Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby Ghdust » Sun Jul 14, 2019 9:35 am

She gets:

1. Access to godlike power

2. The ability to monitor her son without actually having to look after him constantly

3. Time away from her needy husband

Sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

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Re: Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby shinryujimikihiko » Sun Jul 14, 2019 7:29 pm

Yui is a profoundly bent megalomaniac who is arguably sicker than Gendo. I doubt she cares for any of the particular reasons you cited, but I would not be surprised if she is getting something out of it.

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Re: Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby Reichu » Sun Jul 14, 2019 7:49 pm

A megalomaniac who pointedly leaves Earth at the moment she reaches the absolute height of her power? Let me guess, it's because she's already gotten bored with us and wants to go play God over all sapient life in the universe. She should team up with the Kyubey so she can maximize the misery she causes to annoying teenagers everywhere.
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Re: Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby Kendrix » Sun Jul 14, 2019 9:01 pm

she willingly went in there so clearly she must think that the benefits outweigh the costs, which doesn't mean that she necessarily loves every part of it.

You could probably draw a paralel to how Gendo adamified himself but she was kinda more sucessful

One wonders if she could leave as easily as Shinji did in ep 21 if she actually wanted to. Unlike, say, Kyoko she's in there in one piece

Also merging with the EVa might've made her perception of time more like an Angels'.
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Re: Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby kuribo-04 » Mon Jul 15, 2019 9:12 pm

There is this tendency to paint every character in Eva as evil that I don't really understand.
I don't think Yui enjoys it, and I think she did it for the good of Humanity (you can disagree about the method).
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Re: Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby Sgt. Griff » Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:16 am

It's all very well and good to say something's "for the good of humanity", but who gets to decide that? Her taking it upon herself to destroy humanity (as we know it) based on this righteousness is enough for me to cast certain aspersions her way.

To answer the topic,the effects of solitary confinement are well documented. I recall lines from EoE where she says "it won't be easy" re staying in Unit 01 for all eternity, so I imagine she's silently going mad while drifting through the vacuum of space.
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Re: Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby Reichu » Tue Jul 16, 2019 6:43 am

The people who get to decide what's for the good of humanity are the ones who decide to act regardless of the aspersions that will certainly be cast in their direction. Humanity collectively is incapable of acting in its own benefit. Part of the reason we're in such a mess right now is because it's easier to sit on our butts and judge people who try to make the world a better place than be the ones to actually enact necessary changes ourselves.

Yui isn't the hero we deserve, but she's the hero we need.
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Re: Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby CyberXIII » Tue Jul 16, 2019 7:03 am

What's ironic about all this is if NGE2 is correct, Yui's not going to like much of anything in a little longer. S2 Engines play merry hell with memories and brains, especially Lilith-based brains. She's going to end up a giant purple vegetable before long.

And it serves her right.
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Re: Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby Reichu » Tue Jul 16, 2019 7:07 am

The game very specifically says that Kaworu's soul had eaten TOO MUCH of the Fruit of Life. Nobody is in any position to say what the hell that even means, let alone try to apply it to some other character purely out of maliciousness.
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Re: Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby Kendrix » Wed Jul 17, 2019 7:54 pm

Also wasn't that kinda symbolic with how he got caught up in the enjoyments of life and did not think back of his previous existence?
It's all very vague anyways.


I'd wager that if she maintained herself for the last years shes not flickering out anytime soon.

Again one wonders how much merging with EVA 01 made her perception/experience more 'angel like' and thus presumably more suited to such an existence, She might miss human stuff but probably wouldn't go nuts in ways characteristic of human brains, it would ultimately depend on how souls are really defined in the EVA-verse.

But I don't think she was wholly taking one for the team there like she wanted to go to space. I mean being immortal, going to space and leaving behind some proof of existence do all have their merit/advantages. I mean id jump at that opportunity, but I would probably not have kids (or wait till they are twenty) if I was planning on going off-planet.
But it's not like grabbing someone else's kid for the plan would have been morally superior and there's nothing to suggest that they could have done this without anyone piloting EVA, at least not once SEELE unleashed Second Impact.
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Re: Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby Sgt. Griff » Thu Jul 18, 2019 10:58 pm

View Original PostReichu wrote:Yui isn't the hero we deserve, but she's the hero we need. etc


A brief glimpse at the world post 3i I would think makes it fairly clear that she is, at least in the outcome of her actions, hardly a hero to anyone. Whether an individual judges morality based on outcome or intention is entirely up to them so I can hardly decide for anyone whether she was moral, because based on the evidence we have at hand she certainly seemed to have good intentions. I for one can hardly ignore the outcome.

It was probably incorrect to say her flaw was thinking she knew what was best for the world, indeed everyone probably thinks that. Perhaps her immorality stems from the way in which she conducted herself so her goals could be realised? It seems she either failed to consult or consider the impact on others in any meaningful way, or she interpreted her consultation and consideration in a skewed manner.

