Evangelion has been an anime that's been prevalent in my life throughout various stages, and I never really gave it much time to think about the impression it's had. It's hard to define lines of that when you don't really consider what a series has done for you until... well, literal decades after watching it. I wouldn't really consider this a review of sorts because frankly I wouldn't qualify what I'm going to talk about as such. I'll be honest, I'm not as 'into the weeds' as most people are about Evangelion but a complicated past has led me to revisiting the series at multiple points in my life for various reasons. And I guess I just want to talk about that.

In the nebulous years of 2005-2006 I was an immensely unhappy teenager. My parents recently divorced, I was bullied and othered at school, and I was well into a love affair with alcohol and Vicodin that couldn't easily be broken. I was reading a lot of books, playing a lot of videogames, and I had recently been discovering anime of various shapes and forms, as if I needed another reason to be bullied in High School. My anime upbringing was pretty typical—I started watching Pokemon because I enjoyed the videogames, and I liked Dragonball Z because my family wouldn't let me watch boxing and this was my loophole to see two gentlemen beat the ever-loving shit out of each other. The era of Toonami and Adult Swim were my primary gateways into anime later on in puberty. I loved Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, and Samurai Champloo in particular, and I feel as if I'll write about Samurai Champloo on this site at some point in the future.

Back in the day, Comcast had a cable plan called On-Demand, which allowed you to stream various shows directly to your cable box and watch it on TV. This was long before the era of streams and anime torrenting took off, so this was my primary access to lesser known shows. I remember Utena being on there, alongside some fringe OVAs like DNA² and Photon the Idiot Adventures. But one of them in particular I've heard a friend bring up, and it was Neon Genesis Evangelion. I knew absolutely nothing about it, but I saw a big purple robot and figured it couldn't be a terrible way to waste some time. And I'll be super honest with all of you, I don't remember a fucking thing about it watching it. I remember Shinji being a pussy, Asuka being a bitch, and everybody despairing before somehow congratulating themselves at the end. Most of the time I watched it I had a fever, was high on vicodin, drunk, or some combination of the three. It was a semi-lucid nightmare of self-loathing imagery that was only outdone by attempting to watch Utena later. Since then, Evangelion was stuck in the recesses of my head as a show that wasn't for me; as a teenager I did enough connecting with my angst through Linkin Park, I just wanted something fun to watch.

Cut to 2011, I wasn't in a much better place mentally and I was on that incel-doomer bandwagon that 4chan was nurturing like a cancer. I was well-informed on a lot of anime at this point—I was riding the horny harem garbage train like nobody's business and I had less time for more cerebral shows. I felt as if they were beneath me because they were too high on their own shit to tell a good story. I want you to understand the level of arrogance it takes to have that you're busy watching Infinite Stratos and Code Geass and you're going “I'm too smart to like this pseudo-intellectual shit like NGE”. So I tried rewatching Evangelion for two reasons; one, because a friend of mine was obsessed with it, and two; to shut everyone up. And I came off of the show not liking it for the reasons I was informed of in my youth—nobody in the show is likable, it's a misery simulator where nobody learned anything, and the last two episodes read like a series that ran out of a budget in the home stretch. I did not like it, but I could at least vaguely understand some of the reverence the series got.

In 2017 I had a major falling-out with a close friend of mine, the one obsessed with Evangelion. It left me heartbroken and even now it's something I still can't say I'm completely over. It left me an emotional wreck for weeks and then slightly embittered for months despite the fact that I was the primary initiator of said falling-out. Evangelion was already tainted to me, but this blackened my opinion of it further. I couldn't understand why anybody would like this show about the broken human spirit and yet be utterly apathetic in the face of my depression. It bothered me for a long time. It still does, occasionally. Eventually I started working some self-improvement and growing as a person. I've tempered my mood fluctuations and learned to be more direct with my feelings in lieu of passive aggression. I've micromanaged my depression better to cause less collateral damage to my friendships. I really tried to make sure I wouldn't fuck up again like I fucked up with my close friend.

After enough healing, I had a strong urge in 2019 to... watch Evangelion again. Like a thorn in my side, I wondered if enough had changed in my life to shift my toxic opinion I've had of the show. The answer was—unsurprisingly enough—yes, yes it was. You ever look back on something and go “wow fuck, this was obvious” except it was about a show and it was more than a decade later from when you first watched it? Shinji was me the entire time and I hated the show because I hated admitting that. Broken home? Feeling used by your parents with unwanted expectations of greatness placed on you? A desire for acceptance at the sake of your own mental health? Uncomfortable horniness of somebody going through puberty at the time? Boy howdy I felt attacked the third time I watched it. Shinji was still a pussy, but also I get it. Who wouldn't be in that situation? He's just a fucking kid. Shinji and Asuka and even his fuck-up of a guardian Misato were all sympathetic people in one way or another, all lacking something to make them whole. And it took me over a decade to accept that a protagonist doesn't have to be likable to be written well. The last two episodes of the series were perfect because it was never about the stupid giant robots, it was about a kid's yearning for self-love and acceptance. And then End of Evangelion fucked that all up in the best way possible and continued the torrent of despair that most of these losers set out upon themselves in the first place.

Now it's 2023, and I've started the Rebuild movies. I want to see the deviations between the series and I want the happy ending. Maybe I'll have more insightful thoughts about the Rebuild movies when I finish them, but again it was never about that was it? It was about what I went through with this series throughout my life and how it's always been there at vaguely pivotal moments in my life. I just, I just gotta close the loop on this and see where it takes me, and that's the only insight I could offer from watching these movies.