ObsessiveMathsFreak wrote:Going back a little, when Shinji encounters Rei at the hospital in #02, the corridor is deeply desaturated, not unlike the memory images frequently seen in the show
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This instance is important as it reoccurs in the hospital again, most noticably in #16 during Rei's "That's good for you" line, an exact repeat of Yui's words earlier. Shinji is again shocked by this particular instance.
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Going Silhoette = Yui by default is probably going too far - Silhuoettes can simply be dramatic, or make for a "timed reveal" - ioe, you show something, have the viewer guess/create tension, and then show what it is.
EVERYTHING is the hospital is desaturated (Even Asuka, on the few times we see her there in eps 16 and 19) so I doubt the scenes where Rei is have any particular meaning; It's just an easthetic choice the made, perhaps to accentuate the dream-like surreality of waking up in such a place after lovecraftian experiences like being in a Berserking EVA; it's probably related more to the hospital than Rei.
Rei being turned away a lot probably indicates "distance" beyond anything else - that, and Rei is kind of unaware of the social convention of looking at people when you speak to them.
There's never any image of Yui facing away, or Rei appearing "faceless" - and why would Yui ever face away from anyone like that? She's a bold, fearless mad scientist, not a socially inept schoolgirl.
The ep 02 example is an obvious callback to Rei getting wheeled past Shinji in ep 01 - except now she's looking at him, because he went and picked her off the floor.
Before, she stared past him, because he didn't mean anything to her yet - that alone should put a nail through that "residue of Yui" theory - wouldn't her prized crotchfruit be the first thing Yui would react to?
That's not even a question. She moves EVA 01's hand's to protect him from those iron bars in the very same scene.
Also, Rei only
looks like Yui. We know her soul came from somewhere else, and we know just where Yui currently is. She may have some of her genetic characteristics like little gestures like how she holds things, and she obviously inherited her intelligence and talent for biology, and Rei's future plans, if she actually had the freedom to make some, would probably look somewhat like Yui's (Do something with teh scientific talent, or maybe babies), but the whole point of Rei is that she's a person of her own with experiences and feelings of her own, regardless of whatever macabre ingredients she was created from.
They have completely different personalities. Yui is a highly ambitious, calculating mastermind with unshakeable serenitym, something of a "perfect prodigy", who never confided all her secrets to anyone. And she was hardly a better parent than Gendo. She, too, abandoned him for what she thought was his own good, and planned to make him a child soldier *from the beginning*, while Gendo did it as a last-resort kind of thing. (His series incarnation, at least; Rebuild Gendo's a different story, but even here, Yui was in on the plan.)
She may even have been perfectly justified in sacrificing parenting her son for a better chance to work for the better of humanity's future, but that doesn't change that she did sacrifice her role as a mother; The Ikaris hardly did any parenting at all. Sure, she tries to protect him once or twice, but so did Gendo, in equally traumatizing ways.
Acting in a manner that can as much as be mistaken for good parenting should make her LESS Yui-like, not more. If you still insist that Rei is merely the sum of her parts, blame anything resembling good parenting on Lillith.
Misato, for all her faults and failings, trumps Yui and Gendo at parenting at any given day.
Rei, by contrast, is "a bitterly unhappy young girl with little sense of presence", quiet and socially inexperienced, but still rather caring, loyal and devoted, if she wants to be. She has way more in common with Gendo (who raised her after all) than she does with Yui.
Her relationship with Shinji is a completely different one, that between two lonely teenagers who are stuck in similar hard situations and were able to exchange a little of meaningful wamth in a living hell - A parent-child bond in an unequal, symbiotic thing - one's the parent, one's the child.
Shinji cares for or gets protective about Rei just as often as she does about him.
Parents do not want to "become one" with their children - they want them to leave the nest and produce grandkids. That embrace that manifested in that armisael tentacle and is identified by Rei as the work of her heart does not look motherly at all... Even the damn proposal already introduces her as "learned about feelings when she falls in love".
Why is Shinji's reaction to the revelation utter shock?
Because her having anything to do with his freakin mom doesn't fit his idea or relationship with her at all. He doesn't go, "Oh, that's why I always fenlt so comfortable around her" and start calling her "Mommy" or anything.
Of course, it makes sense that he would faintly associate someone acting maternal towards him (Misato) with his actual mother, or take some half-concious notice of Yui's and Rei's obvious physical similarities, but that's really all there is to it, those are the only common denominators.