The following is a very personal thought, I would welcome and expect criticism. The impact of an individual's unmitigated action is not a new idea to me, and it seems in my experience to be known in some form to everyone I've met. It lies (among other things) at the heart of democracies, concepts of consent, consultation and individualism, which acknowledge that one person alone should not have the absolute power to realise their will over others. Certainly democracies, consent and other liberal ideas like private ownership have their issues when it comes to regulating a country or (in Yui's case) moving an entire species into a (dubiously, if the message of the show is anything to go off) higher plane of existence, but (and I acknowledge that reasoning counter factually isn't the most rock solid thing to do) I would not want to live in a world where these concepts are demolished in the pursuit of some righteous end.

This may be very "west"-centric, and I acknowledge NGE is a Japanese work, but there is little in me that can accept Yui as being a hero either in the actual outcome of her plan or the process of executing said plan.

Immortality seems like a bore. I hope it was worth it for her.
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Re: Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby Kendrix » Sat Jul 20, 2019 11:52 am

I really don't like this idea that that's a "western" standpoint
historic/political tangent  SPOILER: Show
Not only does it turn a very basic idea ("how about everybody gets to impact the decisions?") into something parochial and opinionated attached to a big unrelated host of cultural material (ie. that to agree with it is to agree with imperialism), it also disregards the existence of protodemocratic structures in places like Botswana or the Iroquois confederacy (Even within Europe proper, the scandinavians were the least greek-influenced but for much of history the most proto-democratic overall - and lets not forget that we only have the greek writings because of the islamic empires. ) - indeed there's lots of hunter-gathering societies that are pretty egalitarian simply because that's easier with a smaller-scale society. No need to run a campaign or organize a vote; You'd know all the potential chieftains and which you like best.
(That said modern hunter-gatheres cant be assumed to be the same as when everybody did it - the practice subsisted largely in places that are not suited to farming and modern examples tend to have very specialized lifestyles that typically do "manage" the land in some other way, such as burning woods to create grassland for prey animals to eat)
Once your group is larger than your average small tribal settlement, rituals and hierarchies are needed to glue them together, and that's where inequality can happen - You also see it in how new companies might struggle to transistion from startup to larger scale.
"The West" is a bit of a fighting word to begin with often used to sustain fearmongering or superiority complexes, sand leads to a lumping together of Europe and places like the US which isn't all that warranted. Non-Rome Europe has only been civilized since the renaissance, or the medieval high period if you're generous - and the renaissance built on everything made by former nearby civilizations since the egyptians. It was just the latest in a long line of civilizations that got a slight technological edge and thus went to conquer all their neighbors ("neighbors" being relative given that one of those seminal inventions was more accurate navigation at sea)
At the time of the renaissance, the largest naval fleet was Chinese, the richest man on earth was a West-African King and the largest cleanest cities were in central america, and the Incas had some of the best medical technology. Only science changed this, imperfectly and very recently, and humanity would have been better served by cooperation. There was certainly a philosophically significant shift from just collecting what works but often that lead to the squashing and dismissal of other traditions, instead of trying to find out which parts of them work, this lead to a lot of stuff needing to be discovered twice. - Even in Europe itself where midwives and healers with herbal knowledge etc. got the shaft. It#s a tale of the danger of only a little knowledge, of "too clever by half" syndrome. That said admitting the need to restart at zero was already sort of an archievement, knowing what you don't know.
It's not especially great, though I wouldnt agree with the standpoint that it was especially evil either, compared to the past; Lack of opportunity to do evil isn't goodness.
Neither the idea that they came to countries full of little farm villages and built cities there, nor that they swarmed in and killed everybody are really true, instead they often bribed the local kings and took over existing feudal institutions to exact tribute. Some degree of murdering certainly took place and needs to be acknowledged, but generally they didn't really push inland until some catastrophe turned the place into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and then they assumed that that's what those countries always looked like.
It was almost 150 years from first contact with the americas to the first settlements, Africa was only fully conquerred as late as the 19th century.
Why? Because tough luck marching in there before the measles epidemic and the social/economic destabilization brought on by the slave trade (basically some people went about kidnapping and selling their neighbors so everyone else fled to the hills and stayed as far away from larger roads and cities as possible) collapsed the local societies. Yeah there were hunter-gatherers, but also kingdoms and empires. But kingdoms and empires don't handle collapses so well since they can sustain, and have to feed, larger more interconnected populaces.
It wasn't even deliberate destruction (though slavery itself & warfare most certainly were), ppl simply did not understand disease or economics very well.
No such thing really happened in Asia (which already had more trade with the remaining world going on) which is why there was comparably less societal disruption through there were just as many "western" attempts to seize power.

Even Rome is much younger than say, Ancient China, India, Egypt, Axum (roughly modern-day Kenya and Ethiopia) or Mexico/Central America.
That's simply because most early civilizations happened in warm climates or fertile river valleys. Europe's cold, it took more tech to put large-scale kingdoms there, though we dont think of medieval farming innovations as "tech" anymore.
Science and equality aren't "western" things they're human things and pushing that idea gives tyrants everywhere fuel either to fan xenophobia, either by saying that the "others" will destroy western culture or by saying that those who want to promote equality are bringing foreign influence.

