Evangelion is about your mom

an essay wherein I make no attempt to actually synopsize the plot of Evangelion

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a show about everything. Today it feels to me like a show about parents. About the way children are recruited to fight in conflicts they do not understand, on behalf of people they can never really know.  The protagonist, Shinji, interacts primarily with the absence of his parents. His father oversees his son’s life without ever really touching it. His mother is dead, kind of.

There is a lot to unpack between Shinji and his father. He is a distant man who can only communicate a vague, bottomless disappointment to his son. He recruits Shinji to pilot a bioengineered robot, fight literal angels. As a viewer you wonder; why must they be children? The pilots?

The canonical answer is a bunch of lore. The actual answer is that sometimes children are born to perform the tasks their parents failed to do. These tasks are rarely communicated explicitly, but the consequences of failure are very real. In Shinji’s case, he is the only conduit through which his father can touch his wife, Yui.

Yui is a massive, overwhelming presence in the show. She has a couple of cumulative minutes of screentime, and you understand her as a brilliant scientist. A visionary. A mother. A monster.

Her husband worships her, kind of. He clings to her genius, her power. It is implied that his romantic interest is little more than a projection of envy, a desire to be within the orbit of greatness. Paradoxically, he still wants a wife, a mother to his child. He wants this power to be poured into a shape he can hold.

Yui does not want this. She wants to transcend the bounds of humanity, merge flesh and machine until her will outlasts the universe. In a way she achieves this, her soul gets absorbed into an Eva, a mech that can outlast her human body. All this much to the dismay of the man who claims to love her. Throughout the show, Shinji’s father engages in continuous attempts to bring her back. He clones scraps of his wife, resurrects her as a child that he can raise as a daughter. You can feel his struggle to reach this woman, condense her down into an understandable, finite entity.

And between them is Shinji. A child that is half of them both. To his father, he is a disappointment. A child is supposed to solidify a man’s claim to his wife. Instead, he is the consolation prize. Not enough of her to satisfy the itch, but too much of her to dispose of. Shinji can pilot the Eva that contains Yui’s soul, and this makes him both an object of great value and resentment. Though ghoulish, it is not unheard of for fathers to become jealous of their children, especially as infants. Their wives become mothers, women who devote all their time and energy into this small, helpless thing that has put in no work to earn it.

Shinji’s place within the body of his mother’s Eva is a kind of return to infancy. A return to the womb even. A bond so close that no man could ever touch it. His father can only observe this from afar – the perfect, impossible closeness – as he grasps for scraps of his wife. He tests Shinji over and over. Places him in harm’s way continuously. Maybe he hopes for Shinji’s success – proof that his son is worthy of his wife’s devotion. But it seems equally likely that he hopes for failure, for evidence that this child undeservedly stole from him the attentions of the woman he loved.

And still, Shinji can do the one thing Yui could never do– he can stay. He is Yui’s essence without the rebellion, the unbendable will. His father is comforted by Shinji’s weakness. His father is disgusted by Shinji’s weakness.

The tragedy is that Shinji is privy to none of this. He does not feel his mother’s presence, only his father’s resentment. He does not know the impossible job he has been recruited to do but still understands the crushing weight of his failure to perform. It is the banal tragedy of childhood. Nobody really escapes it.

There is another tragedy in Evangelion. A more subtle one in the form of Shinji’s relationship to Yui. There are almost no scenes of the two interacting, not as two cognizant, recognizable human beings anyways. But there is one big one. A single scene that exemplifies the perverse nature of their relationship,

It comes in the form of a flashback. Shinji is a small child; Yui is ready to transcend. She has volunteered herself to be the guinea pig for an experiment that will allow her to merge with the divine, become an alien, immortal thing. This is a terrifying process that will essentially destroy her. And while the results will officially be declared an “accident” it is heavily suggested that this was her intention all along. She does not display fear or trepidation, instead her gaze finds her son, staring down at her from the observation area. She smiles, pleased to see him watching, makes sure his eyes stay on her as the annihilation occurs.

There are lots of ways you can interpret this scene. You could say that Yui is making a sacrifice, doing what is best for humanity in her eyes. Putting on a brave face to comfort the son she is abandoning. But I don’t think so. I watch this scene, and I think about how desperate this woman was for an audience. Her husband could never understand her, wanted too much of the wrong parts of her. But this child? This child could bear witness to the full, devastating depth of her power. Witnessing her could become the defining moment of his life. It does become the defining moment of his life.

Yui is not the only woman in media – or in life – to birth her perfect audience. Mothers do this all the time. Nurture in their children the admiration, deference, and worship they are lacking from other relationships. However, there is something refreshing about Yui. Her reliance on Shinji is not borne out of insecurity. Instead, there is unshakable confidence in her entitlement. She deserves to be witnessed. The only person capable of such a task is one generated from her own flesh

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