Neon Genesis Evangelion: Shinji Ikari and Depression

I recently watched “Neon Genesis Evangelion” on Netflix, in 2019. I am a 23 year old American male suffering from depression who has considered suicide recently. I’ve had bouts of Hikikomori, the act of becoming a social recluse for six months at a time or more in Japanese culture.

It feels like this series was aimed at a person like me. The only way it could be more-so is if I was ten years younger and Japanese.

But I walk away from the experience with the feeling that I was better off not watching it. Because it does nothing to satisfy my sadness or my longing for solutions to my problems. Instead it shoves my issues to the forefront of my mind, with nothing to say about it other than it exists.

I feel literally zero satisfaction watching the end of the television series, and the movie made after. I was physically uncomfortable watching the last two episodes of the television series, because it was so ham-fisted and said almost nothing about the characters, the plot, or the stakes of the series that we didn’t already know at that point.

Shinji Ikari’s “release” from his depression was unearned. It was unrealistic. It was like a parody of how actually depressed people view it. People don’t psychoanalyze themselves into happiness; that’s literally a narrative simplification of life and human struggle. Shinji could have had real events take place in his life to bring him to that point, to make him realize the same thing in a way that would have been believable.

Instead we are given what we received; a product of budget cuts and limitation of medium. This series started airing in Japan in October 1995. I was born October 25th, 1995. The fact that I’m so close to the intended audience and also tied to the airing of the show gives me a weird sense of fate or destiny. I’ve always heard about it, but never bothered to watch until it showed up on Netflix.

At this particular point in my life, I’ve cut myself off from family and friends, because I don’t know how to connect with them at this point. I feel like the fact that no one really reaches out to me means that no one really cares about me. There’s the occasional exception, but unless I first reach out to someone else, they don’t feel the need or want to reach out to me. That makes me feel more lonely than anything else I’ve ever experienced. The fact that if I just disappeared one day wouldn’t even make a ripple in the world, it haunts me every day of my life.

In a lot of ways, this is exactly how Shinji Ikari feels, being alienated from his father and losing his mother, finding meaning in life through piloting the EVA’s and receiving praise through it. Otherwise he is Hikikomori, the lost generation, similar to me. I wouldn’t consider myself an otaku, I’ve only watched a couple of animes in my life, and not nearly as much television as the average person in my life-experience.

So maybe I’m not the intended audience; maybe binge-watching the series start to end over the course of a week isn’t the intended experience. Maybe this is the greatest anime ever, as so many people insist, saying it’s groundbreaking and amazing for it’s time. But if the series wants to focus so heavily on the human characters instead of the rest of the plot they developed, I think it’s fair enough to criticize those human characters.

Shinji is 100% fine and logical as a character, until the last two episodes. He completely becomes a plot contrivance instead of a human being. He’s been depressed, and conflicted, and damaged by his experience as an EVA pilot, and continually refuses to go forward, but eventually does anyway with little explanation. Usually it was because he was the only final hope of humanity, fighting off angels to spare humanity. And even in the End of Evangelion, he knows that Asuka is fighting to the death and still seems hopelessly defeated, instead of saving her like he knew he could. The series tells us repeatedly he loved her but was too afraid to reach out, and his reaction upon seeing the death of her EVA confirms this, but he still had to be dragged to his EVA by his dying commanding officer.

Which one could argue is typical behavior from someone who is depressed, and hates themself. They continuously engage in self-destructive behavior because they hate themselves and secretly desire their own end. But the last two episodes of the television series undid all of this, didn’t it? Shinji Ikari broke his depression (through plot contrivance) through the Human Instrumentality Project. If it didn’t, what was ultimately the point of those episodes? Why was the End of Evangelion titled Episode 25 and 26?

One explanation would be that originally, the writers meant episode 25 and 26 to be the original episodes 23 and 24, and that End of Evangelion was an alternative ending. But there’s literally zero explanation about that in the show itself; leading the audience to inevitable confusion about the conclusion.

At the end of the day, after reading several wikipedia articles and reading criticisms and defenses of the series online, here’s my opinion.

