"End of Evangelion" review

First Spacehey blog entry (yay!) kinda just wanted this review to live somewhere other than my letterboxd acct.

"Live your life on your feet, then you can die!"

I hate Shinji. I hate him because he’s annoying- overly reliant- and extremely selfish. He does everything in his power not to hurt people and he does all of this because he doesn't want to feel guilty about anything. His need to make people like him and only do what he’s asked hurts people, and he hates the agony he feels when he hurts others.
I hate Shinji because he reminds me of myself.

No piece of media has captured the human spirit in such a magnificent way. Every single one of these characters feel so human, and their emotions are so visceral. I relate and have experienced every display of emotion this film presented, and that scares me. Each and every one of these characters died unfulfilled. They were too busy caring about how they presented themselves to others to figure out who they actually are. And honestly I understand why Ikari was trying so hard to put the instrumentality project into place. If everybody can understand everything and there’s no “AP fields” in between anyone- there can be no pain. It’s eternal bliss. But writing this out on paper makes me realize how terrifying the concept of eternal bliss is. You can’t form relationships or hobbies- you can’t enjoy the feeling of the sun on your face because without pain- there can be no concept of joy. Everybody chases to present the best version of themself to everyone else, we try time and time again to be perfect. An existence where we try so hard to be perfect is the worst existence, if we can’t learn to accept the flaws of life we will never learn to live. 

I would also like to touch on Rei and Kaworu. At the end of the film they said, “We are hope, that one day people will learn to understand each other.” This line really stuck with me. The entire series Rei was Ikari’s tool to understand life. Ikari used Rei to hopefully reconnect with his wife one day, not thinking about Rei being a conscious being. Rei spent the entire series being misunderstood, possibly holding onto the hope that someone would understand her. Kaworu on the other hand was the opposite. Instead of a representation of the yearning of hope- Kaworu is the one who encourages hope. Kaworu is the only person that ever said that he liked Shinji, he was also the only person who ever tried to truly understand him. This leads me into my next quote “Man must be the only creature capable of such hatred for it’s own kind”. Humans are incredibly selfish and we will do whatever we can in order to feel happy, however; we never think about others while making these decisions. We never try to truly understand each other.

“As long as the sun, moon, and earth exist…”