Shinji, from Evangelion.
He’s 14. His mum is dead. His dad is a piece of shit and a manipulative bastard, who sees him as nothing but a pawn. “Emotionally traumatised” doesn’t even start to describe him. He’s pressured to pilot a mecha and if he fucks things up people will die, he knows that they will die, and that it’ll be his fault.
And yet people expect him to be assertive or to not have meltdowns? Come the fucking on.
Imagine if nerv had invested some of its money in the mental health of its employees. I like to think many issues could have been solved by hiring a few therapists.
I really thought the idea was, “You like mecha? You like kids piloting mecha? This is how it’d go down.” I loved it so much. Shinji’s a broken, abused shell child. He lives with a broken human who drowns her sorrows in drink. His father is just evil. He’d have to be to let his kid pilot the mecha.
The only real father figure we ever see for shinji is a spy. Who gets killed. He’s in love with a girl that hates him. Because he’s broken. But he has no one else. Except those friends at school who I think they take away. Don’t remember. And that angel who he has to kill or something. Damn, it’s been like 25 years. I have no idea what happened. But in my memory it’s terrible. Wonderful stuff.
I think the biggest problem that people have with NGE is that it just isn’t your typical shounen anime. All of the characters behave in a way because of their past experiences. Shinji being abandoned by his father, witnessing his mother’s death without actually understanding or realising it, asuka being neglected by her mother and Rei being a clone. And all of them in their teens, in a broken world getting told to fight and probably die or humanity is doomed.
With how saturated anime are with flawed main characters that then use that flaw to their advantage to overcome their enemy, NGE just doesn’t do that.
I think that viewers just expect this hero story when they watch it.
I mean. I had a similar impression when I first watched it a long long time ago and thought that shinji was a wuss. But that was after I watched the typical shounen, DB, DBZ, Naruto and bleach. Not to mention that I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. Only later after watching it a second time and digging into the background a bit, shinjis Oedipus complex, asukas hedgehog dilemma and the general motivation of each of the characters it made a lot more sense. Including the context of their situation made me appreciate the storytelling a lot more because it put everything into perspective.
Didn’t realize he was hated? He is a fucked up little weirdo but so is everyone in that show. Man, I might need to rewatch, been way too long.