Sorry for the soapbox moment it's just so livid at local politicians who claim that people from Syria will destroy 'the illustrous history of our thousand-year empire' and like just generally talking like those people are "Savages from the jungle". They had law and order when our ancestors were still throwing people in swamps as a sacrifice to the gods, and living in small wooden huts that needed to be rebuild every couple of years. Look at those photos of normal, orderly cities being reduced to piles of rubble in less than five years! And these fuckers say they oughta drown in the Mediterranean for this ill-defined, vague idea that is "the west".
The sad thing is that "thousand-year empire" is actually a damn cool epithet and all the other countries have some, maybe if the far right nuts shut up for a while and kept their filthy hands of things we could actually use it again, but I don't think that will happen since it'll have been closer to 1500 years since Otto I.


I mean the idea that the rest of the world should maybe have asked/ that they should have at least tried to prevent the whole thing IS present in the show - Misato holds it, in ep 25 she outright tells Ritsuko "How dare you risk all our lives over an experiment/ideology like that and then also deceive us about it"

But to determine the correct course of action you need to have three things, and "which is best/right/just" is only one of them. You also need to consider "What actions are even available" and "What outcomes can you actually reach through which action"
EVA as a whole deals heavily with the theme of ethical dilemmas, the most prominent one being, it's wrong to just grab a young person and make them fight monsters especially with the pressure of the apocalypse on their shoulders, but should they just let doomsday come then? That doesn't sound right either. And at some point insisting on "right" options when their cost increases starts taking on some ambiguity - Is it really because the harm it does will spoil the end, or does the person just want to keep their idea of themselves as "good"? Sometimes all the choices you have are bad ones and you need to choose the least worse.

It's unfair that some people get awful diseases at a young age, but can we change that yet? Not completely/ for everyone. Sometimes the best path that is actually available is still costly. What were they gonna do, hold a survey on which scenario people want? Like that wouldn't lead to the world going in up in the flames of war.

We have to look at what Yui's situation was: She's the kid of a SEELE member, so she understood the conspiracy from day one and was probably raised to think of Instrumentality as a good thing. She's also brilliant and has the smarts to involve herself in the project. She's well situated to influence things from the inside - but she would likely be killed if the outright defied them since they already know her whereabouts and that she knows too much.

Contrtast with Kaji, as a total outsider with no relatives involved in the conspiracy/ who lived through the whole brunt of the post SI hell, for example, chooses to come in as a government spy since only the government had the means of getting him in there as an ordinary citizen. And in the end he just got killed.

I'd argue that saving the Planet from SEELE's plots/ 'reversing' instrumentality is probably way closer than what the majority of humanity would have wanted.
Was she still too entrenched in the mindset she was raised in despite going against it, so that she didn't even consider preventing Instrumentality outright? Perhaps. Fully positible, but to be certain we'd have to know how much "destiny" really exists in the setting of EVA.
For all we know Yui was right and any other way would just have led to Third Impact happening some other way, and she simply did all she could to procure the best possible outcome for herself, humanity and her son; Or she was a victim of her own axioms like about every other character in this show.

This kinda makes me wish that she and Misato would have interacted at some point, precisely because Misato is very much team "Stop this nonsense" / against any sort of clandestine plan deciding ppls destiniers "for" them. She's all about defying "doomed" situations to the last.
But it's not like Misato didn't agree to some necessary evils - working with NERV though she soon figures out that they're not trustworthy, for example. It#s easy to imagine someone who would be against working with them at all because they are affiliated with SEELE and draft teenagers. (but has no other plan to get rid of the angels/ this wouldn't be a "pure" POV either)
One would also imagine a lot of friction regarding Shinji - Misato isn't innocent of enforcing his status as a pilot but she never liked it and Yui kinda choose it by going into EVA 01, on the other hand Yui's his biological mother from a well-to do background while Misato is an unpolished human desaster and far from a responsible parent... but at this point she might know Shinji much better, just from being around him as a semi-formed person rather than a toddler.

The outcome that we see in EOE isn't ideal by far, but what if it was the best one that was actually attainable? Or at least in the upper 10%?
We can't judge people vs. the best outcome and the best methods we can imagine, everything can always be better, but vs the best outcome that they could actually reach and the methods that they actually had available.

Yui certainly made questionable choices/ used questionable methods and that must be acknowledged along with their prices, but so did most other characters especially the adults, thats sort of one of the big themes here. I'd say that she at least qualifies as an anti-hero. Within the choices available to her - at least the choices that she saw - she chose to preserve humanity.
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Re: Do you think Yui enjoys being in Unit 1?

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Postby scorpew » Sun Jul 28, 2019 12:31 pm

I don't know but she wanted to remain in the Evangelion. When she was tried to salvage her soul the attempt failed due to Yui's desire to remain in Eva, as it is dropped by Ritsuko during Episode 20.


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