A Life Bound to EVA: The story of an Evangelion Complex.
Evangelion came to me when I was in the most wretched of states.
At 18 years old, I would go entire days without eating. I was jobless, dropped out of school, only saw friends every other weekend, and lived in isolation with only my mother sometimes around. By all means, I had no credentials and no prospects, and even the friends I did have in person had no interest in the same things I did.
I'd lost all sense of who I was as a person, or who I ever wanted to be. I'd attended the graduation of my friends back in my home town only to go back to the city a night later. Most people thought I left for the city to find more people like me; I was regarded as "artsy" by most, idiosyncratically withdrawn and "disarmingly charismatic". That was what I knew best: how to talk my way out of or into just about any situation. And I'd do it before I even knew why I was doing it or what the repercussions could be. Could I really do this job? Could I love and be loved in equal measure? Could I trust myself to make the right decisions when other people needed me to? What did I really want?
I would take infrequent freelance remote work and dispassionately complete it, sometimes pushing back deadlines on projects I would claim were out of my control or needed more to work with. I would lie to my mother about looking for full time work so I could stay in safety longer, under the protection of the roof she paid for. Sometimes she’d be more adamant that I had to begin pursuing my own path. Other times she kept quiet, silently empathizing with my depression and placing faith in me that I’d find my way eventually.
Every other weekend, I would visit my father, who would come to the city to pick me up and drive me back to my hometown where my friends and both my younger and older brother were. When he talked, he would rarely ask me about myself, instead using the time to talk about himself or complain to me about my brothers or my mother. He liked to keep me in his mind as his son and the one who would cause him the least pain. Most of the time I kept quiet, wanting to preserve that for him as long as I could.
When I turned 19 in January of 2013, I'd never been further from myself. There was something about a January birthday that I felt connected me to the passage of time. January 5th followed the new year so closely that I could feel myself aging along with the world. I wondered, when would it reach a terminus? Was the world suddenly speeding toward it, or had it always been this way and I was merely shedding layers of naiveté? I would have days where I'd see the rise and fall of the sun from my bedroom window, constricted by the blinds I'd kept shuttered the majority of the time. I'd lay so still that at times I'd think I was dead. My hand on the pillow in front of me felt detached from my soul, without the will or seemingly the know-how to move it. Unresponsive, without purpose, distant. Dead. Was this death? Sometimes I'd snap out of it by the distortion of my vision, fearing that I was actually dying, only to find out that they were tears. And once I realized what was happening, only more tears followed. Other times, I simply fell asleep.
In that same January, after the strong encouragement of a friend I'd known for years through an internet connection (and who remains a close friend to this day), I finally watched Neon Genesis Evangelion. It was the first anime I'd watched in full.
Some of the weight of its personal significance to me came to me immediately, others gradually over time. Watching it I was delighted, bewildered, paralyzed, and ultimately defeated. I watched the final two episodes and felt lost, hurt, and confused, like the feeling of suddenly losing a loved one without any pretense or fanfare. I didn't know what The End of Evangelion was, but I'd convinced myself that no matter what it'd turn out to be, it wouldn't be the end of the series I was hoping for — but it was... just not the one I'd wished for. It was more painful than I’d been prepared for, more confronting. After finishing I sobbed myself tearless and laid in my bed as I had before, in a space between deep thought and blankness, searching for answers. I saw myself in Evangelion; my solitude and reluctance in Shinji, my anger and arrogance in Asuka, my existential confusion in Rei, and the future I was pushing back against in Misato. They were like real people to me, rendered with a psychological depth and empathy that was unprecedented to me in any form of art. It beat me, invaded me, and in doing so, made everything in my life feel real in a way it hadn’t for far too long. I needed something more.
