Blockio wrote:Considering that she had one of the biggest moments of glory in the entire movie, sacrificing her own life to thwart Gendo's plan one and for all I'd say that's quite a bit more than "the writing handing her a win". We are talking about the impact and prominence of her actions on the story here, and she sure as hell had both of that.
By handing her a win I'm mostly talking about the exposition that surrounds how she gets the win. In a vacuum, sure, she made some tough calls and sacrifices herself. But it's the sequence of events and how little it feels like her struggle matters that robs it of dramatic vitality. She stands around during Gendo's exposition, and his talking goes on for so long that we can rest certain that Misato will walk out of the situation. Even when she gets shot, the storytelling beats are signaling very heavily (and some have said comically) how dramatic the situation is, but I never actually expected Misato to not walk away from the situation, because it starts resolving itself before you can take it seriously or with gravity. Then she puts a bandana on her wound and walks off and it's fine. By the time she sacrifices herself, even more exposition reveals that, because of technobabble, there's a macguffin she can craft and deliver to Shinji, but there's no real feeling of "will this even work, isn't this absurd?" and instead everyone just completely straight-faced knows it will work, because the writing decides it will work, so the characters, almost like they're actually the writers, have no logical reason for doubt. They deliver a magic spear through the iris of an imaginary being as if it's punching in a time card. There's no stakes to it and Misato doesn't act like a believable human being. Compare it to the intensity of the many times she previously did something near-impossible, and how full of mounting doubt, confidence in the face of it, and the huge relief that resulted, in a dramatic sense. There just wasn't any of that there for me.
Someone compared it to WWII. But WWII, you know, had its many pyrrhic victories and realistic compromises. Shin doesn't; no one is negatively affected by what happens in a lasting way, everything gets reset, and the writing feels like it doesn't care that it's already anticipating that, even in its supposedly grim moments. Misato was rendered non-human for me as of Q, and Shin's attempts to inject humanity into her again just pushes her over a ledge back into inhumanity. It's not just her coldness or lack of screentime, it's really a combination and overlapping of everything.
