The Curse of Eva....sigh

[Kendrix]

Note that there was never any actual in-universe phenomenon called "curse of EVA", Asuka was giving a vague metaphorical answer (much like Misato at the end of ep 23 when she speaks of "the people possessed by EVA") because she was very pissed-off at that moment.

We are given an explanation in the 4th movie: In the rebuild timeline, thethe pilots are artificial and weren't designed to age past a certain point. Rather than grow up, they become progressively less human-like, ending up like Asuka & Mari are when we see them: Only drinking liquid, frozen at a certain appearance etc. Asuka even tells Shinji at some point that he "still has to eat", implying the same would happen to him eventually.

As for what it means thematically:

It's a metaphor for feeling that you've been "left behind" by your peers in terms of accomplishment, whereas you're still held back by your past, your personal issues & the unfairness of the world. etc.

It's a common feeling nowadays, and it's something that Anno said he's experienced at the time he made the OG series (there's a quote saying he made Shinji so young cause he personally doesn't really feel more mature on the inside) though it's no longer quite the case at the time he finished the Rebuilds, he says he felt more in synch with the older characters at this point & consideed Ikuhara & Ogata the authorities on Shinji.
So in a way it's the story of how that happened.

In a way the feeling of being 'left behind' is explored in two ways: First through Shinji, who has literally been frozen in time & encounters a world where everything has gone on without him, & everyone (including Asuka, ultimately) has changed & he feels way out of his depht.

But someone who is still an actual kid can only represent this feeling partially, since part of it comes from very much being an adult, having lived through those years & experiencing the stagnation, frustration and "stuckness" and being really damn bitter over all the lost opportunities, and that's what Asuka represents. She's an actual adult but she feels 'stuck' & her appearance represents that.
She doesn't want to go to the village because she doesn't want ppl to see what became of her; She's basically a shell shocked veteran with some supernatural flourishes to emphasize how she was changed & "used up" by what she went through, but the struggle against NERV/SEELE could standin for any kind of protracted personal "struggle".

This also comes into play in her reaction to Shinji, she spent a long time resenting him & blaming him for everything & denying that she ever had any positive attachment to him (though Mari as Asuka's BFF isn't buying it) the she sees him & her first thought is 'that's not an idiot, it's a brat' - she sees him again at a point where she's more mature & experienced and at first her reaction is thinking he seems even more pathetic than she remembers him & being repulsed and seeing it as confirmation for her hate of him etc.
She may have been willing to stab him in mid fight, but leaving him to die after 4th impact when he's not resisting and just curling into a pathetic little ball is a lot harder, so, she takes some pity on him & while he gets used as a scratching post often enough her attitude actually shifts further to sort of grudgingly taking care of him ("what this guy needs is a mom") - cause, once the anger wears off she can clearly see that he's acting the way he is cause he had no experience, no clue & no guidance.

This also informs her attitude towards her own past self. It's not stated directly but one can infer especially from her conversations with Rei and Mari that she more or less thinks everything was a lie/illusion, she was stupid for ever liking him or briefly thinking things could be better during her stay at the katsuragi household. etc. but if it follows that Shinji is just a kid and fucked up for lack of guidance, then the same was true for Asuka's past self. (who at the time thought what needed was to win guys' attention - it would probably hit more if they've kept the Kaji plot.) - she's also recognizing that her past self could have used a parent or mentor, not just Shinji.

In her instrumentality sequence she quite literally becomes able to move on and "see herself as she really is" when she is able to accept her small, weepy needy baby self & the corresponding emotional parts of her.>

And I mean it's been explicitly stated in EoE that she hates Shinji cause he reminds her of the emotionally needy parts that she visciously rejects in herself.

So being able to say that back then she got attached and even "thought she liked him" (but note that she says "thought" like she knows better now & attributes it to how she was starved for care to the point that getting cooked for seemed like a big deal) is a huge step, an admission that its ok to have human needs & get attached & believe sentimental stuff.
Getting over her hate for Shinji is also getting over her hate of her own more sentimental parts.

