How Shinji resembled Gendo

[Darth Plato]

Rescuing Rei was like Gendo wanting Yui back at any cost.

This just occurred to me two days after my first watch of the rebuilds.

I don't think that parallelism was an accident. And I am appreciating more the implicit message of the original series--one of them--which is a renunciation of the really nasty literary and cultural tradition that it is OK to destroy the world (or whatever) for the sake of one person you love.

There is a tradition going back to Tristan and Isolde that when two people are really in love it trumps all other moral considerations. You might even say it goes back to Jason and the Argonauts, but I think the Argonautica is actually a little bit deeper than that.

[The Killer of Heroes]

Argonautica story was likely written with assumption that audience would likely know what happens with Jason and Medea AFTER the Golden Fleece adventure. I thought it was just b-tier Odyssey riff myself until I read Euripides' Medea, which put it in a completely different context for me. Jason really is just a guy that kinda sucks.

[Darth Plato]

It is definitely tragic that Medea betrayed her whole family for love, only to be cast aside.

Certainly Apollonius of Rhodes, being a librarian of Alexandria, knew all the various traditional legends and expected readers to see the irony. For the incident Greeks, Jason dropping her for a more propitious marriage was understandable but they also saw her as tragic.

As a person who has studied ancient Greek literature (and Latin literature too) I have to say one fascination of Japanese culture is the ways in which it resembles or parallels pre-Christian narrative mindsets. For the ancient Greeks it could be right for the Greeks to want to recover Helen and simultaneously tragic that the Trojans would suffer as a result. The "noble enemy" as a theme receded from western literature when Christianity began to take hold.

I don't want to oversimplify though or go off-topic. Evengelion is interesting in its own way because Anno incorporates themes or elements (mostly esoteric ones) from western tradition while retaining a thoroughly Japanese outlook. The notion of life beginning in Japan (from the black moon) is rooted in Shinto, as are more and more things the more I look into it. Shin evangelion where even Gendo can be redeemed fits into more Japanese or Buddhist ways of thinking than the western tendency to want evil eradicated or sent forever to Hell.

But I digress here because we were investigated Shinji's parallels to Gendo. Many people have noted Shinji's stubbornness and determination. I think insisting on saving Rei is partly an expression of that. In the rebuilds I think characters we already know are being investigated in new ways, and it is not so important that they seem to differ in detail, especially Gendo and Shinji. But I want to hear other people's opinions and ideas.