ChrisTamv wrote:Maya's feelings towards Ritsuko are still unrequited, in fact they're more overt than normal in the last movie. She literally calls her "XO Senpai" every time she refers to her.
For Maya to be calling Ritsuko "Hugs & Kisses Senpai" every time she refers to her would mean she's an out lesbian in NTE, a far more "inclusive" role for an outright lgbt character than ever before.
It's too bad that's not what XO means here. It means "executive officer."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/executive_officerNoun
executive officer (plural executive officers)
(military) second in command of a military unit or ship
Usage notes
On a US Navy ship, one might say "XO, you have the Con." which means "Executive Officer, you have control of the ship."
Synonyms(abbreviation): XOChrisTamv wrote:I mean, if something so secondary made such a difference for you then you'll be happy to hear that not much has changed compared to NGE in this regard.
I don't view it as secondary at all. To include any open acknowledgment of the existence of an lgbt character is a pretty huge thing to such viewers, which NTE doesn't feature. What it does have is the typical merch-adjacent suggestive pairings of Shinji/Kaworu and Asuka/Mari that don't have the level of certainty that Shinji & Asuka does when Asuka confesses her feelings openly.
It's also not secondary to me when you consider it along with everything else; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I've already outlined a lot of my perception of the heteronormativity on the last page, but I'll add in Rei. Previously her character felt more open in that I felt anyone could identify with her and her conflicts. When she rebels against Gendo, this is an act that in being specific becomes universal; it's her reclaiming her selfhood. And while I understand that the mother/child imagery in NTE, the bond she gains for Tsubame and the moment when she looks at the mother cat nursing kittens, tie into her existence as connected to the birth mother to humanity ... at the same time, this connection isn't really explored or even mentioned beyond associations one has to revelations from the original material. What we do have is Rei framed as encapsulating a "strange" person, a character who has always been typified as feeling "other," or to use the non-lgbt connotation of it, "queer," assimilated and welcomed into the village ... by way of comments on how she would be perfect marriage material, and she clearly ends up taking to this integration without any caveat, and one doesn't have to question very hard if she would eventually desire motherhood.
In my view, this is a neutering of her character in this context, because it suggests (at least in her case) that the "being apart from" that characterizes her can only be resolved through adherence to social and biological norms.
We have Kensuke, who is apparently childless, but we don't have anything openly non-normative going on in the village, or at least nothing outright demonstrated as compared to the primacy of the Toji & Hikari coupling, Rei's assimilation, and the overall focus on family reunification (or in Misato's case, disunification). Anything not relating to the later seems pretty much hush-hush or unimportant.
So, yes, compared to every previous installment, it all adds up to being far harder than usual to read lgbt meanings. The positions of the characters don't leave much room. Shinji is around Mari, Asuka has been sent to Kensuke, Kensuke's only other person he's around much is Asuka, and Kaworu and Rei are hanging out for some reason.
EDIT: wording