I don't think any of it has the same meaning for Mari, but she needs to be frozen too since the in-universe logic is that it's all pilots. She is rather there as a contrast figure who has taken the situation better than Asuka, looked at it optimistically & used the extra years to read a bunch of books - which underlines that while Asuka is in a very real shitty situation (which again is phantastical so it can be a standin for the viewer's problems) part of her suffering is in how she views it & her feeling of "stuckness" and "brokenness"

[Axx°N N.]

Note that there was never any actual in-universe phenomenon called "curse of EVA", Asuka was giving a vague metaphorical answer (much like Misato at the end of ep 23 when she speaks of "the people possessed by EVA") because she was very pissed-off at that moment.

I tend to agree with this angle. But does Asuka know she's a clone? Or has she been told of the curse, and repeats the phrase believing it to be true?

To play devil's advocate for those who take the curse literally, I don't blame anyone taking it for a literalism, because when Kaworu namedrops a Book of Life we get even less to work with to decide if it's a metaphorical turn of phrase or new lore. The audience is left asking if one is metaphor, both are or neither are without much to hang a hat on.

It's a metaphor for feeling that you've been "left behind" by your peers in terms of accomplishment, whereas you're still held back by your past, your personal issues & the unfairness of the world. etc.

It's obvious that the struggles in NTE are broad enough that viewer identification with the emotions behind the specific plot beats is a given. But in terms of painting it as a metaphor, I don't think the situation actually lends so well to the general, universal things you've outlined. It's one thing to be fixated on the past, blame the present, write off the future. But it's kind of inarguable that Shinji isn't merely self-defeating and that the root of his problems are his psychology alone, quite the opposite, there's really no ambiguity for blame when you have such a distilled down to evil villain in NTEGendo. In a way it makes all the broadsides about self-mastery seem sort of contradicted and garbled. I'm not sure victims of war tend toward pop-psych self-help kind of stuff when trying to reconcile the pain inflicted on them by quite well-defined outside figures. An actual comparable situation to the plight of the pilots would be, like, the feelings and experiences of actual child soldiers. And I think it's bizarre to do a script treatment where you're saying what a general audience needs and can relate to (to accept themselves, forgive their abusers, welcome the happy) is what someone deeply traumatized and stuck in some nightmarish socio-political environment can even accomplish in the first place, unless you take the specifics as window dressing that aren't meant to function as they would logically function. The way NTE gets itself out of the environment it grounds itself in is through human will transforming reality. And maybe some can see that as a fantastic metaphor for determination against all odds. But in reality the apt metaphor would be child soldiers without any hope of overcoming their authority figures banding together, stealing some laptops, hacking into the defense information and staging some kind of coup. On a plot level, Wille can only overcome Nerv because of the existence of an oversight. The shadow cabal who theoretically controls all information let figures like Ritsuko know enough to be able to backwards engineer something that could foil their plans, which seems totally unlikely. If we're in a setting where we question the official byline, why isn't science part of that faked official byline and thus impotent when trying to wield it against the controllers of things? Because we can't let the heroes lose. In real life, the control of information and power is wielded in such a way that upward movement out of shackles isn't something you can just do because it's what would be best for your mental health.

If my comment seems willfully obtuse, I'm just saying that NTE doesn't just present this metaphor, it then metaphorically solves it, which is another thing entirely.

If we take everything in NTE as metaphor, it just doesn't translate to me. I think the crux of everything in NTE, Shinji's triggering of the impact, is done to create a believable reason for the intensity of emotion he feels that then must be overcome dramatically. But in terms of metaphor, isn't it somewhat alienating? What am I to relate to about Shinji accidentally-ing the world? Or what about Gendo? There's an attempt to universalize him, but what does it amount to in the "all is metaphor" read? I shouldn't shut myself up, or be obsessed, or refuse to move on ... and in so doing, something something worldwide genocide? You can say there's parallelism (genocide = how bad you feel about something bad you did) but I personally think the mark of a good metaphor isn't in how superlative it can possibly be (more=more good), but in how it manages to somehow accurately reflect a feeling provoked by something more mundane and everyday.