Two weeks later, not expecting anything more than a cinematic remake, I watched Rebuild of Evangelion 1.0 and 2.0, and coming to them with my expectations leveled, I couldn’t have prepared myself for what I’d discover in them. Aside from all of the chronological oddities and visual depictions of succession from Neon Genesis, I was struck with the changes in the characters. It was more than the necessity of a cinematic runtime that spurred them into making greater strides at earlier times than they ever had before, but rather others saying things to them that had never been said before, showing them things that had they’d never seen, or taking action at a time where it was critically imperative, where previously there was none. In Rebuild of Evangelion, some catastrophes are averted and others are supplemented with new ones, but the paths the characters are on is always fundamentally bending. It was a sign of true growth.
I learned about Hideaki Anno, where he was in his life when he made Neon Genesis Evangelion, the emotional and creative outpouring that went into The End of Evangelion, and the ways his life had changed before beginning to rebuild it all. This was attachment and compulsion, the need to express something greater. Whatever personal conclusions Anno had come to or was in the progress of unraveling were in Rebuild. To me, it represented hope, a pathway to the answers I needed.
That year, I started a blog devoted to analyzing Eva from what I deemed to be the most valuable for the series — and the most underrepresented by the leading voices in its online discussion: the emotional. Most of the posts were images from the original series, manga, and new films (all of which I considered to be connected by obscure means within Eva’s own universe, which would later gain the name of the Evangelion Infinity), drawing comparison between the three, seeking to instigate discussion of how they overlap and change and the fundamentals of their relationship with one another and how their contrast points toward the future. This eventually garnered a large following and far more attention than I’d ever bargained for; it was both gratifying and terrifying. But it was still just an analysis of another person’s work.
Ever since I’d left my hometown, I’d taken to writing to escape my isolated circumstances, submerging myself in science fiction worlds of my making and sharing them with what started as a small group of friends and blossomed to a larger audience before shrinking once more as a result of my own inactivity as the pain became too strong to even find the words to describe. Eventually, through the Evangelion blog, I found a means to express myself again, and beyond simply analyzing another’s work, I’d write public essays and personal responses to others about how the series had affected myself and others in our external world. Aside from creating stories of my own, this gave me more purpose than anything I’d done prior.
In January 2014, I returned to my hometown to celebrate another birthday. Another year on this Earth: my 20th. I didn’t share Evangelion with my friends; that wasn’t the kind of relationship we had. To share Evangelion with them would be to make myself vulnerable on an intimate level that I feared them misunderstanding or judging — they weren’t the introspective types. All of them were quite unlike me; a loud and rambunctious group of boys with youthful spirits, seemingly living only for the present. In hindsight, I see that’s why I valued my time with them so dearly, despite my occasional frustrations and wishes that I could be more personable. That 20th birthday they treated me to an organized night at the local pub house, a place that seemed to embody the best aspects of my hometown. There, at that celebration dedicated to the life I’d taken for granted, the life I couldn’t understand the value in — to myself or others — I felt loved. More familiar faces had come out than I’d ever seen since my high school days, both acquaintances and friends I’d thought I’d lost all connection with, people who I’d assumed had forgotten me. The standout was already there at the pub all along: a girl I had loved and grown close to through my school years was working there, and she hadn’t forgotten me — nor did she attempt to feign indifference to my presence. Whether the romantic infatuations of a child could be considered “real love” or not, in my time knowing her, it felt as real as I’d known to that point.
It wasn’t hard to understand why I felt the way I did toward her. To me, she was the most beautiful girl in our town, yet never leveraged it for her social status, even in high school when doing so would be most beneficial. She was arguably the most popular girl in the schools we attended, yet she walked home with me as far as our paths aligned, sat next to me at lunch, laughing at each other’s off-color and oddly specific jokes. We confided in one another, yet obeyed unspoken boundaries between us. Even now, it’s hard to say how much of that was her and how much of that was my own fear. In the days soon after I left for the city and the ones leading up to it, that question was torturous for me. That night at the pub, she came to me and hugged me, congratulating me on my life milestone and after her shift finished she sat next to me as the others talked amongst themselves. I always assumed that seeing her again would be painful for me, but everything had changed. We were what the state would consider “adults,” and the circumstances we’d found ourselves in had set in. I knew she was never in love with me the way I was with her, but I’d found value in our friendship beyond the youthful yearning she knew I’d had for her. When the night wound down, I walked her out into the snowy parking lot and she gave me a long kiss on the cheek under the pub’s neon sign and said goodbye. That was the last time I ever saw her.
