#re: 'metatextually taken away' see point 6 in my ep1 rewatch post

[etirabys]

eva rewatch: ep 2-3

Just two comments, only one of them episode-specific.

1. Toji

More than on my first watch, I liked Toji and Kensuke getting pulled into the Eva and watching Shinji’s meltdown therein. I vaguely recall that, on my first watch, it seemed like a ham-handed moment where some of the protagonist’s haters are forced to see how hard the protagonist‘s job is. And it is that, sure! But what I was thinking on this watch was...

...the callousness of fourteen year olds. Toji punches Shinji for causing damage in his first battle, but he’s totally uninterested in Shinji as he does so. I remember being that age and being utterly apathetic to the interiority of my peers – I wasn’t cruel to them (unless they struck at me first), but it just did not occur to me to think about what it was like to be them. And Shinji’s interiority fails to arise to Toji’s attention in that way, even when Toji is hitting him. “Sorry, newbie, I just won’t be satisfied unless I hit you.”

Then they see Shinji close up during battle, and it’s uncomfortable and weird for the normal reasons it’s uncomfortable and weird to be around people who are insane or out of control. (It reminded me of being twelve and seeing my parents have their respective mental breakdowns. “Holy shit, what am I even supposed to do when human beings break script like that?”)

And, in witnessing Shinji in this way, Toji gets an answer to a question he never even thought to ask.

2. Rei

I was talking to my partner @lovelanguageisolate in the gym yesterday about Rei. Rei has always been the most confusing character to me. Shinji and Asuka represent such striking, familiar psychological archetypes, and it feels like Rei should be a character of the same class.

Shinji and Asuka... wait, I just need to concatenate a bunch of things LLI said in a chat last year, it’s so good:

Shinji is always acting out the drama of being victimized.

That's kind of how he's coped. No one has ever adequately acknowledged his abuse, so he has kind of started playing this Nietzschean slave morality game of obeying adults and forcing them into the position of acting coercively so they cannot launder their mistreatment of him through more noble concerns.

He is very, very good at this game of making the adults in his life look at the monsters they are. And it's like the off-brand version of love—not so much from the adults as from the Big Other/cosmos/audience.

He is obeisant, cloyingly needy, open-hearted to those he knows, and naturally good at his job. And he clearly also acts out a maladaptive need to be loved. He radically threatens Asuka's theories about how the world works. He is attractive to her because he is a complete, integrated specimen in those important ways she isn't. He is also nauseating and pathetic, which are some of the lowest things a person can be in her mental theater.

Asuka cannot be happy because, as you've observed, she pours herself monomanaically into performing genius, competence, and independence. She simultaneously mistrusts others so deeply that she refuses to attach to them in any kind of deliberate or open way but needs their approval and attention.

And she is doomed to suffer because of the Freudian narcissist's dilemma: inasmuch as she can impress others with her performance, she thinks less of them by virtue of having fooled them. Inasmuch as she actually receives the trappings of love for performing in all these ways, her conviction that the performance is structurally necessary deepens, but also, the more the actual feelings of being loved feel out of reach.

She is a person I struggle mightily to empathize with because of her fractal nastiness, but her need to be loved is so palpable and endearing, and it makes her suffering so heartrending to me.

But what is Rei, whose existence is so abnormal, so hard to fit into an adolescent psychodramatic archetype? I really want to place her into the pilot trifecta. The show wants me to! But I have to extrapolate what she is from her foils, and from what I think she might become.

And I notice that I have to do this because everything in the show conspires against my getting to know her, both textually and metatextually.

She is continually being taken away.

So my (not entirely satisfying) read these days is that she represents the pathology of not looking, of not even realizing that there is something in oneself to interrogate and develop, of not differentiating, of non-personing oneself. If Shinji and Asuka are visibly embarrassing and contorted in their attempt to... seat their ego in the world, or something?... Rei is the failure to play the game of being a self at all.