[Kendrix]

What am I to relate to about Shinji accidentally-ing the world?

Making a mistake can feel like the end of your personal world, though, & lead to burning bridges or making your immediate surroundings mad at you.

Personally I don't see it as a "punishment" for not having 100% pure intentions or anything like that;

Rather we have in Shinji someone who is very passive, doesn't take risks, always goes along etc. because he's afraid of making mistakes, hurting others & being responsible. He hides behind "others made me" because having desires is too vulnerable to disappointment. In 2.0 he breaks that pattern for a moment - & Misato celebrates him for finally "doing something for your own desires!"

But it would be a much cheaper story if the moment he gets confident everything magically works out & that's all. There was a reason to the fear, a big "or else" attached to it (spelled out for our convenience in the extra train sequence in 1.0: "If I fail everyone will hate me")
So, the "or else" comes. He fucks up, & it hurts others & his relationships with them & the guilt hits him like a ton of bricks, spends the second half of Q and the first third of TuaT coping etremly poorly with the feeling of responsibility that he fully exposed himself to when he owned his desires & acted confidently for a hot second, & just loading more guilt onto himself with the 4th impact debacle (that was much more actively his fault).

The last movie draws a parallel toward the guilt Touji feels as a Doctor when he can't save every patient. So it's much more about handling feelings of responsibility than hard objective culpability. That convo with Touji is really a key scene actually cause it's part of Shinji finally getting some positive examples whole lack he laments in 2.0 (when Gendo tells him to grow up & he's like "how??" - Gendo & Yui sure didn't teach him. And Misato & Kaji were sincerely trying but too weighed down by their own baggage.)



Though, if it doesn't work or hit the spot for you personally, then it just doesn't; That's legit & not something one can debate away.


Also I don't see it pushing a BS forgiveness narrative just because Gendo gets examined in a multidimensional way & ends up seeing his errors / isn't treated as black & white.

The closest is maybe that little speech Kensuke gives, but Asuka immediately shoots that down as naive, so it's just his opinion. & he just says "try talking to him" not that you MUST FORGIVE or else you're bad. The word "forgiveness" is not even used at any point.
It's much more like when Mandela tracked down the estranged brother of some white supremacist terrorist to try talking him down (& it worked) - someone who's already 'in-group' has a higher chance of being parsed as a real person. (which is very different from demanding discriminated black ppl should kiss the terrorist's feet, or in the context of the story, expecting, say, Asuka to wrangle Gendo, as someone who purely a victim that he doesn't have an attachment to and doesn't see as a person. )

As far as Shinji is concerned it's really a follow up to that bit in ep 26 where Shinji is asked, "Why won't you go to where your father is" & he answers "because I might be hated". Trying to understand what Gendo's really thinking means being ready to hear & able to withstand that the answer could be that Gendo in fact doesn't care and actually does hate Shinji. It's about overcoming his fear of rejection.
(in that regard a lot might also be said about Rei & Kaworu & the SDAT player as a standin for Shinji's view of himself, the "key" needed to "defeat" Gendo.)

But once you get to that point, "yes, he just hates you" is kinda the boringer answer.
What would that lead to? Just defeat him in a fight like every other shonen?
Reality is often boring or banal of course. But art is supposed to be interesting.
we all already know all there is to say about boring, banal assholes, because there isnt very much to be said.

Consider the clever recontextualization of that oft repeated flashback scene of Shinji crying at the train station which, in the context that we usually seeing has often been a shorthand for Shinji's own feelings of being worthless or unwanted or something nobody cares about, annoying noisy brat etc.

But when we see it from Gendo's PoV Shinji is drawn as this super cute precious little toddler with glittery tiny tears etc. and we're made to understand that Gendo squashed down his empathy when he left anyway & that this is where he went wrong, & in any case he was thinking something very different than what Shinji took the situation to mean about himself: He was practically a baby, of course it wasnt his fault.

