I'm too embarrassed by my past antics to look at that Gender page again, but if I recall the spurious reasoning for Ramiel being a girl was the quality of the singing voice when it first shows up. This was pre-1.0, and had
Jo been available it would have only bolstered this "argument", since Ramiel's singing sound effects are joined by some of the most ear-piercingly womanly screaming you ever did hear. They make it even more girly by having Ramiel bleed all over the countryside
while screaming like a woman. After its most private part is punctured, no less...
The Angel list is mostly just for fun, though there are some semi-serious ideas that might have (hard to remember) originally motivated it. I do think that the Angels, being born as humans*, are intrinsically male or female. Their souls also lived prior lives, during which we can probably assume by default they were male or female; and though they probably don't remember these lives in any conscious way, their chosen physical forms are so complicated that I think it's likely some unconscious influence from their past selves is responsible. The Angels are very secretive, so aside from Israfel (who has a yin yang for a face when unified -- not exactly subtle) there's no way to be sure, and it doesn't really "matter" anyway. But I still find it fun to think about, as a kind of thought exercise in how our primitive human traits might be transformed via transhumanism (of which the Angels represent a type).
[* It's hard to be human in any meaningful way without, on a species-wide level, the existence of sexual reproduction and the biological binary that is an emergent property of this. We can speculate about it to our heart's delight but we most certainly do not live in an asexual utopia. If we did, we would be a very different type of being than what we are now.]
The way in which this is relevant to NGE beyond the mere realm of "Stop fanwanking and go write your weird original fiction already, Reichu!" was covered by Prim-kun. The Angels are used to abstractly represent aspects of ourselves, and sex being one of those aspects we shouldn't be too surprised to see it represented.
This gets especially ... "interesting" with some of the rape imagery in the show. The violation perpetuated upon Asuka and Rei is performed by Angels that communicate using Asuka and Rei's own forms, so we have no point of reference for Arael and Armisael other than this assumed female one. While plot-wise, the Angels are an invasive Other, and stereotypically "male-rapey" in that respect, they also represent on one level repressed parts of the pilots' identities, which makes them anything but an Other. "I am the part of you that you've been ignoring, and I'm going to make you acknowledge me no matter how much force is needed".
Rape is used in a very different context in episode 19, with Zeruel. The episode is called "A Man's Fight", which I assume is referring to the emotional battle between Shinji and his father, but ironically the climactic battle is anything but a man's fight. Instead, it can be thought of as staging the primordial battle between male and female forces, with the female emerging victorious because this is
Eva and all. The female side of the equation is Eva-01, obviously. Shinji is subsumed into her and rendered insignificant just before the battle, leaving Zeruel as the male side. Zeruel is easily perceived as a masculine force, in that he looks like a slab of roided-up meat that effortlessly breaks through every obstacle in his way, the ultimate penetrator. He can be perceived as having a personality, even, which I would place as a well-tempered sense of cool and confidence that masks more childish rage and fear. His response to encountering Lilin is to blow them away point blank with truly excessive amounts of force. And when Eva-01 catches him off guard and manages to beat him up for a while? He's not content with just incapacitating her and moving on. Zeruel wants to make her suffer. His slow, methodical destruction of her core is likened to rape in the script, and if you watch the scene with this in mind it's hard to ever see it the same way ever again. It also makes everything that happens afterward take on a very different tone. In essence, Eva-01's liberation can be read as a rape revenge fantasy, which is honestly delightful considering how much it drips with Freudian perversion. (She's squatting over his body taking his organ of power into herself. You do the math.)
I'm not sure where Shamshel fits into things. (It's really quite a brilliant finding and I'm jealous that I didn't make it myself...
) I remember the explanation offered under the assumption that Shamshel is a giant dick, which is that Shamshel-dick and Shinji stabbing it psychoanalytically embodies Shinji's rage against his dad, or something. Shinji stabbing a big wiggly female reproductive system that can be superficially mistaken for a dick (because, let's face it, it's pretty difficult for a disembodied vagina to NOT be shaped like a phallus) is much more rich and convoluted. Some parts of the tumblrsphere would probably say that it reinforces Shinji's misogyny, but hopefully nobody here actually buys into that argument. In context, maybe it represents Shinji's momentary and foolish rejection of female authority. Of
course he would get stabbed by oviducts for his trouble. This still feels incomplete. I need to think about it.
AdamMalkovitch wrote:On the topic of Seed, Evangelion, and Angel genders, I've always interpreted all of them as female. (...) And since Anno loves his biology, I don't think it's too far fetched for this to have been his initial idea, and then intentionally left pseudo ambiguous.
The Angels aren't progenitor entities, so I don't think expectations of femininity need to be made of them. They're a race of their own, so they can represent both sexes, in their own weird way. In terms of the Seeds and Evas, the show's weird emphasis on female power -- the ability to gestate and birthe effectively treated as one of the most powerful forces in the universe, and one that powerful men are violently vying to control, ultimately to no avail -- feels like something that Anno arrived at accidentally. In the early production materials, Adam is very specifically referenced as a male, which makes sense given the name and all; but those early materials are also quite different, with no Lilith in sight and Evas that are more like organic-looking robots than organics disguised as robots. The path to the final product took its own unique turns, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Blockio wrote:I see most angels as male, because of their goal to penetrate central dogma and lol sexual imagery
Keep in mind that this is the sort of show where no less than three of its central female characters are aggressively phallic. NGE seems to take a certain joy in acknowledging the sex/gender binary (I mean, some of the relevant archetypes
are pretty cool -- the All-Creating, All-Destroying Mother Goddess, anyone?) and then knocking it over and tapdancing on its corpse. Case in point is Kaworu, who outwardly looks like a boy and effortlessly fools Shinji and most of the audience, but inwardly is, SIGH, yet another mother, since Shinji can't help but amass a collection of the damned things.