fine with the way it all comes “tumbling down.”

(He just wants to be with his boyfriend, guys.)

This past July 4th, city fireworks shows were prohibited in my area because they wanted to limit mass gatherings due to COVID but this didn’t stop people from buying plenty of their own to fire off. In what amounted to a collective “fuck you” to everything and 2020, beginning pretty much exactly at dusk people started firing off their at home lightshows like they were mortar gunners in World War I and did not let up until well past midnight. The entire Southern California night sky was lit up not to unlike the thousands of crosses that filled the screen during the Third Impact of “End of Evangelion” and though it could certainly be interpreted as a moment of people patriotically going “Yea, America!” that night, my head canon was much different. It felt like tens of thousands of people across the region just saying “Fuck it” into the night sky at everything; COVID, our horrendous government, police violence, pending World Wars, environmental disaster, and our collective impending doom from it all.

As these fireworks hit their zenith around 9pm I broke out my phone and started playing “Komm Susser Tod” from the movie and it felt perfect. Everyone just wanted to feel that freedom in the moment, that freedom of not giving a damn anymore. To be removed from expectations, from control, from hatred, from pain and it was kind of beautiful in a sick way.

And that’s what “End of Evangelion” feels like to me now; kind of beautiful in a sick way.

(Not saying the LA skyline looked like this exactly but it felt like it haha...)

There are still many ways to interpret Hideaki Anno’s cult classic, and it’s part of its charm but I think the take away fans should have is definitely not that suicide is ok but that we get it. We understand why people have those feelings and why it feels freeing to desire the void and oblivion. It’s a pity that the series most toxic fans didn’t get that clue through the original finale but Anno, not a person who likes  being shoved around, clearly created perhaps the most twistedly beautiful “fuck you” to that in anime history.

As we enter 2021 all I can say is it’s ok to feel like this, it’s ok to desire freedom from the relentless gloom and doom of the world and people’s prying expectations of what they think you “should” be. No one blames you. At the end of the day, we’re all just trying to survive the apocalypse we have zero control over, so the least we can do is be a bit nicer and considerate of one another. 

At least it’ll make the Third Impact more pleasant whenever it eventually comes...

Happy New Year, everyone! 

Congratulations on surviving 2020! Have fun in 2021...

[electrakarasu]

❛ she is a knight polishing her amour, carrying her own sword. fighting her own battles. making her own glory. ❜

SIMAY BARLAS? No, that’s actually ELECTRA “LEXI” KARASU. Only TWENTY-ONE years old, this SLYTHERIN alumni works as a CURSE BREAKER and is sided with THE NEUTRALS. SHE identifies as CIS-WOMAN and is a HALFBLOOD who is known to be ARROGANT, SCRUTINISING, and DETACHED but also CLEVER, DETERMINED, and ENTERPRISING.

links: stats, pinterest character parallels: jane villanueva ( jane the virgin ), jessica huang ( fresh off the boat ), valencia perez ( crazy ex-girlfriend ), lu ( elite ), lucifer morningstar ( lucifer ), annalise keating ( how to get away with murder )

ELECTRA KARASU : ON HER LIFE

tulip karasu never did have an off-switch. she danced through life like it was a party, she broke every rule the world set out for her and she made reckless decisions with the fury of someone who was so sure of what they were doing. was she so sure that sleeping with a man twice her age, a man who had a wife, was the right thing to do? maybe not. but she did it anyway.

antigone, tulip’s first child, was six years old when tulip gave birth to electra. electra. another name from an old greek play tulip had only half understood. people tried to warn her that naming your child after a woman who attempts to murder her mother was bad luck, but tulip refused to listen — she liked that it sounded alive, crackling with intensity.

one week after electra was born and seven months after she had left christopher harris, tulip reached out to the married man to let him know of the birth of his daughter. christopher, being the ceo of a well-respected company in london, was absolutely mortified and agreed to pay a generous portion of child support if tulip didn’t tell anyone who was the father of her daughter — especially not his wife. he arranged to have the money transfer out of an account his wife could not see, set it to wire to tulip once a month and then never spoke to her again. tulip didn’t much mind — she was on to her next affair anyway.

and so electra was born into a world of chaos, a world without rules or order. tulip wasn’t much of a mother, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t kind — it just meant that as electra grew up, as her smarts began to build, she had to learn how to raise herself. she changed her name to lexi when she was just six, finding the name electra to be too stormy, too out-dated for a girl such as herself, and with that she formed the first step to navigating the world on her own, separate from her mother, from ‘ electra ’.

you see, lexi was something of a prodigy in every sense of the word. she was intelligent and cunning and emotionally mature, showing skills far beyond her age range from the time she could walk. she was nothing like her wild mother or her scruffy older sibling — she had the genes of her father, and from a young age she knew she could build an EMPIRE on that. she understood that she was better. she embraced it. she scolded her mother and her sibling, she corrected her teacher with a squeaky little voice, and by the time she was ready to be shipped off the hogwarts, she knew she was the best of the best.