The creator of the series wanted to deconstruct the mecha genre, and had the opportunity to do so with an open-ended contract with TV-Tokyo. Halfway through the series, it was rewritten to focus more on the characters as the creator of the show became more obsessed with depressive psychology and the science behind it, experiencing his own depression while doing so.

What follows is basically a narrative circle-jerk of depressed pseudo-psycho nonsense. The entire idea of humanity joining together as one consciousness as a way to defeat sadness is the primary piece of evidence I’ll lay out here; why do we assume pain and sadness will disappear just because humanity joins as one consciousness?

We’re simply told that this joining of consciousness will lead to the ending of all the sadness in the world, but there’s no explanation as to why. The show tries to tell us that sadness is just our failure to effectively communicate with each other, and if there was no barrier of communication, every single human soul would effortlessly love one another. But it doesn’t have the time or the budget to flesh out this idea, and if you aren’t convinced by simply being told this is so, you probably won’t connect with or understand the ending or what it’s trying to convey (much like I feel).

In the end, Shinji rejects this idea because he realizes that if you can’t experience pain, you aren’t really living; you’re not really existing as a human being should. You can’t appreciate joy without pain. Individualism is what makes humanity unique. Which in itself is rational, but if Shinji was super depressed, why wouldn’t he choose the painless path?

Who can make the argument that Shinji was a super depressed, tragic protagonist if in the end he chooses the harder, more depressing path? Isn’t the whole point of depression that the depressed individual would choose lack of pain over pain any day of the week? Isn’t that why we are suicidal in the first place? We seek an end to the pain.

And Shinji still acts like this pain has overtaken him throughout the entirety of End of Evangelion. If he was happy instead, if he ran to his EVA to save Asuka, the ending we received would be infinitely more believable. Instead this anime tells us that it cares more about smelling it’s sad farts and revelling in nonsensical religious imagery (to attract a wider, international audience and grow the otaku fanbase[and thus the popularity and profitability of the show and anime as a whole, which at the time was experiencing a dramatic decline due to an economic slump]) rather than give the audience an ending that actually makes fucking sense. They attempted the ending three different times and seemingly satisfied no one with each try.

The author of the anime checked himself into a mental facility after receiving death threats from his fans about the ending to the television series. That should tell you everything you need to know about this. The person who made Neon Genesis Evangelion was in a very fragile state of mind when making this; perhaps the reason why Shinji ultimately flipped his entire character at the end was a way for him to tell himself that he shouldn’t kill himself; that the path at the end of the day was always life and never taking one’s life.

The only problem with that, is that Shinji Ikari did not earn that ending for himself. The writer forced it into the series as a way to ease his own mental faculties as well as push that ‘positive’ message to the rest of the world and his fans, who were probably suffering similarly.

And the only problem I have with that, is that it reinforces this idea that someone suffering from depression is meant to eventually ‘snap out of it’ one day, have a mental epiphany and become happy again through sheer force of will. That’s a very childish way of looking at depression, it’s not realistic nor is it healthy. It supersedes that all depressed people are just suffering from a lack of mental framing; if they could just view the world in a certain way, they wouldn’t be sad anymore. That’s not what depression is, that’s not how it works, that’s not how any of this works. And in a very strange and sad way, I think the narrative of the show was framed in that way to lift a negative mental burden off of the person writing it.

With my own experience feeling those emotions, as someone who considers themselves a writer, I could see myself making the same exact mistake if I was in charge of a television show that routinely had time and budget restraints (which Neon Genesis Evangelion certainly had).

But that doesn’t explain the cult following the anime has. It doesn’t explain the billions of yen the show and movie pulled in, in a time of economic downturn and lack of interest in anime. There has to be some kind of cultural disconnect here that I can’t appreciate, because as well animated the show was for its time, there’s nothing to account for the way depression was bungled in this show (when it was the central theme for christ sakes). Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m projecting too much of my own experiences into the show.

In all of my research into the show, I haven’t seen a single reaction similar to the one I just laid out. In fact I see the opposite; people say this show helped them through dark times in their lives and helped them with their depression. Maybe this show failing to resonate with me says more about me than it does the show.

Maybe I’m just a nihilistic nincompoop.