You have to consider the kind of image Shinji has of Yui - He grew up hearing he was the son of a murderer, that he's got a bit of a muderer in him, and he had this distant father he felt rejected by, and that absent mother who was, in a way, a complete blank slate he could project things into. She wasn't there, what little memories he has of her probably show her doing regular mom things like cleaning, because these are the bits that Shinji would be present for, so it was easy to imagine this perfect loving mother as a sort of survival mechanism.
Shinji has this idea that he had this caring mom who actually loved him, untill bad, bad Gendo came and took her away, and probably never loved her or Shinji to begin with. A black and white view constructed by a confused toddler. He gets to reevaluate Gendo soon enough, but Yui is kind of not present to be reevaluated, so Shinji kinda keeps that idealized view of her, depending on continuity, for good (EoE has no relevant calling-out there, not that he's in any state to do so), untill episode 25 ("Why do I always need to fight? Tell me why! MOTHER!"...they seem to part on good terms in 26, but he also ends up thanking Gendo, presumably because intstrumentality let him see their intentions, and they are, after all, only humans who thought they were doing the best for both their kid and humanity, in their own twisted ways. It's not like Shinji's in any position to look down on them.) or Q ("Father... Mother... Misato-san... [...] I can't trust [any of them] anymore!") but the truth is that Yui's a fairly grey, multilayed figure (so are Misato, Asuka and Rei) and more of an active mastermind than a victim of Gendo's or anything like that. Both the idealized mother figure from his memories and the frightening EVa 01 are the same thing. Just like the woman who wanted Kaji to fuck her real hard in these memories he witnessed and the lady trying to parent him a bit are the same people. Or like Asuka also cries for her mommy at times. Or like Rei did come from the same place as those scary desintegrating clone things. Same lesson, ultimately.
The conclusion he reaches is that they're still the people he really cared about, and that he wants tzo be with them again, so he undoes Instrumentality. Yeah.
An aspect of Shinji that's more pronounced in the manga, but still present in the manga is that he probably reacts so much to his parents being badmouthed because he doesn't know enough about them to confidently defend them; He's always doubting Gendo himself.
To further contribute to the potif-spotting, I'd like to mention, however, that the Yui Silhouette Shinji sees in ep 16
also touches his cheek - I always thought the EoE thing was a callback to
that. the face-patting is just... yeah, babies do that.
The silhouette we see here has long wavy hair and pronounces curves (in contrast to Yui's short, straight, more voluminous hair and her "long/elegant/elvish" figure .) - Shinji just identified something, be it a smell or a "presence" or something, as "Mommy" - the image he sees is probably his brain constructing a "generic female silhouette", because that's what mommies look like, don't they? You could say that he's filling in the bits he can't remember with Misato.
Or when he finally picks up that this weird smell inside EVA 01 is, in fact, Yui. His first guess is someone he associates with "maternal", (like Yui), namely, Misato, the next one is someone whose smell is probably actually similar to Yui's, but still distinguishable (Rei), and then he hits upon the solution. ("Mommy! It's you!")
Sirona wrote:You know, I find this theory highly satisfying.
The two different images of Gendo... are these both from Rei's POV? Are either of them potentially from Yui's POV?
Yui's Pov? With the
beard? I doubt it. The conspicous lack of glasses suggests that the second one is a literal memory from when he saved her after the failed activation experiment, or, at least, evoking it (if this is, in fact, her transistion guide) and the second one... that's just how Rei sees him, as her guardian/surrogate father, and a person who cares for her (in the context of that scene, she just noticed that someone else does, too.) He often smiles when conversing with her (see ep 5, and 15)
ObsessiveMathsFreak wrote:I wasn't going to say anything about this, but I also feel that this type of imagery is very close to my own earliest memories. The desaturated nature of the images in particular, their lack of edge focus in some cases, the featureless faces, and to some extent the high contrast remind me very much of my earliest memories. It would be interesting to find out if early memories are like this for everyone.
No, no, Anno depicted that correctly here. Mine are similar.
In my personal earliest memory, I have more substantial perceptions of my mom's dress and her hair than her face. I always took the desaturation as sunlight or something...
Maybe it's something about how the brain archieves images, or learns to do so.
They're also always image-images, images reconstructed from words come later. So maybe that's why they get "filled out"/"completed" less than things stored earlier, appearing whited-out at the edges, because our brains mostly store outlines/edge detection, and a baby would have less of a concept of where edges should be that separate some things from others. Dunno. Not a neurologist or psychologist.
I did read somewhere that our brains do use edge detection, though.