and so she proved it. having been sorted into slytherin exactly thirteen seconds after the hat had found her head, lexi thrived both academically and socially. within months she was top of her class, she was the most popular girl in her grade and she knew, oh she knew she had the world wrapped around her little finger. this self-importance only grew as she flew through each year, passing every subject with flying colours and proving herself to be one of the brightest and most talented witches the school had seen in years. she finished on a high when she was elected her years head girl, and promised to stay in contact with everyone after graduation. ( spoiler alert: she didn’t. )

leaving hogwarts, lexi knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life. anywhere she went, they’d be lucky to have her, and in fact the ministry had tried to recruit her in any capacity, but she refused, telling them outright that she wouldn’t align herself with a corrupt organisation running over with power-hungry white males. she instead headed straight for gringotts, slotting in easily with the dangerous and fast-paced job of a curse breaker. she would travel the world and learn new languages and collect priceless treasure. within months she was trusted, she proved herself to be worthy of the dangerous title and she wears it with great pride.

ELECTRA KARASU : ON THE WAR

lexi wasn’t daft — she’d always known that some people looked at her differently, as if she were tainted, not worthy of the numerous titles that were being thrown at her. and she knew what it was rooted in, too — for years people would try to undermine her achievements because she had muggle blood, because she wasn’t as pure in her magic as, say, her housemates at hogwarts. and she knew that simmering hate could only last so long before it burst — so she knew what was here when the war finally arrived.

just because lexi is a halfblood, does not mean she is about to storm the streets with signs painted in large letters campaigning for MUGGLE RIGHTS. she thinks it’s ridiculous she should be seen as lesser than, of course, but she’s no fool — war is toxic. no side can claim innocence because anyone who participated in nameless violence, something this war requires, is corrupt. she sees right through the orders facade of innocence and believes them to be just as reckless and one-sided as the death eater’s. she refuses to join, to participate in something that is so clearly below her. let them fight — they can’t touch her, anyway. she’s smarter than any of them, quicker than any spell that can be thrown her way. she can defend herself without a cult.

perhaps subconsciously — though she would never admit it — lexi doesn’t care for the war either because she doesn’t particularly care for muggles. after all, the one muggle that always comes to mind for her is her father. and she hates that man more than she hates anyone else on this earth. her father, power-hungry and drowning in his white privilege, thriving off his success and not giving a fucking damn about anyone other than himself. not even his wife. christopher disgusts lexi, and she is vehemently in agreement with him on one thing — they will never meet.

ELECTRA KARASU : ON FAMILY

despite any apathy that lexi might try and push when it comes to her mother and her sibling, lexi would do anything for her little family. especially antigone — certainly not a role model, nor a particularly good older sibling, but a force and someone lexi would defend until the ends of the earth.

from a young age, lexi had to take on a leadership role in her family — the only one with realistic, practical common sense, the little girl keeping her family from blowing up the earth. she’s very good at it, too, with the emotional maturity to keep it together, but sometimes she can’t help but resent tulip and antigone for leaving it up to her to pick up the pieces. tulip is supposed to be a mother. antigone is supposed to be older. and yet both of them can’t seem to hold it together long enough to stay sane when lexi is gone. sometimes she wonders how they’re even alive, but she’ll do it. her job. her job to keep them together. she might not love it, but she’d rather be caught dead then see her family crash and burn.

lexi is incredibly protective over antigone and so had her doubts when antigone decided to push themselves into the spotlight. they’re obviously talented and incredibly good at what they do, but lexi worries about what might happen should antigone be caught slipping up. after all, they’re all in the spotlight now, no matter how small. lexi isn’t a fan of fame, and she’s certainly not a fan of how antigone deals with their success. throwing your money away and screaming political opinions on stage is certainly no way for a sensible adult to behave. she’ll support her siblings career, always, but of course she’ll worry — and worry she did when antigone disappeared.

to say that lexi nearly lost it when antigone disappeared and returned as a vampire would be an understatement. she was so overwhelmed with grief when they were gone, and then when they returned to live a new truth — lexi could barely handle it. she is so worried about how antigone is handling things, whether they’re dealing with this appropriately and whether or not they’re keeping safe. of course, she got somewhat of an answer when they announced their vampirism live on stage for the world to hear after the announcement of the new creature registry — clearly they are not keeping safe. and lexi doesn’t know how much longer she can keep her sibling truly safe before they get themselves killed — really killed.

ELECTRA KARASU : THE REST

born in 2002, lexi is the absolute epitome of a gen z kid. she’s still not over vine’s death, she’s over dramatic and sarcastic and has a very dry sense of humour. and of course her wardrobe is a complete mess. ( check out her pinterest for more wardrobe inspo. )

obviously incredibly self-important when it comes to her smarts and her skills with a wand, but is also equally aware of just how beautiful she is. she doesn’t exactly strive to accentuate anything in particular, but she knows that eyes are on her almost constantly, and while sometimes she revels in it, other times she gets frustrated and wishes people ( men, in particular ) would see her for more than her looks.

she’s pansexual but very, very tired of men. any man talks and she instantly turns into the eye roll emoji. men exhaust her! she’s attracted to them but at what cost!

multilingual! she says it’s part of the job, but honestly she’s known italian and french since she was 12 and it’s not even necessary to speak the languages of the places she travels. it’s just another way to challenge her brain.