Also its worth noting that Anno himself did reconcile with his own father later in life; He's allowed to depict something like his own story even if it's not going to be everyone's story.

[Konja7]

The closest is maybe that little speech Kensuke gives, but Asuka immediately shoots that down as naive, so it's just his opinion. & he just says "try talking to him" not that you MUST FORGIVE or else you're bad. The word "forgiveness" is not even used at any point.

I don't think it was "just an opinion". Asuka's response is that Shinji wouldn't be able to handle Gendo, but he can in the end.

That said, I agree that Kensuke's point wasn't exactly Shinji forgiving Gendo (especially not for his crimes). Kensuke's advice is more about Shinji finding closure in his relationship with his father, which is related to Kensuke feeling there were many things he didn't tell his own father.

[Axx°N N.]

Making a mistake can feel like the end of your personal world, though, & lead to burning bridges or making your immediate surroundings mad at you.

But in terms of an elegant metaphor, I'm not sure those scared of making mistakes relate this to some feeling that the world has been destroyed--it would make more sense to transfer into an image of someone being left behind by the world. A mistake that feels like the end of your personal world doesn't truly impact the world at large, and that's what informs any hangups you might have about the mistake and its consequences. In fact, I think a lot of what aversion to risk-taking involves psychologically has to do with feelings of not making any kind of mark on the world at large, and being ignored--not blamed.

But it would be a much cheaper story if the moment he gets confident everything magically works out...

But even though NTE adds a C, D, E & F to the equation, isn't it still the same A --> B? Even though the films take great pains to poo-poo Shinji's aversion to risk-taking, nothing he does is of greater consequence than what Gendou happens to be capable or incapable of, relative to Shinji doing basically the same thing each time but with different intent. That being so, it ends up rendering the intent itself sort of inconsequential; Shinji is nudged by Gendou the first time to go tits out for Rei, and the second time by everyone else to go tits out against Gendou, but in each case he's taking up the pretty obvious "hero has to do this" mantle. It happens to not work out the first time owing to Gendo orchestrating everything perfectly, and then it happens to work out the second time because wouldn't you know it, Gendo wasn't such a perfect maestro after all, right in time for the denouement.

But once you get to that point, "yes, he just hates you" is kinda the boringer answer.
What would that lead to? Just defeat him in a fight like every other shonen?
Reality is often boring or banal of course. But art is supposed to be interesting.
we all already know all there is to say about boring, banal assholes, because there isnt very much to be said.

The trope of "villain learns error of his ways through love" is its own cliche, though. It's not like NTE did some avant-garde plotting here.

Also its worth noting that Anno himself did reconcile with his own father later in life; He's allowed to depict something like his own story even if it's not going to be everyone's story.

I mean, I'm not against the idea of reconciliation. I'm just not sure it's conveyed or explored in a coherent way. Yes, men who have gone past the point of no return have returned. And on the other end, Hitler didn't do a 180 (nor was given the chance--but should he have?) and instead shot his own brains out when cornered. In either case, it's the way you tell the story, not the situation from a bird's eye view.

I can't presume to know how it went down with Anno & his father, but I'm left wondering if a floating tokusatsu villain who's a worse (ie, better) genocider than Hitler is really the best way to fictionalize obsession or an absent father. EoEGendo scraping by tooth and nail and then being devoured as things collapse around him is a believable, readable portrayal of a kind of person and circumstance. EoTV Gendou pulling it off is just like, sure. But a floating god-man who was near-omnipotent even before apotheosis who gets defeated because there happens to be a shred of humanity left after all ... doesn't really feel like it exists outside of fiction, and to function within fiction as anything more than simple fantasy needs something more. Your comparison to that terrorist would have to be a terrorist who has a 500 IQ and has nearly cinched his evil goals in every single way, in the least fallible manner possible, and but ends up being fallible because after over a decade of nearly annihilating the human race with inhuman determination (not to mention the resources of the entire world's manufacturing!), a phone call from a recently actualized teenager proffers some kind of way of thinking he never humored before on an off day. Any given fictionalization of Mandela getting through to the actual guy could include more fallibility and more nuance than that, I'm sure, not to mention stakes that aren't simply a pendulum swing of one guy's super-agency.