When I’d returned home to my mother’s place, I felt a hard pang of regret and despair. Why did I leave those people? Where would I be then if I’d stayed behind? Where did I belong? Who would I be? Would I be me? Who was I? Not even my blog provided solace, as I’d return to find people on the site attempting to denigrate my writing and my perspective. Though it was a vocal minority, combined with the despair of imagining the ways in which my life could be different, it was enough to push me into a panic attack. I felt like years worth of repressed fear and anxiety was pouring out all at once, and I was cornered into the bathroom wall I’d huddled against, uncertain if I would simply end up fainting or vomit. Despite the anguish I’d attributed to the blog and the rest of the website, it’s where I returned that same night in an attempt to find my heading. It was then that I found a message from somebody who had recently filled my blog’s activity list with a flood of notifications, ‘likes’, ‘reblogs’, (how strange, the significance we apply to such things) replies, messages in their tags, and the most important one: in my inbox.
The way she spoke of my writing in her message made me feel more odd than most. I’d received “thank yous” before, personal accounts of people’s history with the series and how it’s affected them and how my writing has helped them understand both the story of Evangelion and their feelings toward it, but this one was different. They spoke to me as if the show was scarcely a factor in it at all, but rather my writing was the primary motivator for messaging me. As they told it, they felt as if I’d seen them as a person and helped articulate feelings they’d never accessed before. Then they apologized for being so personal and for if it was “out of bounds” — then they asked if I had any interest in instant messaging to talk more.
I didn’t know what this person looked like, where they lived, how old they were, what gender they were — nothing. It didn’t matter; I’d unwittingly made a connection. I’d soon discover that they were a she and she lived in the American state below my Canadian province and was a mere half year younger than I was. Born in the middle of the year, an August birthday. What did that mean for her perception of time’s passing? It wasn’t a thought of mine at the time, rather, I found myself wound up in her own story of personal strife with her family and those around her. She loved what I loved and hated what I hated, and together we discovered new things for both of us to love and hate together. It wasn’t long until that became the two of us, together in a relationship. To that point, I thought it knew what it meant when The End of Evangelion’s opening title card said that “Love is destructive,” but as reality would have it, I didn’t know the half of it.
It’s hard to compare anything else in life to the fast burning intensity and yearning of a long distance relationship. We were quite literally inseparable: in each other’s pocket and atop desks everywhere we went, who we’d turn to in the secluded corners and balconies of family and friend gatherings, preferring one another’s company to those around us, sharing our relationships with those very people with one another and learning more about ourselves along the way. We’d talk from the fall of the sun to its rise, which I’d watch from my bedroom window, unobscured by the blinds I'd keep reeled up, so that I could be awoken by the sunlight beaming into my room, keeping me on a regular waking schedule, one where I could talk to her, sharing each other’s hours. With her encouragement, I found a job in guest services at the start of the summer at a hair salon that was one of a chain my mother had served as the regional manager for many years prior. There, for the first time since I had come to the city, I found new friends. Some had known me through my mother, remarking on how the last time they’d seen me I was but a little boy, propped up and fawned over on the very desk I stood behind for my job. From the offset, they had a predisposition to liking me because of their relationship with my mother, feeling that I was cut from the same cloth. Most of those that were new there were of my same generation, and they were the ones I grew closest with. Aside from one of the older stylists, I was the only male in the salon. Sometimes that made me feel special, receiving light and friendly flirtations, other times it made me feel like an imposter, as though I was invading a space that wasn’t mine to occupy — but above all, it made me feel at ease.
