Thread by @The_Wub_

This actually gets into something that has irked me about the Evangelion fandom for a long time & it's why I think Anno was right to troll them with basically everything he made related to the series after word. Departure from my usual threads but I wanna talk about this

https://twitter.com/GPrime85/status/1679231912844435457

As someone who, like many of you, is on the border of the Millenial/Zoomer divide, I grew up in an era that saw Eva get big in the West & then in the last couple of years have seen its resurgence among Zoomers. Something in both eras that has bothered me is "NERV was right" takes

Something I have noticed is that this take almost always comes from people who think that Rei was legitimately a better fit for Shinji (despite being the literal clone of his dead mom lol) & both speak to this desire a lot of Eva fans have to be infants/children their whole life

Coincidentally, a lot of these people also despise Asuka & some of them even think Misato is also "a bitch" but funnily enough, many of them also love her but only insofar as she is a new "mommy" to Shinji. "Nerv was right", "Rei was bestgirl" "Misato is mommy" are all wrong

The series is about how being forced to make connections to others is an inescapable part of growing up unless you find a way to totally insulate yourself from it & how adulthood, as painful as it is, can free you from something even worse IE being stuck as a child in perpetuity

This aligns very well with the religious imagery of the show (which again, "Nerv was right/Rei is best" theorists usually think was just "thrown in for fun" cuz Anno said so to troll interviewers one time) IE Jesus had to suffer to help humanity "grow up" &, in adulthood, be free

Misato is not a "mommy" to Shinji she is his feminine mirror image IE an adult who still acts like a teenager & searches for figures (such as Kaji) to reinforce that by being her surrogate father. Her sacrifice at the end is a mirror image of Shinji's final choice to return

And that's another thing, at the end Shinji CHOOSES to come back from Tangworld. Asuka says "How disgusting" because even though Shinji makes the decision, finally, after all of his suffering (& in doing so shows its possible for NERV to still lose) yet still wants to kill her

Why does Shinji want to kill Asuka? Because their relationship & the relationship of both to Misato forces all 3 characters to grow up & their growing up is literally what, if you project the End of Eva's conclusion forward, is implied to have saved the world.

This also throws a wrench into another braindead interpretation of Eva, which is that End of Eva is supposedly an "alternate" ending to the show's original ending. Not so. Shinji chooses to grow, thus saves humanity from NERV, thus "congratulations!" He becomes like Jesus.

Hence the show's title which again, is often perceived as Anno just fucking around. Neon Genesis Evangelion literally translates to "NEW Century Gospel." Or, a Gospel for the 21st Century, a gospel for people who Anno saw sinking into consumer childishness & escapism, as he did

THIS is why Anno hates his own fandom for the most part. It's why he called being Otaku a "socially acceptable form of autism" (before "autism" was de-stigmitized somewhat & interpreted by laymen as "Person who does nothing but indulge their hobbies endlessly & psychotically")

Much of the Eva fandom, to this day, does literally the opposite thing of what Shinji does in the actual original story; they choose Rei, they choose childhood, they choose annihilation & enslavement of their personhood for comfort. In Nietzschean terms they are "life-deniers"

Anyway, there's other dynamics to this but I would write a 200+ tweet thread to explain them and a lot of ya'll are going to be irked by this thread about a show from 30 years ago that many write off as meaningless and overrated already so I am going to cap it here

Epilogue: One can even read the Christ metaphor so far as to portray not NERV & SEELE as such, but specifically Shinji's father, as an Old Testament version of God who, through his Son, abolishes the degenerate application of his Word & raises human consciousness to a new level