[Kendrix]

I mean calling it a reconcilliation is overstating it, there's talking and some closure but Gendo doesn't make it out alive & its not like they played patty cakes ever after.

Also, there are no super God Men in real life; All this "I'm above silly human concers" talk is just him trying to squash down his feelings, with a colorful lightshow to underline it.
It's just a fanciful continuation of what he has already been doing all along through mundane means, through his extreme utilitarianism/ hyper-pragmatism. It's an embodyment of that, a "perfected" exaggeration of that.
He says it's a big ideological plan for the sake of Utopia but what it really is is that he can't cope with shit & wants it all to burn. there are lots of ppl like that.

Freeing yourself from feelings doesn't even work in reality, so is it surprising is the metaphorical version with a lightshow doesn't work either?

It's quite explicitly spelled out:

Gendo: I couldn't possibly still be afraid of Shinji as I am now

Gendo: Am I unable to see Yui because I am weak?
Shinji: I think it's because you won't admit your weakness.

The point is not that "oh, the superman had a shred of humanity left because of the ~power of love and my little ponies~"
The point is that supermen don't exist and you cannot escape from your human weakness. - and denying it creates way more problems than accepting this.


I always think the most under-analyzed or appreciated plot in eva is the "Pragmatism vs Sentimentalism" contrast - especially since its a motiv that also appears in Nadia.

Misato & Ritsuko also wrest with it but Shinji and Gendo represent extremes, & interestingly neither extreme is really shown to be wholly right.
You need some pragmatism & to accept that sometimes you can't avoid hurting others - otherwise you get mired in inaction. Like what happens to Shinji in the Bardiel incident.
But Gendo's hyper pragmatism of just callously squashing people in the name of utopian ends doesn't work for him either.
In EoE of course Rei & Ritsuko grow sick of him & betray him, & in the Rebulds it becomes clear that he can't run from his own human weakness in the end & he's forced to realize that he shouldn't have ditched his sentiments completely (correlated throwing away the player because he "didnt need it anymore", cf how he expresses that he does't need silly keepsake in the graveyard scene), he shouldn't have ditched Shinji.

And realizing that you fucked up does not at all equate to undoing what was done - he can't get those years back. He and Yui finally take a bit of responsibilities for their machinations by taking the spear in Shinji's stead but they do have to pay & even if Shinji understands them well enough to not completely hate them, they'll always be relative strangers to him. He doesn't even cry over them.

[Axx°N N.]

It's just a fanciful continuation of what he has already been doing all along through mundane means, through his extreme utilitarianism/ hyper-pragmatism. It's an embodyment of that, a "perfected" exaggeration of that.

I guess this is the point of divergence--I don't find it to be a depiction with verity, even as a taken-to-the-nth-degree exaggeration. The most avoidant, utilitarian, hyper-pragmatic person who ever lived in actual reality had to vy with more variables, face more setbacks and make more hard decisions than Gendou. There simply isn't a comparable situation to an antagonist who has annihilated almost all of humanity and mans, as part of a merely 2 man team, the entire world sans some rebels. It makes it all the harder to get on board when so much of why this situation arose is withheld entirely--we have to take it for granted that there's some explanation for why Gendou is this virtually perfect at bad-guying but just not perfect enough that a handful of hangers-on managed to put a stake in the ground. We have to tell ourselves "well, Gendou doesn't care enough to level the village," or something, to accept that there's any civvies left at all. And that those important to his keikaku are kept alive, but kept alive in a convoluted "manning an enemy fighter unit" situation (still because he allows it to happen, though) because of totally sound logic on his part, and not the fact that otherwise there wouldn't be fight scenes. The problem with a character like Gendou is that his level of perfection isn't believable when charted by human hands--if you can see why certain decisions were made because the plot needed to work, and not because it actually does adhere to some kind of genius logic, the immersion of Gendou as ubermensch is bonked.