This time provided more feelings than I’d ever felt in my life. I had a full time job with people I enjoyed working alongside, some of whom I’d come to regard as close friends, a healthy connection to my hometown, and a partner who I loved and felt loved by. One hot summer night I decided I’d clean and rearrange my room for the first time since we’d moved. Sorting boxes and moving bookshelves and converting my double into a bunk bed, the uppermost twin having dominated the other side of my room the entire time I wasn’t visited by my younger brother every other weekend. Having that space clear struck me as pertinent to a clear state of mind. The whole time I kept my headphones on, my mic on my chest, laughing, teasing, and flirting with each other over drinks as she studied her coursework until we both gave up on our key tasks and succumbed to the summer heat and one another’s growing advances — as much as a couple could through audio alone. That night went from laughter, to remote sex, to deeply personal talk, to tears. That night, she’d opened up to me more than ever before, and asked me to stay with her until she fell asleep. Soon after she stopped responding, I fell asleep to the sound of her breathing. Despite the fact that we’d later meet in person, able to touch one another directly, that was the best memory I had with her.
Touch. That’s what came of that night. I’d always loved editing video; it felt like the instantly accessible form of visually directing a story that I’d longed for. As I did with my writing, I decided to edit together a video for Evangelion that represented not just my love of the story or what it meant to me, but what I was feeling in my life up to, and including, the time I made it, both as a result of Evangelion and the the circumstances I’d created for myself. I knew I wanted to make an Eva video set to Daft Punk’s operatic opus Touch off of their would-be final album Random Access Memories, which had been the soundtrack to my first year with Eva. Every single verse in the song represented what I’d valued in the series on a thematic and emotional level, with the persistent lyric being: “If love is the answer, you’re home; Hold on.” With Eva’s own continued motif of ”I’m home” and ”Welcome home” in the quest to find where one belongs, it sounded to me as though the song and the series were made for one another. I started and restarted numerous times over months, trying to capture the right feeling that existed outside of either; a feeling I could call my own, a rhythm that existed outside of the sound or the screen. When I was done I called it TOUCH: An Ode to Evangelion, a video that can still be found on YouTube, and a reminder of the unrelenting forward march of time whenever I see the number of years that have passed since its release under the title. My partner told me that she could “see all of [me]” in it the way I’d seen her on that long evening. By the end of the summer, as August faded, I’d come to fear that maybe we’d seen and felt too much, too fast. From our seemingly unconditional familiarity, contempt was born.
We were still children. She was plowing through life in an attempt to appease her mother, and I was just beginning to live life, trying to find the means to leave behind the safeties that came from living with my own mother. The similarities between who we were and the characters we’d initially connected through was not lost on either of us. We came to blows over small and large traits and tics possessed by one another that previously we would have accepted or even endeared ourselves to. By Fall, we’d already “broken up” twice. Our dynamic was crumbling. Phones ran silent. Notifications stopped appearing. I kept trying to fight the notion that it was really over; how could two people love each other so much so fast and passionately, only for it to burn out as though it had barely been lit? On a better, kinder day between us, she told me: “Sometimes I wish you were a girl”. I didn’t tell her, but before I’d met her, a lot of the time I did as well.
When we met for the last time, it was in the early evening snow, the day after Christmas. I went to her by bus and the extent of our visit was a long evening, where, at the end, we parted ways. It was painful, and I hadn’t planned to return to Canada for another three days. I knew we couldn’t stay together. I had a suitcase and was dressed better than I’d ought to be for what I ended up doing: roaming the streets of a city I didn’t know in a country that wasn’t my own. The one upside to dressing as well as I did was that nobody would ask me my age in bars there, which I took to great benefit as I was a mere 9 days from drinking legally in the United States. I was walking through the night in search of a hotel that would take debit, which I naively hoped for at every lit sign at either side of town. Nobody questioned me as I slept on the lounge chair of a hotel I’d visited a few years prior, my hand gripped around my suitcase, which held a brand-new laptop that my mother and father, in a rare joint effort, had both purchased for me on Christmas a couple days earlier. The irony of lugging my literal baggage through the city I associated with the girl I loved, again, was not lost on me.
