Darkwing wrote:Could you elaborate on that?
Whenever the treatment, be it in fanfic or actual elaborate essays, amounts to "Ok, so it turns out she's really Lillith, mystery solved!" or "So she's actually Yui, looking after her baby from beyond the grave, and that's it."
With that perception, it's clear why some people would reach the conclusion/interpretation of "She's just a bland, creepy plot device that only exists to represent X and everything she does/happens to her is related to that", but that's missing the point, that's ignoring this whole human girl stuck in there somewhere, that "pool of inner waters trying to finally conncect to the surface", the main conflict, theme of "Which components actually define your identity?", reduces/simplifies any of her interactions and makes the whole relatability factor inacessible.
If you look at her like that, you'll never try to see her from her own PoV.
Any relatability goes to hell if you don't look at "Rei, the lonely teenaged girl who feels insignificant" and I guess that personally irks me because I related to her a lot, found a lot of my own life reflected there.
It doesn't help that this is one of her actual fears: "You're afraid that you will disappear from the minds of others if another exists".
I can sorta live with the "little sister" interpretation, because that still gives her a place of her own, and I can't tell people not to like S/A just because I don't.
If it's the result of an eventual revelation and developement that is, because whoever says Rei and Shinji have a sibling bond in the source material is probably an only child.
A sibling is someone who has known you all your life and seen you in all sort of silly, everyday situation, so there's little of you they don't know, you let your guard down around them, you get silly, you don't put up any show.
You can usually tell when Shinji has someone in that "familiarity sphere" when he begins getting snarky with them, as with Touji and Kensuke or his flatmates.
No snarking with Rei. Last names. It's not that he doesn't open up to her, he tells her quite a lot in, say, episodes 6 or 15, but any crossing of the distance is a slow and tentative trickle where every little detail is valued/reacted to /dwellt on, any glance, any minute change of expression, and you can tell that Shinji thinks about her possible reaction to every word he says, he doesn't "blurt it out naturally".
That's not how siblings act, anyone who says the act like siblings must never have had any actual siblings. They act more like... yeah, teenagers with a crush. Rei: "You were looking at me! But was it only because you wanted to as me about Gendo? :("
Or she's like, that insecure, nerdy girl in your class who happens to have less "girly" interests, so you can actually talk normally to her and be her friend, even if you're also insecure.
But this is not what a sibling bond looks like. Anyone who says that probably doesn't have any actual siblings. I'd know, I have four of those little beasties, my brother being only marginally younger.