Eventually I was directed to a comfy hostel where I was able to stay for my remaining two days in comfort. I went to the movies. I explored. I dined. I spoke to random people on the street in a way I found never happened with the same spontaneity in Canada. And I wandered, my ears clasped under my headphones (which, in hindsight, may have been unwise to do in the dead of night in a foreign city where everything that would get me back home was on my person). When the time came to go home, I had worked myself through to a state of indifference. When I got back to Canada, my mom welcomed me home with a hug. She didn’t ask how it went, and, mercifully, she never did.
The breakup was hard on me. I didn’t speak to my now-ex partner for another month, knowing she was going through a difficult time in her own life as well due to the death of her mother. When she had seen me that night at the end of December, the reason she didn’t extend the invitation to stay with her that I’d never expected was because she was caring for her mother as her health faded. She didn’t tell me this until we’d reconnected; it didn’t surprise me. I knew that her mother’s health was declining in sync with our relationship for months prior, and despite her asking me to come and be with her for either comfort or a final goodbye, I never imagined it would be under such impending dire circumstances. Through it, I’d offered myself to be there for her, no matter what, hoping that would be sufficient, as it was all I could do for her then. Despite all of my anger and sadness in losing what I had felt was my first “true” love, it paled in comparison to the hell she was going through as she retreated into herself with self harm and isolation. It wasn’t a relationship test a couple of kids were ever meant to endure. When she was saying her goodbyes to her mother, to me, mine was saying “Welcome home”.
I took the queasy comfort that provided. How could I possibly be angry? How could I curse her mother for her impending death coming between us? But I was. And I did. I hated both of them, and most of all, I hated myself.
In January 2015, I quit my job, citing the not-untrue reason of insufficient pay, but the most pressing reason — the one I didn’t give — was that I simply couldn’t get out of bed anymore. Despite my departure, my friends stayed close. They checked on me and invited me out to gatherings to keep me among the living. I was more grateful toward them than I had words for. In the summer before they aww’d and sighed when I would talk about my relationship and how much I loved my partner. The pseudo-poetic fantasy in which I’d spoken of her then made for a dreamy story, bolstered by the truth of my feelings. Without that, I’d lost what was of greatest value to me: my words. I spent the rest of 2015 the way I’d spent every year between 2010 and 2014: lying around in my room, waiting for either fate to uplift me or death by dissolution. It was at this time that I visited my father and got into a long-simmering argument with him that would result in me refusing to see or speak with him directly to this day. Both times we’d gotten into arguments of that scale, his elderly mother had been visiting him. Something about her had always brought out the worst in him, despite her, to me, simply appearing to be a harmless old woman. We’ve not heard a sound out of each other’s mouths since then. He never told me why being around her would set him off as it did. 2015 remains a year that, aside from that lone event, almost does not exist in my memory. In 2016 I decided it had been enough.
I knew I didn’t want to die. After a sombre birthday and a vicious, bloody fight with my younger brother, who had since moved to stay with us in the city, I knew I had to leave. I didn’t want to be the one to cause my mother any more pain than she’d already had to hide and bear watching me waste away all day. I was overdue to depart from my prolonged stay in the womb where I had the luxury of undisturbed comforts and time passed but I never grew, submerged the portal to unreality that my laptop provided. I’d been selfish and I knew it, and knowing only made the pain worse. I found steady work and, in 2017, I moved out.
Where was Eva? Could I face the cruel reflection of my life in fiction anymore? I’d withdrawn from it, feeling every aspect of its relevance to my life had shown its face. It was the guilt, the anger, the longing, love, sadness, confusion, comfort, depression, anxiety... All of it had come to bear, and none of it had an ending. The last thing anyone had seen of Evangelion was a broken Shinji, a furious Asuka, and a lost Rei wandering off into the red desert. I knew I couldn’t wait for Eva anymore, I couldn’t wait for Anno to exorcise his demons and turn them into art that I could simply leech off of; I had to find my own answers.
2017. 2018. 2019. As the years passed, I considered the value of each. I’d risen to prominence in the company I worked at, made new friendships, enjoyed casual on-going romantic flings, and found home in the friends I’d known through an online connection we’d maintained and refined over the entire stretch of the 2010’s. Invaluable. Irreplaceable. Tested and true, the bond I have with my friends has become familial over the years as we’ve grown closer. Every Christmas Eve morning we would have get-togethers of our own, where our time zones would momentarily overlap and we’d make time to celebrate our found family and friendship, sending each other gifts and engaging in merrily heightened banter — a tradition that continues to this day, along with others. These are friends that have been here for me and put up with me at my worst, reassuring me through my failures and holding me up when I triumph with a level of interest and enthusiasm that I can’t feel with anyone else in my life. Until I realized how important they were to me, I simply took the love of a family for granted. That I would die for any of these people without hesitation doesn’t scare me — in fact, it reminds me that I’m alive.
We were an unlikely worldwide band of lone wolves, nerds, troublemakers, and outcasts. We were simultaneously so alike and so different in ways that perfectly complemented each other, and in 2020 we had at least one thing in common with the rest of the world, too.
In a way, we were uniquely prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic in a way few people could have been. We had our tightly wound social circle with us at all times, socially distanced across thousands of miles and oceans between us. I’d lost work and found myself at the mercy of on-going government relief benefits to keep me housed and fed. In the retreat of our Discord server, we battened down the hatches like NERV would Tokyo-3 on an Angel’s approach. You could practically hear Shiro Sagisu’s battle drums as we each reported in through March how the pandemic would be affecting us. Suddenly, I found myself in personal solitude once again, away from the expectations of others outside my friend group, and away from the eyes of strangers. What did loneliness mean to me? What did I learn from loneliness? What was I? Who was I?
Miranda. I’d once asked my mother why she’d planned to give me that name if I had been born a girl. She stared at me, confused. She’d never said such a thing, the name had never even passed through her mind. In truth, I asked her that the morning after waking from a dream in which she’d said it. It wasn’t the name she’d given me, it was the one I’d given myself. Miranda: “to be wondered at” — did I deserve such a name? Does anyone “deserve” the name they’re born into? The name I was born with meant “the first,” yet I was the second child of three. Apparently it just sounded “right” and “interesting” to my parents, so it was the name I was given. Miranda. What was this name to me? An association with strength, self-sufficiency, reliability, femininity. The woman I wanted to be? At my best, the person I was? What am I? Who am I?
Miranda. That was the name I chose for myself in April of 2020. It was me.
I expected nothing from even the people I had absolute faith in. The rejection of some feared me more than others, but it never came. Everyone saw me as who I knew myself to be; in some cases I was told this disarmed some people who I’d known for nearly all my life upon meeting me for the first time again. It made me feel right, even if I knew I’d taken far too long to come to this conclusion about who I am. Despite 2020 feeling like the end of the world, I’d carved out a small niche of personal salvation. If civilization didn’t make it, at least I’d die being me.
By 2021, I knew the time was coming for me to face Evangelion again for the last time. I’d known Hideaki Anno had planned on ending the story with this, and I understood, on a human level, why it took so long to get here. There wasn’t a second between 2012 and now where I felt impatient waiting for the true End of Evangelion, because I was afraid of it. Evangelion has seen me through the best and hardest times in my life and, whether I was aware of it at the time or not, has changed me forever. Most art that I adore creates a greater appreciation within me for that art form, enhances my understanding of it, whether it’s the shot framing, the storytelling, the blocking, the lighting, the editing or the dialogue... but Evangelion does that and more. Nothing has taught me more about living through pain and examining the self than Evangelion.
Even after the film had premiered in Japan before it was announced that Prime would be streaming the film in domestic territories, I felt the comfort of not having to confront an impending release date. When the announcement came, my initial reaction was one of shock, followed by excitement, which gave way to a seeping melancholy and anxiousness. I’d already known that there was virtually no way the film could disappoint me, seeing as nothing Hideaki Anno had created had done so prior (least likely of all something related to Evangelion), but my fears were all personal. How would it feel to be free of Eva? Despite having hedged my bets on the entire exercise of Rebuild being one of deep catharsis and hope based on the prior films and Evangelion’s overarching message, the question of how it would be reached remained a mystery until I pressed ‘play’ one night ago.
The answer was sublime. It almost feels regrettable of me to describe the creative result of one man’s struggles with depression and emotional pain as “perfection,” but that was it, playing out on the screen in front of me after patiently waiting 8 years to see it. I’ve watched it a second time since and came to understand that the first time I was mostly awe-struck and overwhelmed at the sheer intake of information and mastery of the craft, just as I have been on the initial viewing of every entry in this story. What I got from that second viewing was my emotional reckoning in full, crying every 10 minutes as the characters I love and feel so close to finding the endings I’d always wanted for them, haunted no longer by the curse of Eva.
But for me, in the real world, Evangelion was never a curse, but a blessing. Would I have ever found myself without it? I think back to my decision to stay with my mother back in 2010, leaving everything I’d known behind for a future where the only certainty was solitude. My mother, whom I have such a close bond with that I would sacrifice the youth she gave me just to be near her. It’s something I still can’t say to her because I’ve always feared being so emotionally open with her to the point where I’m sure to see her cry. Coming out to her as female was hard enough, and making the strongest woman I’ve ever known cry isn’t something I ever hope to do — much less see. I just hope she knows, and one day, when I’m brave enough, I hope to tell her myself.
I’ve forgiven my father. I forgave him when I’d heard that he’d accepted me and sent me an email telling me himself. He told me about a dream he had before I’d even come out as a woman in which I’d come to him draped in a blanket of white; my name was the same, my eyes were the same, but I was still a child — and I was a girl. I touched his cheek and told him that I was alright, and he woke up in tears. He didn’t know what to make of it at the time, and he didn’t know how to ascribe significance to it. We hadn’t seen each other for years at the time he had the dream, and we haven’t seen each other since.
Shinji, Asuka, Rei, Misato. Gendo. Them and every other character in the series is the reason I’ve written all of this. To not express how much their stories have changed me and taught me about my own life would be to damn myself to speechlessness everlasting. I’ve written it all in the time it’s taken for me to transfer the last 7 years of my life, contained within the scratched and scarred, barely functioning laptop that my mother and father gave me, into a new one, with files even older still with me. Looking back on those years, from people that have messaged me about their own experiences with Eva, a former partner, an inseparable band of friends, I see countless people affected by it. Hideaki Anno has created and concluded an epic expression of pain, anxiety, acceptance, redemption and hope for the new lost generation.
I don’t know what the future holds for me. I don’t know when I’ll be able to articulate to my mother how much she means to me or when I’ll be able to confront my father in person, bearing the woman I’ve grown into for him to see. I want to offer him understanding, I want to offer him forgiveness for the years we spent at each other’s throats and the ones we’ve spent apart. I know that in order for things to change, I need to reach beyond myself and grip the blind uncertainty of what feels like the impossible and pull it toward me. After seeing Evangelion through to the end, I feel that strength drawing closer than it ever has before.
Goodbye, all of Evangelion. And thank you, Anno-senpai.
